CVSep 5, 2022
SEFormer: Structure Embedding Transformer for 3D Object DetectionXiaoyu Feng, Heming Du, Yueqi Duan et al.
Effectively preserving and encoding structure features from objects in irregular and sparse LiDAR points is a key challenge to 3D object detection on point cloud. Recently, Transformer has demonstrated promising performance on many 2D and even 3D vision tasks. Compared with the fixed and rigid convolution kernels, the self-attention mechanism in Transformer can adaptively exclude the unrelated or noisy points and thus suitable for preserving the local spatial structure in irregular LiDAR point cloud. However, Transformer only performs a simple sum on the point features, based on the self-attention mechanism, and all the points share the same transformation for value. Such isotropic operation lacks the ability to capture the direction-distance-oriented local structure which is important for 3D object detection. In this work, we propose a Structure-Embedding transFormer (SEFormer), which can not only preserve local structure as traditional Transformer but also have the ability to encode the local structure. Compared to the self-attention mechanism in traditional Transformer, SEFormer learns different feature transformations for value points based on the relative directions and distances to the query point. Then we propose a SEFormer based network for high-performance 3D object detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed architecture can achieve SOTA results on Waymo Open Dataset, the largest 3D detection benchmark for autonomous driving. Specifically, SEFormer achieves 79.02% mAP, which is 1.2% higher than existing works. We will release the codes.
CVJul 13, 2023
RVD: A Handheld Device-Based Fundus Video Dataset for Retinal Vessel SegmentationMD Wahiduzzaman Khan, Hongwei Sheng, Hu Zhang et al.
Retinal vessel segmentation is generally grounded in image-based datasets collected with bench-top devices. The static images naturally lose the dynamic characteristics of retina fluctuation, resulting in diminished dataset richness, and the usage of bench-top devices further restricts dataset scalability due to its limited accessibility. Considering these limitations, we introduce the first video-based retinal dataset by employing handheld devices for data acquisition. The dataset comprises 635 smartphone-based fundus videos collected from four different clinics, involving 415 patients from 50 to 75 years old. It delivers comprehensive and precise annotations of retinal structures in both spatial and temporal dimensions, aiming to advance the landscape of vasculature segmentation. Specifically, the dataset provides three levels of spatial annotations: binary vessel masks for overall retinal structure delineation, general vein-artery masks for distinguishing the vein and artery, and fine-grained vein-artery masks for further characterizing the granularities of each artery and vein. In addition, the dataset offers temporal annotations that capture the vessel pulsation characteristics, assisting in detecting ocular diseases that require fine-grained recognition of hemodynamic fluctuation. In application, our dataset exhibits a significant domain shift with respect to data captured by bench-top devices, thus posing great challenges to existing methods. In the experiments, we provide evaluation metrics and benchmark results on our dataset, reflecting both the potential and challenges it offers for vessel segmentation tasks. We hope this challenging dataset would significantly contribute to the development of eye disease diagnosis and early prevention.
AIAug 8, 2024
Perceive, Reflect, and Plan: Designing LLM Agent for Goal-Directed City Navigation without InstructionsQingbin Zeng, Qinglong Yang, Shunan Dong et al.
This paper considers a scenario in city navigation: an AI agent is provided with language descriptions of the goal location with respect to some well-known landmarks; By only observing the scene around, including recognizing landmarks and road network connections, the agent has to make decisions to navigate to the goal location without instructions. This problem is very challenging, because it requires agent to establish self-position and acquire spatial representation of complex urban environment, where landmarks are often invisible. In the absence of navigation instructions, such abilities are vital for the agent to make high-quality decisions in long-range city navigation. With the emergent reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), a tempting baseline is to prompt LLMs to "react" on each observation and make decisions accordingly. However, this baseline has very poor performance that the agent often repeatedly visits same locations and make short-sighted, inconsistent decisions. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel agentic workflow featured by its abilities to perceive, reflect and plan. Specifically, we find LLaVA-7B can be fine-tuned to perceive the direction and distance of landmarks with sufficient accuracy for city navigation. Moreover, reflection is achieved through a memory mechanism, where past experiences are stored and can be retrieved with current perception for effective decision argumentation. Planning uses reflection results to produce long-term plans, which can avoid short-sighted decisions in long-range navigation. We show the designed workflow significantly improves navigation ability of the LLM agent compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.
CVNov 15, 2022
Evidence-based Match-status-Aware Gait Recognition for Out-of-Gallery Gait IdentificationHeming Du, Chen Liu, Ming Wang et al.
