Ue-Hwan Kim

Jiae Yoon, Ue-Hwan Kim

In this work, we address the challenge of Scene Change Detection (SCD), where the goal is to identify variations between two images of the same location captured at different times. Existing SCD models often overlook the varying importance of features across layers, employ single-step decoders that confine refinement, and provide limited insight into encoder pretraining strategies. We propose TERDNet, a Transformer Encoder-Recurrent Decoder Network designed to overcome these limitations. TERDNet consists of a transformer-based encoder that extracts multi-level representations, a feature fusion module that integrates correlation volumes with these features, a recurrent 3-gate-GRU decoder that performs iterative refinement, and a combined convolution-interpolation upsampler that restores fine-grained resolution. Extensive experiments on four public benchmarks show that TERDNet consistently outperforms prior approaches and produces more accurate and detailed change masks. Ablation studies confirm the benefit of segmentation-based pretraining and the effectiveness of our fusion design. In addition, robustness tests under viewpoint misalignment confirm TERDNet's potential for deployment in real-world robotic systems, where reliable perception is critical. Our code is available at https://github.com/AutoCompSysLab/TERDNet.

Curie Kim, Ue-Hwan Kim, Jong-Hwan Kim

There have been attempts to detect 3D objects by fusion of stereo camera images and LiDAR sensor data or using LiDAR for pre-training and only monocular images for testing, but there have been less attempts to use only monocular image sequences due to low accuracy. In addition, when depth prediction using only monocular images, only scale-inconsistent depth can be predicted, which is the reason why researchers are reluctant to use monocular images alone. Therefore, we propose a method for predicting absolute depth and detecting 3D objects using only monocular image sequences by enabling end-to-end learning of detection networks and depth prediction networks. As a result, the proposed method surpasses other existing methods in performance on the KITTI 3D dataset. Even when monocular image and 3D LiDAR are used together during training in an attempt to improve performance, ours exhibit is the best performance compared to other methods using the same input. In addition, end-to-end learning not only improves depth prediction performance, but also enables absolute depth prediction, because our network utilizes the fact that the size of a 3D object such as a car is determined by the approximate size.

Curie Kim, Ue-Hwan Kim

The bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation allows robust learning of multiple tasks for autonomous driving including road layout estimation and 3D object detection. However, contemporary methods for unified road layout estimation and 3D object detection rarely handle the class imbalance of the training dataset and multi-class learning to reduce the total number of networks required. To overcome these limitations, we propose a unified model for road layout estimation and 3D object detection inspired by the transformer architecture and the CycleGAN learning framework. The proposed model deals with the performance degradation due to the class imbalance of the dataset utilizing the focal loss and the proposed dual cycle loss. Moreover, we set up extensive learning scenarios to study the effect of multi-class learning for road layout estimation in various situations. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and the learning scheme, we conduct a thorough ablation study and a comparative study. The experiment results attest the effectiveness of our model; we achieve state-of-the-art performance in both the road layout estimation and 3D object detection tasks.

Jiae Yoon, Ue-Hwan Kim

Detecting what has changed in an environment is essential for long-term autonomy, yet most change detection settings assume fixed viewpoints, mild misalignment, or only a few changed objects. We introduce Video-based Scene Change Detection (VSCD), which predicts a pixel-wise change mask for each query frame, given a reference and a query RGB video of the same indoor space recorded at different times under unconstrained camera motion. The two videos are not temporally synchronized, and many object instances may appear or disappear. To study this setting, we build a large-scale benchmark with over 1.1 million frames annotated with pixel-accurate change masks, together with a real-world test set for evaluating transfer beyond simulation. We propose a query-centric multi-reference model that learns temporal matching implicitly from change-mask supervision, aligns candidate reference features to the query via local patch correspondence, and fuses per-candidate change features using frame-level and patch-level confidence before decoding a high-resolution mask once per frame. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance against strong image- and video-based baselines, and we validate its real-world impact by deploying it on a mobile robot for two downstream applications -- visual surveillance and object incremental learning.

Ue-Hwan Kim, Yewon Hwang, Sun-Kyung Lee et al.

