CVJul 4, 2022Code
Back to MLP: A Simple Baseline for Human Motion PredictionWen Guo, Yuming Du, Xi Shen et al. · tencent-ai
This paper tackles the problem of human motion prediction, consisting in forecasting future body poses from historically observed sequences. State-of-the-art approaches provide good results, however, they rely on deep learning architectures of arbitrary complexity, such as Recurrent Neural Networks(RNN), Transformers or Graph Convolutional Networks(GCN), typically requiring multiple training stages and more than 2 million parameters. In this paper, we show that, after combining with a series of standard practices, such as applying Discrete Cosine Transform(DCT), predicting residual displacement of joints and optimizing velocity as an auxiliary loss, a light-weight network based on multi-layer perceptrons(MLPs) with only 0.14 million parameters can surpass the state-of-the-art performance. An exhaustive evaluation on the Human3.6M, AMASS, and 3DPW datasets shows that our method, named siMLPe, consistently outperforms all other approaches. We hope that our simple method could serve as a strong baseline for the community and allow re-thinking of the human motion prediction problem. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/dulucas/siMLPe}.
CVJul 20, 2023Code
CNOS: A Strong Baseline for CAD-based Novel Object SegmentationVan Nguyen Nguyen, Thibault Groueix, Georgy Ponimatkin et al.
We propose a simple three-stage approach to segment unseen objects in RGB images using their CAD models. Leveraging recent powerful foundation models, DINOv2 and Segment Anything, we create descriptors and generate proposals, including binary masks for a given input RGB image. By matching proposals with reference descriptors created from CAD models, we achieve precise object ID assignment along with modal masks. We experimentally demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in CAD-based novel object segmentation, surpassing existing approaches on the seven core datasets of the BOP challenge by 19.8% AP using the same BOP evaluation protocol. Our source code is available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/cnos.
CVMar 23, 2023Code
NOPE: Novel Object Pose Estimation from a Single ImageVan Nguyen Nguyen, Thibault Groueix, Yinlin Hu et al.
The practicality of 3D object pose estimation remains limited for many applications due to the need for prior knowledge of a 3D model and a training period for new objects. To address this limitation, we propose an approach that takes a single image of a new object as input and predicts the relative pose of this object in new images without prior knowledge of the object's 3D model and without requiring training time for new objects and categories. We achieve this by training a model to directly predict discriminative embeddings for viewpoints surrounding the object. This prediction is done using a simple U-Net architecture with attention and conditioned on the desired pose, which yields extremely fast inference. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art methods and show it outperforms them both in terms of accuracy and robustness. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/nope
CVSep 19, 2022Code
A Simple and Powerful Global Optimization for Unsupervised Video Object SegmentationGeorgy Ponimatkin, Nermin Samet, Yang Xiao et al.
We propose a simple, yet powerful approach for unsupervised object segmentation in videos. We introduce an objective function whose minimum represents the mask of the main salient object over the input sequence. It only relies on independent image features and optical flows, which can be obtained using off-the-shelf self-supervised methods. It scales with the length of the sequence with no need for superpixels or sparsification, and it generalizes to different datasets without any specific training. This objective function can actually be derived from a form of spectral clustering applied to the entire video. Our method achieves on-par performance with the state of the art on standard benchmarks (DAVIS2016, SegTrack-v2, FBMS59), while being conceptually and practically much simpler. Code is available at https://ponimatkin.github.io/ssl-vos.
CVSep 15, 2022Code
PIZZA: A Powerful Image-only Zero-Shot Zero-CAD Approach to 6 DoF TrackingVan Nguyen Nguyen, Yuming Du, Yang Xiao et al.
Estimating the relative pose of a new object without prior knowledge is a hard problem, while it is an ability very much needed in robotics and Augmented Reality. We present a method for tracking the 6D motion of objects in RGB video sequences when neither the training images nor the 3D geometry of the objects are available. In contrast to previous works, our method can therefore consider unknown objects in open world instantly, without requiring any prior information or a specific training phase. We consider two architectures, one based on two frames, and the other relying on a Transformer Encoder, which can exploit an arbitrary number of past frames. We train our architectures using only synthetic renderings with domain randomization. Our results on challenging datasets are on par with previous works that require much more information (training images of the target objects, 3D models, and/or depth data). Our source code is available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/pizza
CVApr 23, 2023Code
You Never Get a Second Chance To Make a Good First Impression: Seeding Active Learning for 3D Semantic SegmentationNermin Samet, Oriane Siméoni, Gilles Puy et al.
We propose SeedAL, a method to seed active learning for efficient annotation of 3D point clouds for semantic segmentation. Active Learning (AL) iteratively selects relevant data fractions to annotate within a given budget, but requires a first fraction of the dataset (a 'seed') to be already annotated to estimate the benefit of annotating other data fractions. We first show that the choice of the seed can significantly affect the performance of many AL methods. We then propose a method for automatically constructing a seed that will ensure good performance for AL. Assuming that images of the point clouds are available, which is common, our method relies on powerful unsupervised image features to measure the diversity of the point clouds. It selects the point clouds for the seed by optimizing the diversity under an annotation budget, which can be done by solving a linear optimization problem. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to random seeding and existing methods on both the S3DIS and SemanticKitti datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/nerminsamet/seedal.
CVNov 23, 2023Code
GigaPose: Fast and Robust Novel Object Pose Estimation via One CorrespondenceVan Nguyen Nguyen, Thibault Groueix, Mathieu Salzmann et al.
We present GigaPose, a fast, robust, and accurate method for CAD-based novel object pose estimation in RGB images. GigaPose first leverages discriminative "templates", rendered images of the CAD models, to recover the out-of-plane rotation and then uses patch correspondences to estimate the four remaining parameters. Our approach samples templates in only a two-degrees-of-freedom space instead of the usual three and matches the input image to the templates using fast nearest-neighbor search in feature space, results in a speedup factor of 35x compared to the state of the art. Moreover, GigaPose is significantly more robust to segmentation errors. Our extensive evaluation on the seven core datasets of the BOP challenge demonstrates that it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and can be seamlessly integrated with existing refinement methods. Additionally, we show the potential of GigaPose with 3D models predicted by recent work on 3D reconstruction from a single image, relaxing the need for CAD models and making 6D pose object estimation much more convenient. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/gigaPose
CVNov 28, 2022
In-Hand 3D Object Scanning from an RGB SequenceShreyas Hampali, Tomas Hodan, Luan Tran et al.
