Kaiwei Wang

Lei Sun, Daniel Gehrig, Christos Sakaridis et al.

Effective video frame interpolation hinges on the adept handling of motion in the input scene. Prior work acknowledges asynchronous event information for this, but often overlooks whether motion induces blur in the video, limiting its scope to sharp frame interpolation. We instead propose a unified framework for event-based frame interpolation that performs deblurring ad-hoc and thus works both on sharp and blurry input videos. Our model consists in a bidirectional recurrent network that incorporates the temporal dimension of interpolation and fuses information from the input frames and the events adaptively based on their temporal proximity. To enhance the generalization from synthetic data to real event cameras, we integrate self-supervised framework with the proposed model to enhance the generalization on real-world datasets in the wild. At the dataset level, we introduce a novel real-world high-resolution dataset with events and color videos named HighREV, which provides a challenging evaluation setting for the examined task. Extensive experiments show that our network consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on frame interpolation, single image deblurring, and the joint task of both. Experiments on domain transfer reveal that self-supervised training effectively mitigates the performance degradation observed when transitioning from synthetic data to real-world data. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/AHupuJR/REFID.

Jiaming Zhang, Kailun Yang, Hao Shi et al.

In this paper, we address panoramic semantic segmentation which is under-explored due to two critical challenges: (1) image distortions and object deformations on panoramas; (2) lack of semantic annotations in the 360° imagery. To tackle these problems, first, we propose the upgraded Transformer for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation, i.e., Trans4PASS+, equipped with Deformable Patch Embedding (DPE) and Deformable MLP (DMLPv2) modules for handling object deformations and image distortions whenever (before or after adaptation) and wherever (shallow or deep levels). Second, we enhance the Mutual Prototypical Adaptation (MPA) strategy via pseudo-label rectification for unsupervised domain adaptive panoramic segmentation. Third, aside from Pinhole-to-Panoramic (Pin2Pan) adaptation, we create a new dataset (SynPASS) with 9,080 panoramic images, facilitating Synthetic-to-Real (Syn2Real) adaptation scheme in 360° imagery. Extensive experiments are conducted, which cover indoor and outdoor scenarios, and each of them is investigated with Pin2Pan and Syn2Real regimens. Trans4PASS+ achieves state-of-the-art performances on four domain adaptive panoramic semantic segmentation benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/jamycheung/Trans4PASS.

Hao Shi, Chengshan Pang, Jiaming Zhang et al.

Roadside camera-driven 3D object detection is a crucial task in intelligent transportation systems, which extends the perception range beyond the limitations of vision-centric vehicles and enhances road safety. While previous studies have limitations in using only depth or height information, we find both depth and height matter and they are in fact complementary. The depth feature encompasses precise geometric cues, whereas the height feature is primarily focused on distinguishing between various categories of height intervals, essentially providing semantic context. This insight motivates the development of Complementary-BEV (CoBEV), a novel end-to-end monocular 3D object detection framework that integrates depth and height to construct robust BEV representations. In essence, CoBEV estimates each pixel's depth and height distribution and lifts the camera features into 3D space for lateral fusion using the newly proposed two-stage complementary feature selection (CFS) module. A BEV feature distillation framework is also seamlessly integrated to further enhance the detection accuracy from the prior knowledge of the fusion-modal CoBEV teacher. We conduct extensive experiments on the public 3D detection benchmarks of roadside camera-based DAIR-V2X-I and Rope3D, as well as the private Supremind-Road dataset, demonstrating that CoBEV not only achieves the accuracy of the new state-of-the-art, but also significantly advances the robustness of previous methods in challenging long-distance scenarios and noisy camera disturbance, and enhances generalization by a large margin in heterologous settings with drastic changes in scene and camera parameters. For the first time, the vehicle AP score of a camera model reaches 80% on DAIR-V2X-I in terms of easy mode. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/CoBEV.

Hao Shi, Yu Li, Kailun Yang et al.

This paper raises the new task of Fisheye Semantic Completion (FSC), where dense texture, structure, and semantics of a fisheye image are inferred even beyond the sensor field-of-view (FoV). Fisheye cameras have larger FoV than ordinary pinhole cameras, yet its unique special imaging model naturally leads to a blind area at the edge of the image plane. This is suboptimal for safety-critical applications since important perception tasks, such as semantic segmentation, become very challenging within the blind zone. Previous works considered the out-FoV outpainting and in-FoV segmentation separately. However, we observe that these two tasks are actually closely coupled. To jointly estimate the tightly intertwined complete fisheye image and scene semantics, we introduce the new FishDreamer which relies on successful ViTs enhanced with a novel Polar-aware Cross Attention module (PCA) to leverage dense context and guide semantically-consistent content generation while considering different polar distributions. In addition to the contribution of the novel task and architecture, we also derive Cityscapes-BF and KITTI360-BF datasets to facilitate training and evaluation of this new track. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed FishDreamer outperforms methods solving each task in isolation and surpasses alternative approaches on the Fisheye Semantic Completion. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/FishDreamer.

Jiaan Chen, Hao Shi, Yaozu Ye et al.

Human Pose Estimation (HPE) based on RGB images has experienced a rapid development benefiting from deep learning. However, event-based HPE has not been fully studied, which remains great potential for applications in extreme scenes and efficiency-critical conditions. In this paper, we are the first to estimate 2D human pose directly from 3D event point cloud. We propose a novel representation of events, the rasterized event point cloud, aggregating events on the same position of a small time slice. It maintains the 3D features from multiple statistical cues and significantly reduces memory consumption and computation complexity, proved to be efficient in our work. We then leverage the rasterized event point cloud as input to three different backbones, PointNet, DGCNN, and Point Transformer, with two linear layer decoders to predict the location of human keypoints. We find that based on our method, PointNet achieves promising results with much faster speed, whereas Point Transfomer reaches much higher accuracy, even close to previous event-frame-based methods. A comprehensive set of results demonstrates that our proposed method is consistently effective for these 3D backbone models in event-driven human pose estimation. Our method based on PointNet with 2048 points input achieves 82.46mm in MPJPE3D on the DHP19 dataset, while only has a latency of 12.29ms on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX edge computing platform, which is ideally suitable for real-time detection with event cameras. Code is available at https://github.com/MasterHow/EventPointPose.

Qi Jiang, Hao Shi, Lei Sun et al.

Panoramic Annular Lens (PAL) composed of few lenses has great potential in panoramic surrounding sensing tasks for mobile and wearable devices because of its tiny size and large Field of View (FoV). However, the image quality of tiny-volume PAL confines to optical limit due to the lack of lenses for aberration correction. In this paper, we propose an Annular Computational Imaging (ACI) framework to break the optical limit of light-weight PAL design. To facilitate learning-based image restoration, we introduce a wave-based simulation pipeline for panoramic imaging and tackle the synthetic-to-real gap through multiple data distributions. The proposed pipeline can be easily adapted to any PAL with design parameters and is suitable for loose-tolerance designs. Furthermore, we design the Physics Informed Image Restoration Network (PI2RNet) considering the physical priors of panoramic imaging and single-pass physics-informed engine. At the dataset level, we create the DIVPano dataset and the extensive experiments on it illustrate that our proposed network sets the new state of the art in the panoramic image restoration under spatially-variant degradation. In addition, the evaluation of the proposed ACI on a simple PAL with only 3 spherical lenses reveals the delicate balance between high-quality panoramic imaging and compact design. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore Computational Imaging (CI) in PAL. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/zju-jiangqi/ACI-PI2RNet.

Ze Wang, Kailun Yang, Hao Shi et al.

Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) has become a crucial aspect in the fields of autonomous driving and robotics. One crucial component of visual SLAM is the Field-of-View (FoV) of the camera, as a larger FoV allows for a wider range of surrounding elements and features to be perceived. However, when the FoV of the camera reaches the negative half-plane, traditional methods for representing image feature points using [u,v,1]^T become ineffective. While the panoramic FoV is advantageous for loop closure, its benefits are not easily realized under large-attitude-angle differences where loop-closure frames cannot be easily matched by existing methods. As loop closure on wide-FoV panoramic data further comes with a large number of outliers, traditional outlier rejection methods are not directly applicable. To address these issues, we propose LF-VISLAM, a Visual Inertial SLAM framework for cameras with extremely Large FoV with loop closure. A three-dimensional vector with unit length is introduced to effectively represent feature points even on the negative half-plane. The attitude information of the SLAM system is leveraged to guide the feature point detection of the loop closure. Additionally, a new outlier rejection method based on the unit length representation is integrated into the loop closure module. We collect the PALVIO dataset using a Panoramic Annular Lens (PAL) system with an entire FoV of 360°x(40°~120°) and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) to address the lack of panoramic SLAM datasets. Experiments on the established PALVIO and public datasets show that the proposed LF-VISLAM outperforms state-of-the-art SLAM methods. Our code will be open-sourced at https://github.com/flysoaryun/LF-VISLAM.

Qi Jiang, Shaohua Gao, Yao Gao et al.

High-quality panoramic images with a Field of View (FoV) of 360° are essential for contemporary panoramic computer vision tasks. However, conventional imaging systems come with sophisticated lens designs and heavy optical components. This disqualifies their usage in many mobile and wearable applications where thin and portable, minimalist imaging systems are desired. In this paper, we propose a Panoramic Computational Imaging Engine (PCIE) to achieve minimalist and high-quality panoramic imaging. With less than three spherical lenses, a Minimalist Panoramic Imaging Prototype (MPIP) is constructed based on the design of the Panoramic Annular Lens (PAL), but with low-quality imaging results due to aberrations and small image plane size. We propose two pipelines, i.e. Aberration Correction (AC) and Super-Resolution and Aberration Correction (SR&AC), to solve the image quality problems of MPIP, with imaging sensors of small and large pixel size, respectively. To leverage the prior information of the optical system, we propose a Point Spread Function (PSF) representation method to produce a PSF map as an additional modality. A PSF-aware Aberration-image Recovery Transformer (PART) is designed as a universal network for the two pipelines, in which the self-attention calculation and feature extraction are guided by the PSF map. We train PART on synthetic image pairs from simulation and put forward the PALHQ dataset to fill the gap of real-world high-quality PAL images for low-level vision. A comprehensive variety of experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrates the impressive imaging results of PCIE and the effectiveness of the PSF representation. We further deliver heuristic experimental findings for minimalist and high-quality panoramic imaging. Our dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/zju-jiangqi/PCIE-PART.

Jiaming Zhang, Ruiping Liu, Hao Shi et al.

Multimodal fusion can make semantic segmentation more robust. However, fusing an arbitrary number of modalities remains underexplored. To delve into this problem, we create the DeLiVER arbitrary-modal segmentation benchmark, covering Depth, LiDAR, multiple Views, Events, and RGB. Aside from this, we provide this dataset in four severe weather conditions as well as five sensor failure cases to exploit modal complementarity and resolve partial outages. To make this possible, we present the arbitrary cross-modal segmentation model CMNeXt. It encompasses a Self-Query Hub (SQ-Hub) designed to extract effective information from any modality for subsequent fusion with the RGB representation and adds only negligible amounts of parameters (~0.01M) per additional modality. On top, to efficiently and flexibly harvest discriminative cues from the auxiliary modalities, we introduce the simple Parallel Pooling Mixer (PPX). With extensive experiments on a total of six benchmarks, our CMNeXt achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DeLiVER, KITTI-360, MFNet, NYU Depth V2, UrbanLF, and MCubeS datasets, allowing to scale from 1 to 81 modalities. On the freshly collected DeLiVER, the quad-modal CMNeXt reaches up to 66.30% in mIoU with a +9.10% gain as compared to the mono-modal baseline. The DeLiVER dataset and our code are at: https://jamycheung.github.io/DELIVER.html.

Zhonghua Yi, Hao Shi, Kailun Yang et al.

Key-point-based scene understanding is fundamental for autonomous driving applications. At the same time, optical flow plays an important role in many vision tasks. However, due to the implicit bias of equal attention on all points, classic data-driven optical flow estimation methods yield less satisfactory performance on key points, limiting their implementations in key-point-critical safety-relevant scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce a points-based modeling method that requires the model to learn key-point-related priors explicitly. Based on the modeling method, we present FocusFlow, a framework consisting of 1) a mix loss function combined with a classic photometric loss function and our proposed Conditional Point Control Loss (CPCL) function for diverse point-wise supervision; 2) a conditioned controlling model which substitutes the conventional feature encoder by our proposed Condition Control Encoder (CCE). CCE incorporates a Frame Feature Encoder (FFE) that extracts features from frames, a Condition Feature Encoder (CFE) that learns to control the feature extraction behavior of FFE from input masks containing information of key points, and fusion modules that transfer the controlling information between FFE and CFE. Our FocusFlow framework shows outstanding performance with up to +44.5% precision improvement on various key points such as ORB, SIFT, and even learning-based SiLK, along with exceptional scalability for most existing data-driven optical flow methods like PWC-Net, RAFT, and FlowFormer. Notably, FocusFlow yields competitive or superior performances rivaling the original models on the whole frame. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ZhonghuaYi/FocusFlow_official.

Yaozu Ye, Hao Shi, Kailun Yang et al.

Event cameras respond to changes in log-brightness at the millisecond level, making them ideal for optical flow estimation. However, existing datasets from event cameras provide only low frame rate ground truth for optical flow, limiting the research potential of event-driven optical flow. To address this challenge, we introduce a low-latency event representation, Unified Voxel Grid, and propose EVA-Flow, an EVent-based Anytime Flow estimation network to produce high-frame-rate event optical flow with only low-frame-rate optical flow ground truth for supervision. Furthermore, we propose the Rectified Flow Warp Loss (RFWL) for the unsupervised assessment of intermediate optical flow. A comprehensive variety of experiments on MVSEC, DESC, and our EVA-FlowSet demonstrates that EVA-Flow achieves competitive performance, super-low-latency (5ms), time-dense motion estimation (200Hz), and strong generalization. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Yaozhuwa/EVA-Flow.

Ze Shi, Hao Shi, Kailun Yang et al.

Visual place recognition has gained significant attention in recent years as a crucial technology in autonomous driving and robotics. Currently, the two main approaches are the perspective view retrieval (P2P) paradigm and the equirectangular image retrieval (E2E) paradigm. However, it is practical and natural to assume that users only have consumer-grade pinhole cameras to obtain query perspective images and retrieve them in panoramic database images from map providers. To address this, we propose \textit{PanoVPR}, a perspective-to-equirectangular (P2E) visual place recognition framework that employs sliding windows to eliminate feature truncation caused by hard cropping. Specifically, PanoVPR slides windows over the entire equirectangular image and computes feature descriptors for each window, which are then compared to determine place similarity. Notably, our unified framework enables direct transfer of the backbone from P2P methods without any modification, supporting not only CNNs but also Transformers. To facilitate training and evaluation, we derive the Pitts250k-P2E dataset from the Pitts250k and establish YQ360, latter is the first P2E visual place recognition dataset collected by a mobile robot platform aiming to simulate real-world task scenarios better. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PanoVPR achieves state-of-the-art performance and obtains 3.8% and 8.0% performance gain on Pitts250k-P2E and YQ360 compared to the previous best method, respectively. Code and datasets will be publicly available at https://github.com/zafirshi/PanoVPR.

Ze Wang, Kailun Yang, Hao Shi et al.

In this paper, we propose LF-PGVIO, a Visual-Inertial-Odometry (VIO) framework for large Field-of-View (FoV) cameras with a negative plane using points and geodesic segments. The purpose of our research is to unleash the potential of point-line odometry with large-FoV omnidirectional cameras, even for cameras with negative-plane FoV. To achieve this, we propose an Omnidirectional Curve Segment Detection (OCSD) method combined with a camera model which is applicable to images with large distortions, such as panoramic annular images, fisheye images, and various panoramic images. The geodesic segment is sliced into multiple straight-line segments based on the radian and descriptors are extracted and recombined. Descriptor matching establishes the constraint relationship between 3D line segments in multiple frames. In our VIO system, line feature residual is also extended to support large-FoV cameras. Extensive evaluations on public datasets demonstrate the superior accuracy and robustness of LF-PGVIO compared to state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/flysoaryun/LF-PGVIO.

