Wei Jing

Yinsong Xu, Wei Jing, Liuxin Zhang et al.

Understanding long-form egocentric videos remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to limited context length and insufficient grounding of fine-grained visual details. The recently proposed HD-EPIC benchmark highlights these limitations: even strong long-context models achieve relatively low performance across diverse video question answering tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that decouples long-video reasoning into two complementary forms of evidence: semantic evidence and visual evidence. Semantic evidence captures global procedural structure through a coarse-to-fine extraction pipeline, while object-centric visual evidence preserves fine-grained grounding through bounding boxes and visual embeddings. During inference, we formulate reasoning as a query-conditioned evidence retrieval and integration process, dynamically selecting relevant information from both sources. Our approach achieves competitive performance in the HD-EPIC-VQA Challenge across multiple task categories. More broadly, our results demonstrate that explicitly structuring, retrieving, and integrating semantic and visual evidence is critical for effective long-video understanding with MLLMs.

Tengju Ye, Wei Jing, Chunyong Hu et al.

Building a multi-modality multi-task neural network toward accurate and robust performance is a de-facto standard in perception task of autonomous driving. However, leveraging such data from multiple sensors to jointly optimize the prediction and planning tasks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present FusionAD, to the best of our knowledge, the first unified framework that fuse the information from two most critical sensors, camera and LiDAR, goes beyond perception task. Concretely, we first build a transformer based multi-modality fusion network to effectively produce fusion based features. In constrast to camera-based end-to-end method UniAD, we then establish a fusion aided modality-aware prediction and status-aware planning modules, dubbed FMSPnP that take advantages of multi-modality features. We conduct extensive experiments on commonly used benchmark nuScenes dataset, our FusionAD achieves state-of-the-art performance and surpassing baselines on average 15% on perception tasks like detection and tracking, 10% on occupancy prediction accuracy, reducing prediction error from 0.708 to 0.389 in ADE score and reduces the collision rate from 0.31% to only 0.12%.

Dixuan Lin, Yuxiang Zhang, Mengcheng Li et al.

In this paper, we introduce OmniHands, a universal approach to recovering interactive hand meshes and their relative movement from monocular or multi-view inputs. Our approach addresses two major limitations of previous methods: lacking a unified solution for handling various hand image inputs and neglecting the positional relationship of two hands within images. To overcome these challenges, we develop a universal architecture with novel tokenization and contextual feature fusion strategies, capable of adapting to a variety of tasks. Specifically, we propose a Relation-aware Two-Hand Tokenization (RAT) method to embed positional relation information into the hand tokens. In this way, our network can handle both single-hand and two-hand inputs and explicitly leverage relative hand positions, facilitating the reconstruction of intricate hand interactions in real-world scenarios. As such tokenization indicates the relative relationship of two hands, it also supports more effective feature fusion. To this end, we further develop a 4D Interaction Reasoning (FIR) module to fuse hand tokens in 4D with attention and decode them into 3D hand meshes and relative temporal movements. The efficacy of our approach is validated on several benchmark datasets. The results on in-the-wild videos and real-world scenarios demonstrate the superior performances of our approach for interactive hand reconstruction. More video results can be found on the project page: https://OmniHand.github.io.

Zhiheng Peng, Kai Zhao, Xiaoran Chen et al.

Efficient, accurate and low-cost estimation of human skeletal information is crucial for a range of applications such as biology education and human-computer interaction. However, current simple skeleton models, which are typically based on 2D-3D joint points, fall short in terms of anatomical fidelity, restricting their utility in fields. On the other hand, more complex models while anatomically precise, are hindered by sophisticate multi-stage processing and the need for extra data like skin meshes, making them unsuitable for real-time applications. To this end, we propose the EA-RAS (Towards Efficient and Accurate End-to-End Reconstruction of Anatomical Skeleton), a single-stage, lightweight, and plug-and-play anatomical skeleton estimator that can provide real-time, accurate anatomically realistic skeletons with arbitrary pose using only a single RGB image input. Additionally, EA-RAS estimates the conventional human-mesh model explicitly, which not only enhances the functionality but also leverages the outside skin information by integrating features into the inside skeleton modeling process. In this work, we also develop a progressive training strategy and integrated it with an enhanced optimization process, enabling the network to obtain initial weights using only a small skin dataset and achieve self-supervision in skeleton reconstruction. Besides, we also provide an optional lightweight post-processing optimization strategy to further improve accuracy for scenarios that prioritize precision over real-time processing. The experiments demonstrated that our regression method is over 800 times faster than existing methods, meeting real-time requirements. Additionally, the post-processing optimization strategy provided can enhance reconstruction accuracy by over 50% and achieve a speed increase of more than 7 times.