We propose a method for in-hand 3D scanning of an unknown object with a monocular camera. Our method relies on a neural implicit surface representation that captures both the geometry and the appearance of the object, however, by contrast with most NeRF-based methods, we do not assume that the camera-object relative poses are known. Instead, we simultaneously optimize both the object shape and the pose trajectory. As direct optimization over all shape and pose parameters is prone to fail without coarse-level initialization, we propose an incremental approach that starts by splitting the sequence into carefully selected overlapping segments within which the optimization is likely to succeed. We reconstruct the object shape and track its poses independently within each segment, then merge all the segments before performing a global optimization. We show that our method is able to reconstruct the shape and color of both textured and challenging texture-less objects, outperforms classical methods that rely only on appearance features, and that its performance is close to recent methods that assume known camera poses.
CVMar 6, 2023
MACARONS: Mapping And Coverage Anticipation with RGB Online Self-SupervisionAntoine Guédon, Tom Monnier, Pascal Monasse et al.
We introduce a method that simultaneously learns to explore new large environments and to reconstruct them in 3D from color images only. This is closely related to the Next Best View problem (NBV), where one has to identify where to move the camera next to improve the coverage of an unknown scene. However, most of the current NBV methods rely on depth sensors, need 3D supervision and/or do not scale to large scenes. Our method requires only a color camera and no 3D supervision. It simultaneously learns in a self-supervised fashion to predict a "volume occupancy field" from color images and, from this field, to predict the NBV. Thanks to this approach, our method performs well on new scenes as it is not biased towards any training 3D data. We demonstrate this on a recent dataset made of various 3D scenes and show it performs even better than recent methods requiring a depth sensor, which is not a realistic assumption for outdoor scenes captured with a flying drone.
CVAug 22, 2022
SCONE: Surface Coverage Optimization in Unknown Environments by Volumetric IntegrationAntoine Guédon, Pascal Monasse, Vincent Lepetit
Next Best View computation (NBV) is a long-standing problem in robotics, and consists in identifying the next most informative sensor position(s) for reconstructing a 3D object or scene efficiently and accurately. Like most current methods, we consider NBV prediction from a depth sensor like Lidar systems. Learning-based methods relying on a volumetric representation of the scene are suitable for path planning, but have lower accuracy than methods using a surface-based representation. However, the latter do not scale well with the size of the scene and constrain the camera to a small number of poses. To obtain the advantages of both representations, we show that we can maximize surface metrics by Monte Carlo integration over a volumetric representation. In particular, we propose an approach, SCONE, that relies on two neural modules: The first module predicts occupancy probability in the entire volume of the scene. Given any new camera pose, the second module samples points in the scene based on their occupancy probability and leverages a self-attention mechanism to predict the visibility of the samples. Finally, we integrate the visibility to evaluate the gain in surface coverage for the new camera pose. NBV is selected as the pose that maximizes the gain in total surface coverage. Our method scales to large scenes and handles free camera motion: It takes as input an arbitrarily large point cloud gathered by a depth sensor as well as camera poses to predict NBV. We demonstrate our approach on a novel dataset made of large and complex 3D scenes.
CVJul 28, 2022
MonteBoxFinder: Detecting and Filtering Primitives to Fit a Noisy Point CloudMichaël Ramamonjisoa, Sinisa Stekovic, Vincent Lepetit
We present MonteBoxFinder, a method that, given a noisy input point cloud, fits cuboids to the input scene. Our primary contribution is a discrete optimization algorithm that, from a dense set of initially detected cuboids, is able to efficiently filter good boxes from the noisy ones. Inspired by recent applications of MCTS to scene understanding problems, we develop a stochastic algorithm that is, by design, more efficient for our task. Indeed, the quality of a fit for a cuboid arrangement is invariant to the order in which the cuboids are added into the scene. We develop several search baselines for our problem and demonstrate, on the ScanNet dataset, that our approach is more efficient and precise. Finally, we strongly believe that our core algorithm is very general and that it could be extended to many other problems in 3D scene understanding.
CVDec 22, 2022
Automatically Annotating Indoor Images with CAD Models via RGB-D ScansStefan Ainetter, Sinisa Stekovic, Friedrich Fraundorfer et al.
We present an automatic method for annotating images of indoor scenes with the CAD models of the objects by relying on RGB-D scans. Through a visual evaluation by 3D experts, we show that our method retrieves annotations that are at least as accurate as manual annotations, and can thus be used as ground truth without the burden of manually annotating 3D data. We do this using an analysis-by-synthesis approach, which compares renderings of the CAD models with the captured scene. We introduce a 'cloning procedure' that identifies objects that have the same geometry, to annotate these objects with the same CAD models. This allows us to obtain complete annotations for the ScanNet dataset and the recent ARKitScenes dataset.
CVSep 21, 2022
Long-Lived Accurate Keypoints in Event StreamsPhilippe Chiberre, Etienne Perot, Amos Sironi et al.
We present a novel end-to-end approach to keypoint detection and tracking in an event stream that provides better precision and much longer keypoint tracks than previous methods. This is made possible by two contributions working together. First, we propose a simple procedure to generate stable keypoint labels, which we use to train a recurrent architecture. This training data results in detections that are very consistent over time. Moreover, we observe that previous methods for keypoint detection work on a representation (such as the time surface) that integrates events over a period of time. Since this integration is required, we claim it is better to predict the keypoints' trajectories for the time period rather than single locations, as done in previous approaches. We predict these trajectories in the form of a series of heatmaps for the integration time period. This improves the keypoint localization. Our architecture can also be kept very simple, which results in very fast inference times. We demonstrate our approach on the HVGA ATIS Corner dataset as well as "The Event-Camera Dataset and Simulator" dataset, and show it results in keypoint tracks that are three times longer and nearly twice as accurate as the best previous state-of-the-art methods. We believe our approach can be generalized to other event-based camera problems, and we release our source code to encourage other authors to explore it.
CVJul 7, 2022
MCTS with Refinement for Proposals Selection Games in Scene UnderstandingSinisa Stekovic, Mahdi Rad, Alireza Moradi et al.
