Changhao Chen

Kaichen Zhou, Lanqing Hong, Changhao Chen et al.

Self-supervised depth learning from monocular images normally relies on the 2D pixel-wise photometric relation between temporally adjacent image frames. However, they neither fully exploit the 3D point-wise geometric correspondences, nor effectively tackle the ambiguities in the photometric warping caused by occlusions or illumination inconsistency. To address these problems, this work proposes Density Volume Construction Network (DevNet), a novel self-supervised monocular depth learning framework, that can consider 3D spatial information, and exploit stronger geometric constraints among adjacent camera frustums. Instead of directly regressing the pixel value from a single image, our DevNet divides the camera frustum into multiple parallel planes and predicts the pointwise occlusion probability density on each plane. The final depth map is generated by integrating the density along corresponding rays. During the training process, novel regularization strategies and loss functions are introduced to mitigate photometric ambiguities and overfitting. Without obviously enlarging model parameters size or running time, DevNet outperforms several representative baselines on both the KITTI-2015 outdoor dataset and NYU-V2 indoor dataset. In particular, the root-mean-square-deviation is reduced by around 4% with DevNet on both KITTI-2015 and NYU-V2 in the task of depth estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/gitkaichenzhou/DevNet.

Changhao Chen, Bing Wang, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu et al.

Deep learning based localization and mapping approaches have recently emerged as a new research direction and receive significant attentions from both industry and academia. Instead of creating hand-designed algorithms based on physical models or geometric theories, deep learning solutions provide an alternative to solve the problem in a data-driven way. Benefiting from the ever-increasing volumes of data and computational power on devices, these learning methods are fast evolving into a new area that shows potentials to track self-motion and estimate environmental model accurately and robustly for mobile agents. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey, and propose a taxonomy for the localization and mapping methods using deep learning. This survey aims to discuss two basic questions: whether deep learning is promising to localization and mapping; how deep learning should be applied to solve this problem. To this end, a series of localization and mapping topics are investigated, from the learning based visual odometry, global relocalization, to mapping, and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). It is our hope that this survey organically weaves together the recent works in this vein from robotics, computer vision and machine learning communities, and serves as a guideline for future researchers to apply deep learning to tackle the problem of visual localization and mapping.

Changhao Chen, Xianfei Pan

Inertial sensors are widely utilized in smartphones, drones, robots, and IoT devices, playing a crucial role in enabling ubiquitous and reliable localization. Inertial sensor-based positioning is essential in various applications, including personal navigation, location-based security, and human-device interaction. However, low-cost MEMS inertial sensors' measurements are inevitably corrupted by various error sources, leading to unbounded drifts when integrated doubly in traditional inertial navigation algorithms, subjecting inertial positioning to the problem of error drifts. In recent years, with the rapid increase in sensor data and computational power, deep learning techniques have been developed, sparking significant research into addressing the problem of inertial positioning. Relevant literature in this field spans across mobile computing, robotics, and machine learning. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of deep learning-based inertial positioning and its applications in tracking pedestrians, drones, vehicles, and robots. We connect efforts from different fields and discuss how deep learning can be applied to address issues such as sensor calibration, positioning error drift reduction, and multi-sensor fusion. This article aims to attract readers from various backgrounds, including researchers and practitioners interested in the potential of deep learning-based techniques to solve inertial positioning problems. Our review demonstrates the exciting possibilities that deep learning brings to the table and provides a roadmap for future research in this field.

Yuantai Zhang, Jiaqi Yang, Huajian Zeng et al.

Fast and reliable initialization is critical for monocular visual-inertial navigation systems (VINS), as it establishes the starting conditions for subsequent state estimation. Despite steady progress, most existing methods heavily rely on visual feature correspondences and require 3-4 seconds of sensory data for successful initialization, which limits their applicability and efficiency. With the advent of feed-forward 3D models that can directly predict point clouds from images, we revisit the visual-inertial initialization problem from a concise perspective. In this work, we propose a feature-free initialization framework that leverages up-to-scale point clouds predicted by a feed-forward 3D model, thereby obviating the need for visual feature tracking and estimation. This design substantially reduces system complexity and improves the reliability of initialization. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed feature-free initialization method achieves the highest success rate, exceeding 90%, and significantly reduces the data duration required for successful initialization, typically to under 1.2 s. We further validate our method on a self-collected dataset covering various indoor and outdoor scenarios, demonstrating robust performance, particularly in visually degraded environments where existing methods often fail. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Yuantai-Z/FF-VIO-Init.

Zheming Tu, Changhao Chen, Xianfei Pan et al.

Accurate and robust localization is a fundamental need for mobile agents. Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithms exploit the information from camera and inertial sensors to estimate position and translation. Recent deep learning based VIO models attract attentions as they provide pose information in a data-driven way, without the need of designing hand-crafted algorithms. Existing learning based VIO models rely on recurrent models to fuse multimodal data and process sensor signal, which are hard to train and not efficient enough. We propose a novel learning based VIO framework with external memory attention that effectively and efficiently combines visual and inertial features for states estimation. Our proposed model is able to estimate pose accurately and robustly, even in challenging scenarios, e.g., on overcast days and water-filled ground , which are difficult for traditional VIO algorithms to extract visual features. Experiments validate that it outperforms both traditional and learning based VIO baselines in different scenes.

