Structure PLP-SLAM: Efficient Sparse Mapping and Localization using Point, Line and Plane for Monocular, RGB-D and Stereo CamerasFangwen Shu, Jiaxuan Wang, Alain Pagani et al.
This paper presents a visual SLAM system that uses both points and lines for robust camera localization, and simultaneously performs a piece-wise planar reconstruction (PPR) of the environment to provide a structural map in real-time. One of the biggest challenges in parallel tracking and mapping with a monocular camera is to keep the scale consistent when reconstructing the geometric primitives. This further introduces difficulties in graph optimization of the bundle adjustment (BA) step. We solve these problems by proposing several run-time optimizations on the reconstructed lines and planes. Our system is able to run with depth and stereo sensors in addition to the monocular setting. Our proposed SLAM tightly incorporates the semantic and geometric features to boost both frontend pose tracking and backend map optimization. We evaluate our system exhaustively on various datasets, and show that we outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of trajectory precision. The code of PLP-SLAM has been made available in open-source for the research community (https://github.com/PeterFWS/Structure-PLP-SLAM).
Object Detection with Transformers: A ReviewTahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker et al.
The astounding performance of transformers in natural language processing (NLP) has motivated researchers to explore their applications in computer vision tasks. DEtection TRansformer (DETR) introduces transformers to object detection tasks by reframing detection as a set prediction problem. Consequently, eliminating the need for proposal generation and post-processing steps. Initially, despite competitive performance, DETR suffered from slow training convergence and ineffective detection of smaller objects. However, numerous improvements are proposed to address these issues, leading to substantial improvements in DETR and enabling it to exhibit state-of-the-art performance. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to provide a comprehensive review of 21 recently proposed advancements in the original DETR model. We dive into both the foundational modules of DETR and its recent enhancements, such as modifications to the backbone structure, query design strategies, and refinements to attention mechanisms. Moreover, we conduct a comparative analysis across various detection transformers, evaluating their performance and network architectures. We hope that this study will ignite further interest among researchers in addressing the existing challenges and exploring the application of transformers in the object detection domain. Readers interested in the ongoing developments in detection transformers can refer to our website at: https://github.com/mindgarage-shan/trans_object_detection_survey
24.1CVDec 5, 2022
I2MVFormer: Large Language Model Generated Multi-View Document Supervision for Zero-Shot Image ClassificationMuhammad Ferjad Naeem, Muhammad Gul Zain Ali Khan, Yongqin Xian et al.
Recent works have shown that unstructured text (documents) from online sources can serve as useful auxiliary information for zero-shot image classification. However, these methods require access to a high-quality source like Wikipedia and are limited to a single source of information. Large Language Models (LLM) trained on web-scale text show impressive abilities to repurpose their learned knowledge for a multitude of tasks. In this work, we provide a novel perspective on using an LLM to provide text supervision for a zero-shot image classification model. The LLM is provided with a few text descriptions from different annotators as examples. The LLM is conditioned on these examples to generate multiple text descriptions for each class(referred to as views). Our proposed model, I2MVFormer, learns multi-view semantic embeddings for zero-shot image classification with these class views. We show that each text view of a class provides complementary information allowing a model to learn a highly discriminative class embedding. Moreover, we show that I2MVFormer is better at consuming the multi-view text supervision from LLM compared to baseline models. I2MVFormer establishes a new state-of-the-art on three public benchmark datasets for zero-shot image classification with unsupervised semantic embeddings.
Introducing Language Guidance in Prompt-based Continual LearningMuhammad Gul Zain Ali Khan, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Luc Van Gool et al.
Continual Learning aims to learn a single model on a sequence of tasks without having access to data from previous tasks. The biggest challenge in the domain still remains catastrophic forgetting: a loss in performance on seen classes of earlier tasks. Some existing methods rely on an expensive replay buffer to store a chunk of data from previous tasks. This, while promising, becomes expensive when the number of tasks becomes large or data can not be stored for privacy reasons. As an alternative, prompt-based methods have been proposed that store the task information in a learnable prompt pool. This prompt pool instructs a frozen image encoder on how to solve each task. While the model faces a disjoint set of classes in each task in this setting, we argue that these classes can be encoded to the same embedding space of a pre-trained language encoder. In this work, we propose Language Guidance for Prompt-based Continual Learning (LGCL) as a plug-in for prompt-based methods. LGCL is model agnostic and introduces language guidance at the task level in the prompt pool and at the class level on the output feature of the vision encoder. We show with extensive experimentation that LGCL consistently improves the performance of prompt-based continual learning methods to set a new state-of-the art. LGCL achieves these performance improvements without needing any additional learnable parameters.
ZebraPose: Coarse to Fine Surface Encoding for 6DoF Object Pose EstimationYongzhi Su, Mahdi Saleh, Torben Fetzer et al.
Establishing correspondences from image to 3D has been a key task of 6DoF object pose estimation for a long time. To predict pose more accurately, deeply learned dense maps replaced sparse templates. Dense methods also improved pose estimation in the presence of occlusion. More recently researchers have shown improvements by learning object fragments as segmentation. In this work, we present a discrete descriptor, which can represent the object surface densely. By incorporating a hierarchical binary grouping, we can encode the object surface very efficiently. Moreover, we propose a coarse to fine training strategy, which enables fine-grained correspondence prediction. Finally, by matching predicted codes with object surface and using a PnP solver, we estimate the 6DoF pose. Results on the public LM-O and YCB-V datasets show major improvement over the state of the art w.r.t. ADD(-S) metric, even surpassing RGB-D based methods in some cases.
15.3CVOct 20, 2022
Learning Attention Propagation for Compositional Zero-Shot LearningMuhammad Gul Zain Ali Khan, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Luc Van Gool et al.
Compositional zero-shot learning aims to recognize unseen compositions of seen visual primitives of object classes and their states. While all primitives (states and objects) are observable during training in some combination, their complex interaction makes this task especially hard. For example, wet changes the visual appearance of a dog very differently from a bicycle. Furthermore, we argue that relationships between compositions go beyond shared states or objects. A cluttered office can contain a busy table; even though these compositions don't share a state or object, the presence of a busy table can guide the presence of a cluttered office. We propose a novel method called Compositional Attention Propagated Embedding (CAPE) as a solution. The key intuition to our method is that a rich dependency structure exists between compositions arising from complex interactions of primitives in addition to other dependencies between compositions. CAPE learns to identify this structure and propagates knowledge between them to learn class embedding for all seen and unseen compositions. In the challenging generalized compositional zero-shot setting, we show that our method outperforms previous baselines to set a new state-of-the-art on three publicly available benchmarks.
FeatEnHancer: Enhancing Hierarchical Features for Object Detection and Beyond Under Low-Light VisionKhurram Azeem Hashmi, Goutham Kallempudi, Didier Stricker et al.
