Cédric Demonceaux

Zhuyun Zhou, Zongwei Wu, Rémi Boutteau et al.

Moving Object Detection (MOD) is a critical vision task for successfully achieving safe autonomous driving. Despite plausible results of deep learning methods, most existing approaches are only frame-based and may fail to reach reasonable performance when dealing with dynamic traffic participants. Recent advances in sensor technologies, especially the Event camera, can naturally complement the conventional camera approach to better model moving objects. However, event-based works often adopt a pre-defined time window for event representation, and simply integrate it to estimate image intensities from events, neglecting much of the rich temporal information from the available asynchronous events. Therefore, from a new perspective, we propose RENet, a novel RGB-Event fusion Network, that jointly exploits the two complementary modalities to achieve more robust MOD under challenging scenarios for autonomous driving. Specifically, we first design a temporal multi-scale aggregation module to fully leverage event frames from both the RGB exposure time and larger intervals. Then we introduce a bi-directional fusion module to attentively calibrate and fuse multi-modal features. To evaluate the performance of our network, we carefully select and annotate a sub-MOD dataset from the commonly used DSEC dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art RGB-Event fusion alternatives. The source code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/ZZY-Zhou/RENet.

Zongwei Wu, Danda Pani Paudel, Deng-Ping Fan et al.

Depth cues are known to be useful for visual perception. However, direct measurement of depth is often impracticable. Fortunately, though, modern learning-based methods offer promising depth maps by inference in the wild. In this work, we adapt such depth inference models for object segmentation using the objects' "pop-out" prior in 3D. The "pop-out" is a simple composition prior that assumes objects reside on the background surface. Such compositional prior allows us to reason about objects in the 3D space. More specifically, we adapt the inferred depth maps such that objects can be localized using only 3D information. Such separation, however, requires knowledge about contact surface which we learn using the weak supervision of the segmentation mask. Our intermediate representation of contact surface, and thereby reasoning about objects purely in 3D, allows us to better transfer the depth knowledge into semantics. The proposed adaptation method uses only the depth model without needing the source data used for training, making the learning process efficient and practical. Our experiments on eight datasets of two challenging tasks, namely camouflaged object detection and salient object detection, consistently demonstrate the benefit of our method in terms of both performance and generalizability.

Zongwei Wu, Guillaume Allibert, Fabrice Meriaudeau et al.

RGB-D saliency detection aims to fuse multi-modal cues to accurately localize salient regions. Existing works often adopt attention modules for feature modeling, with few methods explicitly leveraging fine-grained details to merge with semantic cues. Thus, despite the auxiliary depth information, it is still challenging for existing models to distinguish objects with similar appearances but at distinct camera distances. In this paper, from a new perspective, we propose a novel Hierarchical Depth Awareness network (HiDAnet) for RGB-D saliency detection. Our motivation comes from the observation that the multi-granularity properties of geometric priors correlate well with the neural network hierarchies. To realize multi-modal and multi-level fusion, we first use a granularity-based attention scheme to strengthen the discriminatory power of RGB and depth features separately. Then we introduce a unified cross dual-attention module for multi-modal and multi-level fusion in a coarse-to-fine manner. The encoded multi-modal features are gradually aggregated into a shared decoder. Further, we exploit a multi-scale loss to take full advantage of the hierarchical information. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our HiDAnet performs favorably over the state-of-the-art methods by large margins.

Yiting Wang, Nolwenn Peyratout, Tim Brodermann et al.

This paper presents the report of the URVIS 2026 challenge on adverse-to-extreme panoptic segmentation. As the first challenge of its kind, it attracted 17 registered participants and 47 submissions, with 4 teams reaching the final phase. The challenge is based on the MUSES dataset, a multi-sensor benchmark for panoptic segmentation in adverse-to-extreme weather, including RGB frame camera, LiDAR, radar, and event camera data. Weighted Panoptic Quality (wPQ) is designed and adopted as the official ranking metric for fair evaluation across weather conditions. In this report, we summarise the challenge setting and benchmark results, analyse the performance of the submitted methods, and discuss current progress and remaining challenges for robust multimodal panoptic segmentation. Link: https://urvis-workshop.github.io/challenge-Muses.html

Zongwei Wu, Shriarulmozhivarman Gobichettipalayam, Brahim Tamadazte et al.

