Pan Ji

CV
h-index40
57papers
2,279citations
Novelty57%
AI Score58

57 Papers

CVMay 30
Representation-Centric Survey of Supervised Skeletal Action Recognition and the New Benchmark

Yang Liu, Jiyao Yang, Madhawa Perera et al.

3D skeletal action recognition has emerged as a powerful alternative to traditional RGB and depth-based approaches, offering robustness to environmental variations, computational efficiency, and enhanced privacy. Despite remarkable progress, current research remains fragmented across diverse input representations and lacks evaluation under scenarios that reflect real-world challenges. This paper presents a representation-centric review of supervised skeletal action recognition, systematically categorizing state-of-the-art methods by their input feature types: joint coordinates, bone vectors, motion flows, and extended representations, and analyzing how these choices influence spatiotemporal modeling strategies. Building on the insights from this review, we introduce ANUBIS, a large-scale, challenging dataset designed to address critical gaps in existing benchmarks. ANUBIS incorporates multi-view recordings with back-view perspectives, complex multi-person interactions, fine-grained and violent actions, and contemporary social behaviors. We benchmark a diverse set of state-of-the-art models on ANUBIS and conduct an in-depth analysis of how different feature types affect recognition performance across 102 action categories. Our results show strong action-feature dependencies, highlight the limitations of naive multi-representational fusion, and point toward the need for task-aware, semantically aligned integration strategies. This work offers both a comprehensive foundation and a practical benchmarking resource, aiming to guide the next generation of robust, generalizable skeleton-based action recognition systems for complex real-world scenarios. The dataset, benchmarking framework, and code are available at https://yliu1082.github.io/ANUBIS/.

CVSep 19, 2023Code
RGB-based Category-level Object Pose Estimation via Decoupled Metric Scale Recovery

Jiaxin Wei, Xibin Song, Weizhe Liu et al.

While showing promising results, recent RGB-D camera-based category-level object pose estimation methods have restricted applications due to the heavy reliance on depth sensors. RGB-only methods provide an alternative to this problem yet suffer from inherent scale ambiguity stemming from monocular observations. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline that decouples the 6D pose and size estimation to mitigate the influence of imperfect scales on rigid transformations. Specifically, we leverage a pre-trained monocular estimator to extract local geometric information, mainly facilitating the search for inlier 2D-3D correspondence. Meanwhile, a separate branch is designed to directly recover the metric scale of the object based on category-level statistics. Finally, we advocate using the RANSAC-P$n$P algorithm to robustly solve for 6D object pose. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrating the superior performance of our method over previous state-of-the-art RGB-based approaches, especially in terms of rotation accuracy. Code: https://github.com/goldoak/DMSR.

CVMay 29
Robust Dreamer: Deviation-Aware Latent Gaussian Memory for Action-Controlled AR Video Generation

Hanlin Chen, Jiaxin Wei, Xibin Song et al.

Frame-wise action-controlled image-to-video generation is a promising paradigm for interactive world simulation, where each control signal should elicit an immediate visual response. However, maintaining visual fidelity and 3D consistency over long autoregressive rollouts remains challenging. Existing 3D-aware methods often suffer from catastrophic drift due to two impediments: information loss from \textit{Latent--RGB Cycling}, where generated latents are repeatedly decoded to RGB and re-encoded for future conditioning, and the training--inference gap induced by the \textit{error-free hypothesis}, where clean training memory fails to match prediction-corrupted inference memory. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{Robust Dreamer}, a memory-augmented framework built around how to design 3D memory and how to use it robustly. First, we introduce \textbf{Latent Gaussian Memory}, which anchors diffusion latents inherited from the generation process to Gaussian primitives and recalls them via latent-space Gaussian splatting. This provides dense, geometry-aware, view-aligned conditioning while avoiding accumulated degradation from repeated VAE conversion. Second, we propose \textbf{Deviation Learning with Dynamic Deviation Archive}, which synthesizes rollout-induced latent deviations through a one-step approximation, stores them by autoregressive stage and denoising timestamp, and injects them into historical memory during training. This exposes the generator to realistic corrupted memory states and teaches internal correction before inference. Experiments on ScanNet, DL3DV, and OmniWorldGame demonstrate state-of-the-art long-horizon performance.

CVMar 22, 2022Code
PlaneMVS: 3D Plane Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo

Jiachen Liu, Pan Ji, Nitin Bansal et al.

We present a novel framework named PlaneMVS for 3D plane reconstruction from multiple input views with known camera poses. Most previous learning-based plane reconstruction methods reconstruct 3D planes from single images, which highly rely on single-view regression and suffer from depth scale ambiguity. In contrast, we reconstruct 3D planes with a multi-view-stereo (MVS) pipeline that takes advantage of multi-view geometry. We decouple plane reconstruction into a semantic plane detection branch and a plane MVS branch. The semantic plane detection branch is based on a single-view plane detection framework but with differences. The plane MVS branch adopts a set of slanted plane hypotheses to replace conventional depth hypotheses to perform plane sweeping strategy and finally learns pixel-level plane parameters and its planar depth map. We present how the two branches are learned in a balanced way, and propose a soft-pooling loss to associate the outputs of the two branches and make them benefit from each other. Extensive experiments on various indoor datasets show that PlaneMVS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) single-view plane reconstruction methods on both plane detection and 3D geometry metrics. Our method even outperforms a set of SOTA learning-based MVS methods thanks to the learned plane priors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on 3D plane reconstruction within an end-to-end MVS framework. Source code: https://github.com/oppo-us-research/PlaneMVS.

AIJul 18, 2024
SciCode: A Research Coding Benchmark Curated by Scientists

Minyang Tian, Luyu Gao, Shizhuo Dylan Zhang et al. · princeton, uw

Since language models (LMs) now outperform average humans on many challenging tasks, it has become increasingly difficult to develop challenging, high-quality, and realistic evaluations. We address this issue by examining LMs' capabilities to generate code for solving real scientific research problems. Incorporating input from scientists and AI researchers in 16 diverse natural science sub-fields, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science, we created a scientist-curated coding benchmark, SciCode. The problems in SciCode naturally factorize into multiple subproblems, each involving knowledge recall, reasoning, and code synthesis. In total, SciCode contains 338 subproblems decomposed from 80 challenging main problems. It offers optional descriptions specifying useful scientific background information and scientist-annotated gold-standard solutions and test cases for evaluation. Claude3.5-Sonnet, the best-performing model among those tested, can solve only 4.6% of the problems in the most realistic setting. We believe that SciCode demonstrates both contemporary LMs' progress towards becoming helpful scientific assistants and sheds light on the development and evaluation of scientific AI in the future.

CVMar 12, 2022Code
Deformable VisTR: Spatio temporal deformable attention for video instance segmentation

Sudhir Yarram, Jialian Wu, Pan Ji et al.