Existing gait recognition methods typically identify individuals based on the similarity between probe and gallery samples. However, these methods often neglect the fact that the gallery may not contain identities corresponding to the probes, leading to incorrect recognition.To identify Out-of-Gallery (OOG) gait queries, we propose an Evidence-based Match-status-Aware Gait Recognition (EMA-GR) framework. Inspired by Evidential Deep Learning (EDL), EMA-GR is designed to quantify the uncertainty associated with the match status of recognition. Thus, EMA-GR identifies whether the probe has a counterpart in the gallery. Specifically, we adopt an evidence collector to gather match status evidence from a recognition result pair and parameterize a Dirichlet distribution over the gathered evidence, following the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence (DST). We measure the uncertainty and predict the match status of the recognition results, and thus determine whether the probe is an OOG query.To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first attempt to tackle OOG queries in gait recognition. Moreover, EMA-GR is agnostic against gait recognition methods and improves the robustness against OOG queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on datasets with OOG queries, and can also generalize well to other identity-retrieval tasks. Importantly, our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin, achieving a 51.26% improvement when the OOG query rate is around 50% on OUMVLP.
CVSep 30, 2024
TokenBinder: Text-Video Retrieval with One-to-Many Alignment ParadigmBingqing Zhang, Zhuo Cao, Heming Du et al.
Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) methods typically match query-candidate pairs by aligning text and video features in coarse-grained, fine-grained, or combined (coarse-to-fine) manners. However, these frameworks predominantly employ a one(query)-to-one(candidate) alignment paradigm, which struggles to discern nuanced differences among candidates, leading to frequent mismatches. Inspired by Comparative Judgement in human cognitive science, where decisions are made by directly comparing items rather than evaluating them independently, we propose TokenBinder. This innovative two-stage TVR framework introduces a novel one-to-many coarse-to-fine alignment paradigm, imitating the human cognitive process of identifying specific items within a large collection. Our method employs a Focused-view Fusion Network with a sophisticated cross-attention mechanism, dynamically aligning and comparing features across multiple videos to capture finer nuances and contextual variations. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets confirm that TokenBinder substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate its robustness and the effectiveness of its fine-grained alignment in bridging intra- and inter-modality information gaps in TVR tasks.
AIOct 9, 2023
Divide and Ensemble: Progressively Learning for the UnknownHu Zhang, Xin Shen, Heming Du et al.
In the wheat nutrient deficiencies classification challenge, we present the DividE and EnseMble (DEEM) method for progressive test data predictions. We find that (1) test images are provided in the challenge; (2) samples are equipped with their collection dates; (3) the samples of different dates show notable discrepancies. Based on the findings, we partition the dataset into discrete groups by the dates and train models on each divided group. We then adopt the pseudo-labeling approach to label the test data and incorporate those with high confidence into the training set. In pseudo-labeling, we leverage models ensemble with different architectures to enhance the reliability of predictions. The pseudo-labeling and ensembled model training are iteratively conducted until all test samples are labeled. Finally, the separated models for each group are unified to obtain the model for the whole dataset. Our method achieves an average of 93.6\% Top-1 test accuracy~(94.0\% on WW2020 and 93.2\% on WR2021) and wins the 1$st$ place in the Deep Nutrient Deficiency Challenge~\footnote{https://cvppa2023.github.io/challenges/}.
CVDec 18, 2024Code
FlashVTG: Feature Layering and Adaptive Score Handling Network for Video Temporal GroundingZhuo Cao, Bingqing Zhang, Heming Du et al.
Text-guided Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to localize relevant segments in untrimmed videos based on textual descriptions, encompassing two subtasks: Moment Retrieval (MR) and Highlight Detection (HD). Although previous typical methods have achieved commendable results, it is still challenging to retrieve short video moments. This is primarily due to the reliance on sparse and limited decoder queries, which significantly constrain the accuracy of predictions. Furthermore, suboptimal outcomes often arise because previous methods rank predictions based on isolated predictions, neglecting the broader video context. To tackle these issues, we introduce FlashVTG, a framework featuring a Temporal Feature Layering (TFL) module and an Adaptive Score Refinement (ASR) module. The TFL module replaces the traditional decoder structure to capture nuanced video content variations across multiple temporal scales, while the ASR module improves prediction ranking by integrating context from adjacent moments and multi-temporal-scale features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlashVTG achieves state-of-the-art performance on four widely adopted datasets in both MR and HD. Specifically, on the QVHighlights dataset, it boosts mAP by 5.8% for MR and 3.3% for HD. For short-moment retrieval, FlashVTG increases mAP to 125% of previous SOTA performance. All these improvements are made without adding training burdens, underscoring its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zhuo-Cao/FlashVTG.