We propose a novel method applicable in many scene understanding problems that adapts the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm, originally designed to learn to play games of high-state complexity. From a generated pool of proposals, our method jointly selects and optimizes proposals that minimize the objective term. In our first application for floor plan reconstruction from point clouds, our method selects and refines the room proposals, modelled as 2D polygons, by optimizing on an objective function combining the fitness as predicted by a deep network and regularizing terms on the room shapes. We also introduce a novel differentiable method for rendering the polygonal shapes of these proposals. Our evaluations on the recent and challenging Structured3D and Floor-SP datasets show significant improvements over the state-of-the-art, without imposing hard constraints nor assumptions on the floor plan configurations. In our second application, we extend our approach to reconstruct general 3D room layouts from a color image and obtain accurate room layouts. We also show that our differentiable renderer can easily be extended for rendering 3D planar polygons and polygon embeddings. Our method shows high performance on the Matterport3D-Layout dataset, without introducing hard constraints on room layout configurations.
CVOct 26, 2023
BEVContrast: Self-Supervision in BEV Space for Automotive Lidar Point CloudsCorentin Sautier, Gilles Puy, Alexandre Boulch et al.
We present a surprisingly simple and efficient method for self-supervision of 3D backbone on automotive Lidar point clouds. We design a contrastive loss between features of Lidar scans captured in the same scene. Several such approaches have been proposed in the literature from PointConstrast, which uses a contrast at the level of points, to the state-of-the-art TARL, which uses a contrast at the level of segments, roughly corresponding to objects. While the former enjoys a great simplicity of implementation, it is surpassed by the latter, which however requires a costly pre-processing. In BEVContrast, we define our contrast at the level of 2D cells in the Bird's Eye View plane. Resulting cell-level representations offer a good trade-off between the point-level representations exploited in PointContrast and segment-level representations exploited in TARL: we retain the simplicity of PointContrast (cell representations are cheap to compute) while surpassing the performance of TARL in downstream semantic segmentation.
GRNov 21, 2023
SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh RenderingAntoine Guédon, Vincent Lepetit
We propose a method to allow precise and extremely fast mesh extraction from 3D Gaussian Splatting. Gaussian Splatting has recently become very popular as it yields realistic rendering while being significantly faster to train than NeRFs. It is however challenging to extract a mesh from the millions of tiny 3D gaussians as these gaussians tend to be unorganized after optimization and no method has been proposed so far. Our first key contribution is a regularization term that encourages the gaussians to align well with the surface of the scene. We then introduce a method that exploits this alignment to extract a mesh from the Gaussians using Poisson reconstruction, which is fast, scalable, and preserves details, in contrast to the Marching Cubes algorithm usually applied to extract meshes from Neural SDFs. Finally, we introduce an optional refinement strategy that binds gaussians to the surface of the mesh, and jointly optimizes these Gaussians and the mesh through Gaussian splatting rendering. This enables easy editing, sculpting, rigging, animating, compositing and relighting of the Gaussians using traditional softwares by manipulating the mesh instead of the gaussians themselves. Retrieving such an editable mesh for realistic rendering is done within minutes with our method, compared to hours with the state-of-the-art methods on neural SDFs, while providing a better rendering quality. Our project page is the following: https://anttwo.github.io/sugar/
CVSep 12, 2024
UNIT: Unsupervised Online Instance Segmentation through TimeCorentin Sautier, Gilles Puy, Alexandre Boulch et al.
Online object segmentation and tracking in Lidar point clouds enables autonomous agents to understand their surroundings and make safe decisions. Unfortunately, manual annotations for these tasks are prohibitively costly. We tackle this problem with the task of class-agnostic unsupervised online instance segmentation and tracking. To that end, we leverage an instance segmentation backbone and propose a new training recipe that enables the online tracking of objects. Our network is trained on pseudo-labels, eliminating the need for manual annotations. We conduct an evaluation using metrics adapted for temporal instance segmentation. Computing these metrics requires temporally-consistent instance labels. When unavailable, we construct these labels using the available 3D bounding boxes and semantic labels in the dataset. We compare our method against strong baselines and demonstrate its superiority across two different outdoor Lidar datasets.
CVSep 12, 2023
HOC-Search: Efficient CAD Model and Pose Retrieval from RGB-D ScansStefan Ainetter, Sinisa Stekovic, Friedrich Fraundorfer et al.
We present an automated and efficient approach for retrieving high-quality CAD models of objects and their poses in a scene captured by a moving RGB-D camera. We first investigate various objective functions to measure similarity between a candidate CAD object model and the available data, and the best objective function appears to be a "render-and-compare" method comparing depth and mask rendering. We thus introduce a fast-search method that approximates an exhaustive search based on this objective function for simultaneously retrieving the object category, a CAD model, and the pose of an object given an approximate 3D bounding box. This method involves a search tree that organizes the CAD models and object properties including object category and pose for fast retrieval and an algorithm inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search, that efficiently searches this tree. We show that this method retrieves CAD models that fit the real objects very well, with a speed-up factor of 10x to 120x compared to exhaustive search.
CVMar 21, 2024Code
Gaussian Frosting: Editable Complex Radiance Fields with Real-Time RenderingAntoine Guédon, Vincent Lepetit
We propose Gaussian Frosting, a novel mesh-based representation for high-quality rendering and editing of complex 3D effects in real-time. Our approach builds on the recent 3D Gaussian Splatting framework, which optimizes a set of 3D Gaussians to approximate a radiance field from images. We propose first extracting a base mesh from Gaussians during optimization, then building and refining an adaptive layer of Gaussians with a variable thickness around the mesh to better capture the fine details and volumetric effects near the surface, such as hair or grass. We call this layer Gaussian Frosting, as it resembles a coating of frosting on a cake. The fuzzier the material, the thicker the frosting. We also introduce a parameterization of the Gaussians to enforce them to stay inside the frosting layer and automatically adjust their parameters when deforming, rescaling, editing or animating the mesh. Our representation allows for efficient rendering using Gaussian splatting, as well as editing and animation by modifying the base mesh. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various synthetic and real scenes, and show that it outperforms existing surface-based approaches. We will release our code and a web-based viewer as additional contributions. Our project page is the following: https://anttwo.github.io/frosting/
CVMay 18
Articulation in Prime: Primitive-Based Articulated Object Understanding from a Single Casual VideoArslan Artykov, Tom Ravaud, Nicolás Violante-Grezzi et al.
