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Mar 12

The 'Paris-end' of town? Urban typology through machine learning

The confluence of recent advances in availability of geospatial information, computing power, and artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to understand how and where our cities differ or are alike. Departing from a traditional `top-down' analysis of urban design features, this project analyses millions of images of urban form (consisting of street view, satellite imagery, and street maps) to find shared characteristics. A (novel) neural network-based framework is trained with imagery from the largest 1692 cities in the world and the resulting models are used to compare within-city locations from Melbourne and Sydney to determine the closest connections between these areas and their international comparators. This work demonstrates a new, consistent, and objective method to begin to understand the relationship between cities and their health, transport, and environmental consequences of their design. The results show specific advantages and disadvantages using each type of imagery. Neural networks trained with map imagery will be highly influenced by the mix of roads, public transport, and green and blue space as well as the structure of these elements. The colours of natural and built features stand out as dominant characteristics in satellite imagery. The use of street view imagery will emphasise the features of a human scaled visual geography of streetscapes. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this research also answers the age-old question, ``Is there really a `Paris-end' to your city?''.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 8, 2019

TopViewRS: Vision-Language Models as Top-View Spatial Reasoners

Top-view perspective denotes a typical way in which humans read and reason over different types of maps, and it is vital for localization and navigation of humans as well as of `non-human' agents, such as the ones backed by large Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Nonetheless, spatial reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs remain unattested and underexplored. In this work, we thus study their capability to understand and reason over spatial relations from the top view. The focus on top view also enables controlled evaluations at different granularity of spatial reasoning; we clearly disentangle different abilities (e.g., recognizing particular objects versus understanding their relative positions). We introduce the TopViewRS (Top-View Reasoning in Space) dataset, consisting of 11,384 multiple-choice questions with either realistic or semantic top-view map as visual input. We then use it to study and evaluate VLMs across 4 perception and reasoning tasks with different levels of complexity. Evaluation of 10 representative open- and closed-source VLMs reveals the gap of more than 50% compared to average human performance, and it is even lower than the random baseline in some cases. Although additional experiments show that Chain-of-Thought reasoning can boost model capabilities by 5.82% on average, the overall performance of VLMs remains limited. Our findings underscore the critical need for enhanced model capability in top-view spatial reasoning and set a foundation for further research towards human-level proficiency of VLMs in real-world multimodal tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 4, 2024

Intensive Vision-guided Network for Radiology Report Generation

Automatic radiology report generation is booming due to its huge application potential for the healthcare industry. However, existing computer vision and natural language processing approaches to tackle this problem are limited in two aspects. First, when extracting image features, most of them neglect multi-view reasoning in vision and model single-view structure of medical images, such as space-view or channel-view. However, clinicians rely on multi-view imaging information for comprehensive judgment in daily clinical diagnosis. Second, when generating reports, they overlook context reasoning with multi-modal information and focus on pure textual optimization utilizing retrieval-based methods. We aim to address these two issues by proposing a model that better simulates clinicians' perspectives and generates more accurate reports. Given the above limitation in feature extraction, we propose a Globally-intensive Attention (GIA) module in the medical image encoder to simulate and integrate multi-view vision perception. GIA aims to learn three types of vision perception: depth view, space view, and pixel view. On the other hand, to address the above problem in report generation, we explore how to involve multi-modal signals to generate precisely matched reports, i.e., how to integrate previously predicted words with region-aware visual content in next word prediction. Specifically, we design a Visual Knowledge-guided Decoder (VKGD), which can adaptively consider how much the model needs to rely on visual information and previously predicted text to assist next word prediction. Hence, our final Intensive Vision-guided Network (IVGN) framework includes a GIA-guided Visual Encoder and the VKGD. Experiments on two commonly-used datasets IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR demonstrate the superior ability of our method compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 6, 2024

Synthesizing Consistent Novel Views via 3D Epipolar Attention without Re-Training