Changqing Zhou, Yueru Luo, Han Zhang et al.

Open-vocabulary 3D occupancy is vital for embodied agents, which need to understand complex indoor environments where semantic categories are abundant and evolve beyond fixed taxonomies. While recent work has explored open-vocabulary occupancy in outdoor driving scenarios, such methods transfer poorly indoors, where geometry is denser, layouts are more intricate, and semantics are far more fine-grained. To address these challenges, we adopt a geometry-only supervision paradigm that uses only binary occupancy labels (occupied vs free). Our framework builds upon 3D Language-Embedded Gaussians, which serve as a unified intermediate representation coupling fine-grained 3D geometry with a language-aligned semantic embedding. On the geometry side, we find that existing Gaussian-to-Occupancy operators fail to converge under such weak supervision, and we introduce an opacity-aware, Poisson-based approach that stabilizes volumetric aggregation. On the semantic side, direct alignment between rendered features and open-vocabulary segmentation features suffers from feature mixing; we therefore propose a Progressive Temperature Decay schedule that gradually sharpens opacities during splatting, strengthening Gaussian-language alignment. On Occ-ScanNet, our framework achieves 59.50 IoU and 21.05 mIoU in the open-vocabulary setting, surpassing all existing occupancy methods in IoU and outperforming prior open-vocabulary approaches by a large margin in mIoU. Code will be released at https://github.com/JuIvyy/LegoOcc.

Hao Qu, Lilian Zhang, Xiaoping Hu et al.

Accurately perceiving location and scene is crucial for autonomous driving and mobile robots. Recent advances in deep learning have made it possible to learn egomotion and depth from monocular images in a self-supervised manner, without requiring highly precise labels to train the networks. However, monocular vision methods suffer from a limitation known as scale-ambiguity, which restricts their application when absolute-scale is necessary. To address this, we propose SelfOdom, a self-supervised dual-network framework that can robustly and consistently learn and generate pose and depth estimates in global scale from monocular images. In particular, we introduce a novel coarse-to-fine training strategy that enables the metric scale to be recovered in a two-stage process. Furthermore, SelfOdom is flexible and can incorporate inertial data with images, which improves its robustness in challenging scenarios, using an attention-based fusion module. Our model excels in both normal and challenging lighting conditions, including difficult night scenes. Extensive experiments on public datasets have demonstrated that SelfOdom outperforms representative traditional and learning-based VO and VIO models.

Changqing Zhou, Yueru Luo, Changhao Chen

Accurate 3D scene understanding is essential for embodied intelligence, with occupancy prediction emerging as a key task for reasoning about both objects and free space. Existing approaches largely rely on depth priors (e.g., DepthAnything) but make only limited use of 3D cues, restricting performance and generalization. Recently, visual geometry models such as VGGT have shown strong capability in providing rich 3D priors, but similar to monocular depth foundation models, they still operate at the level of visible surfaces rather than volumetric interiors, motivating us to explore how to more effectively leverage these increasingly powerful geometry priors for 3D occupancy prediction. We present GPOcc, a framework that leverages generalizable visual geometry priors (GPs) for monocular occupancy prediction. Our method extends surface points inward along camera rays to generate volumetric samples, which are represented as Gaussian primitives for probabilistic occupancy inference. To handle streaming input, we further design a training-free incremental update strategy that fuses per-frame Gaussians into a unified global representation. Experiments on Occ-ScanNet and EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet demonstrate significant gains: GPOcc improves mIoU by +9.99 in the monocular setting and +11.79 in the streaming setting over prior state of the art. Under the same depth prior, it achieves +6.73 mIoU while running 2.65$\times$ faster. These results highlight that GPOcc leverages geometry priors more effectively and efficiently. Code will be released at https://github.com/JuIvyy/GPOcc.

Zhihao Jia, Bing Wang, Changhao Chen

Neural rendering has garnered substantial attention owing to its capacity for creating realistic 3D scenes. However, its applicability to extensive scenes remains challenging, with limitations in effectiveness. In this work, we propose the Drone-NeRF framework to enhance the efficient reconstruction of unbounded large-scale scenes suited for drone oblique photography using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Our approach involves dividing the scene into uniform sub-blocks based on camera position and depth visibility. Sub-scenes are trained in parallel using NeRF, then merged for a complete scene. We refine the model by optimizing camera poses and guiding NeRF with a uniform sampler. Integrating chosen samples enhances accuracy. A hash-coded fusion MLP accelerates density representation, yielding RGB and Depth outputs. Our framework accounts for sub-scene constraints, reduces parallel-training noise, handles shadow occlusion, and merges sub-regions for a polished rendering result. This Drone-NeRF framework demonstrates promising capabilities in addressing challenges related to scene complexity, rendering efficiency, and accuracy in drone-obtained imagery.

Jialong Liu, Dehan Shen, Yanbo Wen et al.

