Yipeng Zhu

Huajian Huang, Changkun Liu, Yipeng Zhu et al.

Portable 360$^\circ$ cameras are becoming a cheap and efficient tool to establish large visual databases. By capturing omnidirectional views of a scene, these cameras could expedite building environment models that are essential for visual localization. However, such an advantage is often overlooked due to the lack of valuable datasets. This paper introduces a new benchmark dataset, 360Loc, composed of 360$^\circ$ images with ground truth poses for visual localization. We present a practical implementation of 360$^\circ$ mapping combining 360$^\circ$ images with lidar data to generate the ground truth 6DoF poses. 360Loc is the first dataset and benchmark that explores the challenge of cross-device visual positioning, involving 360$^\circ$ reference frames, and query frames from pinhole, ultra-wide FoV fisheye, and 360$^\circ$ cameras. We propose a virtual camera approach to generate lower-FoV query frames from 360$^\circ$ images, which ensures a fair comparison of performance among different query types in visual localization tasks. We also extend this virtual camera approach to feature matching-based and pose regression-based methods to alleviate the performance loss caused by the cross-device domain gap, and evaluate its effectiveness against state-of-the-art baselines. We demonstrate that omnidirectional visual localization is more robust in challenging large-scale scenes with symmetries and repetitive structures. These results provide new insights into 360-camera mapping and omnidirectional visual localization with cross-device queries.

Hanwen Zhang, Yipeng Zhu, Xiaopeng Guo et al.

Extreme subsea environments often cause severe feature de-gradation and estimator divergence in underwater visual-inertial SLAM. Although sensors like Doppler Velocity Logs (DVL) and pressure gauges provide auxiliary constraints, robust multi-sensor fusion during intermittent visual failure remains challenging. To address this, we present APVI-SLAM, a real-time multi-sensor fusion SLAM system that achieves both accurate underwater localization and photorealistic mapping. Our approach introduces a reliability-aware localization framework that dynamically reweights sensor estimators and employs a sliding-window freezing strategy to recover from tracking failures, substantially enhancing system robustness. Furthermore, for high-fidelity scenes reconstruction, we propose an efficient quadtree-guided mapping module that facilitates incremental water-medium modeling and 3D Gaussian optimization. Recognizing the lack of benchmark for underwater mapping evaluation, we also contribute a coral reef surveying dataset with synchronized multi-modality data. Extensive experiments on public and our proposed benchmarks demonstrate that APVI-SLAM achieves state-of-the-art localization and reconstruction quality at real-time speeds.

Yipeng Zhu, Huajian Huang, Tristan Braud et al.

Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) frameworks rely on camera-specific rasterization, suffering from inconsistent solid-angle sampling and degraded performance across heterogeneous camera models (e.g., perspective, fisheye, omnidirectional). To address this limitation, we propose UniTriSplat, a unified 3DGS framework for universal cameras that reformulates Gaussian splatting on the unit sphere via HEALPix discretization. Leveraging the equal-area property of HEALPix, we construct a spherical sampling grid aligned with the angular resolution of input images. We derive the forward rendering and gradient propagation of Gaussians directly in the spherical radian domain, yielding uniform optimization behavior from narrow-FoV images to full 360-degree panoramas. To enhance perceptual reconstruction quality, we additionally introduce a HEALPix-aware SSIM loss that respects spherical neighborhood structure. Extensive experiments across diverse camera models demonstrate that UniTriSplat consistently improves cross-camera generalization while preserving geometric fidelity and rendering quality.