Retrieving the 3D kinematics of articulated objects from monocular video is a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing methods rely on complex video setups or cues such as long-term point tracking or wide-baseline matching, but are frequently brittle under severe occlusions, rapid camera ego-motion, or weak local features. Learning-based methods, meanwhile, struggle to generalize beyond their training categories. We propose a category-agnostic optimization framework that treats articulated object understanding as a primitive-fitting problem. Geometric primitives serve as a proxy representation that avoids the pitfalls of unstable point tracks; a novel mechanism organizes them into coherent parts constrained by revolute and prismatic joints. Our formulation jointly optimizes part segmentation and joint parameters, recovering complex kinematics from a single casually captured video. A visibility-aware procedure handles partial observations and occlusions inherent to real-world data. We also propose the AiP-synth and AiP-real benchmarks, featuring significant camera motion and heavy occlusions, and outperform existing methods. Project page: https://aartykov.github.io/Articulation-in-Prime/
CVMar 17, 2025Code
Is clustering enough for LiDAR instance segmentation? A state-of-the-art training-free baselineCorentin Sautier, Gilles Puy, Alexandre Boulch et al.
Panoptic segmentation of LiDAR point clouds is fundamental to outdoor scene understanding, with autonomous driving being a primary application. While state-of-the-art approaches typically rely on end-to-end deep learning architectures and extensive manual annotations of instances, the significant cost and time investment required for labeling large-scale point cloud datasets remains a major bottleneck in this field. In this work, we demonstrate that competitive panoptic segmentation can be achieved using only semantic labels, with instances predicted without any training or annotations. Our method outperforms {most} state-of-the-art supervised methods on standard benchmarks including SemanticKITTI and nuScenes, and outperforms every publicly available method on SemanticKITTI as a drop-in instance head replacement, while running in real-time on a single-threaded CPU and requiring no instance labels. It is fully explainable, and requires no learning or parameter tuning. Alpine combined with state-of-the-art semantic segmentation ranks first on the official panoptic segmentation leaderboard of SemanticKITTI. Code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/Alpine/
CVMar 23
MAGICIAN: Efficient Long-Term Planning with Imagined Gaussians for Active MappingShiyao Li, Antoine Guédon, Shizhe Chen et al.
Active mapping aims to determine how an agent should move to efficiently reconstruct an unknown environment. Most existing approaches rely on greedy next-best-view prediction, resulting in inefficient exploration and incomplete scene reconstruction. To address this limitation, we introduce MAGICIAN, a novel long-term planning framework that maximizes accumulated surface coverage gain through Imagined Gaussians, a scene representation derived from a pre-trained occupancy network with strong structural priors. This representation enables efficient computation of coverage gain for any novel viewpoint via fast volumetric rendering, allowing its integration into a tree-search algorithm for long-horizon planning. We update Imagined Gaussians and refine the planned trajectory in a closed-loop manner. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across indoor and outdoor benchmarks with varying action spaces, demonstrating the critical advantage of long-term planning in active mapping.
CVAug 30, 2024
BOP-Distrib: Revisiting 6D Pose Estimation Benchmarks for Better Evaluation under Visual AmbiguitiesBoris Meden, Asma Brazi, Fabrice Mayran de Chamisso et al.
6D pose estimation aims at determining the object pose that best explains the camera observation. The unique solution for non-ambiguous objects can turn into a multi-modal pose distribution for symmetrical objects or when occlusions of symmetry-breaking elements happen, depending on the viewpoint. Currently, 6D pose estimation methods are benchmarked on datasets that consider, for their ground truth annotations, visual ambiguities as only related to global object symmetries, whereas they should be defined per-image to account for the camera viewpoint. We thus first propose an automatic method to re-annotate those datasets with a 6D pose distribution specific to each image, taking into account the object surface visibility in the image to correctly determine the visual ambiguities. Second, given this improved ground truth, we re-evaluate the state-of-the-art single pose methods and show that this greatly modifies the ranking of these methods. Third, as some recent works focus on estimating the complete set of solutions, we derive a precision/recall formulation to evaluate them against our image-wise distribution ground truth, making it the first benchmark for pose distribution methods on real images.
CVDec 8, 2025
sim2art: Accurate Articulated Object Modeling from a Single Video using Synthetic Training Data OnlyArslan Artykov, Corentin Sautier, Vincent Lepetit
Understanding articulated objects is a fundamental challenge in robotics and digital twin creation. To effectively model such objects, it is essential to recover both part segmentation and the underlying joint parameters. Despite the importance of this task, previous work has largely focused on setups like multi-view systems, object scanning, or static cameras. In this paper, we present the first data-driven approach that jointly predicts part segmentation and joint parameters from monocular video captured with a freely moving camera. Trained solely on synthetic data, our method demonstrates strong generalization to real-world objects, offering a scalable and practical solution for articulated object understanding. Our approach operates directly on casually recorded video, making it suitable for real-time applications in dynamic environments. Project webpage: https://aartykov.github.io/sim2art/
CVJun 8, 2025Code
GoTrack: Generic 6DoF Object Pose Refinement and TrackingVan Nguyen Nguyen, Christian Forster, Sindi Shkodrani et al.
We introduce GoTrack, an efficient and accurate CAD-based method for 6DoF object pose refinement and tracking, which can handle diverse objects without any object-specific training. Unlike existing tracking methods that rely solely on an analysis-by-synthesis approach for model-to-frame registration, GoTrack additionally integrates frame-to-frame registration, which saves compute and stabilizes tracking. Both types of registration are realized by optical flow estimation. The model-to-frame registration is noticeably simpler than in existing methods, relying only on standard neural network blocks (a transformer is trained on top of DINOv2) and producing reliable pose confidence scores without a scoring network. For the frame-to-frame registration, which is an easier problem as consecutive video frames are typically nearly identical, we employ a light off-the-shelf optical flow model. We demonstrate that GoTrack can be seamlessly combined with existing coarse pose estimation methods to create a minimal pipeline that reaches state-of-the-art RGB-only results on standard benchmarks for 6DoF object pose estimation and tracking. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/gotrack
CVMar 31, 2022Code
Templates for 3D Object Pose Estimation Revisited: Generalization to New Objects and Robustness to OcclusionsVan Nguyen Nguyen, Yinlin Hu, Yang Xiao et al.
