Yang Zheng

Yang Zheng, Adam W. Harley, Bokui Shen et al.

We introduce PointOdyssey, a large-scale synthetic dataset, and data generation framework, for the training and evaluation of long-term fine-grained tracking algorithms. Our goal is to advance the state-of-the-art by placing emphasis on long videos with naturalistic motion. Toward the goal of naturalism, we animate deformable characters using real-world motion capture data, we build 3D scenes to match the motion capture environments, and we render camera viewpoints using trajectories mined via structure-from-motion on real videos. We create combinatorial diversity by randomizing character appearance, motion profiles, materials, lighting, 3D assets, and atmospheric effects. Our dataset currently includes 104 videos, averaging 2,000 frames long, with orders of magnitude more correspondence annotations than prior work. We show that existing methods can be trained from scratch in our dataset and outperform the published variants. Finally, we introduce modifications to the PIPs point tracking method, greatly widening its temporal receptive field, which improves its performance on PointOdyssey as well as on two real-world benchmarks. Our data and code are publicly available at: https://pointodyssey.com

Aivar Sootla, Yang Zheng, Antonis Papachristodoulou

Diagonally dominant matrices have many applications in systems and control theory. Linear dynamical systems with scaled diagonally dominant drift matrices, which include stable positive systems, allow for scalable stability analysis. For example, it is known that Lyapunov inequalities for this class of systems admit diagonal solutions. In this paper, we present an extension of scaled diagonally dominance to block partitioned matrices. We show that our definition describes matrices admitting block-diagonal solutions to Lyapunov inequalities and that these solutions can be computed using linear algebraic tools. We also show how in some cases the Lyapunov inequalities can be decoupled into a set of lower dimensional linear matrix inequalities, thus leading to improved scalability. We conclude by illustrating some advantages and limitations of our results with numerical examples.

Yang Zheng, Tolga Birdal, Fei Xia et al.

We propose a novel method to reliably estimate the pose of a camera given a sequence of images acquired in extreme environments such as deep seas or extraterrestrial terrains. Data acquired under these challenging conditions are corrupted by textureless surfaces, image degradation, and presence of repetitive and highly ambiguous structures. When naively deployed, the state-of-the-art methods can fail in those scenarios as confirmed by our empirical analysis. In this paper, we attempt to make camera relocalization work in these extreme situations. To this end, we propose: (i) a hierarchical localization system, where we leverage temporal information and (ii) a novel environment-aware image enhancement method to boost the robustness and accuracy. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate superior performance in favor of our method under two extreme settings: localizing an autonomous underwater vehicle and localizing a planetary rover in a Mars-like desert. In addition, our method achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods on the indoor benchmark (7-Scenes dataset) using only 20% training data.

Adam W. Harley, Yang You, Xinglong Sun et al.

We introduce AllTracker: a model that estimates long-range point tracks by way of estimating the flow field between a query frame and every other frame of a video. Unlike existing point tracking methods, our approach delivers high-resolution and dense (all-pixel) correspondence fields, which can be visualized as flow maps. Unlike existing optical flow methods, our approach corresponds one frame to hundreds of subsequent frames, rather than just the next frame. We develop a new architecture for this task, blending techniques from existing work in optical flow and point tracking: the model performs iterative inference on low-resolution grids of correspondence estimates, propagating information spatially via 2D convolution layers, and propagating information temporally via pixel-aligned attention layers. The model is fast and parameter-efficient (16 million parameters), and delivers state-of-the-art point tracking accuracy at high resolution (i.e., tracking 768x1024 pixels, on a 40G GPU). A benefit of our design is that we can train jointly on optical flow datasets and point tracking datasets, and we find that doing so is crucial for top performance. We provide an extensive ablation study on our architecture details and training recipe, making it clear which details matter most. Our code and model weights are available at https://alltracker.github.io