In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark dataset for the challenging writing in the air (WiTA) task -- an elaborate task bridging vision and NLP. WiTA implements an intuitive and natural writing method with finger movement for human-computer interaction (HCI). Our WiTA dataset will facilitate the development of data-driven WiTA systems which thus far have displayed unsatisfactory performance -- due to lack of dataset as well as traditional statistical models they have adopted. Our dataset consists of five sub-datasets in two languages (Korean and English) and amounts to 209,926 video instances from 122 participants. We capture finger movement for WiTA with RGB cameras to ensure wide accessibility and cost-efficiency. Next, we propose spatio-temporal residual network architectures inspired by 3D ResNet. These models perform unconstrained text recognition from finger movement, guarantee a real-time operation by processing 435 and 697 decoding frames-per-second for Korean and English, respectively, and will serve as an evaluation standard. Our dataset and the source codes are available at https://github.com/Uehwan/WiTA.

Ue-Hwan Kim, Dongho Ka, Hwasoo Yeo et al.

Minimizing traffic accidents between vehicles and pedestrians is one of the primary research goals in intelligent transportation systems. To achieve the goal, pedestrian orientation recognition and prediction of pedestrian's crossing or not-crossing intention play a central role. Contemporary approaches do not guarantee satisfactory performance due to limited field-of-view, lack of generalization, and high computational complexity. To overcome these limitations, we propose a real-time predictive pedestrian collision warning service (P2CWS) for two tasks: pedestrian orientation recognition (100.53 FPS) and intention prediction (35.76 FPS). Our framework obtains satisfying generalization over multiple sites because of the proposed site-independent features. At the center of the feature extraction lies 3D pose estimation. The 3D pose analysis enables robust and accurate recognition of pedestrian orientations and prediction of intentions over multiple sites. The proposed vision framework realizes 89.3% accuracy in the behavior recognition task on the TUD dataset without any training process and 91.28% accuracy in intention prediction on our dataset achieving new state-of-the-art performance. To contribute to the corresponding research community, we make our source codes public which are available at https://github.com/Uehwan/VisionForPedestrian

Won Shik Jang, Ue-Hwan Kim

Text-goal instance navigation (TGIN) asks an agent to resolve a single, free-form description into actions that reach the correct object instance among same-category distractors. We present \textit{Context-Nav} that elevates long, contextual captions from a local matching cue to a global exploration prior and verifies candidates through 3D spatial reasoning. First, we compute dense text-image alignments for a value map that ranks frontiers -- guiding exploration toward regions consistent with the entire description rather than early detections. Second, upon observing a candidate, we perform a viewpoint-aware relation check: the agent samples plausible observer poses, aligns local frames, and accepts a target only if the spatial relations can be satisfied from at least one viewpoint. The pipeline requires no task-specific training or fine-tuning; we attain state-of-the-art performance on InstanceNav and CoIN-Bench. Ablations show that (i) encoding full captions into the value map avoids wasted motion and (ii) explicit, viewpoint-aware 3D verification prevents semantically plausible but incorrect stops. This suggests that geometry-grounded spatial reasoning is a scalable alternative to heavy policy training or human-in-the-loop interaction for fine-grained instance disambiguation in cluttered 3D scenes.

Yirum Kim, Jaewoo Kim, Ue-Hwan Kim

Current 3D scene graph generation (3DSGG) approaches heavily rely on a single-agent assumption and small-scale environments, exhibiting limited scalability to real-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce Multi-Agent 3D Scene Graph Generation (MA3DSG) model, the first framework designed to tackle this scalability challenge using multiple agents. We develop a training-free graph alignment algorithm that efficiently merges partial query graphs from individual agents into a unified global scene graph. Leveraging extensive analysis and empirical insights, our approach enables conventional single-agent systems to operate collaboratively without requiring any learnable parameters. To rigorously evaluate 3DSGG performance, we propose MA3DSG-Bench-a benchmark that supports diverse agent configurations, domain sizes, and environmental conditions-providing a more general and extensible evaluation framework. This work lays a solid foundation for scalable, multi-agent 3DSGG research.

Sahng-Min Yoo, Ue-Hwan Kim, Yewon Hwang et al.