Large diffusion models demonstrate remarkable zero-shot capabilities in novel view synthesis from a single image. However, these models often face challenges in maintaining consistency across novel and reference views. A crucial factor leading to this issue is the limited utilization of contextual information from reference views. Specifically, when there is an overlap in the viewing frustum between two views, it is essential to ensure that the corresponding regions maintain consistency in both geometry and appearance. This observation leads to a simple yet effective approach, where we propose to use epipolar geometry to locate and retrieve overlapping information from the input view. This information is then incorporated into the generation of target views, eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning, as the process requires no learnable parameters. Furthermore, to enhance the overall consistency of generated views, we extend the utilization of epipolar attention to a multi-view setting, allowing retrieval of overlapping information from the input view and other target views. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in significantly improving the consistency of synthesized views without the need for any fine-tuning. Moreover, This enhancement also boosts the performance of downstream applications such as 3D reconstruction. The code is available at https://github.com/botaoye/ConsisSyn.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 25, 2025

University-1652: A Multi-view Multi-source Benchmark for Drone-based Geo-localization

We consider the problem of cross-view geo-localization. The primary challenge of this task is to learn the robust feature against large viewpoint changes. Existing benchmarks can help, but are limited in the number of viewpoints. Image pairs, containing two viewpoints, e.g., satellite and ground, are usually provided, which may compromise the feature learning. Besides phone cameras and satellites, in this paper, we argue that drones could serve as the third platform to deal with the geo-localization problem. In contrast to the traditional ground-view images, drone-view images meet fewer obstacles, e.g., trees, and could provide a comprehensive view when flying around the target place. To verify the effectiveness of the drone platform, we introduce a new multi-view multi-source benchmark for drone-based geo-localization, named University-1652. University-1652 contains data from three platforms, i.e., synthetic drones, satellites and ground cameras of 1,652 university buildings around the world. To our knowledge, University-1652 is the first drone-based geo-localization dataset and enables two new tasks, i.e., drone-view target localization and drone navigation. As the name implies, drone-view target localization intends to predict the location of the target place via drone-view images. On the other hand, given a satellite-view query image, drone navigation is to drive the drone to the area of interest in the query. We use this dataset to analyze a variety of off-the-shelf CNN features and propose a strong CNN baseline on this challenging dataset. The experiments show that University-1652 helps the model to learn the viewpoint-invariant features and also has good generalization ability in the real-world scenario.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 27, 2020

Delving into the Devils of Bird's-eye-view Perception: A Review, Evaluation and Recipe

Learning powerful representations in bird's-eye-view (BEV) for perception tasks is trending and drawing extensive attention both from industry and academia. Conventional approaches for most autonomous driving algorithms perform detection, segmentation, tracking, etc., in a front or perspective view. As sensor configurations get more complex, integrating multi-source information from different sensors and representing features in a unified view come of vital importance. BEV perception inherits several advantages, as representing surrounding scenes in BEV is intuitive and fusion-friendly; and representing objects in BEV is most desirable for subsequent modules as in planning and/or control. The core problems for BEV perception lie in (a) how to reconstruct the lost 3D information via view transformation from perspective view to BEV; (b) how to acquire ground truth annotations in BEV grid; (c) how to formulate the pipeline to incorporate features from different sources and views; and (d) how to adapt and generalize algorithms as sensor configurations vary across different scenarios. In this survey, we review the most recent works on BEV perception and provide an in-depth analysis of different solutions. Moreover, several systematic designs of BEV approach from the industry are depicted as well. Furthermore, we introduce a full suite of practical guidebook to improve the performance of BEV perception tasks, including camera, LiDAR and fusion inputs. At last, we point out the future research directions in this area. We hope this report will shed some light on the community and encourage more research effort on BEV perception. We keep an active repository to collect the most recent work and provide a toolbox for bag of tricks at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/Birds-eye-view-Perception

  • 22 authors
·
Sep 12, 2022

FrustumFormer: Adaptive Instance-aware Resampling for Multi-view 3D Detection

The transformation of features from 2D perspective space to 3D space is essential to multi-view 3D object detection. Recent approaches mainly focus on the design of view transformation, either pixel-wisely lifting perspective view features into 3D space with estimated depth or grid-wisely constructing BEV features via 3D projection, treating all pixels or grids equally. However, choosing what to transform is also important but has rarely been discussed before. The pixels of a moving car are more informative than the pixels of the sky. To fully utilize the information contained in images, the view transformation should be able to adapt to different image regions according to their contents. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named FrustumFormer, which pays more attention to the features in instance regions via adaptive instance-aware resampling. Specifically, the model obtains instance frustums on the bird's eye view by leveraging image view object proposals. An adaptive occupancy mask within the instance frustum is learned to refine the instance location. Moreover, the temporal frustum intersection could further reduce the localization uncertainty of objects. Comprehensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of FrustumFormer, and we achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark. Codes and models will be made available at https://github.com/Robertwyq/Frustum.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 10, 2023

