Jongmin Lee

Jongmin Lee, Byungjin Kim, Minsu Cho

Detecting robust keypoints from an image is an integral part of many computer vision problems, and the characteristic orientation and scale of keypoints play an important role for keypoint description and matching. Existing learning-based methods for keypoint detection rely on standard translation-equivariant CNNs but often fail to detect reliable keypoints against geometric variations. To learn to detect robust oriented keypoints, we introduce a self-supervised learning framework using rotation-equivariant CNNs. We propose a dense orientation alignment loss by an image pair generated by synthetic transformations for training a histogram-based orientation map. Our method outperforms the previous methods on an image matching benchmark and a camera pose estimation benchmark.

Jongmin Lee, Yoonwoo Jeong, Minsu Cho

We study the problem of learning to assign a characteristic pose, i.e., scale and orientation, for an image region of interest. Despite its apparent simplicity, the problem is non-trivial; it is hard to obtain a large-scale set of image regions with explicit pose annotations that a model directly learns from. To tackle the issue, we propose a self-supervised learning framework with a histogram alignment technique. It generates pairs of image patches by random rescaling/rotating and then train an estimator to predict their scale/orientation values so that their relative difference is consistent with the rescaling/rotating used. The estimator learns to predict a non-parametric histogram distribution of scale/orientation without any supervision. Experiments show that it significantly outperforms previous methods in scale/orientation estimation and also improves image matching and 6 DoF camera pose estimation by incorporating our patch poses into a matching process.

JongMin Lee, Sungjoo Yoo

We present Dense-SfM, a novel Structure from Motion (SfM) framework designed for dense and accurate 3D reconstruction from multi-view images. Sparse keypoint matching, which traditional SfM methods often rely on, limits both accuracy and point density, especially in texture-less areas. Dense-SfM addresses this limitation by integrating dense matching with a Gaussian Splatting (GS) based track extension which gives more consistent, longer feature tracks. To further improve reconstruction accuracy, Dense-SfM is equipped with a multi-view kernelized matching module leveraging transformer and Gaussian Process architectures, for robust track refinement across multi-views. Evaluations on the ETH3D and Texture-Poor SfM datasets show that Dense-SfM offers significant improvements in accuracy and density over state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://icetea-cv.github.io/densesfm/.

Jongmin Lee, Ernest K. Ryu

The classical policy gradient method is the theoretical and conceptual foundation of modern policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most rigorous analyses of such methods, particularly those establishing convergence guarantees, assume a discount factor $γ< 1$. In contrast, however, a recent line of work on policy-based RL for large language models uses the undiscounted total-reward setting with $γ= 1$, rendering much of the existing theory inapplicable. In this paper, we provide analyses of the policy gradient method for undiscounted expected total-reward infinite-horizon MDPs based on two key insights: (i) the classification of the MDP states into recurrent and transient states is invariant over the set of policies that assign strictly positive probability to every action (as is typical in deep RL models employing a softmax output layer) and (ii) the classical state visitation measure (which may be ill-defined when $γ= 1$) can be replaced with a new object that we call the transient visitation measure.

Jang-Hyun Kim, Jongmin Lee, Hee-Seok Oh

This paper presents a new approach for dimension reduction of data observed in a sphere. Several dimension reduction techniques have recently developed for the analysis of non-Euclidean data. As a pioneer work, Hauberg (2016) attempted to implement principal curves on Riemannian manifolds. However, this approach uses approximations to deal with data on Riemannian manifolds, which causes distorted results. In this study, we propose a new approach to construct principal curves on a sphere by a projection of the data onto a continuous curve. Our approach lies in the same line of Hastie and Stuetzle (1989) that proposed principal curves for Euclidean space data. We further investigate the stationarity of the proposed principal curves that satisfy the self-consistency on a sphere. Results from real data analysis with earthquake data and simulation examples demonstrate the promising empirical properties of the proposed approach.