Extreme legged parkour demands rapid terrain assessment and precise foot placement under highly dynamic conditions. While recent learning-based systems achieve impressive agility, they remain fundamentally fragile to perceptual degradation, where even brief visual noise or latency can cause catastrophic failure. To overcome this, we propose Robust Extreme Agility Learning (REAL), an end-to-end framework for reliable parkour under sensory corruption. Instead of relying on perfectly clean perception, REAL tightly couples vision, proprioceptive history, and temporal memory. We distill a cross-modal teacher policy into a deployable student equipped with a FiLM-modulated Mamba backbone to actively filter visual noise and build short-term terrain memory actively. Furthermore, a physics-guided Bayesian state estimator enforces rigid-body consistency during high-impact maneuvers. Validated on a Unitree Go2 quadruped, REAL successfully traverses extreme obstacles even with a 1-meter visual blind zone, while strictly satisfying real-time control constraints with a bounded 13.1 ms inference time.

Kaichen Zhou, Changhao Chen, Bing Wang et al.

Recent learning-based approaches have achieved impressive results in the field of single-shot camera localization. However, how best to fuse multiple modalities (e.g., image and depth) and to deal with degraded or missing input are less well studied. In particular, we note that previous approaches towards deep fusion do not perform significantly better than models employing a single modality. We conjecture that this is because of the naive approaches to feature space fusion through summation or concatenation which do not take into account the different strengths of each modality. To address this, we propose an end-to-end framework, termed VMLoc, to fuse different sensor inputs into a common latent space through a variational Product-of-Experts (PoE) followed by attention-based fusion. Unlike previous multimodal variational works directly adapting the objective function of vanilla variational auto-encoder, we show how camera localization can be accurately estimated through an unbiased objective function based on importance weighting. Our model is extensively evaluated on RGB-D datasets and the results prove the efficacy of our model. The source code is available at https://github.com/kaichen-z/VMLoc.

Bing Wang, Changhao Chen, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu et al.

Deep learning has achieved impressive results in camera localization, but current single-image techniques typically suffer from a lack of robustness, leading to large outliers. To some extent, this has been tackled by sequential (multi-images) or geometry constraint approaches, which can learn to reject dynamic objects and illumination conditions to achieve better performance. In this work, we show that attention can be used to force the network to focus on more geometrically robust objects and features, achieving state-of-the-art performance in common benchmark, even if using only a single image as input. Extensive experimental evidence is provided through public indoor and outdoor datasets. Through visualization of the saliency maps, we demonstrate how the network learns to reject dynamic objects, yielding superior global camera pose regression performance. The source code is avaliable at https://github.com/BingCS/AtLoc.

Zeyu Jiang, Changqing Zhou, Xingxing Zuo et al.

Existing learning-based occupancy prediction methods rely on large-scale 3D annotations and generalize poorly across environments. We present FreeOcc, a training-free framework for open-vocabulary occupancy prediction from monocular or RGB-D sequences. Unlike prior approaches that require voxel-level supervision and ground-truth camera poses, FreeOcc operates without 3D annotations, pose ground truth, or any learning stage. FreeOcc incrementally builds a globally consistent occupancy map via a four-layer pipeline: a SLAM backbone estimates poses and sparse geometry; a geometrically consistent Gaussian update constructs dense 3D Gaussian maps; open-vocabulary semantics from off-the-shelf vision-language models are associated with Gaussian primitives; and a probabilistic Gaussian-to-occupancy projection produces dense voxel occupancy. Despite being entirely training-free and pose-agnostic, FreeOcc achieves over $2\times$ improvements in IoU and mIoU on EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet compared to prior self-supervised methods. We further introduce ReplicaOcc, a benchmark for indoor open-vocabulary occupancy prediction, and show that FreeOcc transfers zero-shot to novel environments, substantially outperforming both supervised and self-supervised baselines. Project page: https://the-masses.github.io/freeocc-web/.

Zeyu Jiang, Kuan Xu, Changhao Chen

Thermal cameras offer strong potential for robot perception under challenging illumination and weather conditions. However, thermal Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains difficult due to unreliable feature extraction, unstable motion tracking, and inconsistent global pose and map construction, particularly in dynamic large-scale outdoor environments. To address these challenges, we propose LST-SLAM, a novel large-scale stereo thermal SLAM system that achieves robust performance in complex, dynamic scenes. Our approach combines self-supervised thermal feature learning, stereo dual-level motion tracking, and geometric pose optimization. We also introduce a semantic-geometric hybrid constraint that suppresses potentially dynamic features lacking strong inter-frame geometric consistency. Furthermore, we develop an online incremental bag-of-words model for loop closure detection, coupled with global pose optimization to mitigate accumulated drift. Extensive experiments on kilometer-scale dynamic thermal datasets show that LST-SLAM significantly outperforms recent representative SLAM systems, including AirSLAM and DROID-SLAM, in both robustness and accuracy.

Zhendong Xiao, Changhao Chen, Shan Yang et al.