Ke Guo, Zhenwei Miao, Wei Jing et al.

Microscopic traffic simulation plays a crucial role in transportation engineering by providing insights into individual vehicle behavior and overall traffic flow. However, creating a realistic simulator that accurately replicates human driving behaviors in various traffic conditions presents significant challenges. Traditional simulators relying on heuristic models often fail to deliver accurate simulations due to the complexity of real-world traffic environments. Due to the covariate shift issue, existing imitation learning-based simulators often fail to generate stable long-term simulations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called learner-aware supervised imitation learning to address the covariate shift problem in multi-agent imitation learning. By leveraging a variational autoencoder simultaneously modeling the expert and learner state distribution, our approach augments expert states such that the augmented state is aware of learner state distribution. Our method, applied to urban traffic simulation, demonstrates significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art baselines in both short-term microscopic and long-term macroscopic realism when evaluated on the real-world dataset pNEUMA.

Yinke Dong, Haifeng Yuan, Hongkun Liu et al.

Accurate motion prediction of pedestrians, cyclists, and other surrounding vehicles (all called agents) is very important for autonomous driving. Most existing works capture map information through an one-stage interaction with map by vector-based attention, to provide map constraints for social interaction and multi-modal differentiation. However, these methods have to encode all required map rules into the focal agent's feature, so as to retain all possible intentions' paths while at the meantime to adapt to potential social interaction. In this work, a progressive interaction network is proposed to enable the agent's feature to progressively focus on relevant maps, in order to better learn agents' feature representation capturing the relevant map constraints. The network progressively encode the complex influence of map constraints into the agent's feature through graph convolutions at the following three stages: after historical trajectory encoder, after social interaction, and after multi-modal differentiation. In addition, a weight allocation mechanism is proposed for multi-modal training, so that each mode can obtain learning opportunities from a single-mode ground truth. Experiments have validated the superiority of progressive interactions to the existing one-stage interaction, and demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. Encouraging results were obtained in the challenging benchmarks.

Zixing Lei, Zibo Zhou, Sheng Yin et al.

Humanoid whole-body control (WBC) policies trained in simulation often suffer from the sim-to-real gap, which fundamentally arises from simulator inductive bias, the inherent assumptions and limitations of any single simulator. These biases lead to nontrivial discrepancies both across simulators and between simulation and the real world. To mitigate the effect of simulator inductive bias, the key idea is to train policies jointly across multiple simulators, encouraging the learned controller to capture dynamics that generalize beyond any single simulator's assumptions. We thus introduce PolySim, a WBC training platform that integrates multiple heterogeneous simulators. PolySim can launch parallel environments from different engines simultaneously within a single training run, thereby realizing dynamics-level domain randomization. Theoretically, we show that PolySim yields a tighter upper bound on simulator inductive bias than single-simulator training. In experiments, PolySim substantially reduces motion-tracking error in sim-to-sim evaluations; for example, on MuJoCo, it improves execution success by 52.8 over an IsaacSim baseline. PolySim further enables zero-shot deployment on a real Unitree G1 without additional fine-tuning, showing effective transfer from simulation to the real world. We will release the PolySim code upon acceptance of this work.

Kaichen Chi, Wei Jing, Junjie Li et al.

Remote sensing shadow removal, which aims to recover contaminated surface information, is tricky since shadows typically display overwhelmingly low illumination intensities. In contrast, the infrared image is robust toward significant light changes, providing visual clues complementary to the visible image. Nevertheless, the existing methods ignore the collaboration between heterogeneous modalities, leading to undesired quality degradation. To fill this gap, we propose a weakly supervised shadow removal network with a spherical feature space, dubbed S2-ShadowNet, to explore the best of both worlds for visible and infrared modalities. Specifically, we employ a modal translation (visible-to-infrared) model to learn the cross-domain mapping, thus generating realistic infrared samples. Then, Swin Transformer is utilized to extract strong representational visible/infrared features. Simultaneously, the extracted features are mapped to the smooth spherical manifold, which alleviates the domain shift through regularization. Well-designed similarity loss and orthogonality loss are embedded into the spherical space, prompting the separation of private visible/infrared features and the alignment of shared visible/infrared features through constraints on both representation content and orientation. Such a manner encourages implicit reciprocity between modalities, thus providing a novel insight into shadow removal. Notably, ground truth is not available in practice, thus S2-ShadowNet is trained by cropping shadow and shadow-free patches from the shadow image itself, avoiding stereotypical and strict pair data acquisition. More importantly, we contribute a large-scale weakly supervised shadow removal benchmark, including 4000 shadow images with corresponding shadow masks.