Contemporary soft keyboards possess limitations: the lack of physical feedback results in an increase of typos, and the interface of soft keyboards degrades the utility of the screen. To overcome these limitations, we propose an Invisible Mobile Keyboard (IMK), which lets users freely type on the desired area without any constraints. To facilitate a data-driven IMK decoding task, we have collected the most extensive text-entry dataset (approximately 2M pairs of typing positions and the corresponding characters). Additionally, we propose our baseline decoder along with a semantic typo correction mechanism based on self-attention, which decodes such unconstrained inputs with high accuracy (96.0%). Moreover, the user study reveals that the users could type faster and feel convenience and satisfaction to IMK with our decoder. Lastly, we make the source code and the dataset public to contribute to the research community.

Ue-Hwan Kim, Jong-Hwan Kim

Self-supervised learning of depth map prediction and motion estimation from monocular video sequences is of vital importance -- since it realizes a broad range of tasks in robotics and autonomous vehicles. A large number of research efforts have enhanced the performance by tackling illumination variation, occlusions, and dynamic objects, to name a few. However, each of those efforts targets individual goals and endures as separate works. Moreover, most of previous works have adopted the same CNN architecture, not reaping architectural benefits. Therefore, the need to investigate the inter-dependency of the previous methods and the effect of architectural factors remains. To achieve these objectives, we revisit numerous previously proposed self-supervised methods for joint learning of depth and motion, perform a comprehensive empirical study, and unveil multiple crucial insights. Furthermore, we remarkably enhance the performance as a result of our study -- outperforming previous state-of-the-art performance.

Jin-Man Park, Jae-Hyuk Jang, Sahng-Min Yoo et al.

We present a challenging dataset, ChangeSim, aimed at online scene change detection (SCD) and more. The data is collected in photo-realistic simulation environments with the presence of environmental non-targeted variations, such as air turbidity and light condition changes, as well as targeted object changes in industrial indoor environments. By collecting data in simulations, multi-modal sensor data and precise ground truth labels are obtainable such as the RGB image, depth image, semantic segmentation, change segmentation, camera poses, and 3D reconstructions. While the previous online SCD datasets evaluate models given well-aligned image pairs, ChangeSim also provides raw unpaired sequences that present an opportunity to develop an online SCD model in an end-to-end manner, considering both pairing and detection. Experiments show that even the latest pair-based SCD models suffer from the bottleneck of the pairing process, and it gets worse when the environment contains the non-targeted variations. Our dataset is available at http://sammica.github.io/ChangeSim/.

In-Ug Yoon, Ue-Hwan Kim, Jong-Hwan

Online incremental clustering of sequentially incoming data without prior knowledge suffers from changing cluster numbers and tends to fall into local extrema according to given data order. To overcome these limitations, we propose a stabilized developmental resonance network (s-DRN). First, we analyze the instability of the conventional choice function during the node activation process and design a scalable activation function to make clustering performance stable over all input data scales. Next, we devise three criteria for the node grouping algorithm: distance, intersection over union (IoU) and size criteria. The proposed node grouping algorithm effectively excludes unnecessary clusters from incrementally created clusters, diminishes the performance dependency on vigilance parameters and makes the clustering process robust. To verify the performance of the proposed s-DRN model, comparative studies are conducted on six real-world datasets whose statistical characteristics are distinctive. The comparative studies demonstrate the proposed s-DRN outperforms baselines in terms of stability and accuracy.

Ue-Hwan Kim, Se-Ho Kim, Jong-Hwan Kim

Intelligent agents need to understand the surrounding environment to provide meaningful services to or interact intelligently with humans. The agents should perceive geometric features as well as semantic entities inherent in the environment. Contemporary methods in general provide one type of information regarding the environment at a time, making it difficult to conduct high-level tasks. Moreover, running two types of methods and associating two resultant information requires a lot of computation and complicates the software architecture. To overcome these limitations, we propose a neural architecture that simultaneously performs both geometric and semantic tasks in a single thread: simultaneous visual odometry, object detection, and instance segmentation (SimVODIS). Training SimVODIS requires unlabeled video sequences and the photometric consistency between input image frames generates self-supervision signals. The performance of SimVODIS outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art performance in pose estimation, depth map prediction, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks while completing all the tasks in a single thread. We expect SimVODIS would enhance the autonomy of intelligent agents and let the agents provide effective services to humans.