Camera relocalization is pivotal in computer vision, with applications in AR, drones, robotics, and autonomous driving. It estimates 3D camera position and orientation (6-DoF) from images. Unlike traditional methods like SLAM, recent strides use deep learning for direct end-to-end pose estimation. We propose EffLoc, a novel efficient Vision Transformer for single-image camera relocalization. EffLoc's hierarchical layout, memory-bound self-attention, and feed-forward layers boost memory efficiency and inter-channel communication. Our introduced sequential group attention (SGA) module enhances computational efficiency by diversifying input features, reducing redundancy, and expanding model capacity. EffLoc excels in efficiency and accuracy, outperforming prior methods, such as AtLoc and MapNet. It thrives on large-scale outdoor car-driving scenario, ensuring simplicity, end-to-end trainability, and eliminating handcrafted loss functions.

Hao Qu, Lilian Zhang, Jun Mao et al.

The performance of visual SLAM in complex, real-world scenarios is often compromised by unreliable feature extraction and matching when using handcrafted features. Although deep learning-based local features excel at capturing high-level information and perform well on matching benchmarks, they struggle with generalization in continuous motion scenes, adversely affecting loop detection accuracy. Our system employs a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) strategy to optimize the training of keypoint extraction networks, enhancing their adaptability to diverse environments. Additionally, we introduce a coarse-to-fine feature tracking mechanism for learned keypoints. It begins with a direct method to approximate the relative pose between consecutive frames, followed by a feature matching method for refined pose estimation. To mitigate cumulative positioning errors, DK-SLAM incorporates a novel online learning module that utilizes binary features for loop closure detection. This module dynamically identifies loop nodes within a sequence, ensuring accurate and efficient localization. Experimental evaluations on publicly available datasets demonstrate that DK-SLAM outperforms leading traditional and learning based SLAM systems, such as ORB-SLAM3 and LIFT-SLAM. These results underscore the efficacy and robustness of our DK-SLAM in varied and challenging real-world environments.

Dehan Shen, Changhao Chen

Learning-based inertial odometry has achieved remarkable progress in pedestrian navigation. However, extending these methods to quadruped robots remains challenging due to their distinct and highly dynamic motion patterns. Models that perform well on pedestrian data often experience severe degradation when deployed on legged platforms. To tackle this challenge, we introduce X-IONet, a cross-platform inertial odometry framework that operates solely using a single Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). X-IONet incorporates a rule-based expert selection module to classify motion platforms and route IMU sequences to platform-specific expert networks. The displacement prediction network features a dual-stage attention architecture that jointly models long-range temporal dependencies and inter-axis correlations, enabling accurate motion representation. It outputs both displacement and associated uncertainty, which are further fused through an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for robust state estimation. Extensive experiments on public pedestrian datasets and a self-collected quadruped robot dataset demonstrate that X-IONet achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) by 14.3% and Relative Trajectory Error (RTE) by 11.4% on pedestrian data, and by 52.8% and 41.3% on quadruped robot data. These results highlight the effectiveness of X-IONet in advancing accurate and robust inertial navigation across both human and legged robot platforms.

Qunchao Jin, Yilin Wu, Changhao Chen

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) in unseen environments remains a challenging problem for household robots, requiring strong perceptual understanding and decision-making capabilities. While recent methods leverage metric maps and Large Language Models (LLMs), they often depend on depth sensors or prebuilt maps, limiting the spatial reasoning ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Mapless ZSON approaches have emerged to address this, but they typically make short-sighted decisions, leading to local deadlocks due to a lack of historical context. We propose PanoNav, a fully RGB-only, mapless ZSON framework that integrates a Panoramic Scene Parsing module to unlock the spatial parsing potential of MLLMs from panoramic RGB inputs, and a Memory-guided Decision-Making mechanism enhanced by a Dynamic Bounded Memory Queue to incorporate exploration history and avoid local deadlocks. Experiments on the public navigation benchmark show that PanoNav significantly outperforms representative baselines in both SR and SPL metrics.

Jiahui Wang, Changhao Chen

Visual navigation is essential for robotics and embodied AI. However, existing foundation models, particularly those with transformer decoders, suffer from high computational overhead and lack interpretability, limiting their deployment in resource-tight scenarios. To address this, we propose DynaNav, a Dynamic Visual Navigation framework that adapts feature and layer selection based on scene complexity. It employs a trainable hard feature selector for sparse operations, enhancing efficiency and interpretability. Additionally, we integrate feature selection into an early-exit mechanism, with Bayesian Optimization determining optimal exit thresholds to reduce computational cost. Extensive experiments in real-world-based datasets and simulated environments demonstrate the effectiveness of DynaNav. Compared to ViNT, DynaNav achieves a 2.26x reduction in FLOPs, 42.3% lower inference time, and 32.8% lower memory usage, while improving navigation performance across four public datasets.

Zhendong Xiao, Wu Wei, Shujie Ji et al.

