Fei Deng

Teng Xiao, Qi Hu, Qingsong Yan et al.

Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras with wide-angle lenses are widely used in surveillance but often require image rectification due to their inherent nonlinear distortions. Current deep learning approaches typically struggle to maintain fine-grained geometric details, resulting in inaccurate rectification. This paper presents a Forward Distortion and Backward Warping Network (FDBW-Net), a novel framework for wide-angle image rectification. It begins by using a forward distortion model to synthesize barrel-distorted images, reducing pixel redundancy and preventing blur. The network employs a pyramid context encoder with attention mechanisms to generate backward warping flows containing geometric details. Then, a multi-scale decoder is used to restore distorted features and output rectified images. FDBW-Net's performance is validated on diverse datasets: public benchmarks, AirSim-rendered PTZ camera imagery, and real-scene PTZ camera datasets. It demonstrates that FDBW-Net achieves SOTA performance in distortion rectification, boosting the adaptability of PTZ cameras for practical visual applications.

Qiang Wang, Shizhen Zheng, Qingsong Yan et al.

Indoor robotics localization, navigation, and interaction heavily rely on scene understanding and reconstruction. Compared to the monocular vision which usually does not explicitly introduce any geometrical constraint, stereo vision-based schemes are more promising and robust to produce accurate geometrical information, such as surface normal and depth/disparity. Besides, deep learning models trained with large-scale datasets have shown their superior performance in many stereo vision tasks. However, existing stereo datasets rarely contain the high-quality surface normal and disparity ground truth, which hardly satisfies the demand of training a prospective deep model for indoor scenes. To this end, we introduce a large-scale synthetic but naturalistic indoor robotics stereo (IRS) dataset with over 100K stereo RGB images and high-quality surface normal and disparity maps. Leveraging the advanced rendering techniques of our customized rendering engine, the dataset is considerably close to the real-world captured images and covers several visual effects, such as brightness changes, light reflection/transmission, lens flare, vivid shadow, etc. We compare the data distribution of IRS with existing stereo datasets to illustrate the typical visual attributes of indoor scenes. Besides, we present DTN-Net, a two-stage deep model for surface normal estimation. Extensive experiments show the advantages and effectiveness of IRS in training deep models for disparity estimation, and DTN-Net provides state-of-the-art results for normal estimation compared to existing methods.