Shihan Kong

Xingyu Chen, Junzhi Yu, Shihan Kong et al.

Object detection has been vigorously investigated for years but fast accurate detection for real-world scenes remains a very challenging problem. Overcoming drawbacks of single-stage detectors, we take aim at precisely detecting objects for static and temporal scenes in real time. Firstly, as a dual refinement mechanism, a novel anchor-offset detection is designed, which includes an anchor refinement, a feature location refinement, and a deformable detection head. This new detection mode is able to simultaneously perform two-step regression and capture accurate object features. Based on the anchor-offset detection, a dual refinement network (DRNet) is developed for high-performance static detection, where a multi-deformable head is further designed to leverage contextual information for describing objects. As for temporal detection in videos, temporal refinement networks (TRNet) and temporal dual refinement networks (TDRNet) are developed by propagating the refinement information across time. We also propose a soft refinement strategy to temporally match object motion with the previous refinement. Our proposed methods are evaluated on PASCAL VOC, COCO, and ImageNet VID datasets. Extensive comparisons on static and temporal detection verify the superiority of DRNet, TRNet, and TDRNet. Consequently, our developed approaches run in a fairly fast speed, and in the meantime achieve a significantly enhanced detection accuracy, i.e., 84.4% mAP on VOC 2007, 83.6% mAP on VOC 2012, 69.4% mAP on VID 2017, and 42.4% AP on COCO. Ultimately, producing encouraging results, our methods are applied to online underwater object detection and grasping with an autonomous system. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SeanChenxy/TDRN.

Xingyu Chen, Junzhi Yu, Shihan Kong et al.

Low visual quality has prevented underwater robotic vision from a wide range of applications. Although several algorithms have been developed, real-time and adaptive methods are deficient for real-world tasks. In this paper, we address this difficulty based on generative adversarial networks (GAN), and propose a GAN-based restoration scheme (GAN-RS). In particular, we develop a multi-branch discriminator including an adversarial branch and a critic branch for the purpose of simultaneously preserving image content and removing underwater noise. In addition to adversarial learning, a novel dark channel prior loss also promotes the generator to produce realistic vision. More specifically, an underwater index is investigated to describe underwater properties, and a loss function based on the underwater index is designed to train the critic branch for underwater noise suppression. Through extensive comparisons on visual quality and feature restoration, we confirm the superiority of the proposed approach. Consequently, the GAN-RS can adaptively improve underwater visual quality in real time and induce an overall superior restoration performance. Finally, a real-world experiment is conducted on the seabed for grasping marine products, and the results are quite promising. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/SeanChenxy/GAN_RS.

Rui Chen, Xingyu Chen, Shaoan Wang et al.

Event cameras output event streams as sparse, asynchronous data with microsecond-level temporal resolution, enabling visual perception with low latency and a high dynamic range. While existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in understanding and analyzing RGB video content, they either fail to interpret event streams effectively or remain constrained to very short sequences. In this paper, we introduce LET-US, a framework for long event-stream--text comprehension that employs an adaptive compression mechanism to reduce the volume of input events while preserving critical visual details. LET-US thus establishes a new frontier in cross-modal inferential understanding over extended event sequences. To bridge the substantial modality gap between event streams and textual representations, we adopt a two-stage optimization paradigm that progressively equips our model with the capacity to interpret event-based scenes. To handle the voluminous temporal information inherent in long event streams, we leverage text-guided cross-modal queries for feature reduction, augmented by hierarchical clustering and similarity computation to distill the most representative event features. Moreover, we curate and construct a large-scale event-text aligned dataset to train our model, achieving tighter alignment of event features within the LLM embedding space. We also develop a comprehensive benchmark covering a diverse set of tasks -- reasoning, captioning, classification, temporal localization and moment retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that LET-US outperforms prior state-of-the-art MLLMs in both descriptive accuracy and semantic comprehension on long-duration event streams. All datasets, codes, and models will be publicly available.

Zhanhua Xin, Zhihao Wang, Shenghao Zhang et al.

In the field of multi-sensor fusion for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), monocular cameras and IMUs are widely used to build simple and effective visual-inertial systems. However, limited research has explored the integration of motor-encoder devices to enhance SLAM performance. By incorporating such devices, it is possible to significantly improve active capability and field of view (FOV) with minimal additional cost and structural complexity. This paper proposes a novel visual-inertial-encoder tightly coupled odometry (VIEO) based on a ViDAR (Video Detection and Ranging) device. A ViDAR calibration method is introduced to ensure accurate initialization for VIEO. In addition, a platform motion decoupled active SLAM method based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is proposed. Experimental data demonstrate that the proposed ViDAR and the VIEO algorithm significantly increase cross-frame co-visibility relationships compared to its corresponding visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithm, improving state estimation accuracy. Additionally, the DRL-based active SLAM algorithm, with the ability to decouple from platform motion, can increase the diversity weight of the feature points and further enhance the VIEO algorithm's performance. The proposed methodology sheds fresh insights into both the updated platform design and decoupled approach of active SLAM systems in complex environments.