Perception

Occlusion

Occlusion is the blocking of a camera's view of an object or region by other geometry, including self-occlusion, where a robot's own arm hides the workspace. Occlusions create missing or ambiguous data for detection, pose estimation, and tracking, and are typically mitigated with multiple viewpoints, temporal filtering, active perception, or amodal models that reason about hidden extents.

Why it matters for physical AI

Manipulation constantly generates occlusion, since the gripper covers exactly what it interacts with, so policies and perception systems must remain reliable when key pixels vanish mid-task.