Extracting useful visual cues for the downstream tasks is especially challenging under low-light vision. Prior works create enhanced representations by either correlating visual quality with machine perception or designing illumination-degrading transformation methods that require pre-training on synthetic datasets. We argue that optimizing enhanced image representation pertaining to the loss of the downstream task can result in more expressive representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel module, FeatEnHancer, that hierarchically combines multiscale features using multiheaded attention guided by task-related loss function to create suitable representations. Furthermore, our intra-scale enhancement improves the quality of features extracted at each scale or level, as well as combines features from different scales in a way that reflects their relative importance for the task at hand. FeatEnHancer is a general-purpose plug-and-play module and can be incorporated into any low-light vision pipeline. We show with extensive experimentation that the enhanced representation produced with FeatEnHancer significantly and consistently improves results in several low-light vision tasks, including dark object detection (+5.7 mAP on ExDark), face detection (+1.5 mAPon DARK FACE), nighttime semantic segmentation (+5.1 mIoU on ACDC ), and video object detection (+1.8 mAP on DarkVision), highlighting the effectiveness of enhancing hierarchical features under low-light vision.
SemAttNet: Towards Attention-based Semantic Aware Guided Depth CompletionDanish Nazir, Marcus Liwicki, Didier Stricker et al.
Depth completion involves recovering a dense depth map from a sparse map and an RGB image. Recent approaches focus on utilizing color images as guidance images to recover depth at invalid pixels. However, color images alone are not enough to provide the necessary semantic understanding of the scene. Consequently, the depth completion task suffers from sudden illumination changes in RGB images (e.g., shadows). In this paper, we propose a novel three-branch backbone comprising color-guided, semantic-guided, and depth-guided branches. Specifically, the color-guided branch takes a sparse depth map and RGB image as an input and generates color depth which includes color cues (e.g., object boundaries) of the scene. The predicted dense depth map of color-guided branch along-with semantic image and sparse depth map is passed as input to semantic-guided branch for estimating semantic depth. The depth-guided branch takes sparse, color, and semantic depths to generate the dense depth map. The color depth, semantic depth, and guided depth are adaptively fused to produce the output of our proposed three-branch backbone. In addition, we also propose to apply semantic-aware multi-modal attention-based fusion block (SAMMAFB) to fuse features between all three branches. We further use CSPN++ with Atrous convolutions to refine the dense depth map produced by our three-branch backbone. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in the KITTI depth completion benchmark at the time of submission.
Attribution-aware Weight Transfer: A Warm-Start Initialization for Class-Incremental Semantic SegmentationDipam Goswami, René Schuster, Joost van de Weijer et al.
In class-incremental semantic segmentation (CISS), deep learning architectures suffer from the critical problems of catastrophic forgetting and semantic background shift. Although recent works focused on these issues, existing classifier initialization methods do not address the background shift problem and assign the same initialization weights to both background and new foreground class classifiers. We propose to address the background shift with a novel classifier initialization method which employs gradient-based attribution to identify the most relevant weights for new classes from the classifier's weights for the previous background and transfers these weights to the new classifier. This warm-start weight initialization provides a general solution applicable to several CISS methods. Furthermore, it accelerates learning of new classes while mitigating forgetting. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvement in mIoU compared to the state-of-the-art CISS methods on the Pascal-VOC 2012, ADE20K and Cityscapes datasets.
16.0CVNov 2, 2022
OPA-3D: Occlusion-Aware Pixel-Wise Aggregation for Monocular 3D Object DetectionYongzhi Su, Yan Di, Fabian Manhardt et al.
Despite monocular 3D object detection having recently made a significant leap forward thanks to the use of pre-trained depth estimators for pseudo-LiDAR recovery, such two-stage methods typically suffer from overfitting and are incapable of explicitly encapsulating the geometric relation between depth and object bounding box. To overcome this limitation, we instead propose OPA-3D, a single-stage, end-to-end, Occlusion-Aware Pixel-Wise Aggregation network that to jointly estimate dense scene depth with depth-bounding box residuals and object bounding boxes, allowing a two-stream detection of 3D objects, leading to significantly more robust detections. Thereby, the geometry stream denoted as the Geometry Stream, combines visible depth and depth-bounding box residuals to recover the object bounding box via explicit occlusion-aware optimization. In addition, a bounding box based geometry projection scheme is employed in an effort to enhance distance perception. The second stream, named as the Context Stream, directly regresses 3D object location and size. This novel two-stream representation further enables us to enforce cross-stream consistency terms which aligns the outputs of both streams, improving the overall performance. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark demonstrate that OPA-3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the main Car category, whilst keeping a real-time inference speed. We plan to release all codes and trained models soon.
THOR-Net: End-to-end Graformer-based Realistic Two Hands and Object Reconstruction with Self-supervisionAhmed Tawfik Aboukhadra, Jameel Malik, Ahmed Elhayek et al.
Realistic reconstruction of two hands interacting with objects is a new and challenging problem that is essential for building personalized Virtual and Augmented Reality environments. Graph Convolutional networks (GCNs) allow for the preservation of the topologies of hands poses and shapes by modeling them as a graph. In this work, we propose the THOR-Net which combines the power of GCNs, Transformer, and self-supervision to realistically reconstruct two hands and an object from a single RGB image. Our network comprises two stages; namely the features extraction stage and the reconstruction stage. In the features extraction stage, a Keypoint RCNN is used to extract 2D poses, features maps, heatmaps, and bounding boxes from a monocular RGB image. Thereafter, this 2D information is modeled as two graphs and passed to the two branches of the reconstruction stage. The shape reconstruction branch estimates meshes of two hands and an object using our novel coarse-to-fine GraFormer shape network. The 3D poses of the hands and objects are reconstructed by the other branch using a GraFormer network. Finally, a self-supervised photometric loss is used to directly regress the realistic textured of each vertex in the hands' meshes. Our approach achieves State-of-the-art results in Hand shape estimation on the HO-3D dataset (10.0mm) exceeding ArtiBoost (10.8mm). It also surpasses other methods in hand pose estimation on the challenging two hands and object (H2O) dataset by 5mm on the left-hand pose and 1 mm on the right-hand pose.
11.2CVApr 1, 2022
RMS-FlowNet: Efficient and Robust Multi-Scale Scene Flow Estimation for Large-Scale Point CloudsRamy Battrawy, René Schuster, Mohammad-Ali Nikouei Mahani et al.
The proposed RMS-FlowNet is a novel end-to-end learning-based architecture for accurate and efficient scene flow estimation which can operate on point clouds of high density. For hierarchical scene flow estimation, the existing methods depend on either expensive Farthest-Point-Sampling (FPS) or structure-based scaling which decrease their ability to handle a large number of points. Unlike these methods, we base our fully supervised architecture on Random-Sampling (RS) for multiscale scene flow prediction. To this end, we propose a novel flow embedding design which can predict more robust scene flow in conjunction with RS. Exhibiting high accuracy, our RMS-FlowNet provides a faster prediction than state-of-the-art methods and works efficiently on consecutive dense point clouds of more than 250K points at once. Our comprehensive experiments verify the accuracy of RMS-FlowNet on the established FlyingThings3D data set with different point cloud densities and validate our design choices. Additionally, we show that our model presents a competitive ability to generalize towards the real-world scenes of KITTI data set without fine-tuning.
