Colton Stearns

Colton Stearns, Davis Rempe, Jie Li et al.

3D multi-object tracking aims to uniquely and consistently identify all mobile entities through time. Despite the rich spatiotemporal information available in this setting, current 3D tracking methods primarily rely on abstracted information and limited history, e.g. single-frame object bounding boxes. In this work, we develop a holistic representation of traffic scenes that leverages both spatial and temporal information of the actors in the scene. Specifically, we reformulate tracking as a spatiotemporal problem by representing tracked objects as sequences of time-stamped points and bounding boxes over a long temporal history. At each timestamp, we improve the location and motion estimates of our tracked objects through learned refinement over the full sequence of object history. By considering time and space jointly, our representation naturally encodes fundamental physical priors such as object permanence and consistency across time. Our spatiotemporal tracking framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Waymo and nuScenes benchmarks.

Colton Stearns, Davis Rempe, Jiateng Liu et al.

Modern depth sensors such as LiDAR operate by sweeping laser-beams across the scene, resulting in a point cloud with notable 1D curve-like structures. In this work, we introduce a new point cloud processing scheme and backbone, called CurveCloudNet, which takes advantage of the curve-like structure inherent to these sensors. While existing backbones discard the rich 1D traversal patterns and rely on generic 3D operations, CurveCloudNet parameterizes the point cloud as a collection of polylines (dubbed a "curve cloud"), establishing a local surface-aware ordering on the points. By reasoning along curves, CurveCloudNet captures lightweight curve-aware priors to efficiently and accurately reason in several diverse 3D environments. We evaluate CurveCloudNet on multiple synthetic and real datasets that exhibit distinct 3D size and structure. We demonstrate that CurveCloudNet outperforms both point-based and sparse-voxel backbones in various segmentation settings, notably scaling to large scenes better than point-based alternatives while exhibiting improved single-object performance over sparse-voxel alternatives. In all, CurveCloudNet is an efficient and accurate backbone that can handle a larger variety of 3D environments than past works.

Wenyan Cong, Hanqing Zhu, Kevin Wang et al.

Efficiently reconstructing 3D scenes from monocular video remains a core challenge in computer vision, vital for applications in virtual reality, robotics, and scene understanding. Recently, frame-by-frame progressive reconstruction without camera poses is commonly adopted, incurring high computational overhead and compounding errors when scaling to longer videos. To overcome these issues, we introduce VideoLifter, a novel video-to-3D pipeline that leverages a local-to-global strategy on a fragment basis, achieving both extreme efficiency and SOTA quality. Locally, VideoLifter leverages learnable 3D priors to register fragments, extracting essential information for subsequent 3D Gaussian initialization with enforced inter-fragment consistency and optimized efficiency. Globally, it employs a tree-based hierarchical merging method with key frame guidance for inter-fragment alignment, pairwise merging with Gaussian point pruning, and subsequent joint optimization to ensure global consistency while efficiently mitigating cumulative errors. This approach significantly accelerates the reconstruction process, reducing training time by over 82% while holding better visual quality than current SOTA methods.

Colton Stearns, Adam Harley, Mikaela Uy et al.

Gaussian splatting has become a popular representation for novel-view synthesis, exhibiting clear strengths in efficiency, photometric quality, and compositional edibility. Following its success, many works have extended Gaussians to 4D, showing that dynamic Gaussians maintain these benefits while also tracking scene geometry far better than alternative representations. Yet, these methods assume dense multi-view videos as supervision. In this work, we are interested in extending the capability of Gaussian scene representations to casually captured monocular videos. We show that existing 4D Gaussian methods dramatically fail in this setup because the monocular setting is underconstrained. Building off this finding, we propose a method we call Dynamic Gaussian Marbles, which consist of three core modifications that target the difficulties of the monocular setting. First, we use isotropic Gaussian "marbles'', reducing the degrees of freedom of each Gaussian. Second, we employ a hierarchical divide and-conquer learning strategy to efficiently guide the optimization towards solutions with globally coherent motion. Finally, we add image-level and geometry-level priors into the optimization, including a tracking loss that takes advantage of recent progress in point tracking. By constraining the optimization, Dynamic Gaussian Marbles learns Gaussian trajectories that enable novel-view rendering and accurately capture the 3D motion of the scene elements. We evaluate on the Nvidia Dynamic Scenes dataset and the DyCheck iPhone dataset, and show that Gaussian Marbles significantly outperforms other Gaussian baselines in quality, and is on-par with non-Gaussian representations, all while maintaining the efficiency, compositionality, editability, and tracking benefits of Gaussians. Our project page can be found here https://geometry.stanford.edu/projects/dynamic-gaussian-marbles.github.io/.