Hao Shi, Qi Jiang, Kailun Yang et al.

Vision sensors are widely applied in vehicles, robots, and roadside infrastructure. However, due to limitations in hardware cost and system size, camera Field-of-View (FoV) is often restricted and may not provide sufficient coverage. Nevertheless, from a spatiotemporal perspective, it is possible to obtain information beyond the camera's physical FoV from past video streams. In this paper, we propose the concept of online video inpainting for autonomous vehicles to expand the field of view, thereby enhancing scene visibility, perception, and system safety. To achieve this, we introduce the FlowLens architecture, which explicitly employs optical flow and implicitly incorporates a novel clip-recurrent transformer for feature propagation. FlowLens offers two key features: 1) FlowLens includes a newly designed Clip-Recurrent Hub with 3D-Decoupled Cross Attention (DDCA) to progressively process global information accumulated over time. 2) It integrates a multi-branch Mix Fusion Feed Forward Network (MixF3N) to enhance the precise spatial flow of local features. To facilitate training and evaluation, we derive the KITTI360 dataset with various FoV mask, which covers both outer- and inner FoV expansion scenarios. We also conduct both quantitative assessments and qualitative comparisons of beyond-FoV semantics and beyond-FoV object detection across different models. We illustrate that employing FlowLens to reconstruct unseen scenes even enhances perception within the field of view by providing reliable semantic context. Extensive experiments and user studies involving offline and online video inpainting, as well as beyond-FoV perception tasks, demonstrate that FlowLens achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code and dataset are made publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/FlowLens.

Qi Jiang, Hao Shi, Shaohua Gao et al.

Semantic scene understanding with Minimalist Optical Systems (MOS) in mobile and wearable applications remains a challenge due to the corrupted imaging quality induced by optical aberrations. However, previous works only focus on improving the subjective imaging quality through the Computational Imaging (CI) technique, ignoring the feasibility of advancing semantic segmentation. In this paper, we pioneer the investigation of Semantic Segmentation under Optical Aberrations (SSOA) with MOS. To benchmark SSOA, we construct Virtual Prototype Lens (VPL) groups through optical simulation, generating Cityscapes-ab and KITTI-360-ab datasets under different behaviors and levels of aberrations. We look into SSOA via an unsupervised domain adaptation perspective to address the scarcity of labeled aberration data in real-world scenarios. Further, we propose Computational Imaging Assisted Domain Adaptation (CIADA) to leverage prior knowledge of CI for robust performance in SSOA. Based on our benchmark, we conduct experiments on the robustness of classical segmenters against aberrations. In addition, extensive evaluations of possible solutions to SSOA reveal that CIADA achieves superior performance under all aberration distributions, bridging the gap between computational imaging and downstream applications for MOS. The project page is at https://github.com/zju-jiangqi/CIADA.

Xiaoting Yin, Hao Shi, Jiaan Chen et al.

Human pose estimation is a fundamental and appealing task in computer vision. Although traditional cameras are commonly applied, their reliability decreases in scenarios under high dynamic range or heavy motion blur, where event cameras offer a robust solution. Predominant event-based methods accumulate events into frames, ignoring the asynchronous and high temporal resolution that is crucial for distinguishing distinct actions. To address this issue and to unlock the 3D potential of event information, we introduce two 3D event representations: the Rasterized Event Point Cloud (RasEPC) and the Decoupled Event Voxel (DEV). The RasEPC aggregates events within concise temporal slices at identical positions, preserving their 3D attributes along with statistical information, thereby significantly reducing memory and computational demands. Meanwhile, the DEV representation discretizes events into voxels and projects them across three orthogonal planes, utilizing decoupled event attention to retrieve 3D cues from the 2D planes. Furthermore, we develop and release EV-3DPW, a synthetic event-based dataset crafted to facilitate training and quantitative analysis in outdoor scenes. Our methods are tested on the DHP19 public dataset, MMHPSD dataset, and our EV-3DPW dataset, with further qualitative validation via a derived driving scene dataset EV-JAAD and an outdoor collection vehicle. Our code and dataset have been made publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/EventPointPose.

Yufan Zhang, Kailun Yang, Ze Wang et al.

This paper presents P2U-SLAM, a visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) system with a wide Field of View (FoV) camera, which utilizes pose uncertainty and point uncertainty. While the wide FoV enables considerable repetitive observations of historical map points for matching cross-view features, the data properties of the historical map points and the poses of historical keyframes have changed during the optimization process. The neglect of data property changes results in the lack of partial information matrices in optimization, increasing the risk of long-term positioning performance degradation. The purpose of our research is to mitigate the risks posed by wide-FoV visual input to the SLAM system. Based on the conditional probability model, this work reveals the definite impacts of the above data properties changes on the optimization process, concretizes these impacts as point uncertainty and pose uncertainty, and gives their specific mathematical form. P2U-SLAM embeds point uncertainty into the tracking module and pose uncertainty into the local mapping module respectively, and updates these uncertainties after each optimization operation including local mapping, map merging, and loop closing. We present an exhaustive evaluation on 27 sequences from two popular public datasets with wide-FoV visual input. P2U-SLAM shows excellent performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/BambValley/P2U-SLAM.

Qi Jiang, Yao Gao, Shaohua Gao et al.

Emerging universal Computational Aberration Correction (CAC) paradigms provide an inspiring solution to light-weight and high-quality imaging with a universal model trained on a lens library (LensLib) to address arbitrary lens optical aberrations blindly. However, the limited coverage of existing LensLibs leads to poor generalization of the trained models to unseen lenses, whose fine-tuning pipeline is also confined to the lens-descriptions-known case. In this work, we introduce OmniLens, a flexible solution to universal CAC via (i) establishing a convincing LensLib with comprehensive coverage for pre-training a robust base model, and (ii) adapting the model to any specific lens designs with unknown lens descriptions via fast LensLib-to-specific domain adaptation. To achieve these, an Evolution-based Automatic Optical Design (EAOD) pipeline is proposed to generate a rich variety of lens samples with realistic aberration behaviors. Then, we design an unsupervised regularization term for efficient domain adaptation on a few easily accessible real-captured images based on the statistical observation of dark channel priors in degradation induced by lens aberrations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the LensLib generated by EAOD effectively develops a universal CAC model with strong generalization capabilities, which can also improve the non-blind lens-specific methods by 0.35~1.81dB in PSNR. Additionally, the proposed domain adaptation method significantly improves the base model, especially in severe aberration cases (at most 2.59dB in PSNR). The code and data will be available at https://github.com/zju-jiangqi/OmniLens.

Shaohua Gao, Kailun Yang, Hao Shi et al.

With the rapid development of high-speed communication and artificial intelligence technologies, human perception of real-world scenes is no longer limited to the use of small Field of View (FoV) and low-dimensional scene detection devices. Panoramic imaging emerges as the next generation of innovative intelligent instruments for environmental perception and measurement. However, while satisfying the need for large-FoV photographic imaging, panoramic imaging instruments are expected to have high resolution, no blind area, miniaturization, and multidimensional intelligent perception, and can be combined with artificial intelligence methods towards the next generation of intelligent instruments, enabling deeper understanding and more holistic perception of 360-degree real-world surrounding environments. Fortunately, recent advances in freeform surfaces, thin-plate optics, and metasurfaces provide innovative approaches to address human perception of the environment, offering promising ideas beyond conventional optical imaging. In this review, we begin with introducing the basic principles of panoramic imaging systems, and then describe the architectures, features, and functions of various panoramic imaging systems. Afterwards, we discuss in detail the broad application prospects and great design potential of freeform surfaces, thin-plate optics, and metasurfaces in panoramic imaging. We then provide a detailed analysis on how these techniques can help enhance the performance of panoramic imaging systems. We further offer a detailed analysis of applications of panoramic imaging in scene understanding for autonomous driving and robotics, spanning panoramic semantic image segmentation, panoramic depth estimation, panoramic visual localization, and so on. Finally, we cast a perspective on future potential and research directions for panoramic imaging instruments.