Yong-Ho Yoo, Ue-Hwan Kim, Jong-Hwan Kim

Surface mount technology (SMT) is a process for producing printed circuit boards. Solder paste printer (SPP), package mounter, and solder reflow oven are used for SMT. The board on which the solder paste is deposited from the SPP is monitored by solder paste inspector (SPI). If SPP malfunctions due to the printer defects, the SPP produces defective products, and then abnormal patterns are detected by SPI. In this paper, we propose a convolutional recurrent reconstructive network (CRRN), which decomposes the anomaly patterns generated by the printer defects, from SPI data. CRRN learns only normal data and detects anomaly pattern through reconstruction error. CRRN consists of a spatial encoder (S-Encoder), a spatiotemporal encoder and decoder (ST-Encoder-Decoder), and a spatial decoder (S-Decoder). The ST-Encoder-Decoder consists of multiple convolutional spatiotemporal memories (CSTMs) with ST-Attention mechanism. CSTM is developed to extract spatiotemporal patterns efficiently. Additionally, a spatiotemporal attention (ST-Attention) mechanism is designed to facilitate transmitting information from the ST-Encoder to the ST-Decoder, which can solve the long-term dependency problem. We demonstrate the proposed CRRN outperforms the other conventional models in anomaly detection. Moreover, we show the discriminative power of the anomaly map decomposed by the proposed CRRN through the printer defect classification.

Ue-Hwan Kim, Jin-Man Park, Taek-Jin Song et al.

Intelligent agents gather information and perceive semantics within the environments before taking on given tasks. The agents store the collected information in the form of environment models that compactly represent the surrounding environments. The agents, however, can only conduct limited tasks without an efficient and effective environment model. Thus, such an environment model takes a crucial role for the autonomy systems of intelligent agents. We claim the following characteristics for a versatile environment model: accuracy, applicability, usability, and scalability. Although a number of researchers have attempted to develop such models that represent environments precisely to a certain degree, they lack broad applicability, intuitive usability, and satisfactory scalability. To tackle these limitations, we propose 3-D scene graph as an environment model and the 3-D scene graph construction framework. The concise and widely used graph structure readily guarantees usability as well as scalability for 3-D scene graph. We demonstrate the accuracy and applicability of the 3-D scene graph by exhibiting the deployment of the 3-D scene graph in practical applications. Moreover, we verify the performance of the proposed 3-D scene graph and the framework by conducting a series of comprehensive experiments under various conditions.

Ue-Hwan Kim, Sahng-Min Yoo, Jong-Hwan Kim

Text-entry aims to provide an effective and efficient pathway for humans to deliver their messages to computers. With the advent of mobile computing, the recent focus of text-entry research has moved from physical keyboards to soft keyboards. Current soft keyboards, however, increase the typo rate due to lack of tactile feedback and degrade the usability of mobile devices due to their large portion on screens. To tackle these limitations, we propose a fully imaginary keyboard (I-Keyboard) with a deep neural decoder (DND). The invisibility of I-Keyboard maximizes the usability of mobile devices and DND empowered by a deep neural architecture allows users to start typing from any position on the touch screens at any angle. To the best of our knowledge, the eyes-free ten-finger typing scenario of I-Keyboard which does not necessitate both a calibration step and a predefined region for typing is first explored in this work. For the purpose of training DND, we collected the largest user data in the process of developing I-Keyboard. We verified the performance of the proposed I-Keyboard and DND by conducting a series of comprehensive simulations and experiments under various conditions. I-Keyboard showed 18.95% and 4.06% increases in typing speed (45.57 WPM) and accuracy (95.84%), respectively over the baseline.

Ue-Hwan Kim, Jong-Hwan Kim

The automated home referred to as Smart Home is expected to offer fully customized services to its residents, reducing the amount of home labor, thus improving human beings' welfare. Service robots and Internet of Things (IoT) play the key roles in the development of Smart Home. The service provision with these two main components in a Smart Home environment requires: 1) learning and reasoning algorithms and 2) the integration of robot and IoT systems. Conventional computational intelligence-based learning and reasoning algorithms do not successfully manage dynamic changes in the Smart Home data, and the simple integrations fail to fully draw the synergies from the collaboration of the two systems. To tackle these limitations, we propose: 1) a stabilized memory network with a feedback mechanism which can learn user behaviors in an incremental manner and 2) a robot-IoT service provision framework for a Smart Home which utilizes the proposed memory architecture as a learning and reasoning module and exploits synergies between the robot and IoT systems. We conduct a set of comprehensive experiments under various conditions to verify the performance of the proposed memory architecture and the service provision framework and analyze the experiment results.