OCJul 16, 2018
Potential Games Design Using Local InformationChangxi Li, Fenghua He, Hongsheng Qi et al.
Consider a multiplayer game, and assume a system level objective function, which the system wants to optimize, is given. This paper aims at accomplishing this goal via potential game theory when players can only get part of other players' information. The technique is designing a set of local information based utility functions, which guarantee that the designed game is potential, with the system level objective function its potential function. First, the existence of local information based utility functions can be verified by checking whether the corresponding linear equations have a solution. Then an algorithm is proposed to calculate the local information based utility functions when the utility design equations have solutions. Finally, consensus problem of multiagent system is considered to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design procedure.
13.0ROMar 25
Equivariant Filter Transformations for Consistent and Efficient Visual--Inertial NavigationChungeng Tian, Fenghua He, Ning Hao
This paper presents an equivariant filter (EqF) transformation approach for visual--inertial navigation. By establishing analytical links between EqFs with different symmetries, the proposed approach enables systematic consistency design and efficient implementation. First, we formalize the mapping from the global system state to the local error-state and prove that it induces a nonsingular linear transformation between the error-states of any two EqFs. Second, we derive transformation laws for the associated linearized error-state systems and unobservable subspaces. These results yield a general consistency design principle: for any unobservable system, a consistent EqF with a state-independent unobservable subspace can be synthesized by transforming the local coordinate chart, thereby avoiding ad hoc symmetry analysis. Third, to mitigate the computational burden arising from the non-block-diagonal Jacobians required for consistency, we propose two efficient implementation strategies. These strategies exploit the Jacobians of a simpler EqF with block-diagonal structure to accelerate covariance operations while preserving consistency. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations and real-world experiments validate the proposed approach in terms of both accuracy and runtime.
CVJan 14
CLIDD: Cross-Layer Independent Deformable Description for Efficient and Discriminative Local Feature RepresentationHaodi Yao, Fenghua He, Ning Hao et al.
Robust local feature representations are essential for spatial intelligence tasks such as robot navigation and augmented reality. Establishing reliable correspondences requires descriptors that provide both high discriminative power and computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce Cross-Layer Independent Deformable Description (CLIDD), a method that achieves superior distinctiveness by sampling directly from independent feature hierarchies. This approach utilizes learnable offsets to capture fine-grained structural details across scales while bypassing the computational burden of unified dense representations. To ensure real-time performance, we implement a hardware-aware kernel fusion strategy that maximizes inference throughput. Furthermore, we develop a scalable framework that integrates lightweight architectures with a training protocol leveraging both metric learning and knowledge distillation. This scheme generates a wide spectrum of model variants optimized for diverse deployment constraints. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves superior matching accuracy and exceptional computational efficiency simultaneously. Specifically, the ultra-compact variant matches the precision of SuperPoint while utilizing only 0.004M parameters, achieving a 99.7% reduction in model size. Furthermore, our high-performance configuration outperforms all current state-of-the-art methods, including high-capacity DINOv2-based frameworks, while exceeding 200 FPS on edge devices. These results demonstrate that CLIDD delivers high-precision local feature matching with minimal computational overhead, providing a robust and scalable solution for real-time spatial intelligence tasks.
CVApr 24, 2025
EdgePoint2: Compact Descriptors for Superior Efficiency and AccuracyHaodi Yao, Fenghua He, Ning Hao et al.
The field of keypoint extraction, which is essential for vision applications like Structure from Motion (SfM) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), has evolved from relying on handcrafted methods to leveraging deep learning techniques. While deep learning approaches have significantly improved performance, they often incur substantial computational costs, limiting their deployment in real-time edge applications. Efforts to create lightweight neural networks have seen some success, yet they often result in trade-offs between efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, the high-dimensional descriptors generated by these networks poses challenges for distributed applications requiring efficient communication and coordination, highlighting the need for compact yet competitively accurate descriptors. In this paper, we present EdgePoint2, a series of lightweight keypoint detection and description neural networks specifically tailored for edge computing applications on embedded system. The network architecture is optimized for efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. To train compact descriptors, we introduce a combination of Orthogonal Procrustes loss and similarity loss, which can serve as a general approach for hypersphere embedding distillation tasks. Additionally, we offer 14 sub-models to satisfy diverse application requirements. Our experiments demonstrate that EdgePoint2 consistently achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy and efficiency across various challenging scenarios while employing lower-dimensional descriptors (32/48/64). Beyond its accuracy, EdgePoint2 offers significant advantages in flexibility, robustness, and versatility. Consequently, EdgePoint2 emerges as a highly competitive option for visual tasks, especially in contexts demanding adaptability to diverse computational and communication constraints.