Camera relocalization, a cornerstone capability of modern computer vision, accurately determines a camera's position and orientation (6-DoF) from images and is essential for applications in augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), autonomous driving, delivery drones, and robotic navigation. Unlike traditional deep learning-based methods that regress camera pose from images in a single scene, which often lack generalization and robustness in diverse environments, we propose MVL-Loc, a novel end-to-end multi-scene 6-DoF camera relocalization framework. MVL-Loc leverages pretrained world knowledge from vision-language models (VLMs) and incorporates multimodal data to generalize across both indoor and outdoor settings. Furthermore, natural language is employed as a directive tool to guide the multi-scene learning process, facilitating semantic understanding of complex scenes and capturing spatial relationships among objects. Extensive experiments on the 7Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets demonstrate MVL-Loc's robustness and state-of-the-art performance in real-world multi-scene camera relocalization, with improved accuracy in both positional and orientational estimates.

Yu Liu, Yangtao Meng, Xianfei Pan et al.

Thermal cameras capture environmental data through heat emission, a fundamentally different mechanism compared to visible light cameras, which rely on pinhole imaging. As a result, traditional visual relocalization methods designed for visible light images are not directly applicable to thermal images. Despite significant advancements in deep learning for camera relocalization, approaches specifically tailored for thermal camera-based relocalization remain underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce ThermalLoc, a novel end-to-end deep learning method for thermal image relocalization. ThermalLoc effectively extracts both local and global features from thermal images by integrating EfficientNet with Transformers, and performs absolute pose regression using two MLP networks. We evaluated ThermalLoc on both the publicly available thermal-odometry dataset and our own dataset. The results demonstrate that ThermalLoc outperforms existing representative methods employed for thermal camera relocalization, including AtLoc, MapNet, PoseNet, and RobustLoc, achieving superior accuracy and robustness.

Yangfan Xu, Qu Hao, Lilian Zhang et al.

Visual SLAM is essential for mobile robots, drone navigation, and VR/AR, but traditional RGB camera systems struggle in low-light conditions, driving interest in thermal SLAM, which excels in such environments. However, thermal imaging faces challenges like low contrast, high noise, and limited large-scale annotated datasets, restricting the use of deep learning in outdoor scenarios. We present DarkSLAM, a noval deep learning-based monocular thermal SLAM system designed for large-scale localization and reconstruction in complex lighting conditions.Our approach incorporates the Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) mechanism in visual odometry and the Selective Kernel Attention (SKA) mechanism in depth estimation to enhance pose accuracy and mitigate thermal depth degradation. Additionally, the system includes thermal depth-based loop closure detection and pose optimization, ensuring robust performance in low-texture thermal scenes. Extensive outdoor experiments demonstrate that DarkSLAM significantly outperforms existing methods like SC-Sfm-Learner and Shin et al., delivering precise localization and 3D dense mapping even in challenging nighttime environments.

Huaiji Zhou, Bing Wang, Changhao Chen

Neural implicit representations such as NeRF have revolutionized 3D scene representation with photo-realistic quality. However, existing methods for visual localization within NeRF representations suffer from inefficiency and scalability issues, particularly in large-scale environments. This work proposes MatLoc-NeRF, a novel matching-based localization framework using selected NeRF features. It addresses efficiency by employing a learnable feature selection mechanism that identifies informative NeRF features for matching with query images. This eliminates the need for all NeRF features or additional descriptors, leading to faster and more accurate pose estimation. To tackle large-scale scenes, MatLoc-NeRF utilizes a pose-aware scene partitioning strategy. It ensures that only the most relevant NeRF sub-block generates key features for a specific pose. Additionally, scene segmentation and a place predictor provide fast coarse initial pose estimation. Evaluations on public large-scale datasets demonstrate that MatLoc-NeRF achieves superior efficiency and accuracy compared to existing NeRF-based localization methods.

Minghao Zhang, Bifeng Song, Changhao Chen et al.

In control problems for insect-scale direct-drive experimental platforms under tandem wing influence, the primary challenge facing existing reinforcement learning models is their limited safety in the exploration process and the stability of the continuous training process. We introduce the ConcertoRL algorithm to enhance control precision and stabilize the online training process, which consists of two main innovations: a time-interleaved mechanism to interweave classical controllers with reinforcement learning-based controllers aiming to improve control precision in the initial stages, a policy composer organizes the experience gained from previous learning to ensure the stability of the online training process. This paper conducts a series of experiments. First, experiments incorporating the time-interleaved mechanism demonstrate a substantial performance boost of approximately 70% over scenarios without reinforcement learning enhancements and a 50% increase in efficiency compared to reference controllers with doubled control frequencies. These results highlight the algorithm's ability to create a synergistic effect that exceeds the sum of its parts.

Zongyang Chen, Xianfei Pan, Changhao Chen

Accurately and reliably positioning pedestrians in satellite-denied conditions remains a significant challenge. Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) is commonly employed to estimate pedestrian location using low-cost inertial sensor. However, PDR is susceptible to drift due to sensor noise, incorrect step detection, and inaccurate stride length estimation. This work proposes ReLoc-PDR, a fusion framework combining PDR and visual relocalization using graph optimization. ReLoc-PDR leverages time-correlated visual observations and learned descriptors to achieve robust positioning in visually-degraded environments. A graph optimization-based fusion mechanism with the Tukey kernel effectively corrects cumulative errors and mitigates the impact of abnormal visual observations. Real-world experiments demonstrate that our ReLoc-PDR surpasses representative methods in accuracy and robustness, achieving accurte and robust pedestrian positioning results using only a smartphone in challenging environments such as less-textured corridors and dark nighttime scenarios.

