Haoqian Liang

Haoqian Liang, Zhichao Li, Ya Yang et al.

Recent research has highlighted the utility of Planar Parallax Geometry in monocular depth estimation. However, its potential has yet to be fully realized because networks rely heavily on appearance for depth prediction. Our in-depth analysis reveals that utilizing flow-pretrain can optimize the network's usage of consecutive frame modeling, leading to substantial performance enhancement. Additionally, we propose Planar Position Embedding (PPE) to handle dynamic objects that defy static scene assumptions and to tackle slope variations that are challenging to differentiate. Comprehensive experiments on autonomous driving datasets, namely KITTI and the Waymo Open Dataset (WOD), prove that our Planar Parallax Network (PPNet) significantly surpasses existing learning-based methods in performance.

Haoqian Liang, Xiaohui Wang, Zhichao Li et al.

Object concepts play a foundational role in human visual cognition, enabling perception, memory, and interaction in the physical world. Inspired by findings in developmental neuroscience - where infants are shown to acquire object understanding through observation of motion - we propose a biologically inspired framework for learning object-centric visual representations in an unsupervised manner. Our key insight is that motion boundary serves as a strong signal for object-level grouping, which can be used to derive pseudo instance supervision from raw videos. Concretely, we generate motion-based instance masks using off-the-shelf optical flow and clustering algorithms, and use them to train visual encoders via contrastive learning. Our framework is fully label-free and does not rely on camera calibration, making it scalable to large-scale unstructured video data. We evaluate our approach on three downstream tasks spanning both low-level (monocular depth estimation) and high-level (3D object detection and occupancy prediction) vision. Our models outperform previous supervised and self-supervised baselines and demonstrate strong generalization to unseen scenes. These results suggest that motion-induced object representations offer a compelling alternative to existing vision foundation models, capturing a crucial but overlooked level of abstraction: the visual instance. The corresponding code will be released upon paper acceptance.