Video instance segmentation (VIS) task requires classifying, segmenting, and tracking object instances over all frames in a video clip. Recently, VisTR has been proposed as end-to-end transformer-based VIS framework, while demonstrating state-of-the-art performance. However, VisTR is slow to converge during training, requiring around 1000 GPU hours due to the high computational cost of its transformer attention module. To improve the training efficiency, we propose Deformable VisTR, leveraging spatio-temporal deformable attention module that only attends to a small fixed set of key spatio-temporal sampling points around a reference point. This enables Deformable VisTR to achieve linear computation in the size of spatio-temporal feature maps. Moreover, it can achieve on par performance as the original VisTR with 10$\times$ less GPU training hours. We validate the effectiveness of our method on the Youtube-VIS benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/skrya/DefVIS.

CVOct 16, 2023Code
ConsistNet: Enforcing 3D Consistency for Multi-view Images Diffusion

Jiayu Yang, Ziang Cheng, Yunfei Duan et al.

Given a single image of a 3D object, this paper proposes a novel method (named ConsistNet) that is able to generate multiple images of the same object, as if seen they are captured from different viewpoints, while the 3D (multi-view) consistencies among those multiple generated images are effectively exploited. Central to our method is a multi-view consistency block which enables information exchange across multiple single-view diffusion processes based on the underlying multi-view geometry principles. ConsistNet is an extension to the standard latent diffusion model, and consists of two sub-modules: (a) a view aggregation module that unprojects multi-view features into global 3D volumes and infer consistency, and (b) a ray aggregation module that samples and aggregate 3D consistent features back to each view to enforce consistency. Our approach departs from previous methods in multi-view image generation, in that it can be easily dropped-in pre-trained LDMs without requiring explicit pixel correspondences or depth prediction. Experiments show that our method effectively learns 3D consistency over a frozen Zero123 backbone and can generate 16 surrounding views of the object within 40 seconds on a single A100 GPU. Our code will be made available on https://github.com/JiayuYANG/ConsistNet

CVJul 18, 2022
MonoIndoor++:Towards Better Practice of Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Indoor Environments

Runze Li, Pan Ji, Yi Xu et al.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has seen significant progress in recent years, especially in outdoor environments. However, depth prediction results are not satisfying in indoor scenes where most of the existing data are captured with hand-held devices. As compared to outdoor environments, estimating depth of monocular videos for indoor environments, using self-supervised methods, results in two additional challenges: (i) the depth range of indoor video sequences varies a lot across different frames, making it difficult for the depth network to induce consistent depth cues for training; (ii) the indoor sequences recorded with handheld devices often contain much more rotational motions, which cause difficulties for the pose network to predict accurate relative camera poses. In this work, we propose a novel framework-MonoIndoor++ by giving special considerations to those challenges and consolidating a set of good practices for improving the performance of self-supervised monocular depth estimation for indoor environments. First, a depth factorization module with transformer-based scale regression network is proposed to estimate a global depth scale factor explicitly, and the predicted scale factor can indicate the maximum depth values. Second, rather than using a single-stage pose estimation strategy as in previous methods, we propose to utilize a residual pose estimation module to estimate relative camera poses across consecutive frames iteratively. Third, to incorporate extensive coordinates guidance for our residual pose estimation module, we propose to perform coordinate convolutional encoding directly over the inputs to pose networks. The proposed method is validated on a variety of benchmark indoor datasets, i.e., EuRoC MAV, NYUv2, ScanNet and 7-Scenes, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance.

CVMay 28, 2022Code
RIAV-MVS: Recurrent-Indexing an Asymmetric Volume for Multi-View Stereo

Changjiang Cai, Pan Ji, Qingan Yan et al.

This paper presents a learning-based method for multi-view depth estimation from posed images. Our core idea is a "learning-to-optimize" paradigm that iteratively indexes a plane-sweeping cost volume and regresses the depth map via a convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Since the cost volume plays a paramount role in encoding the multi-view geometry, we aim to improve its construction both at pixel- and frame- levels. At the pixel level, we propose to break the symmetry of the Siamese network (which is typically used in MVS to extract image features) by introducing a transformer block to the reference image (but not to the source images). Such an asymmetric volume allows the network to extract global features from the reference image to predict its depth map. Given potential inaccuracies in the poses between reference and source images, we propose to incorporate a residual pose network to correct the relative poses. This essentially rectifies the cost volume at the frame level. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world MVS datasets and show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both within-dataset evaluation and cross-dataset generalization. Code available: https://github.com/oppo-us-research/riav-mvs.

CVMay 4, 2022
Representation-Centric Survey of Skeletal Action Recognition and the ANUBIS Benchmark

Yang Liu, Jiyao Yang, Madhawa Perera et al.

3D skeleton-based human action recognition has emerged as a powerful alternative to traditional RGB and depth-based approaches, offering robustness to environmental variations, computational efficiency, and enhanced privacy. Despite remarkable progress, current research remains fragmented across diverse input representations and lacks evaluation under scenarios that reflect modern real-world challenges. This paper presents a representation-centric survey of skeleton-based action recognition, systematically categorizing state-of-the-art methods by their input feature types: joint coordinates, bone vectors, motion flows, and extended representations, and analyzing how these choices influence spatial-temporal modeling strategies. Building on the insights from this review, we introduce ANUBIS, a large-scale, challenging skeleton action dataset designed to address critical gaps in existing benchmarks. ANUBIS incorporates multi-view recordings with back-view perspectives, complex multi-person interactions, fine-grained and violent actions, and contemporary social behaviors. We benchmark a diverse set of state-of-the-art models on ANUBIS and conduct an in-depth analysis of how different feature types affect recognition performance across 102 action categories. Our results show strong action-feature dependencies, highlight the limitations of naïve multi-representational fusion, and point toward the need for task-aware, semantically aligned integration strategies. This work offers both a comprehensive foundation and a practical benchmarking resource, aiming to guide the next generation of robust, generalizable skeleton-based action recognition systems for complex real-world scenarios. The dataset website, benchmarking framework, and download link are available at https://yliu1082.github.io/ANUBIS/.

CVJun 21, 2022
Semantics-Depth-Symbiosis: Deeply Coupled Semi-Supervised Learning of Semantics and Depth

Nitin Bansal, Pan Ji, Junsong Yuan et al.

Multi-task learning (MTL) paradigm focuses on jointly learning two or more tasks, aiming for significant improvement w.r.t model's generalizability, performance, and training/inference memory footprint. The aforementioned benefits become ever so indispensable in the case of joint training for vision-related {\bf dense} prediction tasks. In this work, we tackle the MTL problem of two dense tasks, i.e., semantic segmentation and depth estimation, and present a novel attention module called Cross-Channel Attention Module ({CCAM}), which facilitates effective feature sharing along each channel between the two tasks, leading to mutual performance gain with a negligible increase in trainable parameters. In a true symbiotic spirit, we then formulate a novel data augmentation for the semantic segmentation task using predicted depth called {AffineMix}, and a simple depth augmentation using predicted semantics called {ColorAug}. Finally, we validate the performance gain of the proposed method on the Cityscapes and ScanNet dataset, which helps us achieve state-of-the-art results for a semi-supervised joint model based on depth and semantic segmentation.