Efficiently exploiting multi-modal inputs for accurate RGB-D saliency detection is a topic of high interest. Most existing works leverage cross-modal interactions to fuse the two streams of RGB-D for intermediate features' enhancement. In this process, a practical aspect of the low quality of the available depths has not been fully considered yet. In this work, we aim for RGB-D saliency detection that is robust to the low-quality depths which primarily appear in two forms: inaccuracy due to noise and the misalignment to RGB. To this end, we propose a robust RGB-D fusion method that benefits from (1) layer-wise, and (2) trident spatial, attention mechanisms. On the one hand, layer-wise attention (LWA) learns the trade-off between early and late fusion of RGB and depth features, depending upon the depth accuracy. On the other hand, trident spatial attention (TSA) aggregates the features from a wider spatial context to address the depth misalignment problem. The proposed LWA and TSA mechanisms allow us to efficiently exploit the multi-modal inputs for saliency detection while being robust against low-quality depths. Our experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed fusion method performs consistently better than the state-of-the-art fusion alternatives.

Quentin Herau, Nathan Piasco, Moussab Bennehar et al.

With the recent advances in autonomous driving and the decreasing cost of LiDARs, the use of multimodal sensor systems is on the rise. However, in order to make use of the information provided by a variety of complimentary sensors, it is necessary to accurately calibrate them. We take advantage of recent advances in computer graphics and implicit volumetric scene representation to tackle the problem of multi-sensor spatial and temporal calibration. Thanks to a new formulation of the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) optimization, we are able to jointly optimize calibration parameters along with scene representation based on radiometric and geometric measurements. Our method enables accurate and robust calibration from data captured in uncontrolled and unstructured urban environments, making our solution more scalable than existing calibration solutions. We demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of our method in urban scenes typically encountered in autonomous driving scenarios.

Quentin Herau, Nathan Piasco, Moussab Bennehar et al.

In rapidly-evolving domains such as autonomous driving, the use of multiple sensors with different modalities is crucial to ensure high operational precision and stability. To correctly exploit the provided information by each sensor in a single common frame, it is essential for these sensors to be accurately calibrated. In this paper, we leverage the ability of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to represent different sensors modalities in a common volumetric representation to achieve robust and accurate spatio-temporal sensor calibration. By designing a partitioning approach based on the visible part of the scene for each sensor, we formulate the calibration problem using only the overlapping areas. This strategy results in a more robust and accurate calibration that is less prone to failure. We demonstrate that our approach works on outdoor urban scenes by validating it on multiple established driving datasets. Results show that our method is able to get better accuracy and robustness compared to existing methods.

Zongwei Wu, Guillaume Allibert, Christophe Stolz et al.

Recent RGB-D semantic segmentation has motivated research interest thanks to the accessibility of complementary modalities from the input side. Existing works often adopt a two-stream architecture that processes photometric and geometric information in parallel, with few methods explicitly leveraging the contribution of depth cues to adjust the sampling position on RGB images. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to incorporate the depth information in the RGB convolutional neural network (CNN), termed Z-ACN (Depth-Adapted CNN). Specifically, our Z-ACN generates a 2D depth-adapted offset which is fully constrained by low-level features to guide the feature extraction on RGB images. With the generated offset, we introduce two intuitive and effective operations to replace basic CNN operators: depth-adapted convolution and depth-adapted average pooling. Extensive experiments on both indoor and outdoor semantic segmentation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Teng Wu, Bruno Vallet, Cédric Demonceaux

Mobile mapping, in particular, Mobile Lidar Scanning (MLS) is increasingly widespread to monitor and map urban scenes at city scale with unprecedented resolution and accuracy. The resulting point cloud sampling of the scene geometry can be meshed in order to create a continuous representation for different applications: visualization, simulation, navigation, etc. Because of the highly dynamic nature of these urban scenes, long term mapping should rely on frequent map updates. A trivial solution is to simply replace old data with newer data each time a new acquisition is made. However it has two drawbacks: 1) the old data may be of higher quality (resolution, precision) than the new and 2) the coverage of the scene might be different in various acquisitions, including varying occlusions. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic pipeline to address these two issues by formulating the problem of merging meshes with different quality, coverage and acquisition time. Our method is based on a combined distance and visibility based change detection, a time series analysis to assess the sustainability of changes, a mesh mosaicking based on a global boolean optimization and finally a stitching of the resulting mesh pieces boundaries with triangle strips. Finally, our method is demonstrated on Robotcar and Stereopolis datasets.

Hermes McGriff, Renato Martins, Nicolas Andreff et al.

In this paper, we propose an approach to address the problem of 3D reconstruction of scenes from a single image captured by a light-field camera equipped with a rolling shutter sensor. Our method leverages the 3D information cues present in the light-field and the motion information provided by the rolling shutter effect. We present a generic model for the imaging process of this sensor and a two-stage algorithm that minimizes the re-projection error while considering the position and motion of the camera in a motion-shape bundle adjustment estimation strategy. Thereby, we provide an instantaneous 3D shape-and-pose-and-velocity sensing paradigm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to leverage this type of sensor for this purpose. We also present a new benchmark dataset composed of different light-fields showing rolling shutter effects, which can be used as a common base to improve the evaluation and tracking the progress in the field. We demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our approach through several experiments conducted for different scenes and types of motions. The source code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/ICB-Vision-AI/RSLF

Zongwei Wu, Jingjing Wang, Zhuyun Zhou et al.

