Zhong Wang

Zhong Wang, Lele Ren, Yue Wen et al.

Recent advancements in LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) have boosted a large amount of applications. However, traditional LIO systems tend to focus more on localization rather than mapping, with maps consisting mostly of sparse geometric elements, which is not ideal for downstream tasks. Recent emerging neural field technology has great potential in dense mapping, but pure LiDAR mapping is difficult to work on high-dynamic vehicles. To mitigate this challenge, we present a new solution that tightly couples geometric kinematics with neural fields to enhance simultaneous state estimation and dense mapping capabilities. We propose both semi-coupled and tightly coupled Kinematic-Neural LIO (KN-LIO) systems that leverage online SDF decoding and iterated error-state Kalman filtering to fuse laser and inertial data. Our KN-LIO minimizes information loss and improves accuracy in state estimation, while also accommodating asynchronous multi-LiDAR inputs. Evaluations on diverse high-dynamic datasets demonstrate that our KN-LIO achieves performance on par with or superior to existing state-of-the-art solutions in pose estimation and offers improved dense mapping accuracy over pure LiDAR-based methods. The relevant code and datasets will be made available at https://**.

Ziwen Chen, Zhong Wang

The sport of fencing, like many other sports, faces challenges in refereeing: subjective calls, human errors, bias, and limited availability in practice environments. We present FERA (Fencing Referee Assistant), a prototype AI referee for foil fencing which integrates pose-based multi-label action recognition and rule-based reasoning. FERA extracts 2D joint positions from video, normalizes them, computes a 101-dimensional kinematic feature set, and applies a Transformer for multi-label move and blade classification. To determine priority and scoring, FERA applies a distilled language model with encoded right-of-way rules, producing both a decision and an explanation for each exchange. With limited hand-labeled data, a 5-fold cross-validation achieves an average macro-F1 score of 0.549, outperforming multiple baselines, including a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), BiLSTM, and a vanilla Transformer. While not ready for deployment, these results demonstrate a promising path towards automated referee assistance in foil fencing and new opportunities for AI applications, such as coaching in the field of fencing.