CVMay 28, 2022
Strengthening Skeletal Action Recognizers via Leveraging Temporal Patterns

Zhenyue Qin, Pan Ji, Dongwoo Kim et al.

Skeleton sequences are compact and lightweight. Numerous skeleton-based action recognizers have been proposed to classify human behaviors. In this work, we aim to incorporate components that are compatible with existing models and further improve their accuracy. To this end, we design two temporal accessories: discrete cosine encoding (DCE) and chronological loss (CRL). DCE facilitates models to analyze motion patterns from the frequency domain and meanwhile alleviates the influence of signal noise. CRL guides networks to explicitly capture the sequence's chronological order. These two components consistently endow many recently-proposed action recognizers with accuracy boosts, achieving new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy on two large datasets.

CVApr 12, 2023
Dynamic Voxel Grid Optimization for High-Fidelity RGB-D Supervised Surface Reconstruction

Xiangyu Xu, Lichang Chen, Changjiang Cai et al.

Direct optimization of interpolated features on multi-resolution voxel grids has emerged as a more efficient alternative to MLP-like modules. However, this approach is constrained by higher memory expenses and limited representation capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic grid optimization method for high-fidelity 3D surface reconstruction that incorporates both RGB and depth observations. Rather than treating each voxel equally, we optimize the process by dynamically modifying the grid and assigning more finer-scale voxels to regions with higher complexity, allowing us to capture more intricate details. Furthermore, we develop a scheme to quantify the dynamic subdivision of voxel grid during optimization without requiring any priors. The proposed approach is able to generate high-quality 3D reconstructions with fine details on both synthetic and real-world data, while maintaining computational efficiency, which is substantially faster than the baseline method NeuralRGBD.

CVMay 3, 2022
GeoRefine: Self-Supervised Online Depth Refinement for Accurate Dense Mapping

Pan Ji, Qingan Yan, Yuxin Ma et al.

We present a robust and accurate depth refinement system, named GeoRefine, for geometrically-consistent dense mapping from monocular sequences. GeoRefine consists of three modules: a hybrid SLAM module using learning-based priors, an online depth refinement module leveraging self-supervision, and a global mapping module via TSDF fusion. The proposed system is online by design and achieves great robustness and accuracy via: (i) a robustified hybrid SLAM that incorporates learning-based optical flow and/or depth; (ii) self-supervised losses that leverage SLAM outputs and enforce long-term geometric consistency; (iii) careful system design that avoids degenerate cases in online depth refinement. We extensively evaluate GeoRefine on multiple public datasets and reach as low as $5\%$ absolute relative depth errors.

CVAug 8, 2024
Sketch2Scene: Automatic Generation of Interactive 3D Game Scenes from User's Casual Sketches

Yongzhi Xu, Yonhon Ng, Yifu Wang et al.

3D Content Generation is at the heart of many computer graphics applications, including video gaming, film-making, virtual and augmented reality, etc. This paper proposes a novel deep-learning based approach for automatically generating interactive and playable 3D game scenes, all from the user's casual prompts such as a hand-drawn sketch. Sketch-based input offers a natural, and convenient way to convey the user's design intention in the content creation process. To circumvent the data-deficient challenge in learning (i.e. the lack of large training data of 3D scenes), our method leverages a pre-trained 2D denoising diffusion model to generate a 2D image of the scene as the conceptual guidance. In this process, we adopt the isometric projection mode to factor out unknown camera poses while obtaining the scene layout. From the generated isometric image, we use a pre-trained image understanding method to segment the image into meaningful parts, such as off-ground objects, trees, and buildings, and extract the 2D scene layout. These segments and layouts are subsequently fed into a procedural content generation (PCG) engine, such as a 3D video game engine like Unity or Unreal, to create the 3D scene. The resulting 3D scene can be seamlessly integrated into a game development environment and is readily playable. Extensive tests demonstrate that our method can efficiently generate high-quality and interactive 3D game scenes with layouts that closely follow the user's intention.

CVOct 25, 2022
CLIP-FLow: Contrastive Learning by semi-supervised Iterative Pseudo labeling for Optical Flow Estimation

Zhiqi Zhang, Nitin Bansal, Changjiang Cai et al.

Synthetic datasets are often used to pretrain end-to-end optical flow networks, due to the lack of a large amount of labeled, real-scene data. But major drops in accuracy occur when moving from synthetic to real scenes. How do we better transfer the knowledge learned from synthetic to real domains? To this end, we propose CLIP-FLow, a semi-supervised iterative pseudo-labeling framework to transfer the pretraining knowledge to the target real domain. We leverage large-scale, unlabeled real data to facilitate transfer learning with the supervision of iteratively updated pseudo-ground truth labels, bridging the domain gap between the synthetic and the real. In addition, we propose a contrastive flow loss on reference features and the warped features by pseudo ground truth flows, to further boost the accurate matching and dampen the mismatching due to motion, occlusion, or noisy pseudo labels. We adopt RAFT as the backbone and obtain an F1-all error of 4.11%, i.e. a 19% error reduction from RAFT (5.10%) and ranking 2$^{nd}$ place at submission on the KITTI 2015 benchmark. Our framework can also be extended to other models, e.g. CRAFT, reducing the F1-all error from 4.79% to 4.66% on KITTI 2015 benchmark.

CVMay 5, 2022
FisheyeDistill: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Ordinal Distillation for Fisheye Cameras

Qingan Yan, Pan Ji, Nitin Bansal et al.

In this paper, we deal with the problem of monocular depth estimation for fisheye cameras in a self-supervised manner. A known issue of self-supervised depth estimation is that it suffers in low-light/over-exposure conditions and in large homogeneous regions. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel ordinal distillation loss that distills the ordinal information from a large teacher model. Such a teacher model, since having been trained on a large amount of diverse data, can capture the depth ordering information well, but lacks in preserving accurate scene geometry. Combined with self-supervised losses, we show that our model can not only generate reasonable depth maps in challenging environments but also better recover the scene geometry. We further leverage the fisheye cameras of an AR-Glasses device to collect an indoor dataset to facilitate evaluation.

CVSep 9, 2024
Prim2Room: Layout-Controllable Room Mesh Generation from Primitives

Chengzeng Feng, Jiacheng Wei, Cheng Chen et al.

We propose Prim2Room, a novel framework for controllable room mesh generation leveraging 2D layout conditions and 3D primitive retrieval to facilitate precise 3D layout specification. Diverging from existing methods that lack control and precision, our approach allows for detailed customization of room-scale environments. To overcome the limitations of previous methods, we introduce an adaptive viewpoint selection algorithm that allows the system to generate the furniture texture and geometry from more favorable views than predefined camera trajectories. Additionally, we employ non-rigid depth registration to ensure alignment between generated objects and their corresponding primitive while allowing for shape variations to maintain diversity. Our method not only enhances the accuracy and aesthetic appeal of generated 3D scenes but also provides a user-friendly platform for detailed room design.