We present a method that can recognize new objects and estimate their 3D pose in RGB images even under partial occlusions. Our method requires neither a training phase on these objects nor real images depicting them, only their CAD models. It relies on a small set of training objects to learn local object representations, which allow us to locally match the input image to a set of "templates", rendered images of the CAD models for the new objects. In contrast with the state-of-the-art methods, the new objects on which our method is applied can be very different from the training objects. As a result, we are the first to show generalization without retraining on the LINEMOD and Occlusion-LINEMOD datasets. Our analysis of the failure modes of previous template-based approaches further confirms the benefits of local features for template matching. We outperform the state-of-the-art template matching methods on the LINEMOD, Occlusion-LINEMOD and T-LESS datasets. Our source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/template-pose
CVJun 3, 2021Code
Single Image Depth Prediction with Wavelet DecompositionMichaël Ramamonjisoa, Michael Firman, Jamie Watson et al.
We present a novel method for predicting accurate depths from monocular images with high efficiency. This optimal efficiency is achieved by exploiting wavelet decomposition, which is integrated in a fully differentiable encoder-decoder architecture. We demonstrate that we can reconstruct high-fidelity depth maps by predicting sparse wavelet coefficients. In contrast with previous works, we show that wavelet coefficients can be learned without direct supervision on coefficients. Instead we supervise only the final depth image that is reconstructed through the inverse wavelet transform. We additionally show that wavelet coefficients can be learned in fully self-supervised scenarios, without access to ground-truth depth. Finally, we apply our method to different state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models, in each case giving similar or better results compared to the original model, while requiring less than half the multiply-adds in the decoder network. Code at https://github.com/nianticlabs/wavelet-monodepth
CVMar 16, 2021Code
Back to the Feature: Learning Robust Camera Localization from Pixels to PosePaul-Edouard Sarlin, Ajaykumar Unagar, Måns Larsson et al.
Camera pose estimation in known scenes is a 3D geometry task recently tackled by multiple learning algorithms. Many regress precise geometric quantities, like poses or 3D points, from an input image. This either fails to generalize to new viewpoints or ties the model parameters to a specific scene. In this paper, we go Back to the Feature: we argue that deep networks should focus on learning robust and invariant visual features, while the geometric estimation should be left to principled algorithms. We introduce PixLoc, a scene-agnostic neural network that estimates an accurate 6-DoF pose from an image and a 3D model. Our approach is based on the direct alignment of multiscale deep features, casting camera localization as metric learning. PixLoc learns strong data priors by end-to-end training from pixels to pose and exhibits exceptional generalization to new scenes by separating model parameters and scene geometry. The system can localize in large environments given coarse pose priors but also improve the accuracy of sparse feature matching by jointly refining keypoints and poses with little overhead. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/pixloc.
CVAug 28, 2017Code
DeepPrior++: Improving Fast and Accurate 3D Hand Pose EstimationMarkus Oberweger, Vincent Lepetit
DeepPrior is a simple approach based on Deep Learning that predicts the joint 3D locations of a hand given a depth map. Since its publication early 2015, it has been outperformed by several impressive works. Here we show that with simple improvements: adding ResNet layers, data augmentation, and better initial hand localization, we achieve better or similar performance than more sophisticated recent methods on the three main benchmarks (NYU, ICVL, MSRA) while keeping the simplicity of the original method. Our new implementation is available at https://github.com/moberweger/deep-prior-pp .
CVFeb 8, 2017Code
Monocular LSD-SLAM Integration within AR SystemMarkus Höll, Vincent Lepetit
In this paper, we cover the process of integrating Large-Scale Direct Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (LSD-SLAM) algorithm into our existing AR stereo engine, developed for our modified "Augmented Reality Oculus Rift". With that, we are able to track one of our realworld cameras which are mounted on the rift, within a complete unknown environment. This makes it possible to achieve a constant and full augmentation, synchronizing our 3D movement (x, y, z) in both worlds, the real world and the virtual world. The development for the basic AR setup using the Oculus Rift DK1 and two fisheye cameras is fully documented in our previous paper. After an introduction to image-based registration, we detail the LSD-SLAM algorithm and document our code implementing our integration. The AR stereo engine with Oculus Rift support can be accessed via the GIT repository https://github.com/MaXvanHeLL/ARift.git and the modified LSD-SLAM project used for the integration is available here https://github.com/MaXvanHeLL/LSD-SLAM.git.
CVMar 27
Detailed Geometry and Appearance from Opportunistic MotionRyosuke Hirai, Kohei Yamashita, Antoine Guédon et al.
Reconstructing 3D geometry and appearance from a sparse set of fixed cameras is a foundational task with broad applications, yet it remains fundamentally constrained by the limited viewpoints. We show that this bound can be broken by exploiting opportunistic object motion: as a person manipulates an object~(e.g., moving a chair or lifting a mug), the static cameras effectively ``orbit'' the object in its local coordinate frame, providing additional virtual viewpoints. Harnessing this object motion, however, poses two challenges: the tight coupling of object pose and geometry estimation and the complex appearance variations of a moving object under static illumination. We address these by formulating a joint pose and shape optimization using 2D Gaussian splatting with alternating minimization of 6DoF trajectories and primitive parameters, and by introducing a novel appearance model that factorizes diffuse and specular components with reflected directional probing within the spherical harmonics space. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets with extremely sparse viewpoints demonstrate that our method recovers significantly more accurate geometry and appearance than state-of-the-art baselines.
CVApr 3, 2025
BOP Challenge 2024 on Model-Based and Model-Free 6D Object Pose EstimationVan Nguyen Nguyen, Stephen Tyree, Andrew Guo et al.
We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2024, the 6th in a series of public competitions organized to capture the state of the art in 6D object pose estimation and related tasks. In 2024, our goal was to transition BOP from lab-like setups to real-world scenarios. First, we introduced new model-free tasks, where no 3D object models are available and methods need to onboard objects just from provided reference videos. Second, we defined a new, more practical 6D object detection task where identities of objects visible in a test image are not provided as input. Third, we introduced new BOP-H3 datasets recorded with high-resolution sensors and AR/VR headsets, closely resembling real-world scenarios. BOP-H3 include 3D models and onboarding videos to support both model-based and model-free tasks. Participants competed on seven challenge tracks. Notably, the best 2024 method for model-based 6D localization of unseen objects (FreeZeV2.1) achieves 22% higher accuracy on BOP-Classic-Core than the best 2023 method (GenFlow), and is only 4% behind the best 2023 method for seen objects (GPose2023) although being significantly slower (24.9 vs 2.7s per image). A more practical 2024 method for this task is Co-op which takes only 0.8s per image and is 13% more accurate than GenFlow. Methods have similar rankings on 6D detection as on 6D localization but higher run time. On model-based 2D detection of unseen objects, the best 2024 method (MUSE) achieves 21--29% relative improvement compared to the best 2023 method (CNOS). However, the 2D detection accuracy for unseen objects is still -35% behind the accuracy for seen objects (GDet2023), and the 2D detection stage is consequently the main bottleneck of existing pipelines for 6D localization/detection of unseen objects. The online evaluation system stays open and is available at http://bop.felk.cvut.cz/
CVApr 21
Paparazzo: Active Mapping of Moving 3D ObjectsDavide Allegro, Shiyao Li, Stefano Ghidoni et al.