CVOct 20, 2025Code
When One Moment Isn't Enough: Multi-Moment Retrieval with Cross-Moment InteractionsZhuo Cao, Heming Du, Bingqing Zhang et al.
Existing Moment retrieval (MR) methods focus on Single-Moment Retrieval (SMR). However, one query can correspond to multiple relevant moments in real-world applications. This makes the existing datasets and methods insufficient for video temporal grounding. By revisiting the gap between current MR tasks and real-world applications, we introduce a high-quality datasets called QVHighlights Multi-Moment Dataset (QV-M$^2$), along with new evaluation metrics tailored for multi-moment retrieval (MMR). QV-M$^2$ consists of 2,212 annotations covering 6,384 video segments. Building on existing efforts in MMR, we propose a framework called FlashMMR. Specifically, we propose a Multi-moment Post-verification module to refine the moment boundaries. We introduce constrained temporal adjustment and subsequently leverage a verification module to re-evaluate the candidate segments. Through this sophisticated filtering pipeline, low-confidence proposals are pruned, and robust multi-moment alignment is achieved. We retrain and evaluate 6 existing MR methods on QV-M$^2$ and QVHighlights under both SMR and MMR settings. Results show that QV-M$^2$ serves as an effective benchmark for training and evaluating MMR models, while FlashMMR provides a strong baseline. Specifically, on QV-M$^2$, it achieves improvements over prior SOTA method by 3.00% on G-mAP, 2.70% on mAP@3+tgt, and 2.56% on mR@3. The proposed benchmark and method establish a foundation for advancing research in more realistic and challenging video temporal grounding scenarios. Code is released at https://github.com/Zhuo-Cao/QV-M2.
CVJul 21, 2020Code
Learning Object Relation Graph and Tentative Policy for Visual NavigationHeming Du, Xin Yu, Liang Zheng
Target-driven visual navigation aims at navigating an agent towards a given target based on the observation of the agent. In this task, it is critical to learn informative visual representation and robust navigation policy. Aiming to improve these two components, this paper proposes three complementary techniques, object relation graph (ORG), trial-driven imitation learning (IL), and a memory-augmented tentative policy network (TPN). ORG improves visual representation learning by integrating object relationships, including category closeness and spatial correlations, e.g., a TV usually co-occurs with a remote spatially. Both Trial-driven IL and TPN underlie robust navigation policy, instructing the agent to escape from deadlock states, such as looping or being stuck. Specifically, trial-driven IL is a type of supervision used in policy network training, while TPN, mimicking the IL supervision in unseen environment, is applied in testing. Experiment in the artificial environment AI2-Thor validates that each of the techniques is effective. When combined, the techniques bring significantly improvement over baseline methods in navigation effectiveness and efficiency in unseen environments. We report 22.8% and 23.5% increase in success rate and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL), respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaobaishu0097/ECCV-VN.git.
CVMar 16, 2024
Affective Behaviour Analysis via Integrating Multi-Modal KnowledgeWei Zhang, Feng Qiu, Chen Liu et al.
Affective Behavior Analysis aims to facilitate technology emotionally smart, creating a world where devices can understand and react to our emotions as humans do. To comprehensively evaluate the authenticity and applicability of emotional behavior analysis techniques in natural environments, the 6th competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) utilizes the Aff-Wild2, Hume-Vidmimic2, and C-EXPR-DB datasets to set up five competitive tracks, i.e., Valence-Arousal (VA) Estimation, Expression (EXPR) Recognition, Action Unit (AU) Detection, Compound Expression (CE) Recognition, and Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) Estimation. In this paper, we present our method designs for the five tasks. Specifically, our design mainly includes three aspects: 1) Utilizing a transformer-based feature fusion module to fully integrate emotional information provided by audio signals, visual images, and transcripts, offering high-quality expression features for the downstream tasks. 2) To achieve high-quality facial feature representations, we employ Masked-Auto Encoder as the visual features extraction model and fine-tune it with our facial dataset. 3) Considering the complexity of the video collection scenes, we conduct a more detailed dataset division based on scene characteristics and train the classifier for each scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our designs.