En Yen Puang, Hao Zhang, Hongyuan Zhu et al.

In this paper we present SA-CNN, a hierarchical and lightweight self-attention based encoding and decoding architecture for representation learning of point cloud data. The proposed SA-CNN introduces convolution and transposed convolution stacks to capture and generate contextual information among unordered 3D points. Following conventional hierarchical pipeline, the encoding process extracts feature in local-to-global manner, while the decoding process generates feature and point cloud in coarse-to-fine, multi-resolution stages. We demonstrate that SA-CNN is capable of a wide range of applications, namely classification, part segmentation, reconstruction, shape retrieval, and unsupervised classification. While achieving the state-of-the-art or comparable performance in the benchmarks, SA-CNN maintains its model complexity several order of magnitude lower than the others. In term of qualitative results, we visualize the multi-stage point cloud reconstructions and latent walks on rigid objects as well as deformable non-rigid human and robot models.

Tianying Wang, En Yen Puang, Marcus Lee et al.

We present an end-to-end Reinforcement Learning(RL) framework for robotic manipulation tasks, using a robust and efficient keypoints representation. The proposed method learns keypoints from camera images as the state representation, through a self-supervised autoencoder architecture. The keypoints encode the geometric information, as well as the relationship of the tool and target in a compact representation to ensure efficient and robust learning. After keypoints learning, the RL step then learns the robot motion from the extracted keypoints state representation. The keypoints and RL learning processes are entirely done in the simulated environment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on robotic manipulation tasks including grasping and pushing, in different scenarios. We also investigate the generalization capability of the trained model. In addition to the robust keypoints representation, we further apply domain randomization and adversarial training examples to achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer in real-world robotic manipulation tasks.

Hao Zhang, Aixin Sun, Wei Jing et al.

Temporal sentence grounding in videos (TSGV), \aka natural language video localization (NLVL) or video moment retrieval (VMR), aims to retrieve a temporal moment that semantically corresponds to a language query from an untrimmed video. Connecting computer vision and natural language, TSGV has drawn significant attention from researchers in both communities. This survey attempts to provide a summary of fundamental concepts in TSGV and current research status, as well as future research directions. As the background, we present a common structure of functional components in TSGV, in a tutorial style: from feature extraction from raw video and language query, to answer prediction of the target moment. Then we review the techniques for multimodal understanding and interaction, which is the key focus of TSGV for effective alignment between the two modalities. We construct a taxonomy of TSGV techniques and elaborate the methods in different categories with their strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, we discuss issues with the current TSGV research and share our insights about promising research directions.

Hao Zhang, Aixin Sun, Wei Jing et al.

The temporal sentence grounding in video (TSGV) task is to locate a temporal moment from an untrimmed video, to match a language query, i.e., a sentence. Without considering bias in moment annotations (e.g., start and end positions in a video), many models tend to capture statistical regularities of the moment annotations, and do not well learn cross-modal reasoning between video and language query. In this paper, we propose two debiasing strategies, data debiasing and model debiasing, to "force" a TSGV model to capture cross-modal interactions. Data debiasing performs data oversampling through video truncation to balance moment temporal distribution in train set. Model debiasing leverages video-only and query-only models to capture the distribution bias, and forces the model to learn cross-modal interactions. Using VSLNet as the base model, we evaluate impact of the two strategies on two datasets that contain out-of-distribution test instances. Results show that both strategies are effective in improving model generalization capability. Equipped with both debiasing strategies, VSLNet achieves best results on both datasets.

Flint Xiaofeng Fan, Yining Ma, Zhongxiang Dai et al.

The growing literature of Federated Learning (FL) has recently inspired Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) to encourage multiple agents to federatively build a better decision-making policy without sharing raw trajectories. Despite its promising applications, existing works on FRL fail to I) provide theoretical analysis on its convergence, and II) account for random system failures and adversarial attacks. Towards this end, we propose the first FRL framework the convergence of which is guaranteed and tolerant to less than half of the participating agents being random system failures or adversarial attackers. We prove that the sample efficiency of the proposed framework is guaranteed to improve with the number of agents and is able to account for such potential failures or attacks. All theoretical results are empirically verified on various RL benchmark tasks.

