Bardienus Duisterhof

Bardienus Duisterhof, Lojze Zust, Philippe Weinzaepfel et al.

Structure-from-Motion (SfM), a task aiming at jointly recovering camera poses and 3D geometry of a scene given a set of images, remains a hard problem with still many open challenges despite decades of significant progress. The traditional solution for SfM consists of a complex pipeline of minimal solvers which tends to propagate errors and fails when images do not sufficiently overlap, have too little motion, etc. Recent methods have attempted to revisit this paradigm, but we empirically show that they fall short of fixing these core issues. In this paper, we propose instead to build upon a recently released foundation model for 3D vision that can robustly produce local 3D reconstructions and accurate matches. We introduce a low-memory approach to accurately align these local reconstructions in a global coordinate system. We further show that such foundation models can serve as efficient image retrievers without any overhead, reducing the overall complexity from quadratic to linear. Overall, our novel SfM pipeline is simple, scalable, fast and truly unconstrained, i.e. it can handle any collection of images, ordered or not. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that our method provides steady performance across diverse settings, especially outperforming existing methods in small- and medium-scale settings.

Jenny Seidenschwarz, Qunjie Zhou, Bardienus Duisterhof et al.

Reconstructing scenes and tracking motion are two sides of the same coin. Tracking points allow for geometric reconstruction [14], while geometric reconstruction of (dynamic) scenes allows for 3D tracking of points over time [24, 39]. The latter was recently also exploited for 2D point tracking to overcome occlusion ambiguities by lifting tracking directly into 3D [38]. However, above approaches either require offline processing or multi-view camera setups both unrealistic for real-world applications like robot navigation or mixed reality. We target the challenge of online 2D and 3D point tracking from unposed monocular camera input introducing Dynamic Online Monocular Reconstruction (DynOMo). We leverage 3D Gaussian splatting to reconstruct dynamic scenes in an online fashion. Our approach extends 3D Gaussians to capture new content and object motions while estimating camera movements from a single RGB frame. DynOMo stands out by enabling emergence of point trajectories through robust image feature reconstruction and a novel similarity-enhanced regularization term, without requiring any correspondence-level supervision. It sets the first baseline for online point tracking with monocular unposed cameras, achieving performance on par with existing methods. We aim to inspire the community to advance online point tracking and reconstruction, expanding the applicability to diverse real-world scenarios.

Arthur Jakobsson, Abhinav Mahajan, Karthik Pullalarevu et al.

Many robotic tasks are unforgiving; a single mistake in a dynamic throw can lead to unacceptable delays or unrecoverable failure. To mitigate this, we present a novel approach that leverages learned simulation priors to inform goal-conditioned dynamic manipulation of ropes for efficient and accurate task execution. Related methods for dynamic rope manipulation either require large real-world datasets to estimate rope behavior or the use of iterative improvements on attempts at the task for goal completion. We introduce Wiggle and Go!, a system-identification, two-stage framework that enables zero-shot task rope manipulation. The framework consists of a system identification module that observes rope movement to predict descriptive physical parameters, which then informs an optimization method for goal-conditioned action prediction for the robot to execute zero-shot in the real. Our method achieves strong performance across multiple dynamic manipulation tasks enabled by the same task-agnostic system identification module which offers seamless switching between different manipulation tasks, allowing a single model to support a diverse array of manipulation policies. We achieve a 3.55 cm average accuracy on 3D target striking in real using rope system parameters in comparison to 15.34 cm accuracy when our task model is not system-parameter-informed. We achieve a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.95 between Fourier frequencies of the predicted and real ropes on an unseen trajectory. Project website please see https://wiggleandgo.github.io/