U-RED: Unsupervised 3D Shape Retrieval and Deformation for Partial Point CloudsYan Di, Chenyangguang Zhang, Ruida Zhang et al.
In this paper, we propose U-RED, an Unsupervised shape REtrieval and Deformation pipeline that takes an arbitrary object observation as input, typically captured by RGB images or scans, and jointly retrieves and deforms the geometrically similar CAD models from a pre-established database to tightly match the target. Considering existing methods typically fail to handle noisy partial observations, U-RED is designed to address this issue from two aspects. First, since one partial shape may correspond to multiple potential full shapes, the retrieval method must allow such an ambiguous one-to-many relationship. Thereby U-RED learns to project all possible full shapes of a partial target onto the surface of a unit sphere. Then during inference, each sampling on the sphere will yield a feasible retrieval. Second, since real-world partial observations usually contain noticeable noise, a reliable learned metric that measures the similarity between shapes is necessary for stable retrieval. In U-RED, we design a novel point-wise residual-guided metric that allows noise-robust comparison. Extensive experiments on the synthetic datasets PartNet, ComplementMe and the real-world dataset Scan2CAD demonstrate that U-RED surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches by 47.3%, 16.7% and 31.6% respectively under Chamfer Distance.
7.3CVOct 12, 2022
BoxMask: Revisiting Bounding Box Supervision for Video Object DetectionKhurram Azeem Hashmi, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker et al.
We present a new, simple yet effective approach to uplift video object detection. We observe that prior works operate on instance-level feature aggregation that imminently neglects the refined pixel-level representation, resulting in confusion among objects sharing similar appearance or motion characteristics. To address this limitation, we propose BoxMask, which effectively learns discriminative representations by incorporating class-aware pixel-level information. We simply consider bounding box-level annotations as a coarse mask for each object to supervise our method. The proposed module can be effortlessly integrated into any region-based detector to boost detection. Extensive experiments on ImageNet VID and EPIC KITCHENS datasets demonstrate consistent and significant improvement when we plug our BoxMask module into numerous recent state-of-the-art methods.
9.1CVJun 23, 2023
Bridging the Performance Gap between DETR and R-CNN for Graphical Object Detection in Document ImagesTahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker et al.
This paper takes an important step in bridging the performance gap between DETR and R-CNN for graphical object detection. Existing graphical object detection approaches have enjoyed recent enhancements in CNN-based object detection methods, achieving remarkable progress. Recently, Transformer-based detectors have considerably boosted the generic object detection performance, eliminating the need for hand-crafted features or post-processing steps such as Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) using object queries. However, the effectiveness of such enhanced transformer-based detection algorithms has yet to be verified for the problem of graphical object detection. Essentially, inspired by the latest advancements in the DETR, we employ the existing detection transformer with few modifications for graphical object detection. We modify object queries in different ways, using points, anchor boxes and adding positive and negative noise to the anchors to boost performance. These modifications allow for better handling of objects with varying sizes and aspect ratios, more robustness to small variations in object positions and sizes, and improved image discrimination between objects and non-objects. We evaluate our approach on the four graphical datasets: PubTables, TableBank, NTable and PubLaynet. Upon integrating query modifications in the DETR, we outperform prior works and achieve new state-of-the-art results with the mAP of 96.9\%, 95.7\% and 99.3\% on TableBank, PubLaynet, PubTables, respectively. The results from extensive ablations show that transformer-based methods are more effective for document analysis analogous to other applications. We hope this study draws more attention to the research of using detection transformers in document image analysis.
Autoencoder Attractors for Uncertainty EstimationSteve Dias Da Cruz, Bertram Taetz, Thomas Stifter et al.
The reliability assessment of a machine learning model's prediction is an important quantity for the deployment in safety critical applications. Not only can it be used to detect novel sceneries, either as out-of-distribution or anomaly sample, but it also helps to determine deficiencies in the training data distribution. A lot of promising research directions have either proposed traditional methods like Gaussian processes or extended deep learning based approaches, for example, by interpreting them from a Bayesian point of view. In this work we propose a novel approach for uncertainty estimation based on autoencoder models: The recursive application of a previously trained autoencoder model can be interpreted as a dynamical system storing training examples as attractors. While input images close to known samples will converge to the same or similar attractor, input samples containing unknown features are unstable and converge to different training samples by potentially removing or changing characteristic features. The use of dropout during training and inference leads to a family of similar dynamical systems, each one being robust on samples close to the training distribution but unstable on new features. Either the model reliably removes these features or the resulting instability can be exploited to detect problematic input samples. We evaluate our approach on several dataset combinations as well as on an industrial application for occupant classification in the vehicle interior for which we additionally release a new synthetic dataset.
7.6CVAug 14, 2023
DELO: Deep Evidential LiDAR Odometry using Partial Optimal TransportSk Aziz Ali, Djamila Aouada, Gerd Reis et al.
Accurate, robust, and real-time LiDAR-based odometry (LO) is imperative for many applications like robot navigation, globally consistent 3D scene map reconstruction, or safe motion-planning. Though LiDAR sensor is known for its precise range measurement, the non-uniform and uncertain point sampling density induce structural inconsistencies. Hence, existing supervised and unsupervised point set registration methods fail to establish one-to-one matching correspondences between LiDAR frames. We introduce a novel deep learning-based real-time (approx. 35-40ms per frame) LO method that jointly learns accurate frame-to-frame correspondences and model's predictive uncertainty (PU) as evidence to safe-guard LO predictions. In this work, we propose (i) partial optimal transportation of LiDAR feature descriptor for robust LO estimation, (ii) joint learning of predictive uncertainty while learning odometry over driving sequences, and (iii) demonstrate how PU can serve as evidence for necessary pose-graph optimization when LO network is either under or over confident. We evaluate our method on KITTI dataset and show competitive performance, even superior generalization ability over recent state-of-the-art approaches. Source codes are available.
2.9HCJul 3, 2022
The Gesture Authoring Space: Authoring Customised Hand Gestures for Grasping Virtual Objects in Immersive Virtual EnvironmentsAlexander Schäfer, Gerd Reis, Didier Stricker
Natural user interfaces are on the rise. Manufacturers for Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality head mounted displays are increasingly integrating new sensors into their consumer grade products, allowing gesture recognition without additional hardware. This offers new possibilities for bare handed interaction within virtual environments. This work proposes a hand gesture authoring tool for object specific grab gestures allowing virtual objects to be grabbed as in the real world. The presented solution uses template matching for gesture recognition and requires no technical knowledge to design and create custom tailored hand gestures. In a user study, the proposed approach is compared with the pinch gesture and the controller for grasping virtual objects. The different grasping techniques are compared in terms of accuracy, task completion time, usability, and naturalness. The study showed that gestures created with the proposed approach are perceived by users as a more natural input modality than the others.