Yunkai Wang, Dongkun Zhang, Yuxiang Cui et al.

One of the challenges in vision-based driving trajectory generation is dealing with out-of-distribution scenarios. In this paper, we propose a domain generalization method for vision-based driving trajectory generation for autonomous vehicles in urban environments, which can be seen as a solution to extend the Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) method in complex problems. We leverage an adversarial learning approach to train a trajectory generator as the decoder. Based on the pre-trained decoder, we infer the latent variables corresponding to the trajectories, and pre-train the encoder by regressing the inferred latent variable. Finally, we fix the decoder but fine-tune the encoder with the final trajectory loss. We compare our proposed method with the state-of-the-art trajectory generation method and some recent domain generalization methods on both datasets and simulation, demonstrating that our method has better generalization ability.

Hao Zhang, Aixin Sun, Wei Jing et al.

Given a video, video grounding aims to retrieve a temporal moment that semantically corresponds to a language query. In this work, we propose a Parallel Attention Network with Sequence matching (SeqPAN) to address the challenges in this task: multi-modal representation learning, and target moment boundary prediction. We design a self-guided parallel attention module to effectively capture self-modal contexts and cross-modal attentive information between video and text. Inspired by sequence labeling tasks in natural language processing, we split the ground truth moment into begin, inside, and end regions. We then propose a sequence matching strategy to guide start/end boundary predictions using region labels. Experimental results on three datasets show that SeqPAN is superior to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the self-guided parallel attention module and the sequence matching module is verified.

Hao Zhang, Aixin Sun, Wei Jing et al.

Given a collection of untrimmed and unsegmented videos, video corpus moment retrieval (VCMR) is to retrieve a temporal moment (i.e., a fraction of a video) that semantically corresponds to a given text query. As video and text are from two distinct feature spaces, there are two general approaches to address VCMR: (i) to separately encode each modality representations, then align the two modality representations for query processing, and (ii) to adopt fine-grained cross-modal interaction to learn multi-modal representations for query processing. While the second approach often leads to better retrieval accuracy, the first approach is far more efficient. In this paper, we propose a Retrieval and Localization Network with Contrastive Learning (ReLoCLNet) for VCMR. We adopt the first approach and introduce two contrastive learning objectives to refine video encoder and text encoder to learn video and text representations separately but with better alignment for VCMR. The video contrastive learning (VideoCL) is to maximize mutual information between query and candidate video at video-level. The frame contrastive learning (FrameCL) aims to highlight the moment region corresponds to the query at frame-level, within a video. Experimental results show that, although ReLoCLNet encodes text and video separately for efficiency, its retrieval accuracy is comparable with baselines adopting cross-modal interaction learning.

Hao Zhang, Aixin Sun, Wei Jing et al.

Natural Language Video Localization (NLVL) aims to locate a target moment from an untrimmed video that semantically corresponds to a text query. Existing approaches mainly solve the NLVL problem from the perspective of computer vision by formulating it as ranking, anchor, or regression tasks. These methods suffer from large performance degradation when localizing on long videos. In this work, we address the NLVL from a new perspective, i.e., span-based question answering (QA), by treating the input video as a text passage. We propose a video span localizing network (VSLNet), on top of the standard span-based QA framework (named VSLBase), to address NLVL. VSLNet tackles the differences between NLVL and span-based QA through a simple yet effective query-guided highlighting (QGH) strategy. QGH guides VSLNet to search for the matching video span within a highlighted region. To address the performance degradation on long videos, we further extend VSLNet to VSLNet-L by applying a multi-scale split-and-concatenation strategy. VSLNet-L first splits the untrimmed video into short clip segments; then, it predicts which clip segment contains the target moment and suppresses the importance of other segments. Finally, the clip segments are concatenated, with different confidences, to locate the target moment accurately. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that the proposed VSLNet and VSLNet-L outperform the state-of-the-art methods; VSLNet-L addresses the issue of performance degradation on long videos. Our study suggests that the span-based QA framework is an effective strategy to solve the NLVL problem.

Sicheng Yu, Hao Zhang, Wei Jing et al.

Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is a challenging task in machine reading comprehension. The main challenge in MCQA is to extract "evidence" from the given context that supports the correct answer. In the OpenbookQA dataset, the requirement of extracting "evidence" is particularly important due to the mutual independence of sentences in the context. Existing work tackles this problem by annotated evidence or distant supervision with rules which overly rely on human efforts. To address the challenge, we propose a simple yet effective approach termed evidence filtering to model the relationships between the encoded contexts with respect to different options collectively and to potentially highlight the evidence sentences and filter out unrelated sentences. In addition to the effective reduction of human efforts of our approach compared, through extensive experiments on OpenbookQA, we show that the proposed approach outperforms the models that use the same backbone and more training data; and our parameter analysis also demonstrates the interpretability of our approach.

En Yen Puang, Keng Peng Tee, Wei Jing

We present KOVIS, a novel learning-based, calibration-free visual servoing method for fine robotic manipulation tasks with eye-in-hand stereo camera system. We train the deep neural network only in the simulated environment; and the trained model could be directly used for real-world visual servoing tasks. KOVIS consists of two networks. The first keypoint network learns the keypoint representation from the image using with an autoencoder. Then the visual servoing network learns the motion based on keypoints extracted from the camera image. The two networks are trained end-to-end in the simulated environment by self-supervised learning without manual data labeling. After training with data augmentation, domain randomization, and adversarial examples, we are able to achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to real-world robotic manipulation tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in both simulated environment and real-world experiment with different robotic manipulation tasks, including grasping, peg-in-hole insertion with 4mm clearance, and M13 screw insertion. The demo video is available at http://youtu.be/gfBJBR2tDzA

Wei Jing, Di Deng, Yan Wu et al.

We present a multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning (CPP) framework for the inspection of large-scale, complex 3D structures. In the proposed sampling-based coverage path planning method, we formulate the multi-UAV inspection applications as a multi-agent coverage path planning problem. By combining two NP-hard problems: Set Covering Problem (SCP) and Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), a Set-Covering Vehicle Routing Problem (SC-VRP) is formulated and subsequently solved by a modified Biased Random Key Genetic Algorithm (BRKGA) with novel, efficient encoding strategies and local improvement heuristics. We test our proposed method for several complex 3D structures with the 3D model extracted from OpenStreetMap. The proposed method outperforms previous methods, by reducing the length of the planned inspection path by up to 48%

Hao Zhang, Aixin Sun, Wei Jing et al.

Given an untrimmed video and a text query, natural language video localization (NLVL) is to locate a matching span from the video that semantically corresponds to the query. Existing solutions formulate NLVL either as a ranking task and apply multimodal matching architecture, or as a regression task to directly regress the target video span. In this work, we address NLVL task with a span-based QA approach by treating the input video as text passage. We propose a video span localizing network (VSLNet), on top of the standard span-based QA framework, to address NLVL. The proposed VSLNet tackles the differences between NLVL and span-based QA through a simple yet effective query-guided highlighting (QGH) strategy. The QGH guides VSLNet to search for matching video span within a highlighted region. Through extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, we show that the proposed VSLNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods; and adopting span-based QA framework is a promising direction to solve NLVL.

Wei Jing, Feng Tian, Jizhong Zhang et al.

Facial Expressions Recognition(FER) on low-resolution images is necessary for applications like group expression recognition in crowd scenarios(station, classroom etc.). Classifying a small size facial image into the right expression category is still a challenging task. The main cause of this problem is the loss of discriminative feature due to reduced resolution. Super-resolution method is often used to enhance low-resolution images, but the performance on FER task is limited when on images of very low resolution. In this work, inspired by feature super-resolution methods for object detection, we proposed a novel generative adversary network-based feature level super-resolution method for robust facial expression recognition(FSR-FER). In particular, a pre-trained FER model was employed as feature extractor, and a generator network G and a discriminator network D are trained with features extracted from images of low resolution and original high resolution. Generator network G tries to transform features of low-resolution images to more discriminative ones by making them closer to the ones of corresponding high-resolution images. For better classification performance, we also proposed an effective classification-aware loss re-weighting strategy based on the classification probability calculated by a fixed FER model to make our model focus more on samples that are easily misclassified. Experiment results on Real-World Affective Faces (RAF) Database demonstrate that our method achieves satisfying results on various down-sample factors with a single model and has better performance on low-resolution images compared with methods using image super-resolution and expression recognition separately.

Tianying Wang, Hao Zhang, Wei Qi Toh et al.