Current 3D mapping pipelines generally assume static environments, which limits their ability to accurately capture and reconstruct moving objects. To address this limitation, we introduce the novel task of active mapping of moving objects, in which a mapping agent must plan its trajectory while compensating for the object's motion. Our approach, Paparazzo, provides a learning-free solution that robustly predicts the target's trajectory and identifies the most informative viewpoints from which to observe it, to plan its own path. We also contribute a comprehensive benchmark designed for this new task. Through extensive experiments, we show that Paparazzo significantly improves 3D reconstruction completeness and accuracy compared to several strong baselines, marking an important step toward dynamic scene understanding. Project page: https://davidea97.github.io/paparazzo-page/
CVMar 10, 2025
Alligat0R: Pre-Training Through Co-Visibility Segmentation for Relative Camera Pose RegressionThibaut Loiseau, Guillaume Bourmaud, Vincent Lepetit
Pre-training techniques have greatly advanced computer vision, with CroCo's cross-view completion approach yielding impressive results in tasks like 3D reconstruction and pose regression. However, this method requires substantial overlap between training pairs, limiting its effectiveness. We introduce Alligat0R, a novel pre-training approach that reformulates cross-view learning as a co-visibility segmentation task. Our method predicts whether each pixel in one image is co-visible in the second image, occluded, or outside the field of view (FOV), enabling the use of image pairs with any degree of overlap and providing interpretable predictions. To support this, we present Cub3, a large-scale dataset with 2.5 million image pairs and dense co-visibility annotations derived from the nuScenes dataset. This dataset includes diverse scenarios with varying degrees of overlap. The experiments show that Alligat0R significantly outperforms CroCo in relative pose regression, especially in scenarios with limited overlap. Alligat0R and Cub3 will be made publicly available.
CVFeb 7, 2025
NextBestPath: Efficient 3D Mapping of Unseen EnvironmentsShiyao Li, Antoine Guédon, Clémentin Boittiaux et al.
This work addresses the problem of active 3D mapping, where an agent must find an efficient trajectory to exhaustively reconstruct a new scene. Previous approaches mainly predict the next best view near the agent's location, which is prone to getting stuck in local areas. Additionally, existing indoor datasets are insufficient due to limited geometric complexity and inaccurate ground truth meshes. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel dataset AiMDoom with a map generator for the Doom video game, enabling to better benchmark active 3D mapping in diverse indoor environments. Moreover, we propose a new method we call next-best-path (NBP), which predicts long-term goals rather than focusing solely on short-sighted views. The model jointly predicts accumulated surface coverage gains for long-term goals and obstacle maps, allowing it to efficiently plan optimal paths with a unified model. By leveraging online data collection, data augmentation and curriculum learning, NBP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both the existing MP3D dataset and our AiMDoom dataset, achieving more efficient mapping in indoor environments of varying complexity.
CVOct 17, 2025
GuideFlow3D: Optimization-Guided Rectified Flow For Appearance TransferSayan Deb Sarkar, Sinisa Stekovic, Vincent Lepetit et al. · stanford
Transferring appearance to 3D assets using different representations of the appearance object - such as images or text - has garnered interest due to its wide range of applications in industries like gaming, augmented reality, and digital content creation. However, state-of-the-art methods still fail when the geometry between the input and appearance objects is significantly different. A straightforward approach is to directly apply a 3D generative model, but we show that this ultimately fails to produce appealing results. Instead, we propose a principled approach inspired by universal guidance. Given a pretrained rectified flow model conditioned on image or text, our training-free method interacts with the sampling process by periodically adding guidance. This guidance can be modeled as a differentiable loss function, and we experiment with two different types of guidance including part-aware losses for appearance and self-similarity. Our experiments show that our approach successfully transfers texture and geometric details to the input 3D asset, outperforming baselines both qualitatively and quantitatively. We also show that traditional metrics are not suitable for evaluating the task due to their inability of focusing on local details and comparing dissimilar inputs, in absence of ground truth data. We thus evaluate appearance transfer quality with a GPT-based system objectively ranking outputs, ensuring robust and human-like assessment, as further confirmed by our user study. Beyond showcased scenarios, our method is general and could be extended to different types of diffusion models and guidance functions.
CVMay 5, 2025
Corr2Distrib: Making Ambiguous Correspondences an Ally to Predict Reliable 6D Pose DistributionsAsma Brazi, Boris Meden, Fabrice Mayran de Chamisso et al.
We introduce Corr2Distrib, the first correspondence-based method which estimates a 6D camera pose distribution from an RGB image, explaining the observations. Indeed, symmetries and occlusions introduce visual ambiguities, leading to multiple valid poses. While a few recent methods tackle this problem, they do not rely on local correspondences which, according to the BOP Challenge, are currently the most effective way to estimate a single 6DoF pose solution. Using correspondences to estimate a pose distribution is not straightforward, since ambiguous correspondences induced by visual ambiguities drastically decrease the performance of PnP. With Corr2Distrib, we turn these ambiguities into an advantage to recover all valid poses. Corr2Distrib first learns a symmetry-aware representation for each 3D point on the object's surface, characterized by a descriptor and a local frame. This representation enables the generation of 3DoF rotation hypotheses from single 2D-3D correspondences. Next, we refine these hypotheses into a 6DoF pose distribution using PnP and pose scoring. Our experimental evaluations on complex non-synthetic scenes show that Corr2Distrib outperforms state-of-the-art solutions for both pose distribution estimation and single pose estimation from an RGB image, demonstrating the potential of correspondences-based approaches.
CVApr 18, 2025
Leveraging Automatic CAD Annotations for Supervised Learning in 3D Scene UnderstandingYuchen Rao, Stefan Ainetter, Sinisa Stekovic et al.