CVApr 30
ResiHMR: Residual-Limb Aware Single-Image 3D Human Mesh Recovery for Individuals with Limb LossJiaying Ying, Heming Du, Kaihao Zhang et al.
Single-image human mesh recovery provides a compact 3D, person-centric representation that supports analysis, animation, AR and VR, rehabilitation, and human-computer interaction. However, prevailing systems impose an intact-limb prior and degrade on people with limb loss, because fixed-topology models cannot represent residual limbs. In this work, we present ResiHMR, a residual-limb aware framework for single-image 3D human modeling. ResiHMR adopts residual-limb keypoints and introduces two components: (i) a topology-adaptive Residual Anchor-Factor Optimization module that constrains estimation to the observed kinematic subgraph of anatomically valid structures, and (ii) a geometry-based Residual-Limb Reconstruction module that estimates residual-limb boundaries and convex limb-termination geometry. These components introduce topology-aware optimization and explicit termination geometry as tools for human mesh recovery under non-standard limb anatomy. Unlike joint-removal methods in a fixed topology, ResiHMR explicitly reconstructs residual-limb surfaces and aligns optimization with limb-loss topology, which better matches prosthetic biomechanics and real-world use. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first single-image HMR system that explicitly reconstructs residual-limb surfaces and performs topology-adaptive optimization for individuals with limb loss. On a curated dataset of real-world images with limb loss, ResiHMR improves reconstruction quality under both SMPLify-X and HSMR backbones, reducing intact-joint 2D MPJPE from 41.32 to 37.40 with SMPLify-X and residual-limb 2D MPJPE from 73.61 to 23.19 with HSMR.
CVOct 25, 2024
MM-WLAuslan: Multi-View Multi-Modal Word-Level Australian Sign Language Recognition DatasetXin Shen, Heming Du, Hongwei Sheng et al.
Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) focuses on identifying individual sign language glosses. Considering the diversity of sign languages across geographical regions, developing region-specific ISLR datasets is crucial for supporting communication and research. Auslan, as a sign language specific to Australia, still lacks a dedicated large-scale word-level dataset for the ISLR task. To fill this gap, we curate \underline{\textbf{the first}} large-scale Multi-view Multi-modal Word-Level Australian Sign Language recognition dataset, dubbed MM-WLAuslan. Compared to other publicly available datasets, MM-WLAuslan exhibits three significant advantages: (1) the largest amount of data, (2) the most extensive vocabulary, and (3) the most diverse of multi-modal camera views. Specifically, we record 282K+ sign videos covering 3,215 commonly used Auslan glosses presented by 73 signers in a studio environment. Moreover, our filming system includes two different types of cameras, i.e., three Kinect-V2 cameras and a RealSense camera. We position cameras hemispherically around the front half of the model and simultaneously record videos using all four cameras. Furthermore, we benchmark results with state-of-the-art methods for various multi-modal ISLR settings on MM-WLAuslan, including multi-view, cross-camera, and cross-view. Experiment results indicate that MM-WLAuslan is a challenging ISLR dataset, and we hope this dataset will contribute to the development of Auslan and the advancement of sign languages worldwide. All datasets and benchmarks are available at MM-WLAuslan.
MLNov 14, 2025
FreDN: Spectral Disentanglement for Time Series Forecasting via Learnable Frequency DecompositionZhongde An, Jinhong You, Jiyanglin Li et al.
Time series forecasting is essential in a wide range of real world applications. Recently, frequency-domain methods have attracted increasing interest for their ability to capture global dependencies. However, when applied to non-stationary time series, these methods encounter the $\textit{spectral entanglement}$ and the computational burden of complex-valued learning. The $\textit{spectral entanglement}$ refers to the overlap of trends, periodicities, and noise across the spectrum due to $\textit{spectral leakage}$ and the presence of non-stationarity. However, existing decompositions are not suited to resolving spectral entanglement. To address this, we propose the Frequency Decomposition Network (FreDN), which introduces a learnable Frequency Disentangler module to separate trend and periodic components directly in the frequency domain. Furthermore, we propose a theoretically supported ReIm Block to reduce the complexity of complex-valued operations while maintaining performance. We also re-examine the frequency-domain loss function and provide new theoretical insights into its effectiveness. Extensive experiments on seven long-term forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that FreDN outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 10\%. Furthermore, compared with standard complex-valued architectures, our real-imaginary shared-parameter design reduces the parameter count and computational cost by at least 50\%.
CVJul 21, 2025
Quantifying and Narrowing the Unknown: Interactive Text-to-Video Retrieval via Uncertainty MinimizationBingqing Zhang, Zhuo Cao, Heming Du et al.