TopoPerception: A Shortcut-Free Evaluation of Global Visual Perception in Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically align visual features from an encoder with a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM). However, this makes the visual perception module a bottleneck, which constrains the overall capabilities of LVLMs. Conventional evaluation benchmarks, while rich in visual semantics, often contain unavoidable local shortcuts that can lead to an overestimation of models' perceptual abilities. Here, we introduce TopoPerception, a benchmark that leverages topological properties to rigorously evaluate the global visual perception capabilities of LVLMs across various granularities. Since topology depends on the global structure of an image and is invariant to local features, TopoPerception enables a shortcut-free assessment of global perception, fundamentally distinguishing it from semantically rich tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art models on TopoPerception and find that even at the coarsest perceptual granularity, all models perform no better than random chance, indicating a profound inability to perceive global visual features. Notably, a consistent trend emerge within model families: more powerful models with stronger reasoning capabilities exhibit lower accuracy. This suggests that merely scaling up models is insufficient to address this deficit and may even exacerbate it. Progress may require new training paradigms or architectures. TopoPerception not only exposes a critical bottleneck in current LVLMs but also offers a lens and direction for improving their global visual perception. The data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/Wenhao-Zhou/TopoPerception.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 14, 2025 2

Temporal Enhanced Training of Multi-view 3D Object Detector via Historical Object Prediction

In this paper, we propose a new paradigm, named Historical Object Prediction (HoP) for multi-view 3D detection to leverage temporal information more effectively. The HoP approach is straightforward: given the current timestamp t, we generate a pseudo Bird's-Eye View (BEV) feature of timestamp t-k from its adjacent frames and utilize this feature to predict the object set at timestamp t-k. Our approach is motivated by the observation that enforcing the detector to capture both the spatial location and temporal motion of objects occurring at historical timestamps can lead to more accurate BEV feature learning. First, we elaborately design short-term and long-term temporal decoders, which can generate the pseudo BEV feature for timestamp t-k without the involvement of its corresponding camera images. Second, an additional object decoder is flexibly attached to predict the object targets using the generated pseudo BEV feature. Note that we only perform HoP during training, thus the proposed method does not introduce extra overheads during inference. As a plug-and-play approach, HoP can be easily incorporated into state-of-the-art BEV detection frameworks, including BEVFormer and BEVDet series. Furthermore, the auxiliary HoP approach is complementary to prevalent temporal modeling methods, leading to significant performance gains. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed HoP on the nuScenes dataset. We choose the representative methods, including BEVFormer and BEVDet4D-Depth to evaluate our method. Surprisingly, HoP achieves 68.5% NDS and 62.4% mAP with ViT-L on nuScenes test, outperforming all the 3D object detectors on the leaderboard. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Sense-X/HoP.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 3, 2023

OverLoCK: An Overview-first-Look-Closely-next ConvNet with Context-Mixing Dynamic Kernels

Top-down attention plays a crucial role in the human vision system, wherein the brain initially obtains a rough overview of a scene to discover salient cues (i.e., overview first), followed by a more careful finer-grained examination (i.e., look closely next). However, modern ConvNets remain confined to a pyramid structure that successively downsamples the feature map for receptive field expansion, neglecting this crucial biomimetic principle. We present OverLoCK, the first pure ConvNet backbone architecture that explicitly incorporates a top-down attention mechanism. Unlike pyramid backbone networks, our design features a branched architecture with three synergistic sub-networks: 1) a Base-Net that encodes low/mid-level features; 2) a lightweight Overview-Net that generates dynamic top-down attention through coarse global context modeling (i.e., overview first); and 3) a robust Focus-Net that performs finer-grained perception guided by top-down attention (i.e., look closely next). To fully unleash the power of top-down attention, we further propose a novel context-mixing dynamic convolution (ContMix) that effectively models long-range dependencies while preserving inherent local inductive biases even when the input resolution increases, addressing critical limitations in existing convolutions. Our OverLoCK exhibits a notable performance improvement over existing methods. For instance, OverLoCK-T achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 84.2%, significantly surpassing ConvNeXt-B while using only around one-third of the FLOPs/parameters. On object detection, our OverLoCK-S clearly surpasses MogaNet-B by 1% in AP^b. On semantic segmentation, our OverLoCK-T remarkably improves UniRepLKNet-T by 1.7% in mIoU. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LMMMEng/OverLoCK.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 27, 2025