High-level 3D scene understanding is essential in many applications. However, the challenges of generating accurate 3D annotations make development of deep learning models difficult. We turn to recent advancements in automatic retrieval of synthetic CAD models, and show that data generated by such methods can be used as high-quality ground truth for training supervised deep learning models. More exactly, we employ a pipeline akin to the one previously used to automatically annotate objects in ScanNet scenes with their 9D poses and CAD models. This time, we apply it to the recent ScanNet++ v1 dataset, which previously lacked such annotations. Our findings demonstrate that it is not only possible to train deep learning models on these automatically-obtained annotations but that the resulting models outperform those trained on manually annotated data. We validate this on two distinct tasks: point cloud completion and single-view CAD model retrieval and alignment. Our results underscore the potential of automatic 3D annotations to enhance model performance while significantly reducing annotation costs. To support future research in 3D scene understanding, we will release our annotations, which we call SCANnotate++, along with our trained models.
CVMay 20, 2024
GuidedRec: Guiding Ill-Posed Unsupervised Volumetric RecoveryAlexandre Cafaro, Amaury Leroy, Guillaume Beldjoudi et al.
We introduce a novel unsupervised approach to reconstructing a 3D volume from only two planar projections that exploits a previous\-ly-captured 3D volume of the patient. Such volume is readily available in many important medical procedures and previous methods already used such a volume. Earlier methods that work by deforming this volume to match the projections typically fail when the number of projections is very low as the alignment becomes underconstrained. We show how to use a generative model of the volume structures to constrain the deformation and obtain a correct estimate. Moreover, our method is not bounded to a specific sensor calibration and can be applied to new calibrations without retraining. We evaluate our approach on a challenging dataset and show it outperforms state-of-the-art methods. As a result, our method could be used in treatment scenarios such as surgery and radiotherapy while drastically reducing patient radiation exposure.
CVMar 14, 2024
BOP Challenge 2023 on Detection, Segmentation and Pose Estimation of Seen and Unseen Rigid ObjectsTomas Hodan, Martin Sundermeyer, Yann Labbe et al.
We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2023, the fifth in a series of public competitions organized to capture the state of the art in model-based 6D object pose estimation from an RGB/RGB-D image and related tasks. Besides the three tasks from 2022 (model-based 2D detection, 2D segmentation, and 6D localization of objects seen during training), the 2023 challenge introduced new variants of these tasks focused on objects unseen during training. In the new tasks, methods were required to learn new objects during a short onboarding stage (max 5 minutes, 1 GPU) from provided 3D object models. The best 2023 method for 6D localization of unseen objects (GenFlow) notably reached the accuracy of the best 2020 method for seen objects (CosyPose), although being noticeably slower. The best 2023 method for seen objects (GPose) achieved a moderate accuracy improvement but a significant 43% run-time improvement compared to the best 2022 counterpart (GDRNPP). Since 2017, the accuracy of 6D localization of seen objects has improved by more than 50% (from 56.9 to 85.6 AR_C). The online evaluation system stays open and is available at: http://bop.felk.cvut.cz/.
CVDec 7, 2023
Correspondences of the Third Kind: Camera Pose Estimation from Object ReflectionKohei Yamashita, Vincent Lepetit, Ko Nishino
Computer vision has long relied on two kinds of correspondences: pixel correspondences in images and 3D correspondences on object surfaces. Is there another kind, and if there is, what can they do for us? In this paper, we introduce correspondences of the third kind we call reflection correspondences and show that they can help estimate camera pose by just looking at objects without relying on the background. Reflection correspondences are point correspondences in the reflected world, i.e., the scene reflected by the object surface. The object geometry and reflectance alters the scene geometrically and radiometrically, respectively, causing incorrect pixel correspondences. Geometry recovered from each image is also hampered by distortions, namely generalized bas-relief ambiguity, leading to erroneous 3D correspondences. We show that reflection correspondences can resolve the ambiguities arising from these distortions. We introduce a neural correspondence estimator and a RANSAC algorithm that fully leverages all three kinds of correspondences for robust and accurate joint camera pose and object shape estimation just from the object appearance. The method expands the horizon of numerous downstream tasks, including camera pose estimation for appearance modeling (e.g., NeRF) and motion estimation of reflective objects (e.g., cars on the road), to name a few, as it relieves the requirement of overlapping background.
CVOct 22, 2021
UVO Challenge on Video-based Open-World Segmentation 2021: 1st Place SolutionYuming Du, Wen Guo, Yang Xiao et al.
In this report, we introduce our (pretty straightforard) two-step "detect-then-match" video instance segmentation method. The first step performs instance segmentation for each frame to get a large number of instance mask proposals. The second step is to do inter-frame instance mask matching with the help of optical flow. We demonstrate that with high quality mask proposals, a simple matching mechanism is good enough for tracking. Our approach achieves the first place in the UVO 2021 Video-based Open-World Segmentation Challenge.
CVOct 19, 2021
1st Place Solution for the UVO Challenge on Image-based Open-World Segmentation 2021Yuming Du, Wen Guo, Yang Xiao et al.
We describe our two-stage instance segmentation framework we use to compete in the challenge. The first stage of our framework consists of an object detector, which generates object proposals in the format of bounding boxes. Then, the images and the detected bounding boxes are fed to the second stage, where a segmentation network is applied to segment the objects in the bounding boxes. We train all our networks in a class-agnostic way. Our approach achieves the first place in the UVO 2021 Image-based Open-World Segmentation Challenge.
CVJul 2, 2021
HO-3D_v3: Improving the Accuracy of Hand-Object Annotations of the HO-3D DatasetShreyas Hampali, Sayan Deb Sarkar, Vincent Lepetit
HO-3D is a dataset providing image sequences of various hand-object interaction scenarios annotated with the 3D pose of the hand and the object and was originally introduced as HO-3D_v2. The annotations were obtained automatically using an optimization method, 'HOnnotate', introduced in the original paper. HO-3D_v3 provides more accurate annotations for both the hand and object poses thus resulting in better estimates of contact regions between the hand and the object. In this report, we elaborate on the improvements to the HOnnotate method and provide evaluations to compare the accuracy of HO-3D_v2 and HO-3D_v3. HO-3D_v3 results in 4mm higher accuracy compared to HO-3D_v2 for hand poses while exhibiting higher contact regions with the object surface.
