Duy-Tho Le

Duy-Tho Le, Trung Pham, Jianfei Cai et al.

Optimizing the similarity between parametric shapes is crucial for numerous computer vision tasks, where Intersection over Union (IoU) stands as the canonical measure. However, existing optimization methods exhibit significant shortcomings: regression-based losses like L1/L2 lack correlation with IoU, IoU-based losses are unstable and limited to simple shapes, and task-specific methods are computationally intensive and not generalizable accross domains. As a result, the current landscape of parametric shape objective functions has become scattered, with each domain proposing distinct IoU approximations. To address this, we unify the parametric shape optimization objective functions by introducing Marginalized Generalized IoU (MGIoU), a novel loss function that overcomes these challenges by projecting structured convex shapes onto their unique shape Normals to compute one-dimensional normalized GIoU. MGIoU offers a simple, efficient, fully differentiable approximation strongly correlated with IoU. We then extend MGIoU to MGIoU+ that supports optimizing unstructured convex shapes. Together, MGIoU and MGIoU+ unify parametric shape optimization across diverse applications. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that MGIoU and MGIoU+ consistently outperform existing losses while reducing loss computation latency by 10-40x. Additionally, MGIoU and MGIoU+ satisfy metric properties and scale-invariance, ensuring robustness as an objective function. We further propose MGIoU- for minimizing overlaps in tasks like collision-free trajectory prediction. Code is available at https://ldtho.github.io/MGIoU

Duy-Tho Le, Hengcan Shi, Hamid Rezatofighi et al.

Efficiently and accurately detecting people from 3D point cloud data is of great importance in many robotic and autonomous driving applications. This fundamental perception task is still very challenging due to (i) significant deformations of human body pose and gesture over time and (ii) point cloud sparsity and scarcity for pedestrian class objects. Recent efficient 3D object detection approaches rely on pillar features to detect objects from point cloud data. However, these pillar features do not carry sufficient expressive representations to deal with all the aforementioned challenges in detecting people. To address this shortcoming, we first introduce a stackable Pillar Aware Attention (PAA) module for enhanced pillar features extraction while suppressing noises in the point clouds. By integrating multi-point-channel-pooling, point-wise, channel-wise, and task-aware attention into a simple module, the representation capabilities are boosted while requiring little additional computing resources. We also present Mini-BiFPN, a small yet effective feature network that creates bidirectional information flow and multi-level cross-scale feature fusion to better integrate multi-resolution features. Our proposed framework, namely PiFeNet, has been evaluated on three popular large-scale datasets for 3D pedestrian Detection, i.e. KITTI, JRDB, and nuScenes achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on KITTI Bird-eye-view (BEV) and JRDB and very competitive performance on nuScenes. Our approach has inference speed of 26 frame-per-second (FPS), making it a real-time detector. The code for our PiFeNet is available at https://github.com/ldtho/PiFeNet.

Duy-Tho Le, Hengcan Shi, Jianfei Cai et al.

Diffusion models have recently gained prominence as powerful deep generative models, demonstrating unmatched performance across various domains. However, their potential in multi-sensor fusion remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce DifFUSER, a novel approach that leverages diffusion models for multi-modal fusion in 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation. Benefiting from the inherent denoising property of diffusion, DifFUSER is able to refine or even synthesize sensor features in case of sensor malfunction, thereby improving the quality of the fused output. In terms of architecture, our DifFUSER blocks are chained together in a hierarchical BiFPN fashion, termed cMini-BiFPN, offering an alternative architecture for latent diffusion. We further introduce a Gated Self-conditioned Modulated (GSM) latent diffusion module together with a Progressive Sensor Dropout Training (PSDT) paradigm, designed to add stronger conditioning to the diffusion process and robustness to sensor failures. Our extensive evaluations on the Nuscenes dataset reveal that DifFUSER not only achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 70.04% mIOU in BEV map segmentation tasks but also competes effectively with leading transformer-based fusion techniques in 3D object detection.

Duy-Tho Le, Chenhui Gou, Stavya Datta et al.

Autonomous robot systems have attracted increasing research attention in recent years, where environment understanding is a crucial step for robot navigation, human-robot interaction, and decision. Real-world robot systems usually collect visual data from multiple sensors and are required to recognize numerous objects and their movements in complex human-crowded settings. Traditional benchmarks, with their reliance on single sensors and limited object classes and scenarios, fail to provide the comprehensive environmental understanding robots need for accurate navigation, interaction, and decision-making. As an extension of JRDB dataset, we unveil JRDB-PanoTrack, a novel open-world panoptic segmentation and tracking benchmark, towards more comprehensive environmental perception. JRDB-PanoTrack includes (1) various data involving indoor and outdoor crowded scenes, as well as comprehensive 2D and 3D synchronized data modalities; (2) high-quality 2D spatial panoptic segmentation and temporal tracking annotations, with additional 3D label projections for further spatial understanding; (3) diverse object classes for closed- and open-world recognition benchmarks, with OSPA-based metrics for evaluation. Extensive evaluation of leading methods shows significant challenges posed by our dataset.