CLNov 21, 2024Code
OpenScholar: Synthesizing Scientific Literature with Retrieval-augmented LMs

Akari Asai, Jacqueline He, Rulin Shao et al. · allen-ai

Scientific progress depends on researchers' ability to synthesize the growing body of literature. Can large language models (LMs) assist scientists in this task? We introduce OpenScholar, a specialized retrieval-augmented LM that answers scientific queries by identifying relevant passages from 45 million open-access papers and synthesizing citation-backed responses. To evaluate OpenScholar, we develop ScholarQABench, the first large-scale multi-domain benchmark for literature search, comprising 2,967 expert-written queries and 208 long-form answers across computer science, physics, neuroscience, and biomedicine. On ScholarQABench, OpenScholar-8B outperforms GPT-4o by 5% and PaperQA2 by 7% in correctness, despite being a smaller, open model. While GPT4o hallucinates citations 78 to 90% of the time, OpenScholar achieves citation accuracy on par with human experts. OpenScholar's datastore, retriever, and self-feedback inference loop also improves off-the-shelf LMs: for instance, OpenScholar-GPT4o improves GPT-4o's correctness by 12%. In human evaluations, experts preferred OpenScholar-8B and OpenScholar-GPT4o responses over expert-written ones 51% and 70% of the time, respectively, compared to GPT4o's 32%. We open-source all of our code, models, datastore, data and a public demo.

ROMay 5, 2022
CNN-Augmented Visual-Inertial SLAM with Planar Constraints

Pan Ji, Yuan Tian, Qingan Yan et al.

We present a robust visual-inertial SLAM system that combines the benefits of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and planar constraints. Our system leverages a CNN to predict the depth map and the corresponding uncertainty map for each image. The CNN depth effectively bootstraps the back-end optimization of SLAM and meanwhile the CNN uncertainty adaptively weighs the contribution of each feature point to the back-end optimization. Given the gravity direction from the inertial sensor, we further present a fast plane detection method that detects horizontal planes via one-point RANSAC and vertical planes via two-point RANSAC. Those stably detected planes are in turn used to regularize the back-end optimization of SLAM. We evaluate our system on a public dataset, \ie, EuRoC, and demonstrate improved results over a state-of-the-art SLAM system, \ie, ORB-SLAM3.

GRFeb 20, 2025Code
Pandora3D: A Comprehensive Framework for High-Quality 3D Shape and Texture Generation

Jiayu Yang, Taizhang Shang, Weixuan Sun et al.

This report presents a comprehensive framework for generating high-quality 3D shapes and textures from diverse input prompts, including single images, multi-view images, and text descriptions. The framework consists of 3D shape generation and texture generation. (1). The 3D shape generation pipeline employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to encode implicit 3D geometries into a latent space and a diffusion network to generate latents conditioned on input prompts, with modifications to enhance model capacity. An alternative Artist-Created Mesh (AM) generation approach is also explored, yielding promising results for simpler geometries. (2). Texture generation involves a multi-stage process starting with frontal images generation followed by multi-view images generation, RGB-to-PBR texture conversion, and high-resolution multi-view texture refinement. A consistency scheduler is plugged into every stage, to enforce pixel-wise consistency among multi-view textures during inference, ensuring seamless integration. The pipeline demonstrates effective handling of diverse input formats, leveraging advanced neural architectures and novel methodologies to produce high-quality 3D content. This report details the system architecture, experimental results, and potential future directions to improve and expand the framework. The source code and pretrained weights are released at: https://github.com/Tencent/Tencent-XR-3DGen.

CVMar 24
I3DM: Implicit 3D-aware Memory Retrieval and Injection for Consistent Video Scene Generation

Jia Li, Han Yan, Yihang Chen et al.

Despite remarkable progress in video generation, maintaining long-term scene consistency upon revisiting previously explored areas remains challenging. Existing solutions rely either on explicitly constructing 3D geometry, which suffers from error accumulation and scale ambiguity, or on naive camera Field-of-View (FoV) retrieval, which typically fails under complex occlusions. To overcome these limitations, we propose I3DM, a novel implicit 3D-aware memory mechanism for consistent video scene generation that bypasses explicit 3D reconstruction. At the core of our approach is a 3D-aware memory retrieval strategy, which leverages the intermediate features of a pre-trained Feed-Forward Novel View Synthesis (FF-NVS) model to score view relevance, enabling robust retrieval even in highly occluded scenarios. Furthermore, to fully utilize the retrieved historical frames, we introduce a 3D-aligned memory injection module. This module implicitly warps historical content to the target view and adaptively conditions the generation on reliable warping regions, leading to improved revisit consistency and accurate camera control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving superior revisit consistency, generation fidelity, and camera control precision.

CVDec 18, 2024Code
T$^3$-S2S: Training-free Triplet Tuning for Sketch to Scene Generation

Zhenhong Sun, Yifu Wang, Yonhon Ng et al.

Scene generation is crucial to many computer graphics applications. Recent advances in generative AI have streamlined sketch-to-image workflows, easing the workload for artists and designers in creating scene concept art. However, these methods often struggle for complex scenes with multiple detailed objects, sometimes missing small or uncommon instances. In this paper, we propose a Training-free Triplet Tuning for Sketch-to-Scene (T3-S2S) generation after reviewing the entire cross-attention mechanism. This scheme revitalizes the existing ControlNet model, enabling effective handling of multi-instance generations, involving prompt balance, characteristics prominence, and dense tuning. Specifically, this approach enhances keyword representation via the prompt balance module, reducing the risk of missing critical instances. It also includes a characteristics prominence module that highlights TopK indices in each channel, ensuring essential features are better represented based on token sketches. Additionally, it employs dense tuning to refine contour details in the attention map, compensating for instance-related regions. Experiments validate that our triplet tuning approach substantially improves the performance of existing sketch-to-image models. It consistently generates detailed, multi-instance 2D images, closely adhering to the input prompts and enhancing visual quality in complex multi-instance scenes. Code is available at https://github.com/chaos-sun/t3s2s.git.

LGMay 24, 2021Code
Position-Sensing Graph Neural Networks: Proactively Learning Nodes Relative Positions

Zhenyue Qin, Yiqun Zhang Saeed Anwar, Dongwoo Kim et al.

Most existing graph neural networks (GNNs) learn node embeddings using the framework of message passing and aggregation. Such GNNs are incapable of learning relative positions between graph nodes within a graph. To empower GNNs with the awareness of node positions, some nodes are set as anchors. Then, using the distances from a node to the anchors, GNNs can infer relative positions between nodes. However, P-GNNs arbitrarily select anchors, leading to compromising position-awareness and feature extraction. To eliminate this compromise, we demonstrate that selecting evenly distributed and asymmetric anchors is essential. On the other hand, we show that choosing anchors that can aggregate embeddings of all the nodes within a graph is NP-complete. Therefore, devising efficient optimal algorithms in a deterministic approach is practically not feasible. To ensure position-awareness and bypass NP-completeness, we propose Position-Sensing Graph Neural Networks (PSGNNs), learning how to choose anchors in a back-propagatable fashion. Experiments verify the effectiveness of PSGNNs against state-of-the-art GNNs, substantially improving performance on various synthetic and real-world graph datasets while enjoying stable scalability. Specifically, PSGNNs on average boost AUC more than 14% for pairwise node classification and 18% for link prediction over the existing state-of-the-art position-aware methods. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ZhenyueQin/PSGNN.

