Zongfu Yu

Guoming Huang, Qingyi Zhou, Dianjing Liu et al.

Non-contact manipulation has emerged as a transformative approach across various industrial fields. However, current flexible 2D and 3D non-contact manipulation techniques are often limited to microscopic scales, typically controlling objects in the milligram range. In this paper, we present a magnetic levitation system, termed Maglev-Pentabot, designed to address this limitation. The Maglev-Pentabot leverages deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to develop complex control strategies for manipulating objects in the gram range. Specifically, we propose an electromagnet arrangement optimized through numerical analysis to maximize controllable space. Additionally, an action remapping method is introduced to address sample sparsity issues caused by the strong nonlinearity in magnetic field intensity, hence allowing the DRL controller to converge. Experimental results demonstrate flexible manipulation capabilities, and notably, our system can generalize to transport tasks it has not been explicitly trained for. Furthermore, our approach can be scaled to manipulate heavier objects using larger electromagnets, offering a reference framework for industrial-scale robotic applications.

Shufan Sun, Chenchen Wang, Zongfu Yu

Monocular 3D animal reconstruction is challenging due to complex articulation, self-occlusion, and fine-scale details such as fur. Existing methods often produce distorted geometry and inconsistent textures due to the lack of articulated 3D supervision and limited availability of back-view images in 2D datasets, which makes reconstructing unobserved regions particularly difficult. To address these limitations, we propose DogWeave, a model-based framework for reconstructing high-fidelity 3D canine models from a single RGB image. DogWeave improves geometry by refining a coarsely-initiated parametric mesh into a detailed SDF representation through multi-view normal field optimization using diffusion-enhanced normals. It then generates view-consistent textures through conditional partial inpainting guided by structure and style cues, enabling realistic reconstruction of unobserved regions. Using only about 7,000 dog images processed via our 2D pipeline for training, DogWeave produces complete, realistic 3D models and outperforms state-of-the-art single image to 3d reconstruction methods in both shape accuracy and texture realism for canines.

Jungmin Kim, Nanfang Yu, Zongfu Yu

In the context of visual perception, the optical signal from a scene is transferred into the electronic domain by detectors in the form of image data, which are then processed for the extraction of visual information. In noisy and weak-signal environments such as thermal imaging for night vision applications, however, the performance of neural computing tasks faces a significant bottleneck due to the inherent degradation of data quality upon noisy detection. Here, we propose a concept of optical signal processing before detection to address this issue. We demonstrate that spatially redistributing optical signals through a properly designed linear transformer can enhance the detection noise resilience of visual perception tasks, as benchmarked with the MNIST classification. Our idea is supported by a quantitative analysis detailing the relationship between signal concentration and noise robustness, as well as its practical implementation in an incoherent imaging system. This compute-first detection scheme can pave the way for advancing infrared machine vision technologies widely used for industrial and defense applications.

Xin Lei, Liangyu He, Yixuan Tan et al.

Visual object recognition under situations in which the direct line-of-sight is blocked, such as when it is occluded around the corner, is of practical importance in a wide range of applications. With coherent illumination, the light scattered from diffusive walls forms speckle patterns that contain information of the hidden object. It is possible to realize non-line-of-sight (NLOS) recognition with these speckle patterns. We introduce a novel approach based on speckle pattern recognition with deep neural network, which is simpler and more robust than other NLOS recognition methods. Simulations and experiments are performed to verify the feasibility and performance of this approach.