Hao Shi, Ze Wang, Shangwei Guo et al.

Robust 3D semantic occupancy is crucial for legged/humanoid robots, yet most semantic scene completion (SSC) systems target wheeled platforms with forward-facing sensors. We present OneOcc, a vision-only panoramic SSC framework designed for gait-introduced body jitter and 360° continuity. OneOcc combines: (i) Dual-Projection fusion (DP-ER) to exploit the annular panorama and its equirectangular unfolding, preserving 360° continuity and grid alignment; (ii) Bi-Grid Voxelization (BGV) to reason in Cartesian and cylindrical-polar spaces, reducing discretization bias and sharpening free/occupied boundaries; (iii) a lightweight decoder with Hierarchical AMoE-3D for dynamic multi-scale fusion and better long-range/occlusion reasoning; and (iv) plug-and-play Gait Displacement Compensation (GDC) learning feature-level motion correction without extra sensors. We also release two panoramic occupancy benchmarks: QuadOcc (real quadruped, first-person 360°) and Human360Occ (H3O) (CARLA human-ego 360° with RGB, Depth, semantic occupancy; standardized within-/cross-city splits). OneOcc sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA): on QuadOcc it beats strong vision baselines and popular LiDAR ones; on H3O it gains +3.83 mIoU (within-city) and +8.08 (cross-city). Modules are lightweight, enabling deployable full-surround perception for legged/humanoid robots. Datasets and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/OneOcc.

Kai Luo, Hao Shi, Kunyu Peng et al.

This paper investigates Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) in panoramic imagery, which introduces unique challenges including a 360° Field of View (FoV), resolution dilution, and severe view-dependent distortions. Conventional MOT methods designed for narrow-FoV pinhole cameras generalize unsatisfactorily under these conditions. To address panoramic distortion, large search space, and identity ambiguity under a 360° FoV, OmniTrack++ adopts a feedback-driven framework that progressively refines perception with trajectory cues. A DynamicSSM block first stabilizes panoramic features, implicitly alleviating geometric distortion. On top of normalized representations, FlexiTrack Instances use trajectory-informed feedback for flexible localization and reliable short-term association. To ensure long-term robustness, an ExpertTrack Memory consolidates appearance cues via a Mixture-of-Experts design, enabling recovery from fragmented tracks and reducing identity drift. Finally, a Tracklet Management module adaptively switches between end-to-end and tracking-by-detection modes according to scene dynamics, offering a balanced and scalable solution for panoramic MOT. To support rigorous evaluation, we establish the EmboTrack benchmark, a comprehensive dataset for panoramic MOT that includes QuadTrack, captured with a quadruped robot, and BipTrack, collected with a bipedal wheel-legged robot. Together, these datasets span wide-angle environments and diverse motion patterns, providing a challenging testbed for real-world panoramic perception. Extensive experiments on JRDB and EmboTrack demonstrate that OmniTrack++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding substantial HOTA improvements of +25.5% on JRDB and +43.07% on QuadTrack over the original OmniTrack. Datasets and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/xifen523/OmniTrack.

Xiaolong Qian, Qi Jiang, Yao Gao et al.

Controllable Depth-of-Field (DoF) imaging commonly produces amazing visual effects based on heavy and expensive high-end lenses. However, confronted with the increasing demand for mobile scenarios, it is desirable to achieve a lightweight solution with Minimalist Optical Systems (MOS). This work centers around two major limitations of MOS, i.e., the severe optical aberrations and uncontrollable DoF, for achieving single-lens controllable DoF imaging via computational methods. A Depth-aware Controllable DoF Imaging (DCDI) framework is proposed equipped with All-in-Focus (AiF) aberration correction and monocular depth estimation, where the recovered image and corresponding depth map are utilized to produce imaging results under diverse DoFs of any high-end lens via patch-wise convolution. To address the depth-varying optical degradation, we introduce a Depth-aware Degradation-adaptive Training (DA2T) scheme. At the dataset level, a Depth-aware Aberration MOS (DAMOS) dataset is established based on the simulation of Point Spread Functions (PSFs) under different object distances. Additionally, we design two plug-and-play depth-aware mechanisms to embed depth information into the aberration image recovery for better tackling depth-aware degradation. Furthermore, we propose a storage-efficient Omni-Lens-Field model to represent the 4D PSF library of various lenses. With the predicted depth map, recovered image, and depth-aware PSF map inferred by Omni-Lens-Field, single-lens controllable DoF imaging is achieved. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework enhances the recovery performance, and attains impressive single-lens controllable DoF imaging results, providing a seminal baseline for this field. The source code and the established dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/XiaolongQian/DCDI.

Xiaolong Qian, Qi Jiang, Yao Gao et al.

Prevalent Computational Aberration Correction (CAC) methods are typically tailored to specific optical systems, leading to poor generalization and labor-intensive re-training for new lenses. Developing CAC paradigms capable of generalizing across diverse photographic lenses offers a promising solution to these challenges. However, efforts to achieve such cross-lens universality within consumer photography are still in their early stages due to the lack of a comprehensive benchmark that encompasses a sufficiently wide range of optical aberrations. Furthermore, it remains unclear which specific factors influence existing CAC methods and how these factors affect their performance. In this paper, we present comprehensive experiments and evaluations involving 24 image restoration and CAC algorithms, utilizing our newly proposed UniCAC, a large-scale benchmark for photographic cameras constructed via automatic optical design. The Optical Degradation Evaluator (ODE) is introduced as a novel framework to objectively assess the difficulty of CAC tasks, offering credible quantification of optical aberrations and enabling reliable evaluation. Drawing on our comparative analysis, we identify three key factors -- prior utilization, network architecture, and training strategy -- that most significantly influence CAC performance, and further investigate their respective effects. We believe that our benchmark, dataset, and observations contribute foundational insights to related areas and lay the groundwork for future investigations. Benchmarks, codes, and Zemax files will be available at https://github.com/XiaolongQian/UniCAC.

Luming Wang, Hao Shi, Jiajun Zhai et al.

Egocentric 3D hand pose estimation and gesture recognition are essential for immersive augmented/virtual reality, human-computer interaction, and robotics. However, conventional frame-based cameras suffer from motion blur and limited dynamic range, while existing event-based methods are hindered by ego-motion interference, monocular depth ambiguity, and the lack of large-scale real-world stereo datasets. To overcome these limitations, we propose EgoEV-HandPose, an end-to-end framework for joint 3D bimanual pose estimation and gesture recognition from stereo event streams. Central to our approach is KeypointBEV, a flexible stereo fusion module that lifts features into a canonical bird's-eye-view space and employs an iterative reprojection-guided refinement loop to progressively resolve depth uncertainty and enforce kinematic consistency. In addition, we introduce EgoEVHands, the first large-scale real-world stereo event-camera dataset for egocentric hand perception, containing 5,419 annotated sequences with dense 3D/2D keypoints across 38 gesture classes under varying illumination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoEV-HandPose achieves state-of-the-art performance with an MPJPE of 30.54mm and 86.87% Top-1 gesture recognition accuracy, significantly outperforming RGB-based stereo and prior event-camera methods, particularly in low-light and bimanual occlusion scenarios, thereby setting a new benchmark for event-based egocentric perception. The established dataset and source code will be publicly released at https://github.com/ZJUWang01/EgoEV-HandPose.

Ze Dong, Hao Shi, Zejia Gao et al.