8.1CVMar 2, 2022
Unsupervised Anomaly Detection from Time-of-Flight Depth ImagesPascal Schneider, Jason Rambach, Bruno Mirbach et al.
Video anomaly detection (VAD) addresses the problem of automatically finding anomalous events in video data. The primary data modalities on which current VAD systems work on are monochrome or RGB images. Using depth data in this context instead is still hardly explored in spite of depth images being a popular choice in many other computer vision research areas and the increasing availability of inexpensive depth camera hardware. We evaluate the application of existing autoencoder-based methods on depth video and propose how the advantages of using depth data can be leveraged by integration into the loss function. Training is done unsupervised using normal sequences without need for any additional annotations. We show that depth allows easy extraction of auxiliary information for scene analysis in the form of a foreground mask and demonstrate its beneficial effect on the anomaly detection performance through evaluation on a large public dataset, for which we are also the first ones to present results on.
8.8CVOct 5, 2022
Spatio-Temporal Learnable Proposals for End-to-End Video Object DetectionKhurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Muhammamd Zeshan Afzal
This paper presents the novel idea of generating object proposals by leveraging temporal information for video object detection. The feature aggregation in modern region-based video object detectors heavily relies on learned proposals generated from a single-frame RPN. This imminently introduces additional components like NMS and produces unreliable proposals on low-quality frames. To tackle these restrictions, we present SparseVOD, a novel video object detection pipeline that employs Sparse R-CNN to exploit temporal information. In particular, we introduce two modules in the dynamic head of Sparse R-CNN. First, the Temporal Feature Extraction module based on the Temporal RoI Align operation is added to extract the RoI proposal features. Second, motivated by sequence-level semantic aggregation, we incorporate the attention-guided Semantic Proposal Feature Aggregation module to enhance object feature representation before detection. The proposed SparseVOD effectively alleviates the overhead of complicated post-processing methods and makes the overall pipeline end-to-end trainable. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves the single-frame Sparse RCNN by 8%-9% in mAP. Furthermore, besides achieving state-of-the-art 80.3% mAP on the ImageNet VID dataset with ResNet-50 backbone, our SparseVOD outperforms existing proposal-based methods by a significant margin on increasing IoU thresholds (IoU > 0.5).
8.1CVDec 15, 2022
Multi-task Fusion for Efficient Panoptic-Part SegmentationSravan Kumar Jagadeesh, René Schuster, Didier Stricker
In this paper, we introduce a novel network that generates semantic, instance, and part segmentation using a shared encoder and effectively fuses them to achieve panoptic-part segmentation. Unifying these three segmentation problems allows for mutually improved and consistent representation learning. To fuse the predictions of all three heads efficiently, we introduce a parameter-free joint fusion module that dynamically balances the logits and fuses them to create panoptic-part segmentation. Our method is evaluated on the Cityscapes Panoptic Parts (CPP) and Pascal Panoptic Parts (PPP) datasets. For CPP, the PartPQ of our proposed model with joint fusion surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 1.6 and 4.7 percentage points for all areas and segments with parts, respectively. On PPP, our joint fusion outperforms a model using the previous top-down merging strategy by 3.3 percentage points in PartPQ and 10.5 percentage points in PartPQ for partitionable classes.
1.4CVJun 30, 2022
Self-SuperFlow: Self-supervised Scene Flow Prediction in Stereo SequencesKatharina Bendig, René Schuster, Didier Stricker
In recent years, deep neural networks showed their exceeding capabilities in addressing many computer vision tasks including scene flow prediction. However, most of the advances are dependent on the availability of a vast amount of dense per pixel ground truth annotations, which are very difficult to obtain for real life scenarios. Therefore, synthetic data is often relied upon for supervision, resulting in a representation gap between the training and test data. Even though a great quantity of unlabeled real world data is available, there is a huge lack in self-supervised methods for scene flow prediction. Hence, we explore the extension of a self-supervised loss based on the Census transform and occlusion-aware bidirectional displacements for the problem of scene flow prediction. Regarding the KITTI scene flow benchmark, our method outperforms the corresponding supervised pre-training of the same network and shows improved generalization capabilities while achieving much faster convergence.
3.9CVJul 18, 2023
Light-Weight Vision Transformer with Parallel Local and Global Self-AttentionNikolas Ebert, Laurenz Reichardt, Didier Stricker et al.
While transformer architectures have dominated computer vision in recent years, these models cannot easily be deployed on hardware with limited resources for autonomous driving tasks that require real-time-performance. Their computational complexity and memory requirements limits their use, especially for applications with high-resolution inputs. In our work, we redesign the powerful state-of-the-art Vision Transformer PLG-ViT to a much more compact and efficient architecture that is suitable for such tasks. We identify computationally expensive blocks in the original PLG-ViT architecture and propose several redesigns aimed at reducing the number of parameters and floating-point operations. As a result of our redesign, we are able to reduce PLG-ViT in size by a factor of 5, with a moderate drop in performance. We propose two variants, optimized for the best trade-off between parameter count to runtime as well as parameter count to accuracy. With only 5 million parameters, we achieve 79.5$\%$ top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-1K classification benchmark. Our networks demonstrate great performance on general vision benchmarks like COCO instance segmentation. In addition, we conduct a series of experiments, demonstrating the potential of our approach in solving various tasks specifically tailored to the challenges of autonomous driving and transportation.
Autoencoder for Synthetic to Real Generalization: From Simple to More Complex ScenesSteve Dias Da Cruz, Bertram Taetz, Thomas Stifter et al.
Learning on synthetic data and transferring the resulting properties to their real counterparts is an important challenge for reducing costs and increasing safety in machine learning. In this work, we focus on autoencoder architectures and aim at learning latent space representations that are invariant to inductive biases caused by the domain shift between simulated and real images showing the same scenario. We train on synthetic images only, present approaches to increase generalizability and improve the preservation of the semantics to real datasets of increasing visual complexity. We show that pre-trained feature extractors (e.g. VGG) can be sufficient for generalization on images of lower complexity, but additional improvements are required for visually more complex scenes. To this end, we demonstrate a new sampling technique, which matches semantically important parts of the image, while randomizing the other parts, leads to salient feature extraction and a neglection of unimportant parts. This helps the generalization to real data and we further show that our approach outperforms fine-tuned classification models.
Text2CAD: Generating Sequential CAD Models from Beginner-to-Expert Level Text PromptsMohammad Sadil Khan, Sankalp Sinha, Talha Uddin Sheikh et al.
Prototyping complex computer-aided design (CAD) models in modern softwares can be very time-consuming. This is due to the lack of intelligent systems that can quickly generate simpler intermediate parts. We propose Text2CAD, the first AI framework for generating text-to-parametric CAD models using designer-friendly instructions for all skill levels. Furthermore, we introduce a data annotation pipeline for generating text prompts based on natural language instructions for the DeepCAD dataset using Mistral and LLaVA-NeXT. The dataset contains $\sim170$K models and $\sim660$K text annotations, from abstract CAD descriptions (e.g., generate two concentric cylinders) to detailed specifications (e.g., draw two circles with center $(x,y)$ and radius $r_{1}$, $r_{2}$, and extrude along the normal by $d$...). Within the Text2CAD framework, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based auto-regressive network to generate parametric CAD models from input texts. We evaluate the performance of our model through a mixture of metrics, including visual quality, parametric precision, and geometrical accuracy. Our proposed framework shows great potential in AI-aided design applications. Our source code and annotations will be publicly available.
