Joe-Mei Feng

Joe-Mei Feng, Felix Krahmer, Rayan Saab

We provide the first analysis of a non-trivial quantization scheme for compressed sensing measurements arising from structured measurements. Specifically, our analysis studies compressed sensing matrices consisting of rows selected at random, without replacement, from a circulant matrix generated by a random subgaussian vector. We quantize the measurements using stable, possibly one-bit, Sigma-Delta schemes, and use a reconstruction method based on convex optimization. We show that the part of the reconstruction error due to quantization decays polynomially in the number of measurements. This is in line with analogous results on Sigma-Delta quantization associated with random Gaussian or subgaussian matrices, and significantly better than results associated with the widely assumed memoryless scalar quantization. Moreover, we prove that our approach is stable and robust; i.e., the reconstruction error degrades gracefully in the presence of non-quantization noise and when the underlying signal is not strictly sparse. The analysis relies on results concerning subgaussian chaos processes as well as a variation of McDiarmid's inequality.

Joe-Mei Feng, Hsin-Hsiung Kao

We develop an operator-theoretic framework for stability and statistical concentration in nonlinear inverse problems with block-structured parameters. Under a unified set of assumptions combining blockwise Lipschitz geometry, local identifiability, and sub-Gaussian noise, we establish deterministic stability inequalities, global Lipschitz bounds for least-squares misfit functionals, and nonasymptotic concentration estimates. These results yield high-probability parameter error bounds that are intrinsic to the forward operator and independent of any specific reconstruction algorithm. As a concrete instantiation, we verify that the Gaussian Splatting rendering operator satisfies the proposed assumptions and derive explicit constants governing its Lipschitz continuity and resolution-dependent observability. This leads to a fundamental stability--resolution tradeoff, showing that estimation error is inherently constrained by the ratio between image resolution and model complexity. Overall, the analysis characterizes operator-level limits for a broad class of high-dimensional nonlinear inverse problems arising in modern imaging and differentiable rendering.

Joe-Mei Feng, Sheng-Wei Yu

We present a unified operator-theoretic framework for analyzing per-feature sensitivity in camera pose estimation on the Lie group SE(3). Classical sensitivity tools - conditioning analyses, Euclidean perturbation arguments, and Fisher information bounds - do not explain how individual image features influence the pose estimate, nor why dynamic or inconsistent observations can disproportionately distort modern SLAM and structure-from-motion systems. To address this gap, we extend influence function theory to matrix Lie groups and derive an intrinsic perturbation operator for left-trivialized M-estimators on SE(3). The resulting Geometric Observability Index (GOI) quantifies the contribution of a single measurement through the curvature operator and the Lie algebraic structure of the observable subspace. GOI admits a spectral decomposition along the principal directions of the observable curvature, revealing a direct correspondence between weak observability and amplified sensitivity. In the population regime, GOI coincides with the Fisher information geometry on SE(3), yielding a single-measurement analogue of the Cramer-Rao bound. The same spectral mechanism explains classical degeneracies such as pure rotation and vanishing parallax, as well as dynamic feature amplification along weak curvature directions. Overall, GOI provides a geometrically consistent description of measurement influence that unifies conditioning analysis, Fisher information geometry, influence function theory, and dynamic scene detectability through the spectral geometry of the curvature operator. Because these quantities arise directly within Gauss-Newton pipelines, the curvature spectrum and GOI also yield lightweight, training-free diagnostic signals for identifying dynamic features and detecting weak observability configurations without modifying existing SLAM architectures.

Nie Jiwei, Feng Joe-Mei, Xue Dingyu et al.

In a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system, a loop-closure can eliminate accumulated errors, which is accomplished by Visual Place Recognition (VPR), a task that retrieves the current scene from a set of pre-stored sequential images through matching specific scene-descriptors. In urban scenes, the appearance variation caused by seasons and illumination has brought great challenges to the robustness of scene descriptors. Semantic segmentation images can not only deliver the shape information of objects but also their categories and spatial relations that will not be affected by the appearance variation of the scene. Innovated by the Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptor (VLAD), in this paper, we propose a novel image descriptor with aggregated semantic skeleton representation (SSR), dubbed SSR-VLAD, for the VPR under drastic appearance-variation of environments. The SSR-VLAD of one image aggregates the semantic skeleton features of each category and encodes the spatial-temporal distribution information of the image semantic information. We conduct a series of experiments on three public datasets of challenging urban scenes. Compared with four state-of-the-art VPR methods- CoHOG, NetVLAD, LOST-X, and Region-VLAD, VPR by matching SSR-VLAD outperforms those methods and maintains competitive real-time performance at the same time.