Embodied robotic agents often perceive movies through an egocentric screen-view interface rather than native cinematic footage, introducing domain shifts such as viewpoint distortion, scale variation, illumination changes, and environmental interference. However, existing research on movie emotion understanding is almost exclusively conducted on cinematic footage, limiting cross-domain generalization to real-world viewing scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoScreen-Emotion (ESE), the first benchmark dataset for egocentric screen-view movie emotion understanding. ESE contains 224 movie trailers captured under controlled egocentric screen-view conditions, producing 28,667 temporally aligned key-frames annotated by multiple raters with a confidence-aware multi-label protocol to address emotional ambiguity. We further build a multimodal long-context emotion reasoning framework that models temporal visual evidence, narrative summaries, compressed historical context, and audio cues. Cross-domain experiments reveal a severe domain gap: models trained on cinematic footage drop from 27.99 to 16.69 Macro-F1 when evaluated on realistic egocentric screen-view observations. Training on ESE substantially improves robustness under realistic viewing conditions. Our approach achieves competitive performance compared with strong closed-source multimodal models, highlighting the importance of domain-specific data and long-context multimodal reasoning.

Wenyong Li, Qi Jiang, Weijian Hu et al.

Active Alignment (AA) is a key technology for the large-scale automated assembly of high-precision optical systems. Compared with labor-intensive per-model on-device calibration, a digital-twin pipeline built on optical simulation offers a substantial advantage in generating large-scale labeled data. However, complex imaging conditions induce a domain gap between simulation and real-world images, limiting the generalization of simulation-trained models. To address this, we propose augmenting a simulation baseline with minimal unlabeled real-world images captured at random misalignment positions, mitigating the gap from a domain adaptation perspective. We introduce Domain Adaptive Active Alignment (DA3), which utilizes an autoregressive domain transformation generator and an adversarial-based feature alignment strategy to distill real-world domain information via self-supervised learning. This enables the extraction of domain-invariant image degradation features to facilitate robust misalignment prediction. Experiments on two lens types reveal that DA3 improves accuracy by 46% over a purely simulation pipeline. Notably, it approaches the performance achieved with precisely labeled real-world data collected on 3 lens samples, while reducing on-device data collection time by 98.7%. The results demonstrate that domain adaptation effectively endows simulation-trained models with robust real-world performance, validating the digital-twin pipeline as a practical solution to significantly enhance the efficiency of large-scale optical assembly.

Yuhan Bao, Lei Sun, Yuqin Ma et al.

Fast and accurate auto-focus in adverse conditions remains an arduous task. The emergence of event cameras has opened up new possibilities for addressing the challenge. This paper presents a new high-speed and accurate event-based focusing algorithm. Specifically, the symmetrical relationship between the event polarities in focusing is investigated, and the event-based focus evaluation function is proposed based on the principles of the event cameras and the imaging model in the focusing process. Comprehensive experiments on the public event-based autofocus dataset (EAD) show the robustness of the model. Furthermore, precise focus with less than one depth of focus is achieved within 0.004 seconds on our self-built high-speed focusing platform. The dataset and code will be made publicly available.

Hao Shi, Song Wang, Jiaming Zhang et al.

Vision-based occupancy prediction, also known as 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC), presents a significant challenge in computer vision. Previous methods, confined to onboard processing, struggle with simultaneous geometric and semantic estimation, continuity across varying viewpoints, and single-view occlusion. Our paper introduces OccFiner, a novel offboard framework designed to enhance the accuracy of vision-based occupancy predictions. OccFiner operates in two hybrid phases: 1) a multi-to-multi local propagation network that implicitly aligns and processes multiple local frames for correcting onboard model errors and consistently enhancing occupancy accuracy across all distances. 2) the region-centric global propagation, focuses on refining labels using explicit multi-view geometry and integrating sensor bias, particularly for increasing the accuracy of distant occupied voxels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccFiner improves both geometric and semantic accuracy across various types of coarse occupancy, setting a new state-of-the-art performance on the SemanticKITTI dataset. Notably, OccFiner significantly boosts the performance of vision-based SSC models, achieving accuracy levels competitive with established LiDAR-based onboard SSC methods. Furthermore, OccFiner is the first to achieve automatic annotation of SSC in a purely vision-based approach. Quantitative experiments prove that OccFiner successfully facilitates occupancy data loop-closure in autonomous driving. Additionally, we quantitatively and qualitatively validate the superiority of the offboard approach on city-level SSC static maps. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/OccFiner.

Kang Zeng, Hao Shi, Jiacheng Lin et al.

LiDAR-based Moving Object Segmentation (MOS) aims to locate and segment moving objects in point clouds of the current scan using motion information from previous scans. Despite the promising results achieved by previous MOS methods, several key issues, such as the weak coupling of temporal and spatial information, still need further study. In this paper, we propose a novel LiDAR-based 3D Moving Object Segmentation with Motion-aware State Space Model, termed MambaMOS. Firstly, we develop a novel embedding module, the Time Clue Bootstrapping Embedding (TCBE), to enhance the coupling of temporal and spatial information in point clouds and alleviate the issue of overlooked temporal clues. Secondly, we introduce the Motion-aware State Space Model (MSSM) to endow the model with the capacity to understand the temporal correlations of the same object across different time steps. Specifically, MSSM emphasizes the motion states of the same object at different time steps through two distinct temporal modeling and correlation steps. We utilize an improved state space model to represent these motion differences, significantly modeling the motion states. Finally, extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI-MOS and KITTI-Road benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MambaMOS achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Terminal-K/MambaMOS.

Yuhan Bao, Lei Sun, Yuqin Ma et al.

Event cameras, or Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS) are novel neuromorphic sensors that capture brightness changes as a continuous stream of "events" rather than traditional intensity frames. Converting sparse events to dense intensity frames faithfully has long been an ill-posed problem. Previous methods have primarily focused on converting events to video in dynamic scenes or with a moving camera. In this paper, for the first time, we realize events to dense intensity image conversion using a stationary event camera in static scenes with a transmittance adjustment device for brightness modulation. Different from traditional methods that mainly rely on event integration, the proposed Event-Based Temporal Mapping Photography (EvTemMap) measures the time of event emitting for each pixel. Then, the resulting Temporal Matrix is converted to an intensity frame with a temporal mapping neural network. At the hardware level, the proposed EvTemMap is implemented by combining a transmittance adjustment device with a DVS, named Adjustable Transmittance Dynamic Vision Sensor (AT-DVS). Additionally, we collected TemMat dataset under various conditions including low-light and high dynamic range scenes. The experimental results showcase the high dynamic range, fine-grained details, and high-grayscale resolution of the proposed EvTemMap. The code and dataset are available in https://github.com/YuHanBaozju/EvTemMap

Yao Gao, Qi Jiang, Shaohua Gao et al.

Recently, joint design approaches that simultaneously optimize optical systems and downstream algorithms through data-driven learning have demonstrated superior performance over traditional separate design approaches. However, current joint design approaches heavily rely on the manual identification of initial lenses, posing challenges and limitations, particularly for compound lens systems with multiple potential starting points. In this work, we present Quasi-Global Search Optics (QGSO) to automatically design compound lens based computational imaging systems through two parts: (i) Fused Optimization Method for Automatic Optical Design (OptiFusion), which searches for diverse initial optical systems under certain design specifications; and (ii) Efficient Physic-aware Joint Optimization (EPJO), which conducts parallel joint optimization of initial optical systems and image reconstruction networks with the consideration of physical constraints, culminating in the selection of the optimal solution in all search results. Extensive experimental results illustrate that QGSO serves as a transformative end-to-end lens design paradigm for superior global search ability, which automatically provides compound lens based computational imaging systems with higher imaging quality compared to existing paradigms. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/LiGpy/QGSO.

Kai Luo, Hao Shi, Sheng Wu et al.