1.5CVJun 30, 2023
Achieving RGB-D level Segmentation Performance from a Single ToF CameraPranav Sharma, Jigyasa Singh Katrolia, Jason Rambach et al.
Depth is a very important modality in computer vision, typically used as complementary information to RGB, provided by RGB-D cameras. In this work, we show that it is possible to obtain the same level of accuracy as RGB-D cameras on a semantic segmentation task using infrared (IR) and depth images from a single Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera. In order to fuse the IR and depth modalities of the ToF camera, we introduce a method utilizing depth-specific convolutions in a multi-task learning framework. In our evaluation on an in-car segmentation dataset, we demonstrate the competitiveness of our method against the more costly RGB-D approaches.
7.6CVJul 11, 2024
Semi-Supervised Object Detection: A Survey on Progress from CNN to TransformerTahira Shehzadi, Ifza, Didier Stricker et al.
The impressive advancements in semi-supervised learning have driven researchers to explore its potential in object detection tasks within the field of computer vision. Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) leverages a combination of a small labeled dataset and a larger, unlabeled dataset. This approach effectively reduces the dependence on large labeled datasets, which are often expensive and time-consuming to obtain. Initially, SSOD models encountered challenges in effectively leveraging unlabeled data and managing noise in generated pseudo-labels for unlabeled data. However, numerous recent advancements have addressed these issues, resulting in substantial improvements in SSOD performance. This paper presents a comprehensive review of 27 cutting-edge developments in SSOD methodologies, from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to Transformers. We delve into the core components of semi-supervised learning and its integration into object detection frameworks, covering data augmentation techniques, pseudo-labeling strategies, consistency regularization, and adversarial training methods. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis of various SSOD models, evaluating their performance and architectural differences. We aim to ignite further research interest in overcoming existing challenges and exploring new directions in semi-supervised learning for object detection.
2.9HCJun 16, 2022
Learning Effect of Lay People in Gesture-Based Locomotion in Virtual RealityAlexander Schäfer, Gerd Reis, Didier Stricker
Locomotion in Virtual Reality (VR) is an important part of VR applications. Many scientists are enriching the community with different variations that enable locomotion in VR. Some of the most promising methods are gesture-based and do not require additional handheld hardware. Recent work focused mostly on user preference and performance of the different locomotion techniques. This ignores the learning effect that users go through while new methods are being explored. In this work, it is investigated whether and how quickly users can adapt to a hand gesture-based locomotion system in VR. Four different locomotion techniques are implemented and tested by participants. The goal of this paper is twofold: First, it aims to encourage researchers to consider the learning effect in their studies. Second, this study aims to provide insight into the learning effect of users in gesture-based systems.
1.4CVApr 10, 2022
Scale Invariant Semantic Segmentation with RGB-D FusionMohammad Dawud Ansari, Alwi Husada, Didier Stricker
In this paper, we propose a neural network architecture for scale-invariant semantic segmentation using RGB-D images. We utilize depth information as an additional modality apart from color images only. Especially in an outdoor scene which consists of different scale objects due to the distance of the objects from the camera. The near distance objects consist of significantly more pixels than the far ones. We propose to incorporate depth information to the RGB data for pixel-wise semantic segmentation to address the different scale objects in an outdoor scene. We adapt to a well-known DeepLab-v2(ResNet-101) model as our RGB baseline. Depth images are passed separately as an additional input with a distinct branch. The intermediate feature maps of both color and depth image branch are fused using a novel fusion block. Our model is compact and can be easily applied to the other RGB model. We perform extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation on a challenging dataset Cityscapes. The results obtained are comparable to the state-of-the-art. Additionally, we evaluated our model on a self-recorded real dataset. For the shake of extended evaluation of a driving scene with ground truth we generated a synthetic dataset using popular vehicle simulation project CARLA. The results obtained from the real and synthetic dataset shows the effectiveness of our approach.
3.7CVSep 30, 2024Code
PoseAdapt: Sustainable Human Pose Estimation via Continual Learning Benchmarks and ToolkitMuhammad Saif Ullah Khan, Didier Stricker
Human pose estimators are typically retrained from scratch or naively fine-tuned whenever keypoint sets, sensing modalities, or deployment domains change--an inefficient, compute-intensive practice that rarely matches field constraints. We present PoseAdapt, an open-source framework and benchmark suite for continual pose model adaptation. PoseAdapt defines domain-incremental and class-incremental tracks that simulate realistic changes in density, lighting, and sensing modality, as well as skeleton growth. The toolkit supports two workflows: (i) Strategy Benchmarking, which lets researchers implement continual learning (CL) methods as plugins and evaluate them under standardized protocols; and (ii) Model Adaptation, which allows practitioners to adapt strong pretrained models to new tasks with minimal supervision. We evaluate representative regularization-based methods in single-step and sequential settings. Benchmarks enforce a fixed lightweight backbone, no access to past data, and tight per-step budgets. This isolates adaptation strategy effects, highlighting the difficulty of maintaining accuracy under strict resource limits. PoseAdapt connects modern CL techniques with practical pose estimation needs, enabling adaptable models that improve over time without repeated full retraining.
1.4CVNov 28, 2022
Object Permanence in Object Detection Leveraging Temporal Priors at Inference TimeMichael Fürst, Priyash Bhugra, René Schuster et al.
Object permanence is the concept that objects do not suddenly disappear in the physical world. Humans understand this concept at young ages and know that another person is still there, even though it is temporarily occluded. Neural networks currently often struggle with this challenge. Thus, we introduce explicit object permanence into two stage detection approaches drawing inspiration from particle filters. At the core, our detector uses the predictions of previous frames as additional proposals for the current one at inference time. Experiments confirm the feedback loop improving detection performance by a up to 10.3 mAP with little computational overhead. Our approach is suited to extend two-stage detectors for stabilized and reliable detections even under heavy occlusion. Additionally, the ability to apply our method without retraining an existing model promises wide application in real-world tasks.