Despite recent advances, Text-to-video retrieval (TVR) is still hindered by multiple inherent uncertainties, such as ambiguous textual queries, indistinct text-video mappings, and low-quality video frames. Although interactive systems have emerged to address these challenges by refining user intent through clarifying questions, current methods typically rely on heuristic or ad-hoc strategies without explicitly quantifying these uncertainties, limiting their effectiveness. Motivated by this gap, we propose UMIVR, an Uncertainty-Minimizing Interactive Text-to-Video Retrieval framework that explicitly quantifies three critical uncertainties-text ambiguity, mapping uncertainty, and frame uncertainty-via principled, training-free metrics: semantic entropy-based Text Ambiguity Score (TAS), Jensen-Shannon divergence-based Mapping Uncertainty Score (MUS), and a Temporal Quality-based Frame Sampler (TQFS). By adaptively generating targeted clarifying questions guided by these uncertainty measures, UMIVR iteratively refines user queries, significantly reducing retrieval ambiguity. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate UMIVR's effectiveness, achieving notable gains in Recall@1 (69.2\% after 10 interactive rounds) on the MSR-VTT-1k dataset, thereby establishing an uncertainty-minimizing foundation for interactive TVR.
IVFeb 7, 2025
CMamba: Learned Image Compression with State Space ModelsZhuojie Wu, Heming Du, Shuyun Wang et al.
Learned Image Compression (LIC) has explored various architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and transformers, in modeling image content distributions in order to achieve compression effectiveness. However, achieving high rate-distortion performance while maintaining low computational complexity (\ie, parameters, FLOPs, and latency) remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a hybrid Convolution and State Space Models (SSMs) based image compression framework, termed \textit{CMamba}, to achieve superior rate-distortion performance with low computational complexity. Specifically, CMamba introduces two key components: a Content-Adaptive SSM (CA-SSM) module and a Context-Aware Entropy (CAE) module. First, we observed that SSMs excel in modeling overall content but tend to lose high-frequency details. In contrast, CNNs are proficient at capturing local details. Motivated by this, we propose the CA-SSM module that can dynamically fuse global content extracted by SSM blocks and local details captured by CNN blocks in both encoding and decoding stages. As a result, important image content is well preserved during compression. Second, our proposed CAE module is designed to reduce spatial and channel redundancies in latent representations after encoding. Specifically, our CAE leverages SSMs to parameterize the spatial content in latent representations. Benefiting from SSMs, CAE significantly improves spatial compression efficiency while reducing spatial content redundancies. Moreover, along the channel dimension, CAE reduces inter-channel redundancies of latent representations via an autoregressive manner, which can fully exploit prior knowledge from previous channels without sacrificing efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that CMamba achieves superior rate-distortion performance.
MMOct 25, 2024
Diverse Sign Language TranslationXin Shen, Lei Shen, Shaozu Yuan et al.
Like spoken languages, a single sign language expression could correspond to multiple valid textual interpretations. Hence, learning a rigid one-to-one mapping for sign language translation (SLT) models might be inadequate, particularly in the case of limited data. In this work, we introduce a Diverse Sign Language Translation (DivSLT) task, aiming to generate diverse yet accurate translations for sign language videos. Firstly, we employ large language models (LLM) to generate multiple references for the widely-used CSL-Daily and PHOENIX14T SLT datasets. Here, native speakers are only invited to touch up inaccurate references, thus significantly improving the annotation efficiency. Secondly, we provide a benchmark model to spur research in this task. Specifically, we investigate multi-reference training strategies to enable our DivSLT model to achieve diverse translations. Then, to enhance translation accuracy, we employ the max-reward-driven reinforcement learning objective that maximizes the reward of the translated result. Additionally, we utilize multiple metrics to assess the accuracy, diversity, and semantic precision of the DivSLT task. Experimental results on the enriched datasets demonstrate that our DivSLT method achieves not only better translation performance but also diverse translation results.
IRFeb 15
Robust Test-time Video-Text Retrieval: Benchmarking and Adapting for Query ShiftsBingqing Zhang, Zhuo Cao, Heming Du et al.