Bing Wang, Changhao Chen, Zhaopeng Cui et al.

Accurately describing and detecting 2D and 3D keypoints is crucial to establishing correspondences across images and point clouds. Despite a plethora of learning-based 2D or 3D local feature descriptors and detectors having been proposed, the derivation of a shared descriptor and joint keypoint detector that directly matches pixels and points remains under-explored by the community. This work takes the initiative to establish fine-grained correspondences between 2D images and 3D point clouds. In order to directly match pixels and points, a dual fully convolutional framework is presented that maps 2D and 3D inputs into a shared latent representation space to simultaneously describe and detect keypoints. Furthermore, an ultra-wide reception mechanism in combination with a novel loss function are designed to mitigate the intrinsic information variations between pixel and point local regions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework shows competitive performance in fine-grained matching between images and point clouds and achieves state-of-the-art results for the task of indoor visual localization. Our source code will be available at [no-name-for-blind-review].

Changhao Chen, Bing Wang, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu et al.

Deep learning based localization and mapping has recently attracted significant attention. Instead of creating hand-designed algorithms through exploitation of physical models or geometric theories, deep learning based solutions provide an alternative to solve the problem in a data-driven way. Benefiting from ever-increasing volumes of data and computational power, these methods are fast evolving into a new area that offers accurate and robust systems to track motion and estimate scenes and their structure for real-world applications. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey, and propose a new taxonomy for localization and mapping using deep learning. We also discuss the limitations of current models, and indicate possible future directions. A wide range of topics are covered, from learning odometry estimation, mapping, to global localization and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). We revisit the problem of perceiving self-motion and scene understanding with on-board sensors, and show how to solve it by integrating these modules into a prospective spatial machine intelligence system (SMIS). It is our hope that this work can connect emerging works from robotics, computer vision and machine learning communities, and serve as a guide for future researchers to apply deep learning to tackle localization and mapping problems.

Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Muhamad Risqi U. Saputra, Peijun Zhao et al.

Robust and accurate trajectory estimation of mobile agents such as people and robots is a key requirement for providing spatial awareness for emerging capabilities such as augmented reality or autonomous interaction. Although currently dominated by optical techniques e.g., visual-inertial odometry, these suffer from challenges with scene illumination or featureless surfaces. As an alternative, we propose milliEgo, a novel deep-learning approach to robust egomotion estimation which exploits the capabilities of low-cost mmWave radar. Although mmWave radar has a fundamental advantage over monocular cameras of being metric i.e., providing absolute scale or depth, current single chip solutions have limited and sparse imaging resolution, making existing point-cloud registration techniques brittle. We propose a new architecture that is optimized for solving this challenging pose transformation problem. Secondly, to robustly fuse mmWave pose estimates with additional sensors, e.g. inertial or visual sensors we introduce a mixed attention approach to deep fusion. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate our proposed system is able to achieve 1.3% 3D error drift and generalizes well to unseen environments. We also show that the neural architecture can be made highly efficient and suitable for real-time embedded applications.

Wei Wang, Bing Wang, Peijun Zhao et al.

In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end learning-based LiDAR relocalization framework, termed PointLoc, which infers 6-DoF poses directly using only a single point cloud as input, without requiring a pre-built map. Compared to RGB image-based relocalization, LiDAR frames can provide rich and robust geometric information about a scene. However, LiDAR point clouds are unordered and unstructured making it difficult to apply traditional deep learning regression models for this task. We address this issue by proposing a novel PointNet-style architecture with self-attention to efficiently estimate 6-DoF poses from 360° LiDAR input frames.Extensive experiments on recently released challenging Oxford Radar RobotCar dataset and real-world robot experiments demonstrate that the proposedmethod can achieve accurate relocalization performance.

Changhao Chen, Peijun Zhao, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu et al.

Modern inertial measurements units (IMUs) are small, cheap, energy efficient, and widely employed in smart devices and mobile robots. Exploiting inertial data for accurate and reliable pedestrian navigation supports is a key component for emerging Internet-of-Things applications and services. Recently, there has been a growing interest in applying deep neural networks (DNNs) to motion sensing and location estimation. However, the lack of sufficient labelled data for training and evaluating architecture benchmarks has limited the adoption of DNNs in IMU-based tasks. In this paper, we present and release the Oxford Inertial Odometry Dataset (OxIOD), a first-of-its-kind public dataset for deep learning based inertial navigation research, with fine-grained ground-truth on all sequences. Furthermore, to enable more efficient inference at the edge, we propose a novel lightweight framework to learn and reconstruct pedestrian trajectories from raw IMU data. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our dataset and methods in achieving accurate data-driven pedestrian inertial navigation on resource-constrained devices.

Changhao Chen, Stefano Rosa, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu et al.

