Muhammad Shahzad

Albert Luginov, Muhammad Shahzad

We introduce NimbleD, an efficient self-supervised monocular depth estimation learning framework that incorporates supervision from pseudo-labels generated by a large vision model. This framework does not require camera intrinsics, enabling large-scale pre-training on publicly available videos. Our straightforward yet effective learning strategy significantly enhances the performance of fast and lightweight models without introducing any overhead, allowing them to achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art self-supervised monocular depth estimation models. This advancement is particularly beneficial for virtual and augmented reality applications requiring low latency inference. The source code, model weights, and acknowledgments are available at https://github.com/xapaxca/nimbled .

Jaime Spencer, Fabio Tosi, Matteo Poggi et al.

This paper discusses the results of the third edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC). The challenge focuses on zero-shot generalization to the challenging SYNS-Patches dataset, featuring complex scenes in natural and indoor settings. As with the previous edition, methods can use any form of supervision, i.e. supervised or self-supervised. The challenge received a total of 19 submissions outperforming the baseline on the test set: 10 among them submitted a report describing their approach, highlighting a diffused use of foundational models such as Depth Anything at the core of their method. The challenge winners drastically improved 3D F-Score performance, from 17.51% to 23.72%.

Anton Obukhov, Matteo Poggi, Fabio Tosi et al.

This paper presents the results of the fourth edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC), which focuses on zero-shot generalization to the SYNS-Patches benchmark, a dataset featuring challenging environments in both natural and indoor settings. In this edition, we revised the evaluation protocol to use least-squares alignment with two degrees of freedom to support disparity and affine-invariant predictions. We also revised the baselines and included popular off-the-shelf methods: Depth Anything v2 and Marigold. The challenge received a total of 24 submissions that outperformed the baselines on the test set; 10 of these included a report describing their approach, with most leading methods relying on affine-invariant predictions. The challenge winners improved the 3D F-Score over the previous edition's best result, raising it from 22.58% to 23.05%.

Yuanyuan Wang, Qian Song, Dawood Wasif et al.

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for assessing the reliability of Earth observation (EO) products. However, the extensive use of machine learning models in EO introduces an additional layer of complexity, as those models themselves are inherently uncertain. While various UQ methods do exist for machine learning models, their performance on EO datasets remains largely unevaluated. A key challenge in the community is the absence of the ground truth for uncertainty, i.e. how certain the uncertainty estimates are, apart from the labels for the image/signal. This article fills this gap by introducing three benchmark datasets specifically designed for UQ in EO machine learning models. These datasets address three common problem types in EO: regression, image segmentation, and scene classification. They enable a transparent comparison of different UQ methods for EO machine learning models. We describe the creation and characteristics of each dataset, including data sources, preprocessing steps, and label generation, with a particular focus on calculating the reference uncertainty. We also showcase baseline performance of several machine learning models on each dataset, highlighting the utility of these benchmarks for model development and comparison. Overall, this article offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working in artificial intelligence for EO, promoting a more accurate and reliable quality measure of the outputs of machine learning models. The dataset and code are accessible via https://gitlab.lrz.de/ai4eo/WG_Uncertainty.

Asmat Zahra, Nazia Perwaiz, Muhammad Shahzad et al.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) is one of the primary components of an automated visual surveillance system. It aims to automatically identify/search persons in a multi-camera network having non-overlapping field-of-views. Owing to its potential in various applications and research significance, a plethora of deep learning based re-Id approaches have been proposed in the recent years. However, there exist several vision related challenges, e.g., occlusion, pose scale \& viewpoint variance, background clutter, person misalignment and cross-domain generalization across camera modalities, which makes the problem of re-Id still far from being solved. Majority of the proposed approaches directly or indirectly aim to solve one or multiple of these existing challenges. In this context, a comprehensive review of current re-ID approaches in solving theses challenges is needed to analyze and focus on particular aspects for further advancements. At present, such a focused review does not exist and henceforth in this paper, we have presented a systematic challenge-specific literature survey of 230+ papers between the years of 2015-21. For the first time a survey of this type have been presented where the person re-Id approaches are reviewed in such solution-oriented perspective. Moreover, we have presented several diversified prominent developing trends in the respective research domain which will provide a visionary perspective regarding ongoing person re-Id research and eventually help to develop practical real world solutions.

Saqib Ali Khan, Yilei Shi, Muhammad Shahzad et al.

Semantic segmentation of raw 3D point clouds is an essential component in 3D scene analysis, but it poses several challenges, primarily due to the non-Euclidean nature of 3D point clouds. Although, several deep learning based approaches have been proposed to address this task, but almost all of them emphasized on using the latent (global) feature representations from traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN), resulting in severe loss of spatial information, thus failing to model the geometry of the underlying 3D objects, that plays an important role in remote sensing 3D scenes. In this letter, we have proposed an alternative approach to overcome the limitations of CNN based approaches by encoding the spatial features of raw 3D point clouds into undirected symmetrical graph models. These encodings are then combined with a high-dimensional feature vector extracted from a traditional CNN into a localized graph convolution operator that outputs the required 3D segmentation map. We have performed experiments on two standard benchmark datasets (including an outdoor aerial remote sensing dataset and an indoor synthetic dataset). The proposed method achieves on par state-of-the-art accuracy with improved training time and model stability thus indicating strong potential for further research towards a generalized state-of-the-art method for 3D scene understanding.