Wenjie Mu

Gengxuan Tian, Junqiao Zhao, Yingfeng Cai et al.

LiDAR-based place recognition plays a crucial role in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and LiDAR localization. Despite the emergence of various deep learning-based and hand-crafting-based methods, rotation-induced place recognition failure remains a critical challenge. Existing studies address this limitation through specific training strategies or network structures. However, the former does not produce satisfactory results, while the latter focuses mainly on the reduced problem of SO(2) rotation invariance. Methods targeting SO(3) rotation invariance suffer from limitations in discrimination capability. In this paper, we propose a new method that employs Vector Neurons Network (VNN) to achieve SO(3) rotation invariance. We first extract rotation-equivariant features from neighboring points and map low-dimensional features to a high-dimensional space through VNN. Afterwards, we calculate the Euclidean and Cosine distance in the rotation-equivariant feature space as rotation-invariant feature descriptors. Finally, we aggregate the features using GeM pooling to obtain global descriptors. To address the significant information loss when formulating rotation-invariant descriptors, we propose computing distances between features at different layers within the Euclidean space neighborhood. This greatly improves the discriminability of the point cloud descriptors while ensuring computational efficiency. Experimental results on public datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms other baseline methods implementing rotation invariance, while achieving comparable results with current state-of-the-art place recognition methods that do not consider rotation issues.

Wenjie Mu, Zhan Li, Chuanzhou Su et al.

Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields (GeNeRFs) enable high-quality scene reconstruction from sparse views and can generalize to unseen scenes. However, in real-world settings, transient distractors break cross-view structural consistency, corrupting supervision and degrading reconstruction quality. Existing distractor-free NeRF methods rely on per-scene optimization and estimate uncertainty from per-view reconstruction errors, which are not reliable for GeNeRFs and often misjudge inconsistent static structures as distractors. To this end, we propose MU-GeNeRF, a Multi-view Uncertainty-guided distractor-aware GeNeRF framework designed to alleviate GeNeRF's robust modeling challenges in the presence of transient distractions. We decompose distractor awareness into two complementary uncertainty components: Source-view Uncertainty, which captures structural discrepancies across source views caused by viewpoint changes or dynamic factors; and Target-view Uncertainty, which detects observation anomalies in the target image induced by transient distractors.These two uncertainties address distinct error sources and are combined through a heteroscedastic reconstruction loss, which guides the model to adaptively modulate supervision, enabling more robust distractor suppression and geometric modeling.Extensive experiments show that our method not only surpasses existing GeNeRFs but also achieves performance comparable to scene-specific distractor-free NeRFs.

Junqiao Zhao, Fenglin Zhang, Yingfeng Cai et al.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) aims to retrieve frames from a geotagged database that are located at the same place as the query frame. To improve the robustness of VPR in perceptually aliasing scenarios, sequence-based VPR methods are proposed. These methods are either based on matching between frame sequences or extracting sequence descriptors for direct retrieval. However, the former is usually based on the assumption of constant velocity, which is difficult to hold in practice, and is computationally expensive and subject to sequence length. Although the latter overcomes these problems, existing sequence descriptors are constructed by aggregating features of multiple frames only, without interaction on temporal information, and thus cannot obtain descriptors with spatio-temporal discrimination.In this paper, we propose a sequence descriptor that effectively incorporates spatio-temporal information. Specifically, spatial attention within the same frame is utilized to learn spatial feature patterns, while attention in corresponding local regions of different frames is utilized to learn the persistence or change of features over time. We use a sliding window to control the temporal range of attention and use relative positional encoding to construct sequential relationships between different features. This allows our descriptors to capture the intrinsic dynamics in a sequence of frames.Comprehensive experiments on challenging benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods.The code is available at https://github.com/tiev-tongji/Spatio-Temporal-SeqVPR.