From an Image to a Scene: Learning to Imagine the World from a Million 360 Videos

Three-dimensional (3D) understanding of objects and scenes play a key role in humans' ability to interact with the world and has been an active area of research in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Large scale synthetic and object-centric 3D datasets have shown to be effective in training models that have 3D understanding of objects. However, applying a similar approach to real-world objects and scenes is difficult due to a lack of large-scale data. Videos are a potential source for real-world 3D data, but finding diverse yet corresponding views of the same content has shown to be difficult at scale. Furthermore, standard videos come with fixed viewpoints, determined at the time of capture. This restricts the ability to access scenes from a variety of more diverse and potentially useful perspectives. We argue that large scale 360 videos can address these limitations to provide: scalable corresponding frames from diverse views. In this paper, we introduce 360-1M, a 360 video dataset, and a process for efficiently finding corresponding frames from diverse viewpoints at scale. We train our diffusion-based model, Odin, on 360-1M. Empowered by the largest real-world, multi-view dataset to date, Odin is able to freely generate novel views of real-world scenes. Unlike previous methods, Odin can move the camera through the environment, enabling the model to infer the geometry and layout of the scene. Additionally, we show improved performance on standard novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction benchmarks.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 10, 2024

Drag View: Generalizable Novel View Synthesis with Unposed Imagery

We introduce DragView, a novel and interactive framework for generating novel views of unseen scenes. DragView initializes the new view from a single source image, and the rendering is supported by a sparse set of unposed multi-view images, all seamlessly executed within a single feed-forward pass. Our approach begins with users dragging a source view through a local relative coordinate system. Pixel-aligned features are obtained by projecting the sampled 3D points along the target ray onto the source view. We then incorporate a view-dependent modulation layer to effectively handle occlusion during the projection. Additionally, we broaden the epipolar attention mechanism to encompass all source pixels, facilitating the aggregation of initialized coordinate-aligned point features from other unposed views. Finally, we employ another transformer to decode ray features into final pixel intensities. Crucially, our framework does not rely on either 2D prior models or the explicit estimation of camera poses. During testing, DragView showcases the capability to generalize to new scenes unseen during training, also utilizing only unposed support images, enabling the generation of photo-realistic new views characterized by flexible camera trajectories. In our experiments, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of the performance of DragView with recent scene representation networks operating under pose-free conditions, as well as with generalizable NeRFs subject to noisy test camera poses. DragView consistently demonstrates its superior performance in view synthesis quality, while also being more user-friendly. Project page: https://zhiwenfan.github.io/DragView/.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 5, 2023 1

Map It Anywhere (MIA): Empowering Bird's Eye View Mapping using Large-scale Public Data

Top-down Bird's Eye View (BEV) maps are a popular representation for ground robot navigation due to their richness and flexibility for downstream tasks. While recent methods have shown promise for predicting BEV maps from First-Person View (FPV) images, their generalizability is limited to small regions captured by current autonomous vehicle-based datasets. In this context, we show that a more scalable approach towards generalizable map prediction can be enabled by using two large-scale crowd-sourced mapping platforms, Mapillary for FPV images and OpenStreetMap for BEV semantic maps. We introduce Map It Anywhere (MIA), a data engine that enables seamless curation and modeling of labeled map prediction data from existing open-source map platforms. Using our MIA data engine, we display the ease of automatically collecting a dataset of 1.2 million pairs of FPV images & BEV maps encompassing diverse geographies, landscapes, environmental factors, camera models & capture scenarios. We further train a simple camera model-agnostic model on this data for BEV map prediction. Extensive evaluations using established benchmarks and our dataset show that the data curated by MIA enables effective pretraining for generalizable BEV map prediction, with zero-shot performance far exceeding baselines trained on existing datasets by 35%. Our analysis highlights the promise of using large-scale public maps for developing & testing generalizable BEV perception, paving the way for more robust autonomous navigation.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024 4