Panoramic imagery, with its 360° field of view, offers comprehensive information to support Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) in capturing spatial and temporal relationships of surrounding objects. However, most MOT algorithms are tailored for pinhole images with limited views, impairing their effectiveness in panoramic settings. Additionally, panoramic image distortions, such as resolution loss, geometric deformation, and uneven lighting, hinder direct adaptation of existing MOT methods, leading to significant performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose OmniTrack, an omnidirectional MOT framework that incorporates Tracklet Management to introduce temporal cues, FlexiTrack Instances for object localization and association, and the CircularStatE Module to alleviate image and geometric distortions. This integration enables tracking in panoramic field-of-view scenarios, even under rapid sensor motion. To mitigate the lack of panoramic MOT datasets, we introduce the QuadTrack dataset--a comprehensive panoramic dataset collected by a quadruped robot, featuring diverse challenges such as panoramic fields of view, intense motion, and complex environments. Extensive experiments on the public JRDB dataset and the newly introduced QuadTrack benchmark demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed framework. OmniTrack achieves a HOTA score of 26.92% on JRDB, representing an improvement of 3.43%, and further achieves 23.45% on QuadTrack, surpassing the baseline by 6.81%. The established dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/xifen523/OmniTrack.

Xiaoting Yin, Hao Shi, Yuhan Bao et al.

Achieving 3D reconstruction from images captured under optimal conditions has been extensively studied in the vision and imaging fields. However, in real-world scenarios, challenges such as motion blur and insufficient illumination often limit the performance of standard frame-based cameras in delivering high-quality images. To address these limitations, we incorporate a transmittance adjustment device at the hardware level, enabling event cameras to capture both motion and exposure events for diverse 3D reconstruction scenarios. Motion events (triggered by camera or object movement) are collected in fast-motion scenarios when the device is inactive, while exposure events (generated through controlled camera exposure) are captured during slower motion to reconstruct grayscale images for high-quality training and optimization of event-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our framework supports three modes: High-Quality Reconstruction using exposure events, Fast Reconstruction relying on motion events, and Balanced Hybrid optimizing with initial exposure events followed by high-speed motion events. On the EventNeRF dataset, we demonstrate that exposure events significantly improve fine detail reconstruction compared to motion events and outperform frame-based cameras under challenging conditions such as low illumination and overexposure. Furthermore, we introduce EME-3D, a real-world 3D dataset with exposure events, motion events, camera calibration parameters, and sparse point clouds. Our method achieves faster and higher-quality reconstruction than event-based NeRF and is more cost-effective than methods combining event and RGB data. E-3DGS sets a new benchmark for event-based 3D reconstruction with robust performance in challenging conditions and lower hardware demands. The source code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/MasterHow/E-3DGS.

Qi Jiang, Zhonghua Yi, Shaohua Gao et al.

Relying on paired synthetic data, existing learning-based Computational Aberration Correction (CAC) methods are confronted with the intricate and multifaceted synthetic-to-real domain gap, which leads to suboptimal performance in real-world applications. In this paper, in contrast to improving the simulation pipeline, we deliver a novel insight into real-world CAC from the perspective of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). By incorporating readily accessible unpaired real-world data into training, we formalize the Domain Adaptive CAC (DACAC) task, and then introduce a comprehensive Real-world aberrated images (Realab) dataset to benchmark it. The setup task presents a formidable challenge due to the intricacy of understanding the target optical degradation domain. To this intent, we propose a novel Quantized Domain-Mixing Representation (QDMR) framework as a potent solution to the issue. Centering around representing and quantizing the optical degradation which is consistent across different images, QDMR adapts the CAC model to the target domain from three key aspects: (1) reconstructing aberrated images of both domains by a VQGAN to learn a Domain-Mixing Codebook (DMC) characterizing the optical degradation; (2) modulating the deep features in CAC model with DMC to transfer the target domain knowledge; and (3) leveraging the trained VQGAN to generate pseudo target aberrated images from the source ones for convincing target domain supervision. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks reveal that the models with QDMR consistently surpass the competitive methods in mitigating the synthetic-to-real gap, which produces visually pleasant real-world CAC results with fewer artifacts. Codes and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/zju-jiangqi/QDMR.

Zhonghua Yi, Hao Shi, Qi Jiang et al.

Optical flow estimation is extensively used in autonomous driving and video editing. While existing models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks, the robustness of these methods has been infrequently investigated. Despite some research focusing on the robustness of optical flow models against adversarial attacks, there has been a lack of studies investigating their robustness to common corruptions. Taking into account the unique temporal characteristics of optical flow, we introduce 7 temporal corruptions specifically designed for benchmarking the robustness of optical flow models, in addition to 17 classical single-image corruptions, in which advanced PSF Blur simulation method is performed. Two robustness benchmarks, KITTI-FC and GoPro-FC, are subsequently established as the first corruption robustness benchmark for optical flow estimation, with Out-Of-Domain (OOD) and In-Domain (ID) settings to facilitate comprehensive studies. Robustness metrics, Corruption Robustness Error (CRE), Corruption Robustness Error ratio (CREr), and Relative Corruption Robustness Error (RCRE) are further introduced to quantify the optical flow estimation robustness. 29 model variants from 15 optical flow methods are evaluated, yielding 10 intriguing observations, such as 1) the absolute robustness of the model is heavily dependent on the estimation performance; 2) the corruptions that diminish local information are more serious than that reduce visual effects. We also give suggestions for the design and application of optical flow models. We anticipate that our benchmark will serve as a foundational resource for advancing research in robust optical flow estimation. The benchmarks and source code will be released at https://github.com/ZhonghuaYi/optical_flow_robustness_benchmark.

Shangwei Guo, Hao Shi, Song Wang et al.

Autonomous driving systems rely on robust 3D scene understanding. Recent advances in Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) for autonomous driving underscore the limitations of RGB-based approaches, which struggle under motion blur, poor lighting, and adverse weather. Event cameras, offering high dynamic range and low latency, address these challenges by providing asynchronous data that complements RGB inputs. We present DSEC-SSC, the first real-world benchmark specifically designed for event-aided SSC, which includes a novel 4D labeling pipeline for generating dense, visibility-aware labels that adapt dynamically to object motion. Our proposed RGB-Event fusion framework, EvSSC, introduces an Event-aided Lifting Module (ELM) that effectively bridges 2D RGB-Event features to 3D space, enhancing view transformation and the robustness of 3D volume construction across SSC models. Extensive experiments on DSEC-SSC and simulated SemanticKITTI-E demonstrate that EvSSC is adaptable to both transformer-based and LSS-based SSC architectures. Notably, evaluations on SemanticKITTI-C demonstrate that EvSSC achieves consistently improved prediction accuracy across five degradation modes and both In-domain and Out-of-domain settings, achieving up to a 52.5% relative improvement in mIoU when the image sensor partially fails. Additionally, we quantitatively and qualitatively validate the superiority of EvSSC under motion blur and extreme weather conditions, where autonomous driving is challenged. The established datasets and our codebase will be made publicly at https://github.com/Pandapan01/EvSSC.

Jiajun Zhai, Hao Shi, Shangwei Guo et al.

Robotic Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well for open-ended manipulation, but their perception is fragile under sensing-stage degradations such as extreme low light, motion blur, and black clipping. We present E-VLA, an event-augmented VLA framework that improves manipulation robustness when conventional frame-based vision becomes unreliable. Instead of reconstructing images from events, E-VLA directly leverages motion and structural cues in event streams to preserve semantic perception and perception-action consistency under adverse conditions. We build an open-source teleoperation platform with a DAVIS346 event camera and collect a real-world synchronized RGB-event-action manipulation dataset across diverse tasks and illumination settings. We also propose lightweight, pretrained-compatible event integration strategies and study event windowing and fusion for stable deployment. Experiments show that even a simple parameter-free fusion, i.e., overlaying accumulated event maps onto RGB images, could substantially improve robustness in dark and blur-heavy scenes: on Pick-Place at 20 lux, success increases from 0% (image-only) to 60% with overlay fusion and to 90% with our event adapter; under severe motion blur (1000 ms exposure), Pick-Place improves from 0% to 20-25%, and Sorting from 5% to 32.5%. Overall, E-VLA provides systematic evidence that event-driven perception can be effectively integrated into VLA models, pointing toward robust embodied intelligence beyond conventional frame-based imaging. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/JJayzee/E-VLA.

