Liu Liu

Yan Yang, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu

This paper proposes a pre-trained neural network for handling event camera data. Our model is a self-supervised learning framework, and uses paired event camera data and natural RGB images for training. Our method contains three modules connected in a sequence: i) a family of event data augmentations, generating meaningful event images for self-supervised training; ii) a conditional masking strategy to sample informative event patches from event images, encouraging our model to capture the spatial layout of a scene and accelerating training; iii) a contrastive learning approach, enforcing the similarity of embeddings between matching event images, and between paired event and RGB images. An embedding projection loss is proposed to avoid the model collapse when enforcing the event image embedding similarities. A probability distribution alignment loss is proposed to encourage the event image to be consistent with its paired RGB image in the feature space. Transfer learning performance on downstream tasks shows the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. For example, we achieve top-1 accuracy at 64.83% on the N-ImageNet dataset.

Mengjie Zhou, Liu Liu, Yiran Zhong et al.

We study the image-based geolocalization problem, aiming to localize ground-view query images on cartographic maps. Current methods often utilize cross-view localization techniques to match ground-view query images with 2D maps. However, the performance of these methods is unsatisfactory due to significant cross-view appearance differences. In this paper, we lift cross-view matching to a 2.5D space, where heights of structures (e.g., trees and buildings) provide geometric information to guide the cross-view matching. We propose a new approach to learning representative embeddings from multi-modal data. Specifically, we establish a projection relationship between 2.5D space and 2D aerial-view space. The projection is further used to combine multi-modal features from the 2.5D and 2D maps using an effective pixel-to-point fusion method. By encoding crucial geometric cues, our method learns discriminative location embeddings for matching panoramic images and maps. Additionally, we construct the first large-scale ground-to-2.5D map geolocalization dataset to validate our method and facilitate future research. Both single-image based and route based localization experiments are conducted to test our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significantly higher localization accuracy and faster convergence than previous 2D map-based approaches.

Yan Yang, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu

This paper introduces a self-supervised learning framework designed for pre-training neural networks tailored to dense prediction tasks using event camera data. Our approach utilizes solely event data for training. Transferring achievements from dense RGB pre-training directly to event camera data yields subpar performance. This is attributed to the spatial sparsity inherent in an event image (converted from event data), where many pixels do not contain information. To mitigate this sparsity issue, we encode an event image into event patch features, automatically mine contextual similarity relationships among patches, group the patch features into distinctive contexts, and enforce context-to-context similarities to learn discriminative event features. For training our framework, we curate a synthetic event camera dataset featuring diverse scene and motion patterns. Transfer learning performance on downstream dense prediction tasks illustrates the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches.

Liu Liu, Yukai Lin, Xiao Liang et al.

This technical report introduces CyberLoc, an image-based visual localization pipeline for robust and accurate long-term pose estimation under challenging conditions. The proposed method comprises four modules connected in a sequence. First, a mapping module is applied to build accurate 3D maps of the scene, one map for each reference sequence if there exist multiple reference sequences under different conditions. Second, a single-image-based localization pipeline (retrieval--matching--PnP) is performed to estimate 6-DoF camera poses for each query image, one for each 3D map. Third, a consensus set maximization module is proposed to filter out outlier 6-DoF camera poses, and outputs one 6-DoF camera pose for a query. Finally, a robust pose refinement module is proposed to optimize 6-DoF query poses, taking candidate global 6-DoF camera poses and their corresponding global 2D-3D matches, sparse 2D-2D feature matches between consecutive query images and SLAM poses of the query sequence as input. Experiments on the 4seasons dataset show that our method achieves high accuracy and robustness. In particular, our approach wins the localization challenge of ECCV 2022 workshop on Map-based Localization for Autonomous Driving (MLAD-ECCV2022).

Enqi Liu, Liyuan Pan, Yan Yang et al.

Fine-grained video action recognition can be conceptualized as a video-text matching problem. Previous approaches often rely on global video semantics to consolidate video embeddings, which can lead to misalignment in video-text pairs due to a lack of understanding of action semantics at an atomic granularity level. To tackle this challenge, we propose a multi-granularity framework based on two observations: (i) videos with different global semantics may share similar atomic actions or appearances, and (ii) atomic actions within a video can be momentary, slow, or even non-directly related to the global video semantics. Inspired by the concept of storyboarding, which disassembles a script into individual shots, we enhance global video semantics by generating fine-grained descriptions using a pre-trained large language model. These detailed descriptions capture common atomic actions depicted in videos. A filtering metric is proposed to select the descriptions that correspond to the atomic actions present in both the videos and the descriptions. By employing global semantics and fine-grained descriptions, we can identify key frames in videos and utilize them to aggregate embeddings, thereby making the embedding more accurate. Extensive experiments on various video action recognition datasets demonstrate superior performance of our proposed method in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings.

Liu Liu, Dylan Campbell, Hongdong Li et al.

Conventional absolute camera pose via a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solver often assumes that the correspondences between 2D image pixels and 3D points are given. When the correspondences between 2D and 3D points are not known a priori, the task becomes the much more challenging blind PnP problem. This paper proposes a deep CNN model which simultaneously solves for both the 6-DoF absolute camera pose and 2D--3D correspondences. Our model comprises three neural modules connected in sequence. First, a two-stream PointNet-inspired network is applied directly to both the 2D image keypoints and the 3D scene points in order to extract discriminative point-wise features harnessing both local and contextual information. Second, a global feature matching module is employed to estimate a matchability matrix among all 2D--3D pairs. Third, the obtained matchability matrix is fed into a classification module to disambiguate inlier matches. The entire network is trained end-to-end, followed by a robust model fitting (P3P-RANSAC) at test time only to recover the 6-DoF camera pose. Extensive tests on both real and simulated data have shown that our method substantially outperforms existing approaches, and is capable of processing thousands of points a second with the state-of-the-art accuracy.

Liu Liu, Hongdong Li, Yuchao Dai

This paper studies the relative pose problem for autonomous vehicle driving in highly dynamic and possibly cluttered environments. This is a challenging scenario due to the existence of multiple, large, and independently moving objects in the environment, which often leads to excessive portion of outliers and results in erroneous motion estimation. Existing algorithms cannot cope with such situations well. This paper proposes a new algorithm for relative pose using a multi-camera system with multiple non-overlapping individual cameras. The method works robustly even when the numbers of outliers are overwhelming. By exploiting specific prior knowledge of driving scene we have developed an efficient 4-point algorithm for multi-camera relative pose, which admits analytic solutions by solving a polynomial root-finding equation, and runs extremely fast (at about 0.5$u$s per root). When the solver is used in combination with RANSAC, we are able to quickly prune unpromising hypotheses, significantly improve the chance of finding inliers. Experiments on synthetic data have validated the performance of the proposed algorithm. Tests on real data further confirm the method's practical relevance.