CVMay 11, 2021Code
Disentangling Noise from Images: A Flow-Based Image Denoising Neural Network

Yang Liu, Saeed Anwar, Zhenyue Qin et al.

The prevalent convolutional neural network (CNN) based image denoising methods extract features of images to restore the clean ground truth, achieving high denoising accuracy. However, these methods may ignore the underlying distribution of clean images, inducing distortions or artifacts in denoising results. This paper proposes a new perspective to treat image denoising as a distribution learning and disentangling task. Since the noisy image distribution can be viewed as a joint distribution of clean images and noise, the denoised images can be obtained via manipulating the latent representations to the clean counterpart. This paper also provides a distribution learning based denoising framework. Following this framework, we present an invertible denoising network, FDN, without any assumptions on either clean or noise distributions, as well as a distribution disentanglement method. FDN learns the distribution of noisy images, which is different from the previous CNN based discriminative mapping. Experimental results demonstrate FDN's capacity to remove synthetic additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) on both category-specific and remote sensing images. Furthermore, the performance of FDN surpasses that of previously published methods in real image denoising with fewer parameters and faster speed. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Yang-Liu1082/FDN.git.

CVMay 4, 2021Code
Fusing Higher-order Features in Graph Neural Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Zhenyue Qin, Yang Liu, Pan Ji et al.

Skeleton sequences are lightweight and compact, and thus are ideal candidates for action recognition on edge devices. Recent skeleton-based action recognition methods extract features from 3D joint coordinates as spatial-temporal cues, using these representations in a graph neural network for feature fusion to boost recognition performance. The use of first- and second-order features, i.e., joint and bone representations, has led to high accuracy. Nonetheless, many models are still confused by actions that have similar motion trajectories. To address these issues, we propose fusing higher-order features in the form of angular encoding into modern architectures to robustly capture the relationships between joints and body parts. This simple fusion with popular spatial-temporal graph neural networks achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy in two large benchmarks, including NTU60 and NTU120, while employing fewer parameters and reduced run time. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ZhenyueQin/Angular-Skeleton-Encoding.

IVApr 21, 2021Code
Invertible Denoising Network: A Light Solution for Real Noise Removal

Yang Liu, Zhenyue Qin, Saeed Anwar et al.

Invertible networks have various benefits for image denoising since they are lightweight, information-lossless, and memory-saving during back-propagation. However, applying invertible models to remove noise is challenging because the input is noisy, and the reversed output is clean, following two different distributions. We propose an invertible denoising network, InvDN, to address this challenge. InvDN transforms the noisy input into a low-resolution clean image and a latent representation containing noise. To discard noise and restore the clean image, InvDN replaces the noisy latent representation with another one sampled from a prior distribution during reversion. The denoising performance of InvDN is better than all the existing competitive models, achieving a new state-of-the-art result for the SIDD dataset while enjoying less run time. Moreover, the size of InvDN is far smaller, only having 4.2% of the number of parameters compared to the most recently proposed DANet. Further, via manipulating the noisy latent representation, InvDN is also able to generate noise more similar to the original one. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Yang-Liu1082/InvDN.git.

CVJan 30, 2024
BlockFusion: Expandable 3D Scene Generation using Latent Tri-plane Extrapolation

Zhennan Wu, Yang Li, Han Yan et al.

We present BlockFusion, a diffusion-based model that generates 3D scenes as unit blocks and seamlessly incorporates new blocks to extend the scene. BlockFusion is trained using datasets of 3D blocks that are randomly cropped from complete 3D scene meshes. Through per-block fitting, all training blocks are converted into the hybrid neural fields: with a tri-plane containing the geometry features, followed by a Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) for decoding the signed distance values. A variational auto-encoder is employed to compress the tri-planes into the latent tri-plane space, on which the denoising diffusion process is performed. Diffusion applied to the latent representations allows for high-quality and diverse 3D scene generation. To expand a scene during generation, one needs only to append empty blocks to overlap with the current scene and extrapolate existing latent tri-planes to populate new blocks. The extrapolation is done by conditioning the generation process with the feature samples from the overlapping tri-planes during the denoising iterations. Latent tri-plane extrapolation produces semantically and geometrically meaningful transitions that harmoniously blend with the existing scene. A 2D layout conditioning mechanism is used to control the placement and arrangement of scene elements. Experimental results indicate that BlockFusion is capable of generating diverse, geometrically consistent and unbounded large 3D scenes with unprecedented high-quality shapes in both indoor and outdoor scenarios.

CVMar 24, 2024
Frankenstein: Generating Semantic-Compositional 3D Scenes in One Tri-Plane

Han Yan, Yang Li, Zhennan Wu et al.

We present Frankenstein, a diffusion-based framework that can generate semantic-compositional 3D scenes in a single pass. Unlike existing methods that output a single, unified 3D shape, Frankenstein simultaneously generates multiple separated shapes, each corresponding to a semantically meaningful part. The 3D scene information is encoded in one single tri-plane tensor, from which multiple Singed Distance Function (SDF) fields can be decoded to represent the compositional shapes. During training, an auto-encoder compresses tri-planes into a latent space, and then the denoising diffusion process is employed to approximate the distribution of the compositional scenes. Frankenstein demonstrates promising results in generating room interiors as well as human avatars with automatically separated parts. The generated scenes facilitate many downstream applications, such as part-wise re-texturing, object rearrangement in the room or avatar cloth re-targeting. Our project page is available at: https://wolfball.github.io/frankenstein/.

CVMar 27, 2024
NeuSDFusion: A Spatial-Aware Generative Model for 3D Shape Completion, Reconstruction, and Generation

Ruikai Cui, Weizhe Liu, Weixuan Sun et al.

3D shape generation aims to produce innovative 3D content adhering to specific conditions and constraints. Existing methods often decompose 3D shapes into a sequence of localized components, treating each element in isolation without considering spatial consistency. As a result, these approaches exhibit limited versatility in 3D data representation and shape generation, hindering their ability to generate highly diverse 3D shapes that comply with the specified constraints. In this paper, we introduce a novel spatial-aware 3D shape generation framework that leverages 2D plane representations for enhanced 3D shape modeling. To ensure spatial coherence and reduce memory usage, we incorporate a hybrid shape representation technique that directly learns a continuous signed distance field representation of the 3D shape using orthogonal 2D planes. Additionally, we meticulously enforce spatial correspondences across distinct planes using a transformer-based autoencoder structure, promoting the preservation of spatial relationships in the generated 3D shapes. This yields an algorithm that consistently outperforms state-of-the-art 3D shape generation methods on various tasks, including unconditional shape generation, multi-modal shape completion, single-view reconstruction, and text-to-shape synthesis. Our project page is available at https://weizheliu.github.io/NeuSDFusion/ .