1.4CVSep 14, 2022
INV-Flow2PoseNet: Light-Resistant Rigid Object Pose from Optical Flow of RGB-D Images using Images, Normals and VerticesTorben Fetzer, Gerd Reis, Didier Stricker
This paper presents a novel architecture for simultaneous estimation of highly accurate optical flows and rigid scene transformations for difficult scenarios where the brightness assumption is violated by strong shading changes. In the case of rotating objects or moving light sources, such as those encountered for driving cars in the dark, the scene appearance often changes significantly from one view to the next. Unfortunately, standard methods for calculating optical flows or poses are based on the expectation that the appearance of features in the scene remain constant between views. These methods may fail frequently in the investigated cases. The presented method fuses texture and geometry information by combining image, vertex and normal data to compute an illumination-invariant optical flow. By using a coarse-to-fine strategy, globally anchored optical flows are learned, reducing the impact of erroneous shading-based pseudo-correspondences. Based on the learned optical flows, a second architecture is proposed that predicts robust rigid transformations from the warped vertex and normal maps. Particular attention is payed to situations with strong rotations, which often cause such shading changes. Therefore a 3-step procedure is proposed that profitably exploits correlations between the normals and vertices. The method has been evaluated on a newly created dataset containing both synthetic and real data with strong rotations and shading effects. This data represents the typical use case in 3D reconstruction, where the object often rotates in large steps between the partial reconstructions. Additionally, we apply the method to the well-known Kitti Odometry dataset. Even if, due to fulfillment of the brighness assumption, this is not the typical use case of the method, the applicability to standard situations and the relation to other methods is therefore established.
3.7CVAug 23, 2024
G3FA: Geometry-guided GAN for Face AnimationAlireza Javanmardi, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker
Animating human face images aims to synthesize a desired source identity in a natural-looking way mimicking a driving video's facial movements. In this context, Generative Adversarial Networks have demonstrated remarkable potential in real-time face reenactment using a single source image, yet are constrained by limited geometry consistency compared to graphic-based approaches. In this paper, we introduce Geometry-guided GAN for Face Animation (G3FA) to tackle this limitation. Our novel approach empowers the face animation model to incorporate 3D information using only 2D images, improving the image generation capabilities of the talking head synthesis model. We integrate inverse rendering techniques to extract 3D facial geometry properties, improving the feedback loop to the generator through a weighted average ensemble of discriminators. In our face reenactment model, we leverage 2D motion warping to capture motion dynamics along with orthogonal ray sampling and volume rendering techniques to produce the ultimate visual output. To evaluate the performance of our G3FA, we conducted comprehensive experiments using various evaluation protocols on VoxCeleb2 and TalkingHead benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework compared to the state-of-the-art real-time face animation methods.
3.7CVSep 30, 2024
Classroom-Inspired Multi-Mentor Distillation with Adaptive Learning StrategiesShalini Sarode, Muhammad Saif Ullah Khan, Tahira Shehzadi et al.
We propose ClassroomKD, a novel multi-mentor knowledge distillation framework inspired by classroom environments to enhance knowledge transfer between the student and multiple mentors with different knowledge levels. Unlike traditional methods that rely on fixed mentor-student relationships, our framework dynamically selects and adapts the teaching strategies of diverse mentors based on their effectiveness for each data sample. ClassroomKD comprises two main modules: the Knowledge Filtering (KF) module and the Mentoring module. The KF Module dynamically ranks mentors based on their performance for each input, activating only high-quality mentors to minimize error accumulation and prevent information loss. The Mentoring Module adjusts the distillation strategy by tuning each mentor's influence according to the dynamic performance gap between the student and mentors, effectively modulating the learning pace. Extensive experiments on image classification (CIFAR-100 and ImageNet) and 2D human pose estimation (COCO Keypoints and MPII Human Pose) demonstrate that ClassroomKD outperforms existing knowledge distillation methods for different network architectures. Our results highlight that a dynamic and adaptive approach to mentor selection and guidance leads to more effective knowledge transfer, paving the way for enhanced model performance through distillation.
3.9CVOct 18, 2023
ShapeGraFormer: GraFormer-Based Network for Hand-Object Reconstruction from a Single Depth MapAhmed Tawfik Aboukhadra, Jameel Malik, Nadia Robertini et al.
3D reconstruction of hand-object manipulations is important for emulating human actions. Most methods dealing with challenging object manipulation scenarios, focus on hands reconstruction in isolation, ignoring physical and kinematic constraints due to object contact. Some approaches produce more realistic results by jointly reconstructing 3D hand-object interactions. However, they focus on coarse pose estimation or rely upon known hand and object shapes. We propose the first approach for realistic 3D hand-object shape and pose reconstruction from a single depth map. Unlike previous work, our voxel-based reconstruction network regresses the vertex coordinates of a hand and an object and reconstructs more realistic interaction. Our pipeline additionally predicts voxelized hand-object shapes, having a one-to-one mapping to the input voxelized depth. Thereafter, we exploit the graph nature of the hand and object shapes, by utilizing the recent GraFormer network with positional embedding to reconstruct shapes from template meshes. In addition, we show the impact of adding another GraFormer component that refines the reconstructed shapes based on the hand-object interactions and its ability to reconstruct more accurate object shapes. We perform an extensive evaluation on the HO-3D and DexYCB datasets and show that our method outperforms existing approaches in hand reconstruction and produces plausible reconstructions for the objects
8.7CVJul 11, 2024
CLEO: Continual Learning of Evolving OntologiesShishir Muralidhara, Saqib Bukhari, Georg Schneider et al.
Continual learning (CL) addresses the problem of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, which occurs when a trained model tends to overwrite previously learned information, when presented with a new task. CL aims to instill the lifelong learning characteristic of humans in intelligent systems, making them capable of learning continuously while retaining what was already learned. Current CL problems involve either learning new domains (domain-incremental) or new and previously unseen classes (class-incremental). However, general learning processes are not just limited to learning information, but also refinement of existing information. In this paper, we define CLEO - Continual Learning of Evolving Ontologies, as a new incremental learning setting under CL to tackle evolving classes. CLEO is motivated by the need for intelligent systems to adapt to real-world ontologies that change over time, such as those in autonomous driving. We use Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC, and Mapillary Vistas to define the task settings and demonstrate the applicability of CLEO. We highlight the shortcomings of existing CIL methods in adapting to CLEO and propose a baseline solution, called Modelling Ontologies (MoOn). CLEO is a promising new approach to CL that addresses the challenge of evolving ontologies in real-world applications. MoOn surpasses previous CL approaches in the context of CLEO.
2.0CVJul 1, 2024
RMS-FlowNet++: Efficient and Robust Multi-Scale Scene Flow Estimation for Large-Scale Point CloudsRamy Battrawy, René Schuster, Didier Stricker
The proposed RMS-FlowNet++ is a novel end-to-end learning-based architecture for accurate and efficient scene flow estimation that can operate on high-density point clouds. For hierarchical scene f low estimation, existing methods rely on expensive Farthest-Point-Sampling (FPS) to sample the scenes, must find large correspondence sets across the consecutive frames and/or must search for correspondences at a full input resolution. While this can improve the accuracy, it reduces the overall efficiency of these methods and limits their ability to handle large numbers of points due to memory requirements. In contrast to these methods, our architecture is based on an efficient design for hierarchical prediction of multi-scale scene flow. To this end, we develop a special flow embedding block that has two advantages over the current methods: First, a smaller correspondence set is used, and second, the use of Random-Sampling (RS) is possible. In addition, our architecture does not need to search for correspondences at a full input resolution. Exhibiting high accuracy, our RMS-FlowNet++ provides a faster prediction than state-of-the-art methods, avoids high memory requirements and enables efficient scene flow on dense point clouds of more than 250K points at once. Our comprehensive experiments verify the accuracy of RMS FlowNet++ on the established FlyingThings3D data set with different point cloud densities and validate our design choices. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our model has a competitive ability to generalize to the real-world scenes of the KITTI data set without fine-tuning.