Modern video-text retrieval (VTR) models excel on in-distribution benchmarks but are highly vulnerable to real-world query shifts, where the distribution of query data deviates from the training domain, leading to a sharp performance drop. Existing image-focused robustness solutions are inadequate to handle this vulnerability in video, as they fail to address the complex spatio-temporal dynamics inherent in these shifts. To systematically evaluate this vulnerability, we first introduce a comprehensive benchmark featuring 12 distinct types of video perturbations across five severity degrees. Analysis on this benchmark reveals that query shifts amplify the hubness phenomenon, where a few gallery items become dominant "hubs" that attract a disproportionate number of queries. To mitigate this, we then propose HAT-VTR (Hubness Alleviation for Test-time Video-Text Retrieval), as our baseline test-time adaptation framework designed to directly counteract hubness in VTR. It leverages two key components: a Hubness Suppression Memory to refine similarity scores, and multi-granular losses to enforce temporal feature consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HAT-VTR substantially improves robustness, consistently outperforming prior methods across diverse query shift scenarios, and enhancing model reliability for real-world applications.
CVSep 29, 2025
Dynamic Orchestration of Multi-Agent System for Real-World Multi-Image Agricultural VQAYan Ke, Xin Yu, Heming Du et al.
Agricultural visual question answering is essential for providing farmers and researchers with accurate and timely knowledge. However, many existing approaches are predominantly developed for evidence-constrained settings such as text-only queries or single-image cases. This design prevents them from coping with real-world agricultural scenarios that often require multi-image inputs with complementary views across spatial scales, and growth stages. Moreover, limited access to up-to-date external agricultural context makes these systems struggle to adapt when evidence is incomplete. In addition, rigid pipelines often lack systematic quality control. To address this gap, we propose a self-reflective and self-improving multi-agent framework that integrates four roles, the Retriever, the Reflector, the Answerer, and the Improver. They collaborate to enable context enrichment, reflective reasoning, answer drafting, and iterative improvement. A Retriever formulates queries and gathers external information, while a Reflector assesses adequacy and triggers sequential reformulation and renewed retrieval. Two Answerers draft candidate responses in parallel to reduce bias. The Improver refines them through iterative checks while ensuring that information from multiple images is effectively aligned and utilized. Experiments on the AgMMU benchmark show that our framework achieves competitive performance on multi-image agricultural QA.
CVSep 2, 2023
When 3D Bounding-Box Meets SAM: Point Cloud Instance Segmentation with Weak-and-Noisy SupervisionQingtao Yu, Heming Du, Chen Liu et al.
Learning from bounding-boxes annotations has shown great potential in weakly-supervised 3D point cloud instance segmentation. However, we observed that existing methods would suffer severe performance degradation with perturbed bounding box annotations. To tackle this issue, we propose a complementary image prompt-induced weakly-supervised point cloud instance segmentation (CIP-WPIS) method. CIP-WPIS leverages pretrained knowledge embedded in the 2D foundation model SAM and 3D geometric prior to achieve accurate point-wise instance labels from the bounding box annotations. Specifically, CP-WPIS first selects image views in which 3D candidate points of an instance are fully visible. Then, we generate complementary background and foreground prompts from projections to obtain SAM 2D instance mask predictions. According to these, we assign the confidence values to points indicating the likelihood of points belonging to the instance. Furthermore, we utilize 3D geometric homogeneity provided by superpoints to decide the final instance label assignments. In this fashion, we achieve high-quality 3D point-wise instance labels. Extensive experiments on both Scannet-v2 and S3DIS benchmarks demonstrate that our method is robust against noisy 3D bounding-box annotations and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
CVMay 20, 2021
VTNet: Visual Transformer Network for Object Goal NavigationHeming Du, Xin Yu, Liang Zheng
Object goal navigation aims to steer an agent towards a target object based on observations of the agent. It is of pivotal importance to design effective visual representations of the observed scene in determining navigation actions. In this paper, we introduce a Visual Transformer Network (VTNet) for learning informative visual representation in navigation. VTNet is a highly effective structure that embodies two key properties for visual representations: First, the relationships among all the object instances in a scene are exploited; Second, the spatial locations of objects and image regions are emphasized so that directional navigation signals can be learned. Furthermore, we also develop a pre-training scheme to associate the visual representations with navigation signals, and thus facilitate navigation policy learning. In a nutshell, VTNet embeds object and region features with their location cues as spatial-aware descriptors and then incorporates all the encoded descriptors through attention operations to achieve informative representation for navigation. Given such visual representations, agents are able to explore the correlations between visual observations and navigation actions. For example, an agent would prioritize "turning right" over "turning left" when the visual representation emphasizes on the right side of activation map. Experiments in the artificial environment AI2-Thor demonstrate that VTNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in unseen testing environments.