CVMay 24, 2024
LAM3D: Large Image-Point-Cloud Alignment Model for 3D Reconstruction from Single Image

Ruikai Cui, Xibin Song, Weixuan Sun et al.

Large Reconstruction Models have made significant strides in the realm of automated 3D content generation from single or multiple input images. Despite their success, these models often produce 3D meshes with geometric inaccuracies, stemming from the inherent challenges of deducing 3D shapes solely from image data. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, the Large Image and Point Cloud Alignment Model (LAM3D), which utilizes 3D point cloud data to enhance the fidelity of generated 3D meshes. Our methodology begins with the development of a point-cloud-based network that effectively generates precise and meaningful latent tri-planes, laying the groundwork for accurate 3D mesh reconstruction. Building upon this, our Image-Point-Cloud Feature Alignment technique processes a single input image, aligning to the latent tri-planes to imbue image features with robust 3D information. This process not only enriches the image features but also facilitates the production of high-fidelity 3D meshes without the need for multi-view input, significantly reducing geometric distortions. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art high-fidelity 3D mesh reconstruction from a single image in just 6 seconds, and experiments on various datasets demonstrate its effectiveness.

CVNov 27, 2024
PhyCAGE: Physically Plausible Compositional 3D Asset Generation from a Single Image

Han Yan, Mingrui Zhang, Yang Li et al.

We present PhyCAGE, the first approach for physically plausible compositional 3D asset generation from a single image. Given an input image, we first generate consistent multi-view images for components of the assets. These images are then fitted with 3D Gaussian Splatting representations. To ensure that the Gaussians representing objects are physically compatible with each other, we introduce a Physical Simulation-Enhanced Score Distillation Sampling (PSE-SDS) technique to further optimize the positions of the Gaussians. It is achieved by setting the gradient of the SDS loss as the initial velocity of the physical simulation, allowing the simulator to act as a physics-guided optimizer that progressively corrects the Gaussians' positions to a physically compatible state. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can generate physically plausible compositional 3D assets given a single image.

CVFeb 17, 2025
MARS: Mesh AutoRegressive Model for 3D Shape Detailization

Jingnan Gao, Weizhe Liu, Weixuan Sun et al.

State-of-the-art methods for mesh detailization predominantly utilize Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate detailed meshes from coarse ones. These methods typically learn a specific style code for each category or similar categories without enforcing geometry supervision across different Levels of Detail (LODs). Consequently, such methods often fail to generalize across a broader range of categories and cannot ensure shape consistency throughout the detailization process. In this paper, we introduce MARS, a novel approach for 3D shape detailization. Our method capitalizes on a novel multi-LOD, multi-category mesh representation to learn shape-consistent mesh representations in latent space across different LODs. We further propose a mesh autoregressive model capable of generating such latent representations through next-LOD token prediction. This approach significantly enhances the realism of the generated shapes. Extensive experiments conducted on the challenging 3D Shape Detailization benchmark demonstrate that our proposed MARS model achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing methods in both qualitative and quantitative assessments. Notably, the model's capability to generate fine-grained details while preserving the overall shape integrity is particularly commendable.

CVMar 11, 2025
CDI3D: Cross-guided Dense-view Interpolation for 3D Reconstruction

Zhiyuan Wu, Xibin Song, Senbo Wang et al.

3D object reconstruction from single-view image is a fundamental task in computer vision with wide-ranging applications. Recent advancements in Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) have shown great promise in leveraging multi-view images generated by 2D diffusion models to extract 3D content. However, challenges remain as 2D diffusion models often struggle to produce dense images with strong multi-view consistency, and LRMs tend to amplify these inconsistencies during the 3D reconstruction process. Addressing these issues is critical for achieving high-quality and efficient 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we present CDI3D, a feed-forward framework designed for efficient, high-quality image-to-3D generation with view interpolation. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose to integrate 2D diffusion-based view interpolation into the LRM pipeline to enhance the quality and consistency of the generated mesh. Specifically, our approach introduces a Dense View Interpolation (DVI) module, which synthesizes interpolated images between main views generated by the 2D diffusion model, effectively densifying the input views with better multi-view consistency. We also design a tilt camera pose trajectory to capture views with different elevations and perspectives. Subsequently, we employ a tri-plane-based mesh reconstruction strategy to extract robust tokens from these interpolated and original views, enabling the generation of high-quality 3D meshes with superior texture and geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches across various benchmarks, producing 3D content with enhanced texture fidelity and geometric accuracy.

CVOct 24, 2025
BachVid: Training-Free Video Generation with Consistent Background and Character

Han Yan, Xibin Song, Yifu Wang et al.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have recently driven significant progress in text-to-video (T2V) generation. However, generating multiple videos with consistent characters and backgrounds remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on reference images or extensive training, and often only address character consistency, leaving background consistency to image-to-video models. We introduce BachVid, the first training-free method that achieves consistent video generation without needing any reference images. Our approach is based on a systematic analysis of DiT's attention mechanism and intermediate features, revealing its ability to extract foreground masks and identify matching points during the denoising process. Our method leverages this finding by first generating an identity video and caching the intermediate variables, and then inject these cached variables into corresponding positions in newly generated videos, ensuring both foreground and background consistency across multiple videos. Experimental results demonstrate that BachVid achieves robust consistency in generated videos without requiring additional training, offering a novel and efficient solution for consistent video generation without relying on reference images or additional training.

CVApr 2, 2025
Deep LG-Track: An Enhanced Localization-Confidence-Guided Multi-Object Tracker

Ting Meng, Chunyun Fu, Xiangyan Yan et al.

Multi-object tracking plays a crucial role in various applications, such as autonomous driving and security surveillance. This study introduces Deep LG-Track, a novel multi-object tracker that incorporates three key enhancements to improve the tracking accuracy and robustness. First, an adaptive Kalman filter is developed to dynamically update the covariance of measurement noise based on detection confidence and trajectory disappearance. Second, a novel cost matrix is formulated to adaptively fuse motion and appearance information, leveraging localization confidence and detection confidence as weighting factors. Third, a dynamic appearance feature updating strategy is introduced, adjusting the relative weighting of historical and current appearance features based on appearance clarity and localization accuracy. Comprehensive evaluations on the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets demonstrate that the proposed Deep LG-Track consistently outperforms state-of-the-art trackers across multiple performance metrics, highlighting its effectiveness in multi-object tracking tasks.

CVJan 27, 2025
BAG: Body-Aligned 3D Wearable Asset Generation

Zhongjin Luo, Yang Li, Mingrui Zhang et al.