Autonomous vehicles and mobile robotic systems are typically equipped with multiple sensors to provide redundancy. By integrating the observations from different sensors, these mobile agents are able to perceive the environment and estimate system states, e.g. locations and orientations. Although deep learning approaches for multimodal odometry estimation and localization have gained traction, they rarely focus on the issue of robust sensor fusion - a necessary consideration to deal with noisy or incomplete sensor observations in the real world. Moreover, current deep odometry models suffer from a lack of interpretability. To this extent, we propose SelectFusion, an end-to-end selective sensor fusion module which can be applied to useful pairs of sensor modalities such as monocular images and inertial measurements, depth images and LIDAR point clouds. Our model is a uniform framework that is not restricted to specific modality or task. During prediction, the network is able to assess the reliability of the latent features from different sensor modalities and estimate trajectory both at scale and global pose. In particular, we propose two fusion modules - a deterministic soft fusion and a stochastic hard fusion, and offer a comprehensive study of the new strategies compared to trivial direct fusion. We extensively evaluate all fusion strategies in both public datasets and on progressively degraded datasets that present synthetic occlusions, noisy and missing data and time misalignment between sensors, and we investigate the effectiveness of the different fusion strategies in attending the most reliable features, which in itself, provides insights into the operation of the various models.

Wei Wang, Muhamad Risqi U. Saputra, Peijun Zhao et al.

Odometry is of key importance for localization in the absence of a map. There is considerable work in the area of visual odometry (VO), and recent advances in deep learning have brought novel approaches to VO, which directly learn salient features from raw images. These learning-based approaches have led to more accurate and robust VO systems. However, they have not been well applied to point cloud data yet. In this work, we investigate how to exploit deep learning to estimate point cloud odometry (PCO), which may serve as a critical component in point cloud-based downstream tasks or learning-based systems. Specifically, we propose a novel end-to-end deep parallel neural network called DeepPCO, which can estimate the 6-DOF poses using consecutive point clouds. It consists of two parallel sub-networks to estimate 3-D translation and orientation respectively rather than a single neural network. We validate our approach on KITTI Visual Odometry/SLAM benchmark dataset with different baselines. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves good performance in terms of pose accuracy.

Muhamad Risqi U. Saputra, Pedro P. B. de Gusmao, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu et al.

Visual odometry shows excellent performance in a wide range of environments. However, in visually-denied scenarios (e.g. heavy smoke or darkness), pose estimates degrade or even fail. Thermal cameras are commonly used for perception and inspection when the environment has low visibility. However, their use in odometry estimation is hampered by the lack of robust visual features. In part, this is as a result of the sensor measuring the ambient temperature profile rather than scene appearance and geometry. To overcome this issue, we propose a Deep Neural Network model for thermal-inertial odometry (DeepTIO) by incorporating a visual hallucination network to provide the thermal network with complementary information. The hallucination network is taught to predict fake visual features from thermal images by using Huber loss. We also employ selective fusion to attentively fuse the features from three different modalities, i.e thermal, hallucination, and inertial features. Extensive experiments are performed in hand-held and mobile robot data in benign and smoke-filled environments, showing the efficacy of the proposed model.

Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Xuan Kan, Bowen Du et al.

Facial recognition is a key enabling component for emerging Internet of Things (IoT) services such as smart homes or responsive offices. Through the use of deep neural networks, facial recognition has achieved excellent performance. However, this is only possibly when trained with hundreds of images of each user in different viewing and lighting conditions. Clearly, this level of effort in enrolment and labelling is impossible for wide-spread deployment and adoption. Inspired by the fact that most people carry smart wireless devices with them, e.g. smartphones, we propose to use this wireless identifier as a supervisory label. This allows us to curate a dataset of facial images that are unique to a certain domain e.g. a set of people in a particular office. This custom corpus can then be used to finetune existing pre-trained models e.g. FaceNet. However, due to the vagaries of wireless propagation in buildings, the supervisory labels are noisy and weak.We propose a novel technique, AutoTune, which learns and refines the association between a face and wireless identifier over time, by increasing the inter-cluster separation and minimizing the intra-cluster distance. Through extensive experiments with multiple users on two sites, we demonstrate the ability of AutoTune to design an environment-specific, continually evolving facial recognition system with entirely no user effort.

Changhao Chen, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Bing Wang et al.

Dynamical models estimate and predict the temporal evolution of physical systems. State Space Models (SSMs) in particular represent the system dynamics with many desirable properties, such as being able to model uncertainty in both the model and measurements, and optimal (in the Bayesian sense) recursive formulations e.g. the Kalman Filter. However, they require significant domain knowledge to derive the parametric form and considerable hand-tuning to correctly set all the parameters. Data driven techniques e.g. Recurrent Neural Networks have emerged as compelling alternatives to SSMs with wide success across a number of challenging tasks, in part due to their ability to extract relevant features from rich inputs. They however lack interpretability and robustness to unseen conditions. In this work, we present DynaNet, a hybrid deep learning and time-varying state-space model which can be trained end-to-end. Our neural Kalman dynamical model allows us to exploit the relative merits of each approach. We demonstrate state-of-the-art estimation and prediction on a number of physically challenging tasks, including visual odometry, sensor fusion for visual-inertial navigation and pendulum control. In addition we show how DynaNet can indicate failures through investigation of properties such as the rate of innovation (Kalman Gain).