Mengzhou Gao, Kaiwei Wang, Pengfei Jiao

Neural Flows efficiently model irregular multivariate time series by directly learning ODE solution trajectories with neural networks, bypassing step-by-step numerical solvers. Despite their efficiency, many existing approaches treat variables independently, leaving inter-variable interactions underexplored. Moreover, their one-step mapping makes interaction modeling inherently challenging, as it removes the iterative refinement of interactions during learning. To address this challenge, we propose one-step Graph-Structured Neural Flows (GSNF), which introduce two auxiliary-trajectory self-supervision strategies to strengthen interaction learning: (i) interaction-aware trajectory generation via re-initialization, which induces trajectory divergence to expose graph-induced interactions, with a theoretically derived lower bound on divergence; and (ii) reverse-time trajectory generation, which enforces forward-backward consistency to regularize graph learning, enabled by flow invertibility. Experiments on five real-world datasets show that GSNF achieves state-of-the-art classification performance with highly competitive training time and memory usage.

Luming Wang, Hao Shi, Xiaoting Yin et al.

Egocentric gesture recognition is a pivotal technology for enhancing natural human-computer interaction, yet traditional RGB-based solutions suffer from motion blur and illumination variations in dynamic scenarios. While event cameras show distinct advantages in handling high dynamic range with ultra-low power consumption, existing RGB-based architectures face inherent limitations in processing asynchronous event streams due to their synchronous frame-based nature. Moreover, from an egocentric perspective, event cameras record data that includes events generated by both head movements and hand gestures, thereby increasing the complexity of gesture recognition. To address this, we propose a novel network architecture specifically designed for event data processing, incorporating (1) a lightweight CNN with asymmetric depthwise convolutions to reduce parameters while preserving spatiotemporal features, (2) a plug-and-play state-space model as context block that decouples head movement noise from gesture dynamics, and (3) a parameter-free Bins-Temporal Shift Module (BTSM) that shifts features along bins and temporal dimensions to fuse sparse events efficiently. We further establish the EgoEvGesture dataset, the first large-scale dataset for egocentric gesture recognition using event cameras. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves 62.7% accuracy tested on unseen subjects with only 7M parameters, 3.1% higher than state-of-the-art approaches. Notable misclassifications in freestyle motions stem from high inter-personal variability and unseen test patterns differing from training data. Moreover, our approach achieved a remarkable accuracy of 97.0% on the DVS128 Gesture, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization capability of our method on public datasets. The dataset and models are made available at https://github.com/3190105222/EgoEv_Gesture.

Xiaolong Qian, Qi Jiang, Lei Sun et al.

Beyond the commonly recognized optical aberrations, the imaging performance of compact optical systems-including single-lens and metalens designs-is often further degraded by veiling glare caused by stray-light scattering from non-ideal optical surfaces and coatings, particularly in complex real-world environments. This compound degradation undermines traditional lens aberration correction yet remains underexplored. A major challenge is that conventional scattering models (e.g., for dehazing) fail to fit veiling glare due to its spatial-varying and depth-independent nature. Consequently, paired high-quality data are difficult to prepare via simulation, hindering application of data-driven veiling glare removal models. To this end, we propose VeilGen, a generative model that learns to simulate veiling glare by estimating its underlying optical transmission and glare maps in an unsupervised manner from target images, regularized by Stable Diffusion (SD)-based priors. VeilGen enables paired dataset generation with realistic compound degradation of optical aberrations and veiling glare, while also providing the estimated latent optical transmission and glare maps to guide the veiling glare removal process. We further introduce DeVeiler, a restoration network trained with a reversibility constraint, which utilizes the predicted latent maps to guide an inverse process of the learned scattering model. Extensive experiments on challenging compact optical systems demonstrate that our approach delivers superior restoration quality and physical fidelity compared with existing methods. These suggest that VeilGen reliably synthesizes realistic veiling glare, and its learned latent maps effectively guide the restoration process in DeVeiler. All code and datasets will be publicly released at https://github.com/XiaolongQian/DeVeiler.

Qi Jiang, Xiaolong Qian, Yao Gao et al.

Emerging deep-learning-based lens library pre-training (LensLib-PT) pipeline offers a new avenue for blind lens aberration correction by training a universal neural network, demonstrating strong capability in handling diverse unknown optical degradations. This work proposes the OmniLens++ framework, which resolves two challenges that hinder the generalization ability of existing pipelines: the difficulty of scaling data and the absence of prior guidance characterizing optical degradation. To improve data scalability, we expand the design specifications to increase the degradation diversity of the lens source, and we sample a more uniform distribution by quantifying the spatial-variation patterns and severity of optical degradation. In terms of model design, to leverage the Point Spread Functions (PSFs), which intuitively describe optical degradation, as guidance in a blind paradigm, we propose the Latent PSF Representation (LPR). The VQVAE framework is introduced to learn latent features of LensLib's PSFs, which is assisted by modeling the optical degradation process to constrain the learning of degradation priors. Experiments on diverse aberrations of real-world lenses and synthetic LensLib show that OmniLens++ exhibits state-of-the-art generalization capacity in blind aberration correction. Beyond performance, the AODLibpro is verified as a scalable foundation for more effective training across diverse aberrations, and LPR can further tap the potential of large-scale LensLib. The source code and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zju-jiangqi/OmniLens2.

Zongxi Yu, Xiaolong Qian, Shaohua Gao et al.

Achieving high-fidelity, compact RGBD imaging presents a dual challenge: conventional compact optics struggle with RGB sharpness across the entire depth-of-field, while software-only Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is an ill-posed problem reliant on unreliable semantic priors. While deep optics with elements like DOEs can encode depth, they introduce trade-offs in fabrication complexity and chromatic aberrations, compromising simplicity. To address this, we first introduce a novel bio-inspired all-spherical monocentric lens, around which we build the Bionic Monocentric Imaging (BMI) framework, a holistic co-design. This optical design naturally encodes depth into its depth-varying Point Spread Functions (PSFs) without requiring complex diffractive or freeform elements. We establish a rigorous physically-based forward model to generate a synthetic dataset by precisely simulating the optical degradation process. This simulation pipeline is co-designed with a dual-head, multi-scale reconstruction network that employs a shared encoder to jointly recover a high-fidelity All-in-Focus (AiF) image and a precise depth map from a single coded capture. Extensive experiments validate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed framework. In depth estimation, the method attains an Abs Rel of 0.026 and an RMSE of 0.130, markedly outperforming leading software-only approaches and other deep optics systems. For image restoration, the system achieves an SSIM of 0.960 and a perceptual LPIPS score of 0.082, thereby confirming a superior balance between image fidelity and depth accuracy. This study illustrates that the integration of bio-inspired, fully spherical optics with a joint reconstruction algorithm constitutes an effective strategy for addressing the intrinsic challenges in high-performance compact RGBD imaging. Source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/ZongxiYu-ZJU/BMI.

Sheng Wu, Fei Teng, Hao Shi et al.

Panoramic cameras, capturing comprehensive 360-degree environmental data, are suitable for quadruped robots in surrounding perception and interaction with complex environments. However, the scarcity of high-quality panoramic training data-caused by inherent kinematic constraints and complex sensor calibration challenges-fundamentally limits the development of robust perception systems tailored to these embodied platforms. To address this issue, we propose QuaDreamer-the first panoramic data generation engine specifically designed for quadruped robots. QuaDreamer focuses on mimicking the motion paradigm of quadruped robots to generate highly controllable, realistic panoramic videos, providing a data source for downstream tasks. Specifically, to effectively capture the unique vertical vibration characteristics exhibited during quadruped locomotion, we introduce Vertical Jitter Encoding (VJE). VJE extracts controllable vertical signals through frequency-domain feature filtering and provides high-quality prompts. To facilitate high-quality panoramic video generation under jitter signal control, we propose a Scene-Object Controller (SOC) that effectively manages object motion and boosts background jitter control through the attention mechanism. To address panoramic distortions in wide-FoV video generation, we propose the Panoramic Enhancer (PE)-a dual-stream architecture that synergizes frequency-texture refinement for local detail enhancement with spatial-structure correction for global geometric consistency. We further demonstrate that the generated video sequences can serve as training data for the quadruped robot's panoramic visual perception model, enhancing the performance of multi-object tracking in 360-degree scenes. The source code and model weights will be publicly available at https://github.com/losehu/QuaDreamer.

