Sai-Kit Yeung

Xiaopeng Guo, Yinzhe Xu, Huajian Huang et al.

Monocular omnidirectional visual odometry (OVO) systems leverage 360-degree cameras to overcome field-of-view limitations of perspective VO systems. However, existing methods, reliant on handcrafted features or photometric objectives, often lack robustness in challenging scenarios, such as aggressive motion and varying illumination. To address this, we present 360DVO, the first deep learning-based OVO framework. Our approach introduces a distortion-aware spherical feature extractor (DAS-Feat) that adaptively learns distortion-resistant features from 360-degree images. These sparse feature patches are then used to establish constraints for effective pose estimation within a novel omnidirectional differentiable bundle adjustment (ODBA) module. To facilitate evaluation in realistic settings, we also contribute a new real-world OVO benchmark. Extensive experiments on this benchmark and public synthetic datasets (TartanAir V2 and 360VO) demonstrate that 360DVO surpasses state-of-the-art baselines (including 360VO and OpenVSLAM), improving robustness by 50% and accuracy by 37.5%. Homepage: https://chris1004336379.github.io/360DVO-homepage

Yuk-Kwan Wong, Haixin Liang, Zeyu Ma et al.

Marine visual understanding is essential for monitoring and protecting marine ecosystems, enabling automatic and scalable biological surveys. However, progress is hindered by limited training data and the lack of a systematic task formulation that aligns domain-specific marine challenges with well-defined computer vision tasks, thereby limiting effective model application. To address this gap, we present ORCA, a multi-modal benchmark for marine research comprising 14,647 images from 478 species, with 42,217 bounding box annotations and 22,321 expert-verified instance captions. The dataset provides fine-grained visual and textual annotations that capture morphology-oriented attributes across diverse marine species. To catalyze methodological advances, we evaluate 18 state-of-the-art models on three tasks: object detection (closed-set and open-vocabulary), instance captioning, and visual grounding. Results highlight key challenges, including species diversity, morphological overlap, and specialized domain demands, underscoring the difficulty of marine understanding. ORCA thus establishes a comprehensive benchmark to advance research in marine domain. Project Page: http://orca.hkustvgd.com/.

YuK-Kwan Wong, Tuan-An To, Jipeng Zhang et al.

We have witnessed promising progress led by large language models (LLMs) and further vision language models (VLMs) in handling various queries as a general-purpose assistant. VLMs, as a bridge to connect the visual world and language corpus, receive both visual content and various text-only user instructions to generate corresponding responses. Though great success has been achieved by VLMs in various fields, in this work, we ask whether the existing VLMs can act as domain experts, accurately answering marine questions, which require significant domain expertise and address special domain challenges/requirements. To comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness and explore the boundary of existing VLMs, we construct the first large-scale marine VLM dataset and benchmark called MarineEval, with 2,000 image-based question-answering pairs. During our dataset construction, we ensure the diversity and coverage of the constructed data: 7 task dimensions and 20 capacity dimensions. The domain requirements are specially integrated into the data construction and further verified by the corresponding marine domain experts. We comprehensively benchmark 17 existing VLMs on our MarineEval and also investigate the limitations of existing models in answering marine research questions. The experimental results reveal that existing VLMs cannot effectively answer the domain-specific questions, and there is still a large room for further performance improvements. We hope our new benchmark and observations will facilitate future research. Project Page: http://marineeval.hkustvgd.com/

Jiahao Lu, Tianyu Huang, Peng Li et al.

Recent developments in monocular depth estimation methods enable high-quality depth estimation of single-view images but fail to estimate consistent video depth across different frames. Recent works address this problem by applying a video diffusion model to generate video depth conditioned on the input video, which is training-expensive and can only produce scale-invariant depth values without camera poses. In this paper, we propose a novel video-depth estimation method called Align3R to estimate temporal consistent depth maps for a dynamic video. Our key idea is to utilize the recent DUSt3R model to align estimated monocular depth maps of different timesteps. First, we fine-tune the DUSt3R model with additional estimated monocular depth as inputs for the dynamic scenes. Then, we apply optimization to reconstruct both depth maps and camera poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Align3R estimates consistent video depth and camera poses for a monocular video with superior performance than baseline methods.