Multi-sensor clues have shown promise for object segmentation, but inherent noise in each sensor, as well as the calibration error in practice, may bias the segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach by mining the Cross-Modal Semantics to guide the fusion and decoding of multimodal features, with the aim of controlling the modal contribution based on relative entropy. We explore semantics among the multimodal inputs in two aspects: the modality-shared consistency and the modality-specific variation. Specifically, we propose a novel network, termed XMSNet, consisting of (1) all-round attentive fusion (AF), (2) coarse-to-fine decoder (CFD), and (3) cross-layer self-supervision. On the one hand, the AF block explicitly dissociates the shared and specific representation and learns to weight the modal contribution by adjusting the \textit{proportion, region,} and \textit{pattern}, depending upon the quality. On the other hand, our CFD initially decodes the shared feature and then refines the output through specificity-aware querying. Further, we enforce semantic consistency across the decoding layers to enable interaction across network hierarchies, improving feature discriminability. Exhaustive comparison on eleven datasets with depth or thermal clues, and on two challenging tasks, namely salient and camouflage object segmentation, validate our effectiveness in terms of both performance and robustness. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zongwei97/XMSNet.

Quentin Herau, Moussab Bennehar, Arthur Moreau et al.

Reliable multimodal sensor fusion algorithms require accurate spatiotemporal calibration. Recently, targetless calibration techniques based on implicit neural representations have proven to provide precise and robust results. Nevertheless, such methods are inherently slow to train given the high computational overhead caused by the large number of sampled points required for volume rendering. With the recent introduction of 3D Gaussian Splatting as a faster alternative to implicit representation methods, we propose to leverage this new rendering approach to achieve faster multi-sensor calibration. We introduce 3DGS-Calib, a new calibration method that relies on the speed and rendering accuracy of 3D Gaussian Splatting to achieve multimodal spatiotemporal calibration that is accurate, robust, and with a substantial speed-up compared to methods relying on implicit neural representations. We demonstrate the superiority of our proposal with experimental results on sequences from KITTI-360, a widely used driving dataset.

Felipe Cadar, Guilherme Potje, Renato Martins et al.

Visual correspondence is a crucial step in key computer vision tasks, including camera localization, image registration, and structure from motion. The most effective techniques for matching keypoints currently involve using learned sparse or dense matchers, which need pairs of images. These neural networks have a good general understanding of features from both images, but they often struggle to match points from different semantic areas. This paper presents a new method that uses semantic cues from foundation vision model features (like DINOv2) to enhance local feature matching by incorporating semantic reasoning into existing descriptors. Therefore, the learned descriptors do not require image pairs at inference time, allowing feature caching and fast matching using similarity search, unlike learned matchers. We present adapted versions of six existing descriptors, with an average increase in performance of 29% in camera localization, with comparable accuracy to existing matchers as LightGlue and LoFTR in two existing benchmarks. Both code and trained models are available at https://www.verlab.dcc.ufmg.br/descriptors/reasoning_accv24

Quentin Herau, Nathan Piasco, Moussab Bennehar et al.

Autonomous driving systems rely on accurate perception and localization of the ego car to ensure safety and reliability in challenging real-world driving scenarios. Public datasets play a vital role in benchmarking and guiding advancement in research by providing standardized resources for model development and evaluation. However, potential inaccuracies in sensor calibration and vehicle poses within these datasets can lead to erroneous evaluations of downstream tasks, adversely impacting the reliability and performance of the autonomous systems. To address this challenge, we propose a robust optimization method based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to refine sensor poses and calibration parameters, enhancing the integrity of dataset benchmarks. To validate improvement in accuracy of our optimized poses without ground truth, we present a thorough evaluation process, relying on reprojection metrics, Novel View Synthesis rendering quality, and geometric alignment. We demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in sensor pose accuracy. By optimizing these critical parameters, our approach not only improves the utility of existing datasets but also paves the way for more reliable autonomous driving models. To foster continued progress in this field, we make the optimized sensor poses publicly available, providing a valuable resource for the research community.

Steven Tel, Zongwei Wu, Yulun Zhang et al.