Zhonghua Yi, Hao Shi, Qi Jiang et al.

Event cameras, with high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, have limited research on the inter-modality local feature extraction and matching of event-image data. We propose EI-Nexus, an unmediated and flexible framework that integrates two modality-specific keypoint extractors and a feature matcher. To achieve keypoint extraction across viewpoint and modality changes, we bring Local Feature Distillation (LFD), which transfers the viewpoint consistency from a well-learned image extractor to the event extractor, ensuring robust feature correspondence. Furthermore, with the help of Context Aggregation (CA), a remarkable enhancement is observed in feature matching. We further establish the first two inter-modality feature matching benchmarks, MVSEC-RPE and EC-RPE, to assess relative pose estimation on event-image data. Our approach outperforms traditional methods that rely on explicit modal transformation, offering more unmediated and adaptable feature extraction and matching, achieving better keypoint similarity and state-of-the-art results on the MVSEC-RPE and EC-RPE benchmarks. The source code and benchmarks will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ZhonghuaYi/EI-Nexus_official.

Hao Shi, Yifan Zhou, Kailun Yang et al.

Optical flow estimation is a basic task in self-driving and robotics systems, which enables to temporally interpret traffic scenes. Autonomous vehicles clearly benefit from the ultra-wide Field of View (FoV) offered by 360° panoramic sensors. However, due to the unique imaging process of panoramic cameras, models designed for pinhole images do not directly generalize satisfactorily to 360° panoramic images. In this paper, we put forward a novel network framework--PanoFlow, to learn optical flow for panoramic images. To overcome the distortions introduced by equirectangular projection in panoramic transformation, we design a Flow Distortion Augmentation (FDA) method, which contains radial flow distortion (FDA-R) or equirectangular flow distortion (FDA-E). We further look into the definition and properties of cyclic optical flow for panoramic videos, and hereby propose a Cyclic Flow Estimation (CFE) method by leveraging the cyclicity of spherical images to infer 360° optical flow and converting large displacement to relatively small displacement. PanoFlow is applicable to any existing flow estimation method and benefits from the progress of narrow-FoV flow estimation. In addition, we create and release a synthetic panoramic dataset FlowScape based on CARLA to facilitate training and quantitative analysis. PanoFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance on the public OmniFlowNet and the established FlowScape benchmarks. Our proposed approach reduces the End-Point-Error (EPE) on FlowScape by 27.3%. On OmniFlowNet, PanoFlow achieves a 55.5% error reduction from the best published result. We also qualitatively validate our method via a collection vehicle and a public real-world OmniPhotos dataset, indicating strong potential and robustness for real-world navigation applications. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/PanoFlow.

Ze Wang, Kailun Yang, Hao Shi et al.

Visual-inertial-odometry has attracted extensive attention in the field of autonomous driving and robotics. The size of Field of View (FoV) plays an important role in Visual-Odometry (VO) and Visual-Inertial-Odometry (VIO), as a large FoV enables to perceive a wide range of surrounding scene elements and features. However, when the field of the camera reaches the negative half plane, one cannot simply use [u,v,1]^T to represent the image feature points anymore. To tackle this issue, we propose LF-VIO, a real-time VIO framework for cameras with extremely large FoV. We leverage a three-dimensional vector with unit length to represent feature points, and design a series of algorithms to overcome this challenge. To address the scarcity of panoramic visual odometry datasets with ground-truth location and pose, we present the PALVIO dataset, collected with a Panoramic Annular Lens (PAL) system with an entire FoV of 360°x(40°-120°) and an IMU sensor. With a comprehensive variety of experiments, the proposed LF-VIO is verified on both the established PALVIO benchmark and a public fisheye camera dataset with a FoV of 360°x(0°-93.5°). LF-VIO outperforms state-of-the-art visual-inertial-odometry methods. Our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/flysoaryun/LF-VIO

Hao Shi, Yifan Zhou, Kailun Yang et al.

Optical flow estimation is an essential task in self-driving systems, which helps autonomous vehicles perceive temporal continuity information of surrounding scenes. The calculation of all-pair correlation plays an important role in many existing state-of-the-art optical flow estimation methods. However, the reliance on local knowledge often limits the model's accuracy under complex street scenes. In this paper, we propose a new deep network architecture for optical flow estimation in autonomous driving--CSFlow, which consists of two novel modules: Cross Strip Correlation module (CSC) and Correlation Regression Initialization module (CRI). CSC utilizes a striping operation across the target image and the attended image to encode global context into correlation volumes, while maintaining high efficiency. CRI is used to maximally exploit the global context for optical flow initialization. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on the public autonomous driving dataset KITTI-2015. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/CSFlow.

Yaozu Ye, Kailun Yang, Kaite Xiang et al.

Semantic segmentation is a critical method in the field of autonomous driving. When performing semantic image segmentation, a wider field of view (FoV) helps to obtain more information about the surrounding environment, making automatic driving safer and more reliable, which could be offered by fisheye cameras. However, large public fisheye datasets are not available, and the fisheye images captured by the fisheye camera with large FoV comes with large distortion, so commonly-used semantic segmentation model cannot be directly utilized. In this paper, a seven degrees of freedom (DoF) augmentation method is proposed to transform rectilinear image to fisheye image in a more comprehensive way. In the training process, rectilinear images are transformed into fisheye images in seven DoF, which simulates the fisheye images taken by cameras of different positions, orientations and focal lengths. The result shows that training with the seven-DoF augmentation can improve the model's accuracy and robustness against different distorted fisheye data. This seven-DoF augmentation provides a universal semantic segmentation solution for fisheye cameras in different autonomous driving applications. Also, we provide specific parameter settings of the augmentation for autonomous driving. At last, we tested our universal semantic segmentation model on real fisheye images and obtained satisfactory results. The code and configurations are released at https://github.com/Yaozhuwa/FisheyeSeg.

Ruiqi Cheng, Kaiwei Wang, Jian Bai et al.

Place recognition plays a crucial role in navigational assistance, and is also a challenging issue of assistive technology. The place recognition is prone to erroneous localization owing to various changes between database and query images. Aiming at the wearable assistive device for visually impaired people, we propose an open-sourced place recognition algorithm OpenMPR, which utilizes the multimodal data to address the challenging issues of place recognition. Compared with conventional place recognition, the proposed OpenMPR not only leverages multiple effective descriptors, but also assigns different weights to those descriptors in image matching. Incorporating GNSS data into the algorithm, the cone-based sequence searching is used for robust place recognition. The experiments illustrate that the proposed algorithm manages to solve the place recognition issue in the real-world scenarios and surpass the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of assistive navigation performance. On the real-world testing dataset, the online OpenMPR achieves 88.7% precision at 100% recall without illumination changes, and achieves 57.8% precision at 99.3% recall with illumination changes. The OpenMPR is available at https://github.com/chengricky/OpenMultiPR.

Xinxin Hu, Kailun Yang, Lei Fei et al.

Compared to RGB semantic segmentation, RGBD semantic segmentation can achieve better performance by taking depth information into consideration. However, it is still problematic for contemporary segmenters to effectively exploit RGBD information since the feature distributions of RGB and depth (D) images vary significantly in different scenes. In this paper, we propose an Attention Complementary Network (ACNet) that selectively gathers features from RGB and depth branches. The main contributions lie in the Attention Complementary Module (ACM) and the architecture with three parallel branches. More precisely, ACM is a channel attention-based module that extracts weighted features from RGB and depth branches. The architecture preserves the inference of the original RGB and depth branches, and enables the fusion branch at the same time. Based on the above structures, ACNet is capable of exploiting more high-quality features from different channels. We evaluate our model on SUN-RGBD and NYUDv2 datasets, and prove that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In particular, a mIoU score of 48.3\% on NYUDv2 test set is achieved with ResNet50. We will release our source code based on PyTorch and the trained segmentation model at https://github.com/anheidelonghu/ACNet.