AirShot: Efficient Few-Shot Detection for Autonomous Exploration

Few-shot object detection has drawn increasing attention in the field of robotic exploration, where robots are required to find unseen objects with a few online provided examples. Despite recent efforts have been made to yield online processing capabilities, slow inference speeds of low-powered robots fail to meet the demands of real-time detection-making them impractical for autonomous exploration. Existing methods still face performance and efficiency challenges, mainly due to unreliable features and exhaustive class loops. In this work, we propose a new paradigm AirShot, and discover that, by fully exploiting the valuable correlation map, AirShot can result in a more robust and faster few-shot object detection system, which is more applicable to robotics community. The core module Top Prediction Filter (TPF) can operate on multi-scale correlation maps in both the training and inference stages. During training, TPF supervises the generation of a more representative correlation map, while during inference, it reduces looping iterations by selecting top-ranked classes, thus cutting down on computational costs with better performance. Surprisingly, this dual functionality exhibits general effectiveness and efficiency on various off-the-shelf models. Exhaustive experiments on COCO2017, VOC2014, and SubT datasets demonstrate that TPF can significantly boost the efficacy and efficiency of most off-the-shelf models, achieving up to 36.4% precision improvements along with 56.3% faster inference speed. Code and Data are at: https://github.com/ImNotPrepared/AirShot.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 7, 2024

Multi-View Active Fine-Grained Recognition

As fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) being developed for decades, great works related have exposed a key direction -- finding discriminative local regions and revealing subtle differences. However, unlike identifying visual contents within static images, for recognizing objects in the real physical world, discriminative information is not only present within seen local regions but also hides in other unseen perspectives. In other words, in addition to focusing on the distinguishable part from the whole, for efficient and accurate recognition, it is required to infer the key perspective with a few glances, e.g., people may recognize a "Benz AMG GT" with a glance of its front and then know that taking a look at its exhaust pipe can help to tell which year's model it is. In this paper, back to reality, we put forward the problem of active fine-grained recognition (AFGR) and complete this study in three steps: (i) a hierarchical, multi-view, fine-grained vehicle dataset is collected as the testbed, (ii) a simple experiment is designed to verify that different perspectives contribute differently for FGVC and different categories own different discriminative perspective, (iii) a policy-gradient-based framework is adopted to achieve efficient recognition with active view selection. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method delivers a better performance-efficient trade-off than previous FGVC methods and advanced neural networks.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 2, 2022

Focus on Neighbors and Know the Whole: Towards Consistent Dense Multiview Text-to-Image Generator for 3D Creation

Generating dense multiview images from text prompts is crucial for creating high-fidelity 3D assets. Nevertheless, existing methods struggle with space-view correspondences, resulting in sparse and low-quality outputs. In this paper, we introduce CoSER, a novel consistent dense Multiview Text-to-Image Generator for Text-to-3D, achieving both efficiency and quality by meticulously learning neighbor-view coherence and further alleviating ambiguity through the swift traversal of all views. For achieving neighbor-view consistency, each viewpoint densely interacts with adjacent viewpoints to perceive the global spatial structure, and aggregates information along motion paths explicitly defined by physical principles to refine details. To further enhance cross-view consistency and alleviate content drift, CoSER rapidly scan all views in spiral bidirectional manner to aware holistic information and then scores each point based on semantic material. Subsequently, we conduct weighted down-sampling along the spatial dimension based on scores, thereby facilitating prominent information fusion across all views with lightweight computation. Technically, the core module is built by integrating the attention mechanism with a selective state space model, exploiting the robust learning capabilities of the former and the low overhead of the latter. Extensive evaluation shows that CoSER is capable of producing dense, high-fidelity, content-consistent multiview images that can be flexibly integrated into various 3D generation models.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 23, 2024

VSFormer: Mining Correlations in Flexible View Set for Multi-view 3D Shape Understanding

