David W. Murray

Gratianus Wesley Putra Data, Henry Howard-Jenkins, David Murray et al.

We propose Cos R-CNN, a simple exemplar-based R-CNN formulation that is designed for online few-shot object detection. That is, it is able to localise and classify novel object categories in images with few examples without fine-tuning. Cos R-CNN frames detection as a learning-to-compare task: unseen classes are represented as exemplar images, and objects are detected based on their similarity to these exemplars. The cosine-based classification head allows for dynamic adaptation of classification parameters to the exemplar embedding, and encourages the clustering of similar classes in embedding space without the need for manual tuning of distance-metric hyperparameters. This simple formulation achieves best results on the recently proposed 5-way ImageNet few-shot detection benchmark, beating the online 1/5/10-shot scenarios by more than 8/3/1%, as well as performing up to 20% better in online 20-way few-shot VOC across all shots on novel classes.

Stuart Golodetz, Michael Sapienza, Julien P. C. Valentin et al.

We present an open-source, real-time implementation of SemanticPaint, a system for geometric reconstruction, object-class segmentation and learning of 3D scenes. Using our system, a user can walk into a room wearing a depth camera and a virtual reality headset, and both densely reconstruct the 3D scene and interactively segment the environment into object classes such as 'chair', 'floor' and 'table'. The user interacts physically with the real-world scene, touching objects and using voice commands to assign them appropriate labels. These user-generated labels are leveraged by an online random forest-based machine learning algorithm, which is used to predict labels for previously unseen parts of the scene. The entire pipeline runs in real time, and the user stays 'in the loop' throughout the process, receiving immediate feedback about the progress of the labelling and interacting with the scene as necessary to refine the predicted segmentation.

Stuart Golodetz, Tommaso Cavallari, Nicholas A Lord et al.

Reconstructing dense, volumetric models of real-world 3D scenes is important for many tasks, but capturing large scenes can take significant time, and the risk of transient changes to the scene goes up as the capture time increases. These are good reasons to want instead to capture several smaller sub-scenes that can be joined to make the whole scene. Achieving this has traditionally been difficult: joining sub-scenes that may never have been viewed from the same angle requires a high-quality camera relocaliser that can cope with novel poses, and tracking drift in each sub-scene can prevent them from being joined to make a consistent overall scene. Recent advances, however, have significantly improved our ability to capture medium-sized sub-scenes with little to no tracking drift: real-time globally consistent reconstruction systems can close loops and re-integrate the scene surface on the fly, whilst new visual-inertial odometry approaches can significantly reduce tracking drift during live reconstruction. Moreover, high-quality regression forest-based relocalisers have recently been made more practical by the introduction of a method to allow them to be trained and used online. In this paper, we leverage these advances to present what to our knowledge is the first system to allow multiple users to collaborate interactively to reconstruct dense, voxel-based models of whole buildings using only consumer-grade hardware, a task that has traditionally been both time-consuming and dependent on the availability of specialised hardware. Using our system, an entire house or lab can be reconstructed in under half an hour and at a far lower cost than was previously possible.

Victor Adrian Prisacariu, Olaf Kähler, Stuart Golodetz et al.

Volumetric models have become a popular representation for 3D scenes in recent years. One breakthrough leading to their popularity was KinectFusion, which focuses on 3D reconstruction using RGB-D sensors. However, monocular SLAM has since also been tackled with very similar approaches. Representing the reconstruction volumetrically as a TSDF leads to most of the simplicity and efficiency that can be achieved with GPU implementations of these systems. However, this representation is memory-intensive and limits applicability to small-scale reconstructions. Several avenues have been explored to overcome this. With the aim of summarizing them and providing for a fast, flexible 3D reconstruction pipeline, we propose a new, unifying framework called InfiniTAM. The idea is that steps like camera tracking, scene representation and integration of new data can easily be replaced and adapted to the user's needs. This report describes the technical implementation details of InfiniTAM v3, the third version of our InfiniTAM system. We have added various new features, as well as making numerous enhancements to the low-level code that significantly improve our camera tracking performance. The new features that we expect to be of most interest are (i) a robust camera tracking module; (ii) an implementation of Glocker et al.'s keyframe-based random ferns camera relocaliser; (iii) a novel approach to globally-consistent TSDF-based reconstruction, based on dividing the scene into rigid submaps and optimising the relative poses between them; and (iv) an implementation of Keller et al.'s surfel-based reconstruction approach.

Victor Adrian Prisacariu, Olaf Kähler, Ming Ming Cheng et al.

Volumetric models have become a popular representation for 3D scenes in recent years. One of the breakthroughs leading to their popularity was KinectFusion, where the focus is on 3D reconstruction using RGB-D sensors. However, monocular SLAM has since also been tackled with very similar approaches. Representing the reconstruction volumetrically as a truncated signed distance function leads to most of the simplicity and efficiency that can be achieved with GPU implementations of these systems. However, this representation is also memory-intensive and limits the applicability to small scale reconstructions. Several avenues have been explored for overcoming this limitation. With the aim of summarizing them and providing for a fast and flexible 3D reconstruction pipeline, we propose a new, unifying framework called InfiniTAM. The core idea is that individual steps like camera tracking, scene representation and integration of new data can easily be replaced and adapted to the needs of the user. Along with the framework we also provide a set of components for scalable reconstruction: two implementations of camera trackers, based on RGB data and on depth data, two representations of the 3D volumetric data, a dense volume and one based on hashes of subblocks, and an optional module for swapping subblocks in and out of the typically limited GPU memory.