CVJun 17, 2021
Visual Correspondence HallucinationHugo Germain, Vincent Lepetit, Guillaume Bourmaud
Given a pair of partially overlapping source and target images and a keypoint in the source image, the keypoint's correspondent in the target image can be either visible, occluded or outside the field of view. Local feature matching methods are only able to identify the correspondent's location when it is visible, while humans can also hallucinate its location when it is occluded or outside the field of view through geometric reasoning. In this paper, we bridge this gap by training a network to output a peaked probability distribution over the correspondent's location, regardless of this correspondent being visible, occluded, or outside the field of view. We experimentally demonstrate that this network is indeed able to hallucinate correspondences on pairs of images captured in scenes that were not seen at training-time. We also apply this network to an absolute camera pose estimation problem and find it is significantly more robust than state-of-the-art local feature matching-based competitors.
CVApr 29, 2021
Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose EstimationShreyas Hampali, Sayan Deb Sarkar, Mahdi Rad et al.
We propose a robust and accurate method for estimating the 3D poses of two hands in close interaction from a single color image. This is a very challenging problem, as large occlusions and many confusions between the joints may happen. State-of-the-art methods solve this problem by regressing a heatmap for each joint, which requires solving two problems simultaneously: localizing the joints and recognizing them. In this work, we propose to separate these tasks by relying on a CNN to first localize joints as 2D keypoints, and on self-attention between the CNN features at these keypoints to associate them with the corresponding hand joint. The resulting architecture, which we call "Keypoint Transformer", is highly efficient as it achieves state-of-the-art performance with roughly half the number of model parameters on the InterHand2.6M dataset. We also show it can be easily extended to estimate the 3D pose of an object manipulated by one or two hands with high performance. Moreover, we created a new dataset of more than 75,000 images of two hands manipulating an object fully annotated in 3D and will make it publicly available.
CVApr 25, 2021
Learning to Better Segment Objects from Unseen Classes with Unlabeled VideosYuming Du, Yang Xiao, Vincent Lepetit
The ability to localize and segment objects from unseen classes would open the door to new applications, such as autonomous object learning in active vision. Nonetheless, improving the performance on unseen classes requires additional training data, while manually annotating the objects of the unseen classes can be labor-extensive and expensive. In this paper, we explore the use of unlabeled video sequences to automatically generate training data for objects of unseen classes. It is in principle possible to apply existing video segmentation methods to unlabeled videos and automatically obtain object masks, which can then be used as a training set even for classes with no manual labels available. However, our experiments show that these methods do not perform well enough for this purpose. We therefore introduce a Bayesian method that is specifically designed to automatically create such a training set: Our method starts from a set of object proposals and relies on (non-realistic) analysis-by-synthesis to select the correct ones by performing an efficient optimization over all the frames simultaneously. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method can generate a high-quality training set which significantly boosts the performance of segmenting objects of unseen classes. We thus believe that our method could open the door for open-world instance segmentation using abundant Internet videos.
CVMar 20, 2021
MonteFloor: Extending MCTS for Reconstructing Accurate Large-Scale Floor PlansSinisa Stekovic, Mahdi Rad, Friedrich Fraundorfer et al.
We propose a novel method for reconstructing floor plans from noisy 3D point clouds. Our main contribution is a principled approach that relies on the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to maximize a suitable objective function efficiently despite the complexity of the problem. Like previous work, we first project the input point cloud to a top view to create a density map and extract room proposals from it. Our method selects and optimizes the polygonal shapes of these room proposals jointly to fit the density map and outputs an accurate vectorized floor map even for large complex scenes. To do this, we adapted MCTS, an algorithm originally designed to learn to play games, to select the room proposals by maximizing an objective function combining the fitness with the density map as predicted by a deep network and regularizing terms on the room shapes. We also introduce a refinement step to MCTS that adjusts the shape of the room proposals. For this step, we propose a novel differentiable method for rendering the polygonal shapes of these proposals. We evaluate our method on the recent and challenging Structured3D and Floor-SP datasets and show a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art, without imposing any hard constraints nor assumptions on the floor plan configurations.
CVMar 14, 2021
Monte Carlo Scene Search for 3D Scene UnderstandingShreyas Hampali, Sinisa Stekovic, Sayan Deb Sarkar et al.
We explore how a general AI algorithm can be used for 3D scene understanding to reduce the need for training data. More exactly, we propose a modification of the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to retrieve objects and room layouts from noisy RGB-D scans. While MCTS was developed as a game-playing algorithm, we show it can also be used for complex perception problems. Our adapted MCTS algorithm has few easy-to-tune hyperparameters and can optimise general losses. We use it to optimise the posterior probability of objects and room layout hypotheses given the RGB-D data. This results in an analysis-by-synthesis approach that explores the solution space by rendering the current solution and comparing it to the RGB-D observations. To perform this exploration even more efficiently, we propose simple changes to the standard MCTS' tree construction and exploration policy. We demonstrate our approach on the ScanNet dataset. Our method often retrieves configurations that are better than some manual annotations, especially on layouts.
CVMar 12, 2021
Neural Reprojection Error: Merging Feature Learning and Camera Pose EstimationHugo Germain, Vincent Lepetit, Guillaume Bourmaud
Absolute camera pose estimation is usually addressed by sequentially solving two distinct subproblems: First a feature matching problem that seeks to establish putative 2D-3D correspondences, and then a Perspective-n-Point problem that minimizes, with respect to the camera pose, the sum of so-called Reprojection Errors (RE). We argue that generating putative 2D-3D correspondences 1) leads to an important loss of information that needs to be compensated as far as possible, within RE, through the choice of a robust loss and the tuning of its hyperparameters and 2) may lead to an RE that conveys erroneous data to the pose estimator. In this paper, we introduce the Neural Reprojection Error (NRE) as a substitute for RE. NRE allows to rethink the camera pose estimation problem by merging it with the feature learning problem, hence leveraging richer information than 2D-3D correspondences and eliminating the need for choosing a robust loss and its hyperparameters. Thus NRE can be used as training loss to learn image descriptors tailored for pose estimation. We also propose a coarse-to-fine optimization method able to very efficiently minimize a sum of NRE terms with respect to the camera pose. We experimentally demonstrate that NRE is a good substitute for RE as it significantly improves both the robustness and the accuracy of the camera pose estimate while being computationally and memory highly efficient. From a broader point of view, we believe this new way of merging deep learning and 3D geometry may be useful in other computer vision applications.