While recent advancements have shown remarkable progress in general 3D shape generation models, the challenge of leveraging these approaches to automatically generate wearable 3D assets remains unexplored. To this end, we present BAG, a Body-aligned Asset Generation method to output 3D wearable asset that can be automatically dressed on given 3D human bodies. This is achived by controlling the 3D generation process using human body shape and pose information. Specifically, we first build a general single-image to consistent multiview image diffusion model, and train it on the large Objaverse dataset to achieve diversity and generalizability. Then we train a Controlnet to guide the multiview generator to produce body-aligned multiview images. The control signal utilizes the multiview 2D projections of the target human body, where pixel values represent the XYZ coordinates of the body surface in a canonical space. The body-conditioned multiview diffusion generates body-aligned multiview images, which are then fed into a native 3D diffusion model to produce the 3D shape of the asset. Finally, by recovering the similarity transformation using multiview silhouette supervision and addressing asset-body penetration with physics simulators, the 3D asset can be accurately fitted onto the target human body. Experimental results demonstrate significant advantages over existing methods in terms of image prompt-following capability, shape diversity, and shape quality. Our project page is available at https://bag-3d.github.io/.

CVJan 6, 2025
DoubleDiffusion: Combining Heat Diffusion with Denoising Diffusion for Texture Generation on 3D Meshes

Xuyang Wang, Ziang Cheng, Zhenyu Li et al.

This paper addresses the problem of generating textures for 3D mesh assets. Existing approaches often rely on image diffusion models to generate multi-view image observations, which are then transformed onto the mesh surface to produce a single texture. However, due to the gap between multi-view images and 3D space, such process is susceptible to arange of issues such as geometric inconsistencies, visibility occlusion, and baking artifacts. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel approach that directly generates texture on 3D meshes. Our approach leverages heat dissipation diffusion, which serves as an efficient operator that propagates features on the geometric surface of a mesh, while remaining insensitive to the specific layout of the wireframe. By integrating this technique into a generative diffusion pipeline, we significantly improve the efficiency of texture generation compared to existing texture generation methods. We term our approach DoubleDiffusion, as it combines heat dissipation diffusion with denoising diffusion to enable native generative learning on 3D mesh surfaces.

CVJul 26, 2021
MonoIndoor: Towards Good Practice of Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Indoor Environments

Pan Ji, Runze Li, Bir Bhanu et al.

Self-supervised depth estimation for indoor environments is more challenging than its outdoor counterpart in at least the following two aspects: (i) the depth range of indoor sequences varies a lot across different frames, making it difficult for the depth network to induce consistent depth cues, whereas the maximum distance in outdoor scenes mostly stays the same as the camera usually sees the sky; (ii) the indoor sequences contain much more rotational motions, which cause difficulties for the pose network, while the motions of outdoor sequences are pre-dominantly translational, especially for driving datasets such as KITTI. In this paper, special considerations are given to those challenges and a set of good practices are consolidated for improving the performance of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in indoor environments. The proposed method mainly consists of two novel modules, \ie, a depth factorization module and a residual pose estimation module, each of which is designed to respectively tackle the aforementioned challenges. The effectiveness of each module is shown through a carefully conducted ablation study and the demonstration of the state-of-the-art performance on three indoor datasets, \ie, EuRoC, NYUv2, and 7-scenes.

CVApr 2, 2021
Learning Transferable Kinematic Dictionary for 3D Human Pose and Shape Reconstruction

Ze Ma, Yifan Yao, Pan Ji et al.

Estimating 3D human pose and shape from a single image is highly under-constrained. To address this ambiguity, we propose a novel prior, namely kinematic dictionary, which explicitly regularizes the solution space of relative 3D rotations of human joints in the kinematic tree. Integrated with a statistical human model and a deep neural network, our method achieves end-to-end 3D reconstruction without the need of using any shape annotations during the training of neural networks. The kinematic dictionary bridges the gap between in-the-wild images and 3D datasets, and thus facilitates end-to-end training across all types of datasets. The proposed method achieves competitive results on large-scale datasets including Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP, and LSP, while running in real-time given the human bounding boxes.

CVNov 2, 2020
Set Augmented Triplet Loss for Video Person Re-Identification

Pengfei Fang, Pan Ji, Lars Petersson et al.

Modern video person re-identification (re-ID) machines are often trained using a metric learning approach, supervised by a triplet loss. The triplet loss used in video re-ID is usually based on so-called clip features, each aggregated from a few frame features. In this paper, we propose to model the video clip as a set and instead study the distance between sets in the corresponding triplet loss. In contrast to the distance between clip representations, the distance between clip sets considers the pair-wise similarity of each element (i.e., frame representation) between two sets. This allows the network to directly optimize the feature representation at a frame level. Apart from the commonly-used set distance metrics (e.g., ordinary distance and Hausdorff distance), we further propose a hybrid distance metric, tailored for the set-aware triplet loss. Also, we propose a hard positive set construction strategy using the learned class prototypes in a batch. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results across several standard benchmarks, demonstrating the advantages of the proposed method.

CVOct 28, 2020
Displacement-Invariant Matching Cost Learning for Accurate Optical Flow Estimation

Jianyuan Wang, Yiran Zhong, Yuchao Dai et al.

Learning matching costs has been shown to be critical to the success of the state-of-the-art deep stereo matching methods, in which 3D convolutions are applied on a 4D feature volume to learn a 3D cost volume. However, this mechanism has never been employed for the optical flow task. This is mainly due to the significantly increased search dimension in the case of optical flow computation, ie, a straightforward extension would require dense 4D convolutions in order to process a 5D feature volume, which is computationally prohibitive. This paper proposes a novel solution that is able to bypass the requirement of building a 5D feature volume while still allowing the network to learn suitable matching costs from data. Our key innovation is to decouple the connection between 2D displacements and learn the matching costs at each 2D displacement hypothesis independently, ie, displacement-invariant cost learning. Specifically, we apply the same 2D convolution-based matching net independently on each 2D displacement hypothesis to learn a 4D cost volume. Moreover, we propose a displacement-aware projection layer to scale the learned cost volume, which reconsiders the correlation between different displacement candidates and mitigates the multi-modal problem in the learned cost volume. The cost volume is then projected to optical flow estimation through a 2D soft-argmin layer. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on various datasets, and outperforms all published optical flow methods on the Sintel benchmark.

CVOct 7, 2020
Channel Recurrent Attention Networks for Video Pedestrian Retrieval

Pengfei Fang, Pan Ji, Jieming Zhou et al.

Full attention, which generates an attention value per element of the input feature maps, has been successfully demonstrated to be beneficial in visual tasks. In this work, we propose a fully attentional network, termed {\it channel recurrent attention network}, for the task of video pedestrian retrieval. The main attention unit, \textit{channel recurrent attention}, identifies attention maps at the frame level by jointly leveraging spatial and channel patterns via a recurrent neural network. This channel recurrent attention is designed to build a global receptive field by recurrently receiving and learning the spatial vectors. Then, a \textit{set aggregation} cell is employed to generate a compact video representation. Empirical experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed deep network, outperforming current state-of-the-art results across standard video person retrieval benchmarks, and a thorough ablation study shows the effectiveness of the proposed units.

