Meng Yang

Haotian Wang, Meng Yang, Xinhu Zheng et al.

Depth completion, inferring dense depth maps from sparse measurements, is crucial for robust 3D perception. Although deep learning based methods have made tremendous progress in this problem, these models cannot generalize well across different scenes that are unobserved in training, posing a fundamental limitation that yet to be overcome. A careful analysis of existing deep neural network architectures for depth completion, which are largely borrowing from successful backbones for image analysis tasks, reveals that a key design bottleneck actually resides in the conventional normalization layers. These normalization layers are designed, on one hand, to make training more stable, on the other hand, to build more visual invariance across scene scales. However, in depth completion, the scale is actually what we want to robustly estimate in order to better generalize to unseen scenes. To mitigate, we propose a novel scale propagation normalization (SP-Norm) method to propagate scales from input to output, and simultaneously preserve the normalization operator for easy convergence. More specifically, we rescale the input using learned features of a single-layer perceptron from the normalized input, rather than directly normalizing the input as conventional normalization layers. We then develop a new network architecture based on SP-Norm and the ConvNeXt V2 backbone. We explore the composition of various basic blocks and architectures to achieve superior performance and efficient inference for generalizable depth completion. Extensive experiments are conducted on six unseen datasets with various types of sparse depth maps, i.e., randomly sampled 0.1\%/1\%/10\% valid pixels, 4/8/16/32/64-line LiDAR points, and holes from Structured-Light. Our model consistently achieves the best accuracy with faster speed and lower memory when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Meng Yang, Jun Chen, Wenping Gong et al.

Complicated nonlinear intensity differences, nonlinear local geometric distortions, noises and rotation transformation are main challenges in multimodal image matching. In order to solve these problems, we propose a method based on Frequency-domain Information of Local Energy Response called FILER. The core of FILER is the local energy response model based on frequency-domain information, which can overcome the effect of nonlinear intensity differences. To improve the robustness to local nonlinear geometric distortions and noises, we design a new edge structure enhanced feature detector and convolutional feature weighted descriptor, respectively. In addition, FILER overcomes the sensitivity of the frequency-domain information to the rotation angle and achieves rotation invariance. Extensive experiments multimodal image pairs show that FILER outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms and has good robustness and universality.

Meng Yang, Fan Fan, Zizhuo Li et al.

Multimodal image matching seeks pixel-level correspondences between images of different modalities, crucial for cross-modal perception, fusion and analysis. However, the significant appearance differences between modalities make this task challenging. Due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated datasets, existing deep learning methods that extract modality-common features for matching perform poorly and lack adaptability to diverse scenarios. Vision Foundation Model (VFM), trained on large-scale data, yields generalizable and robust feature representations adapted to data and tasks of various modalities, including multimodal matching. Thus, we propose DistillMatch, a multimodal image matching method using knowledge distillation from VFM. DistillMatch employs knowledge distillation to build a lightweight student model that extracts high-level semantic features from VFM (including DINOv2 and DINOv3) to assist matching across modalities. To retain modality-specific information, it extracts and injects modality category information into the other modality's features, which enhances the model's understanding of cross-modal correlations. Furthermore, we design V2I-GAN to boost the model's generalization by translating visible to pseudo-infrared images for data augmentation. Experiments show that DistillMatch outperforms existing algorithms on public datasets.

Delong Suzhang, Meng Yang

The low-quality structure in raw depth maps is prevalent in real-world RGB-D datasets, which makes real-world depth recovery a critical task in recent years. However, the lack of paired raw-ground truth (raw-GT) data in the real world poses challenges for generalized depth recovery. Existing methods insufficiently consider the diversity of structure misalignment in raw depth maps, which leads to poor generalization in real-world depth recovery. Notably, random structure misalignments are not limited to raw depth data but also affect GT depth in real-world datasets. In the proposed method, we tackle the generalization problem from both input and output perspectives. For input, we enrich the diversity of structure misalignment in raw depth maps by designing a new raw depth generation pipeline, which helps the network avoid overfitting to a specific condition. Furthermore, a structure uncertainty module is designed to explicitly identify the misaligned structure for input raw depth maps to better generalize in unseen scenarios. Notably the well-trained depth foundation model (DFM) can help the structure uncertainty module estimate the structure uncertainty better. For output, a robust feature alignment module is designed to precisely align with the accurate structure of RGB images avoiding the interference of inaccurate GT depth. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the proposed method achieves competitive accuracy and generalization capabilities across various challenging raw depth maps.