Changhao Chen, Stefano Rosa, Yishu Miao et al.

Deep learning approaches for Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) have proven successful, but they rarely focus on incorporating robust fusion strategies for dealing with imperfect input sensory data. We propose a novel end-to-end selective sensor fusion framework for monocular VIO, which fuses monocular images and inertial measurements in order to estimate the trajectory whilst improving robustness to real-life issues, such as missing and corrupted data or bad sensor synchronization. In particular, we propose two fusion modalities based on different masking strategies: deterministic soft fusion and stochastic hard fusion, and we compare with previously proposed direct fusion baselines. During testing, the network is able to selectively process the features of the available sensor modalities and produce a trajectory at scale. We present a thorough investigation on the performances on three public autonomous driving, Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) and hand-held VIO datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the fusion strategies, which offer better performances compared to direct fusion, particularly in presence of corrupted data. In addition, we study the interpretability of the fusion networks by visualising the masking layers in different scenarios and with varying data corruption, revealing interesting correlations between the fusion networks and imperfect sensory input data.

Linhai Xie, Yishu Miao, Sen Wang et al.

Due to the sparse rewards and high degree of environment variation, reinforcement learning approaches such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) are plagued by issues of high variance when applied in complex real world environments. We present a new framework for overcoming these issues by incorporating a stochastic switch, allowing an agent to choose between high and low variance policies. The stochastic switch can be jointly trained with the original DDPG in the same framework. In this paper, we demonstrate the power of the framework in a navigation task, where the robot can dynamically choose to learn through exploration, or to use the output of a heuristic controller as guidance. Instead of starting from completely random moves, the navigation capability of a robot can be quickly bootstrapped by several simple independent controllers. The experimental results show that with the aid of stochastic guidance we are able to effectively and efficiently train DDPG navigation policies and achieve significantly better performance than state-of-the-art baselines models.

Changhao Chen, Yishu Miao, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu et al.

Inertial information processing plays a pivotal role in ego-motion awareness for mobile agents, as inertial measurements are entirely egocentric and not environment dependent. However, they are affected greatly by changes in sensor placement/orientation or motion dynamics, and it is infeasible to collect labelled data from every domain. To overcome the challenges of domain adaptation on long sensory sequences, we propose a novel framework that extracts domain-invariant features of raw sequences from arbitrary domains, and transforms to new domains without any paired data. Through the experiments, we demonstrate that it is able to efficiently and effectively convert the raw sequence from a new unlabelled target domain into an accurate inertial trajectory, benefiting from the physical motion knowledge transferred from the labelled source domain. We also conduct real-world experiments to show our framework can reconstruct physically meaningful trajectories from raw IMU measurements obtained with a standard mobile phone in various attachments.

Changhao Chen, Peijun Zhao, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu et al.

Advances in micro-electro-mechanical (MEMS) techniques enable inertial measurements units (IMUs) to be small, cheap, energy efficient, and widely used in smartphones, robots, and drones. Exploiting inertial data for accurate and reliable navigation and localization has attracted significant research and industrial interest, as IMU measurements are completely ego-centric and generally environment agnostic. Recent studies have shown that the notorious issue of drift can be significantly alleviated by using deep neural networks (DNNs), e.g. IONet. However, the lack of sufficient labelled data for training and testing various architectures limits the proliferation of adopting DNNs in IMU-based tasks. In this paper, we propose and release the Oxford Inertial Odometry Dataset (OxIOD), a first-of-its-kind data collection for inertial-odometry research, with all sequences having ground-truth labels. Our dataset contains 158 sequences totalling more than 42 km in total distance, much larger than previous inertial datasets. Another notable feature of this dataset lies in its diversity, which can reflect the complex motions of phone-based IMUs in various everyday usage. The measurements were collected with four different attachments (handheld, in the pocket, in the handbag and on the trolley), four motion modes (halting, walking slowly, walking normally, and running), five different users, four types of off-the-shelf consumer phones, and large-scale localization from office buildings. Deep inertial tracking experiments were conducted to show the effectiveness of our dataset in training deep neural network models and evaluate learning-based and model-based algorithms. The OxIOD Dataset is available at: http://deepio.cs.ox.ac.uk

Changhao Chen, Xiaoxuan Lu, Andrew Markham et al.

Inertial sensors play a pivotal role in indoor localization, which in turn lays the foundation for pervasive personal applications. However, low-cost inertial sensors, as commonly found in smartphones, are plagued by bias and noise, which leads to unbounded growth in error when accelerations are double integrated to obtain displacement. Small errors in state estimation propagate to make odometry virtually unusable in a matter of seconds. We propose to break the cycle of continuous integration, and instead segment inertial data into independent windows. The challenge becomes estimating the latent states of each window, such as velocity and orientation, as these are not directly observable from sensor data. We demonstrate how to formulate this as an optimization problem, and show how deep recurrent neural networks can yield highly accurate trajectories, outperforming state-of-the-art shallow techniques, on a wide range of tests and attachments. In particular, we demonstrate that IONet can generalize to estimate odometry for non-periodic motion, such as a shopping trolley or baby-stroller, an extremely challenging task for existing techniques.