Johannes Niedermayer

Tomislav Pavković, Mohammad-Ali Nikouei Mahani, Johannes Niedermayer et al.

3D semantic occupancy prediction is one of the crucial tasks of autonomous driving. It enables precise and safe interpretation and navigation in complex environments. Reliable predictions rely on effective sensor fusion, as different modalities can contain complementary information. Unlike conventional methods that depend on dense grid representations, our approach, GaussianFusionOcc, uses semantic 3D Gaussians alongside an innovative sensor fusion mechanism. Seamless integration of data from camera, LiDAR, and radar sensors enables more precise and scalable occupancy prediction, while 3D Gaussian representation significantly improves memory efficiency and inference speed. GaussianFusionOcc employs modality-agnostic deformable attention to extract essential features from each sensor type, which are then used to refine Gaussian properties, resulting in a more accurate representation of the environment. Extensive testing with various sensor combinations demonstrates the versatility of our approach. By leveraging the robustness of multi-modal fusion and the efficiency of Gaussian representation, GaussianFusionOcc outperforms current state-of-the-art models.

Johannes Niedermayer, Peer Kröger

To increase the computational efficiency of interest-point based object retrieval, researchers have put remarkable research efforts into improving the efficiency of kNN-based feature matching, pursuing to match thousands of features against a database within fractions of a second. However, due to the high-dimensional nature of image features that reduces the effectivity of index structures (curse of dimensionality), due to the vast amount of features stored in image databases (images are often represented by up to several thousand features), this ultimate goal demanded to trade query runtimes for query precision. In this paper we address an approach complementary to indexing in order to improve the runtimes of retrieval by querying only the most promising keypoint descriptors, as this affects matching runtimes linearly and can therefore lead to increased efficiency. As this reduction of kNN queries reduces the number of tentative correspondences, a loss of query precision is minimized by an additional image-level correspondence generation stage with a computational performance independent of the underlying indexing structure. We evaluate such an adaption of the standard recognition pipeline on a variety of datasets using both SIFT and state-of-the-art binary descriptors. Our results suggest that decreasing the number of queried descriptors does not necessarily imply a reduction in the result quality as long as alternative ways of increasing query recall (by thoroughly selecting k) and MAP (using image-level correspondence generation) are considered.