CVAug 16, 2020
Cross-Modality 3D Object Detection

Ming Zhu, Chao Ma, Pan Ji et al.

In this paper, we focus on exploring the fusion of images and point clouds for 3D object detection in view of the complementary nature of the two modalities, i.e., images possess more semantic information while point clouds specialize in distance sensing. To this end, we present a novel two-stage multi-modal fusion network for 3D object detection, taking both binocular images and raw point clouds as input. The whole architecture facilitates two-stage fusion. The first stage aims at producing 3D proposals through sparse point-wise feature fusion. Within the first stage, we further exploit a joint anchor mechanism that enables the network to utilize 2D-3D classification and regression simultaneously for better proposal generation. The second stage works on the 2D and 3D proposal regions and fuses their dense features. In addition, we propose to use pseudo LiDAR points from stereo matching as a data augmentation method to densify the LiDAR points, as we observe that objects missed by the detection network mostly have too few points especially for far-away objects. Our experiments on the KITTI dataset show that the proposed multi-stage fusion helps the network to learn better representations.

CVJul 21, 2020
Learning Monocular Visual Odometry via Self-Supervised Long-Term Modeling

Yuliang Zou, Pan Ji, Quoc-Huy Tran et al.

Monocular visual odometry (VO) suffers severely from error accumulation during frame-to-frame pose estimation. In this paper, we present a self-supervised learning method for VO with special consideration for consistency over longer sequences. To this end, we model the long-term dependency in pose prediction using a pose network that features a two-layer convolutional LSTM module. We train the networks with purely self-supervised losses, including a cycle consistency loss that mimics the loop closure module in geometric VO. Inspired by prior geometric systems, we allow the networks to see beyond a small temporal window during training, through a novel a loss that incorporates temporally distant (e.g., O(100)) frames. Given GPU memory constraints, we propose a stage-wise training mechanism, where the first stage operates in a local time window and the second stage refines the poses with a "global" loss given the first stage features. We demonstrate competitive results on several standard VO datasets, including KITTI and TUM RGB-D.

CVJul 2, 2020
Understanding Road Layout from Videos as a Whole

Buyu Liu, Bingbing Zhuang, Samuel Schulter et al.

In this paper, we address the problem of inferring the layout of complex road scenes from video sequences. To this end, we formulate it as a top-view road attributes prediction problem and our goal is to predict these attributes for each frame both accurately and consistently. In contrast to prior work, we exploit the following three novel aspects: leveraging camera motions in videos, including context cuesand incorporating long-term video information. Specifically, we introduce a model that aims to enforce prediction consistency in videos. Our model consists of one LSTM and one Feature Transform Module (FTM). The former implicitly incorporates the consistency constraint with its hidden states, and the latter explicitly takes the camera motion into consideration when aggregating information along videos. Moreover, we propose to incorporate context information by introducing road participants, e.g. objects, into our model. When the entire video sequence is available, our model is also able to encode both local and global cues, e.g. information from both past and future frames. Experiments on two data sets show that: (1) Incorporating either globalor contextual cues improves the prediction accuracy and leveraging both gives the best performance. (2) Introducing the LSTM and FTM modules improves the prediction consistency in videos. (3) The proposed method outperforms the SOTA by a large margin.

CVApr 22, 2020
Pseudo RGB-D for Self-Improving Monocular SLAM and Depth Prediction

Lokender Tiwari, Pan Ji, Quoc-Huy Tran et al.

Classical monocular Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) and the recently emerging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for monocular depth prediction represent two largely disjoint approaches towards building a 3D map of the surrounding environment. In this paper, we demonstrate that the coupling of these two by leveraging the strengths of each mitigates the other's shortcomings. Specifically, we propose a joint narrow and wide baseline based self-improving framework, where on the one hand the CNN-predicted depth is leveraged to perform pseudo RGB-D feature-based SLAM, leading to better accuracy and robustness than the monocular RGB SLAM baseline. On the other hand, the bundle-adjusted 3D scene structures and camera poses from the more principled geometric SLAM are injected back into the depth network through novel wide baseline losses proposed for improving the depth prediction network, which then continues to contribute towards better pose and 3D structure estimation in the next iteration. We emphasize that our framework only requires unlabeled monocular videos in both training and inference stages, and yet is able to outperform state-of-the-art self-supervised monocular and stereo depth prediction networks (e.g, Monodepth2) and feature-based monocular SLAM system (i.e, ORB-SLAM). Extensive experiments on KITTI and TUM RGB-D datasets verify the superiority of our self-improving geometry-CNN framework.

CVJul 30, 2019
Degeneracy in Self-Calibration Revisited and a Deep Learning Solution for Uncalibrated SLAM

Bingbing Zhuang, Quoc-Huy Tran, Pan Ji et al.

Self-calibration of camera intrinsics and radial distortion has a long history of research in the computer vision community. However, it remains rare to see real applications of such techniques to modern Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) systems, especially in driving scenarios. In this paper, we revisit the geometric approach to this problem, and provide a theoretical proof that explicitly shows the ambiguity between radial distortion and scene depth when two-view geometry is used to self-calibrate the radial distortion. In view of such geometric degeneracy, we propose a learning approach that trains a convolutional neural network (CNN) on a large amount of synthetic data. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed method by applying it as a checkerboard-free calibration tool for SLAM, achieving comparable or superior performance to previous learning and hand-crafted methods.

CVApr 24, 2019
Neural Collaborative Subspace Clustering

Tong Zhang, Pan Ji, Mehrtash Harandi et al.

We introduce the Neural Collaborative Subspace Clustering, a neural model that discovers clusters of data points drawn from a union of low-dimensional subspaces. In contrast to previous attempts, our model runs without the aid of spectral clustering. This makes our algorithm one of the kinds that can gracefully scale to large datasets. At its heart, our neural model benefits from a classifier which determines whether a pair of points lies on the same subspace or not. Essential to our model is the construction of two affinity matrices, one from the classifier and the other from a notion of subspace self-expressiveness, to supervise training in a collaborative scheme. We thoroughly assess and contrast the performance of our model against various state-of-the-art clustering algorithms including deep subspace-based ones.

CVApr 8, 2019
Noise-Aware Unsupervised Deep Lidar-Stereo Fusion

Xuelian Cheng, Yiran Zhong, Yuchao Dai et al.

In this paper, we present LidarStereoNet, the first unsupervised Lidar-stereo fusion network, which can be trained in an end-to-end manner without the need of ground truth depth maps. By introducing a novel "Feedback Loop'' to connect the network input with output, LidarStereoNet could tackle both noisy Lidar points and misalignment between sensors that have been ignored in existing Lidar-stereo fusion studies. Besides, we propose to incorporate a piecewise planar model into network learning to further constrain depths to conform to the underlying 3D geometry. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art stereo matching, depth completion and Lidar-Stereo fusion approaches significantly.