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging aims to retrieve information from multiple low-dynamic range inputs to generate realistic output. The essence is to leverage the contextual information, including both dynamic and static semantics, for better image generation. Existing methods often focus on the spatial misalignment across input frames caused by the foreground and/or camera motion. However, there is no research on jointly leveraging the dynamic and static context in a simultaneous manner. To delve into this problem, we propose a novel alignment-free network with a Semantics Consistent Transformer (SCTNet) with both spatial and channel attention modules in the network. The spatial attention aims to deal with the intra-image correlation to model the dynamic motion, while the channel attention enables the inter-image intertwining to enhance the semantic consistency across frames. Aside from this, we introduce a novel realistic HDR dataset with more variations in foreground objects, environmental factors, and larger motions. Extensive comparisons on both conventional datasets and ours validate the effectiveness of our method, achieving the best trade-off on the performance and the computational cost.

Daniel Braun, Olivier Morel, Pascal Vasseur et al.

Monocular depth estimation has been a popular area of research for several years, especially since self-supervised networks have shown increasingly good results in bridging the gap with supervised and stereo methods. However, these approaches focus their interest on dense 3D reconstruction and sometimes on tiny details that are superfluous for autonomous navigation. In this paper, we propose to address this issue by estimating the navigation map under a quadtree representation. The objective is to create an adaptive depth map prediction that only extract details that are essential for the obstacle avoidance. Other 3D space which leaves large room for navigation will be provided with approximate distance. Experiment on KITTI dataset shows that our method can significantly reduce the number of output information without major loss of accuracy.

Zongwei Wu, Guillaume Allibert, Christophe Stolz et al.

Recent RGBD-based models for saliency detection have attracted research attention. The depth clues such as boundary clues, surface normal, shape attribute, etc., contribute to the identification of salient objects with complicated scenarios. However, most RGBD networks require multi-modalities from the input side and feed them separately through a two-stream design, which inevitably results in extra costs on depth sensors and computation. To tackle these inconveniences, we present in this paper a novel fusion design named modality-guided subnetwork (MGSnet). It has the following superior designs: 1) Our model works for both RGB and RGBD data, and dynamically estimating depth if not available. Taking the inner workings of depth-prediction networks into account, we propose to estimate the pseudo-geometry maps from RGB input - essentially mimicking the multi-modality input. 2) Our MGSnet for RGB SOD results in real-time inference but achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other RGB models. 3) The flexible and lightweight design of MGS facilitates the integration into RGBD two-streaming models. The introduced fusion design enables a cross-modality interaction to enable further progress but with a minimal cost.

Clara Fernandez-Labrador, Ajad Chhatkuli, Danda Pani Paudel et al.

Automatic discovery of category-specific 3D keypoints from a collection of objects of some category is a challenging problem. One reason is that not all objects in a category necessarily have the same semantic parts. The level of difficulty adds up further when objects are represented by 3D point clouds, with variations in shape and unknown coordinate frames. We define keypoints to be category-specific, if they meaningfully represent objects' shape and their correspondences can be simply established order-wise across all objects. This paper aims at learning category-specific 3D keypoints, in an unsupervised manner, using a collection of misaligned 3D point clouds of objects from an unknown category. In order to do so, we model shapes defined by the keypoints, within a category, using the symmetric linear basis shapes without assuming the plane of symmetry to be known. The usage of symmetry prior leads us to learn stable keypoints suitable for higher misalignments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on learning such keypoints directly from 3D point clouds. Using categories from four benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the quality of our learned keypoints by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our experiments also show that the keypoints discovered by our method are geometrically and semantically consistent.

Julia Guerrero-Viu, Clara Fernandez-Labrador, Cédric Demonceaux et al.

In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in taking advantage of the 360 panoramic images potential, while managing the new challenges they imply. While several tasks have been improved thanks to the contextual information these images offer, object recognition in indoor scenes still remains a challenging problem that has not been deeply investigated. This paper provides an object recognition system that performs object detection and semantic segmentation tasks by using a deep learning model adapted to match the nature of equirectangular images. From these results, instance segmentation masks are recovered, refined and transformed into 3D bounding boxes that are placed into the 3D model of the room. Quantitative and qualitative results support that our method outperforms the state of the art by a large margin and show a complete understanding of the main objects in indoor scenes.

Clara Fernandez-Labrador, Jose M. Facil, Alejandro Perez-Yus et al.

The problem of 3D layout recovery in indoor scenes has been a core research topic for over a decade. However, there are still several major challenges that remain unsolved. Among the most relevant ones, a major part of the state-of-the-art methods make implicit or explicit assumptions on the scenes -- e.g. box-shaped or Manhattan layouts. Also, current methods are computationally expensive and not suitable for real-time applications like robot navigation and AR/VR. In this work we present CFL (Corners for Layout), the first end-to-end model for 3D layout recovery on 360 images. Our experimental results show that we outperform the state of the art relaxing assumptions about the scene and at a lower cost. We also show that our model generalizes better to camera position variations than conventional approaches by using EquiConvs, a type of convolution applied directly on the sphere projection and hence invariant to the equirectangular distortions. CFL Webpage: https://cfernandezlab.github.io/CFL/