10.2CVNov 9, 2025
NURBGen: High-Fidelity Text-to-CAD Generation through LLM-Driven NURBS ModelingMuhammad Usama, Mohammad Sadil Khan, Didier Stricker et al.
Generating editable 3D CAD models from natural language remains challenging, as existing text-to-CAD systems either produce meshes or rely on scarce design-history data. We present NURBGen, the first framework to generate high-fidelity 3D CAD models directly from text using Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS). To achieve this, we fine-tune a large language model (LLM) to translate free-form texts into JSON representations containing NURBS surface parameters (\textit{i.e}, control points, knot vectors, degrees, and rational weights) which can be directly converted into BRep format using Python. We further propose a hybrid representation that combines untrimmed NURBS with analytic primitives to handle trimmed surfaces and degenerate regions more robustly, while reducing token complexity. Additionally, we introduce partABC, a curated subset of the ABC dataset consisting of individual CAD components, annotated with detailed captions using an automated annotation pipeline. NURBGen demonstrates strong performance on diverse prompts, surpassing prior methods in geometric fidelity and dimensional accuracy, as confirmed by expert evaluations. Code and dataset will be released publicly.
3.9CVNov 30, 2023
JPPF: Multi-task Fusion for Consistent Panoptic-Part SegmentationShishir Muralidhara, Sravan Kumar Jagadeesh, René Schuster et al.
Part-aware panoptic segmentation is a problem of computer vision that aims to provide a semantic understanding of the scene at multiple levels of granularity. More precisely, semantic areas, object instances, and semantic parts are predicted simultaneously. In this paper, we present our Joint Panoptic Part Fusion (JPPF) that combines the three individual segmentations effectively to obtain a panoptic-part segmentation. Two aspects are of utmost importance for this: First, a unified model for the three problems is desired that allows for mutually improved and consistent representation learning. Second, balancing the combination so that it gives equal importance to all individual results during fusion. Our proposed JPPF is parameter-free and dynamically balances its input. The method is evaluated and compared on the Cityscapes Panoptic Parts (CPP) and Pascal Panoptic Parts (PPP) datasets in terms of PartPQ and Part-Whole Quality (PWQ). In extensive experiments, we verify the importance of our fair fusion, highlight its most significant impact for areas that can be further segmented into parts, and demonstrate the generalization capabilities of our design without fine-tuning on 5 additional datasets.
2.8CVSep 27, 2023
Cross-Dataset Experimental Study of Radar-Camera Fusion in Bird's-Eye ViewLukas Stäcker, Philipp Heidenreich, Jason Rambach et al.
By exploiting complementary sensor information, radar and camera fusion systems have the potential to provide a highly robust and reliable perception system for advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving functions. Recent advances in camera-based object detection offer new radar-camera fusion possibilities with bird's eye view feature maps. In this work, we propose a novel and flexible fusion network and evaluate its performance on two datasets: nuScenes and View-of-Delft. Our experiments reveal that while the camera branch needs large and diverse training data, the radar branch benefits more from a high-performance radar. Using transfer learning, we improve the camera's performance on the smaller dataset. Our results further demonstrate that the radar-camera fusion approach significantly outperforms the camera-only and radar-only baselines.
13.1CVNov 9, 2025
Inpaint360GS: Efficient Object-Aware 3D Inpainting via Gaussian Splatting for 360° ScenesShaoxiang Wang, Shihong Zhang, Christen Millerdurai et al.
Despite recent advances in single-object front-facing inpainting using NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), inpainting in complex 360° scenes remains largely underexplored. This is primarily due to three key challenges: (i) identifying target objects in the 3D field of 360° environments, (ii) dealing with severe occlusions in multi-object scenes, which makes it hard to define regions to inpaint, and (iii) maintaining consistent and high-quality appearance across views effectively. To tackle these challenges, we propose Inpaint360GS, a flexible 360° editing framework based on 3DGS that supports multi-object removal and high-fidelity inpainting in 3D space. By distilling 2D segmentation into 3D and leveraging virtual camera views for contextual guidance, our method enables accurate object-level editing and consistent scene completion. We further introduce a new dataset tailored for 360° inpainting, addressing the lack of ground truth object-free scenes. Experiments demonstrate that Inpaint360GS outperforms existing baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://dfki-av.github.io/inpaint360gs/
2.0CVSep 17, 2024
ShapeAug++: More Realistic Shape Augmentation for Event DataKatharina Bendig, René Schuster, Didier Stricker
The novel Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVSs) gained a great amount of attention recently as they are superior compared to RGB cameras in terms of latency, dynamic range and energy consumption. This is particularly of interest for autonomous applications since event cameras are able to alleviate motion blur and allow for night vision. One challenge in real-world autonomous settings is occlusion where foreground objects hinder the view on traffic participants in the background. The ShapeAug method addresses this problem by using simulated events resulting from objects moving on linear paths for event data augmentation. However, the shapes and movements lack complexity, making the simulation fail to resemble the behavior of objects in the real world. Therefore in this paper, we propose ShapeAug++, an extended version of ShapeAug which involves randomly generated polygons as well as curved movements. We show the superiority of our method on multiple DVS classification datasets, improving the top-1 accuracy by up to 3.7% compared to ShapeAug.
2.0CVJul 3, 2024
EgoFlowNet: Non-Rigid Scene Flow from Point Clouds with Ego-Motion SupportRamy Battrawy, René Schuster, Didier Stricker
Recent weakly-supervised methods for scene flow estimation from LiDAR point clouds are limited to explicit reasoning on object-level. These methods perform multiple iterative optimizations for each rigid object, which makes them vulnerable to clustering robustness. In this paper, we propose our EgoFlowNet - a point-level scene flow estimation network trained in a weakly-supervised manner and without object-based abstraction. Our approach predicts a binary segmentation mask that implicitly drives two parallel branches for ego-motion and scene flow. Unlike previous methods, we provide both branches with all input points and carefully integrate the binary mask into the feature extraction and losses. We also use a shared cost volume with local refinement that is updated at multiple scales without explicit clustering or rigidity assumptions. On realistic KITTI scenes, we show that our EgoFlowNet performs better than state-of-the-art methods in the presence of ground surface points.
3.6CVNov 30, 2025
TalkingPose: Efficient Face and Gesture Animation with Feedback-guided Diffusion ModelAlireza Javanmardi, Pragati Jaiswal, Tewodros Amberbir Habtegebrial et al.
Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly improved the realism and generalizability of character-driven animation, enabling the synthesis of high-quality motion from just a single RGB image and a set of driving poses. Nevertheless, generating temporally coherent long-form content remains challenging. Existing approaches are constrained by computational and memory limitations, as they are typically trained on short video segments, thus performing effectively only over limited frame lengths and hindering their potential for extended coherent generation. To address these constraints, we propose TalkingPose, a novel diffusion-based framework specifically designed for producing long-form, temporally consistent human upper-body animations. TalkingPose leverages driving frames to precisely capture expressive facial and hand movements, transferring these seamlessly to a target actor through a stable diffusion backbone. To ensure continuous motion and enhance temporal coherence, we introduce a feedback-driven mechanism built upon image-based diffusion models. Notably, this mechanism does not incur additional computational costs or require secondary training stages, enabling the generation of animations with unlimited duration. Additionally, we introduce a comprehensive, large-scale dataset to serve as a new benchmark for human upper-body animation.
MARVEL-40M+: Multi-Level Visual Elaboration for High-Fidelity Text-to-3D Content CreationSankalp Sinha, Mohammad Sadil Khan, Muhammad Usama et al.
Generating high-fidelity 3D content from text prompts remains a significant challenge in computer vision due to the limited size, diversity, and annotation depth of the existing datasets. To address this, we introduce MARVEL-40M+, an extensive dataset with 40 million text annotations for over 8.9 million 3D assets aggregated from seven major 3D datasets. Our contribution is a novel multi-stage annotation pipeline that integrates open-source pretrained multi-view VLMs and LLMs to automatically produce multi-level descriptions, ranging from detailed (150-200 words) to concise semantic tags (10-20 words). This structure supports both fine-grained 3D reconstruction and rapid prototyping. Furthermore, we incorporate human metadata from source datasets into our annotation pipeline to add domain-specific information in our annotation and reduce VLM hallucinations. Additionally, we develop MARVEL-FX3D, a two-stage text-to-3D pipeline. We fine-tune Stable Diffusion with our annotations and use a pretrained image-to-3D network to generate 3D textured meshes within 15s. Extensive evaluations show that MARVEL-40M+ significantly outperforms existing datasets in annotation quality and linguistic diversity, achieving win rates of 72.41% by GPT-4 and 73.40% by human evaluators. Project page is available at https://sankalpsinha-cmos.github.io/MARVEL/.
AnonyNoise: Anonymizing Event Data with Smart Noise to Outsmart Re-Identification and Preserve PrivacyKatharina Bendig, René Schuster, Nicole Thiemer et al.
The increasing capabilities of deep neural networks for re-identification, combined with the rise in public surveillance in recent years, pose a substantial threat to individual privacy. Event cameras were initially considered as a promising solution since their output is sparse and therefore difficult for humans to interpret. However, recent advances in deep learning proof that neural networks are able to reconstruct high-quality grayscale images and re-identify individuals using data from event cameras. In our paper, we contribute a crucial ethical discussion on data privacy and present the first event anonymization pipeline to prevent re-identification not only by humans but also by neural networks. Our method effectively introduces learnable data-dependent noise to cover personally identifiable information in raw event data, reducing attackers' re-identification capabilities by up to 60%, while maintaining substantial information for the performing of downstream tasks. Moreover, our anonymization generalizes well on unseen data and is robust against image reconstruction and inversion attacks. Code: https://github.com/dfki-av/AnonyNoise
Shape2.5D: A Dataset of Texture-less Surfaces for Depth and Normals EstimationMuhammad Saif Ullah Khan, Sankalp Sinha, Didier Stricker et al.
Reconstructing texture-less surfaces poses unique challenges in computer vision, primarily due to the lack of specialized datasets that cater to the nuanced needs of depth and normals estimation in the absence of textural information. We introduce "Shape2.5D," a novel, large-scale dataset designed to address this gap. Comprising 1.17 million frames spanning over 39,772 3D models and 48 unique objects, our dataset provides depth and surface normal maps for texture-less object reconstruction. The proposed dataset includes synthetic images rendered with 3D modeling software to simulate various lighting conditions and viewing angles. It also includes a real-world subset comprising 4,672 frames captured with a depth camera. Our comprehensive benchmarks demonstrate the dataset's ability to support the development of algorithms that robustly estimate depth and normals from RGB images and perform voxel reconstruction. Our open-source data generation pipeline allows the dataset to be extended and adapted for future research. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/saifkhichi96/Shape25D.
IKEA Object State Dataset: A 6DoF object pose estimation dataset and benchmark for multi-state assembly objectsYongzhi Su, Mingxin Liu, Jason Rambach et al.
Utilizing 6DoF(Degrees of Freedom) pose information of an object and its components is critical for object state detection tasks. We present IKEA Object State Dataset, a new dataset that contains IKEA furniture 3D models, RGBD video of the assembly process, the 6DoF pose of furniture parts and their bounding box. The proposed dataset will be available at https://github.com/mxllmx/IKEAObjectStateDataset.
5.6CVAug 9, 2021Code
Visual SLAM with Graph-Cut Optimized Multi-Plane ReconstructionFangwen Shu, Yaxu Xie, Jason Rambach et al.
This paper presents a semantic planar SLAM system that improves pose estimation and mapping using cues from an instance planar segmentation network. While the mainstream approaches are using RGB-D sensors, employing a monocular camera with such a system still faces challenges such as robust data association and precise geometric model fitting. In the majority of existing work, geometric model estimation problems such as homography estimation and piece-wise planar reconstruction (PPR) are usually solved by standard (greedy) RANSAC separately and sequentially. However, setting the inlier-outlier threshold is difficult in absence of information about the scene (i.e. the scale). In this work, we revisit these problems and argue that two mentioned geometric models (homographies/3D planes) can be solved by minimizing an energy function that exploits the spatial coherence, i.e. with graph-cut optimization, which also tackles the practical issue when the output of a trained CNN is inaccurate. Moreover, we propose an adaptive parameter setting strategy based on our experiments, and report a comprehensive evaluation on various open-source datasets.
DeepLiDARFlow: A Deep Learning Architecture For Scene Flow Estimation Using Monocular Camera and Sparse LiDARRishav, Ramy Battrawy, René Schuster et al.
Scene flow is the dense 3D reconstruction of motion and geometry of a scene. Most state-of-the-art methods use a pair of stereo images as input for full scene reconstruction. These methods depend a lot on the quality of the RGB images and perform poorly in regions with reflective objects, shadows, ill-conditioned light environment and so on. LiDAR measurements are much less sensitive to the aforementioned conditions but LiDAR features are in general unsuitable for matching tasks due to their sparse nature. Hence, using both LiDAR and RGB can potentially overcome the individual disadvantages of each sensor by mutual improvement and yield robust features which can improve the matching process. In this paper, we present DeepLiDARFlow, a novel deep learning architecture which fuses high level RGB and LiDAR features at multiple scales in a monocular setup to predict dense scene flow. Its performance is much better in the critical regions where image-only and LiDAR-only methods are inaccurate. We verify our DeepLiDARFlow using the established data sets KITTI and FlyingThings3D and we show strong robustness compared to several state-of-the-art methods which used other input modalities. The code of our paper is available at https://github.com/dfki-av/DeepLiDARFlow.