Learning-based methods have been used to pro-gram robotic tasks in recent years. However, extensive training is usually required not only for the initial task learning but also for generalizing the learned model to the same task but in different environments. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm for efficient task generalization and environment adaptation in the robotic task learning problem. The proposed method is able to efficiently generalize the previously learned task by model fusion to solve the environment adaptation problem. The proposed Deep Model Fusion (DMF) method reuses and combines the previously trained model to improve the learning efficiency and results.Besides, we also introduce a Multi-objective Guided Reward(MGR) shaping technique to further improve training efficiency.The proposed method was benchmarked with previous methods in various environments to validate its effectiveness.

Tianying Wang, Wei Qi Toh, Hao Zhang et al.

Robotic drawing has become increasingly popular as an entertainment and interactive tool. In this paper we present RoboCoDraw, a real-time collaborative robot-based drawing system that draws stylized human face sketches interactively in front of human users, by using the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based style transfer and a Random-Key Genetic Algorithm (RKGA)-based path optimization. The proposed RoboCoDraw system takes a real human face image as input, converts it to a stylized avatar, then draws it with a robotic arm. A core component in this system is the Avatar-GAN proposed by us, which generates a cartoon avatar face image from a real human face. AvatarGAN is trained with unpaired face and avatar images only and can generate avatar images of much better likeness with human face images in comparison with the vanilla CycleGAN. After the avatar image is generated, it is fed to a line extraction algorithm and converted to sketches. An RKGA-based path optimization algorithm is applied to find a time-efficient robotic drawing path to be executed by the robotic arm. We demonstrate the capability of RoboCoDraw on various face images using a lightweight, safe collaborative robot UR5.

Di Deng, Wei Jing, Yuhe Fu et al.

There is a strong demand for covering a large area autonomously by multiple UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) supported by a ground vehicle. Limited by UAVs' battery life and communication distance, complete coverage of large areas typically involves multiple take-offs and landings to recharge batteries, and the transportation of UAVs between operation areas by a ground vehicle. In this paper, we introduce a novel large-area-coverage planning framework which collectively optimizes the paths for aerial and ground vehicles. Our method first partitions a large area into sub-areas, each of which a given fleet of UAVs can cover without recharging batteries. UAV operation routes, or trails, are then generated for each sub-area. Next, the assignment of trials to different UAVs and the order in which UAVs visit their assigned trails are simultaneously optimized to minimize the total UAV flight distance. Finally, a ground vehicle transportation path which visits all sub-areas is found by solving an asymmetric traveling salesman problem (ATSP). Although finding the globally optimal trail assignment and transition paths can be formulated as a Mixed Integer Quadratic Program (MIQP), the MIQP is intractable even for small problems. We show that the solution time can be reduced to close-to-real-time levels by first finding a feasible solution using a Random Key Genetic Algorithm (RKGA), which is then locally optimized by solving a much smaller MIQP.

Yi Cheng, Hongyuan Zhu, Ying Sun et al.

6D object pose estimation is widely applied in robotic tasks such as grasping and manipulation. Prior methods using RGB-only images are vulnerable to heavy occlusion and poor illumination, so it is important to complement them with depth information. However, existing methods using RGB-D data cannot adequately exploit consistent and complementary information between RGB and depth modalities. In this paper, we present a novel method to effectively consider the correlation within and across both modalities with attention mechanism to learn discriminative and compact multi-modal features. Then, effective fusion strategies for intra- and inter-correlation modules are explored to ensure efficient information flow between RGB and depth. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to explore effective intra- and inter-modality fusion in 6D pose estimation. The experimental results show that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on LineMOD and YCB-Video dataset. We also demonstrate that the proposed method can benefit a real-world robot grasping task by providing accurate object pose estimation.

Wei Jing, Di Deng, Zhe Xiao et al.

Planning the path to gather the surface information of the target objects is crucial to improve the efficiency of and reduce the overall cost, for visual inspection applications with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Coverage Path Planning (CPP) problem is often formulated for these inspection applications because of the coverage requirement. Traditionally, researchers usually plan and optimize the viewpoints to capture the surface information first, and then optimize the path to visit the selected viewpoints. In this paper, we propose a novel planning method to directly sample and plan the inspection path for a camera-equipped UAV to acquire visual and geometric information of the target structures as a video stream setting in complex 3D environment. The proposed planning method first generates via-points and path primitives around the target object by using sampling methods based on voxel dilation and subtraction. A novel Primitive Coverage Graph (PCG) is then proposed to encode the topological information, flying distances, and visibility information, with the sampled via-points and path primitives. Finally graph search is performed to find the resultant path in the PCG to complete the inspection task with the coverage requirements. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulation and field tests in this paper.