View-based methods have demonstrated promising performance in 3D shape understanding. However, they tend to make strong assumptions about the relations between views or learn the multi-view correlations indirectly, which limits the flexibility of exploring inter-view correlations and the effectiveness of target tasks. To overcome the above problems, this paper investigates flexible organization and explicit correlation learning for multiple views. In particular, we propose to incorporate different views of a 3D shape into a permutation-invariant set, referred to as View Set, which removes rigid relation assumptions and facilitates adequate information exchange and fusion among views. Based on that, we devise a nimble Transformer model, named VSFormer, to explicitly capture pairwise and higher-order correlations of all elements in the set. Meanwhile, we theoretically reveal a natural correspondence between the Cartesian product of a view set and the correlation matrix in the attention mechanism, which supports our model design. Comprehensive experiments suggest that VSFormer has better flexibility, efficient inference efficiency and superior performance. Notably, VSFormer reaches state-of-the-art results on various 3d recognition datasets, including ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN and RGBD. It also establishes new records on the SHREC'17 retrieval benchmark. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/auniquesun/VSFormer.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 13, 2024

Rethinking Amodal Video Segmentation from Learning Supervised Signals with Object-centric Representation

Video amodal segmentation is a particularly challenging task in computer vision, which requires to deduce the full shape of an object from the visible parts of it. Recently, some studies have achieved promising performance by using motion flow to integrate information across frames under a self-supervised setting. However, motion flow has a clear limitation by the two factors of moving cameras and object deformation. This paper presents a rethinking to previous works. We particularly leverage the supervised signals with object-centric representation in real-world scenarios. The underlying idea is the supervision signal of the specific object and the features from different views can mutually benefit the deduction of the full mask in any specific frame. We thus propose an Efficient object-centric Representation amodal Segmentation (EoRaS). Specially, beyond solely relying on supervision signals, we design a translation module to project image features into the Bird's-Eye View (BEV), which introduces 3D information to improve current feature quality. Furthermore, we propose a multi-view fusion layer based temporal module which is equipped with a set of object slots and interacts with features from different views by attention mechanism to fulfill sufficient object representation completion. As a result, the full mask of the object can be decoded from image features updated by object slots. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be released at https://github.com/kfan21/EoRaS.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 23, 2023

Yes, we CANN: Constrained Approximate Nearest Neighbors for local feature-based visual localization

Large-scale visual localization systems continue to rely on 3D point clouds built from image collections using structure-from-motion. While the 3D points in these models are represented using local image features, directly matching a query image's local features against the point cloud is challenging due to the scale of the nearest-neighbor search problem. Many recent approaches to visual localization have thus proposed a hybrid method, where first a global (per image) embedding is used to retrieve a small subset of database images, and local features of the query are matched only against those. It seems to have become common belief that global embeddings are critical for said image-retrieval in visual localization, despite the significant downside of having to compute two feature types for each query image. In this paper, we take a step back from this assumption and propose Constrained Approximate Nearest Neighbors (CANN), a joint solution of k-nearest-neighbors across both the geometry and appearance space using only local features. We first derive the theoretical foundation for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval across multiple metrics and then showcase how CANN improves visual localization. Our experiments on public localization benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art global feature-based retrieval and approaches using local feature aggregation schemes. Moreover, it is an order of magnitude faster in both index and query time than feature aggregation schemes for these datasets. Code will be released.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 15, 2023

Splat and Distill: Augmenting Teachers with Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction For 3D-Aware Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have achieved remarkable success when applied to various downstream 2D tasks. Despite their effectiveness, they often exhibit a critical lack of 3D awareness. To this end, we introduce Splat and Distill, a framework that instills robust 3D awareness into 2D VFMs by augmenting the teacher model with a fast, feed-forward 3D reconstruction pipeline. Given 2D features produced by a teacher model, our method first lifts these features into an explicit 3D Gaussian representation, in a feedforward manner. These 3D features are then ``splatted" onto novel viewpoints, producing a set of novel 2D feature maps used to supervise the student model, ``distilling" geometrically grounded knowledge. By replacing slow per-scene optimization of prior work with our feed-forward lifting approach, our framework avoids feature-averaging artifacts, creating a dynamic learning process where the teacher's consistency improves alongside that of the student. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on a suite of downstream tasks, including monocular depth estimation, surface normal estimation, multi-view correspondence, and semantic segmentation. Our method significantly outperforms prior works, not only achieving substantial gains in 3D awareness but also enhancing the underlying semantic richness of 2D features. Project page is available at https://davidshavin4.github.io/Splat-and-Distill/

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 5

TopoStreamer: Temporal Lane Segment Topology Reasoning in Autonomous Driving

Lane segment topology reasoning constructs a comprehensive road network by capturing the topological relationships between lane segments and their semantic types. This enables end-to-end autonomous driving systems to perform road-dependent maneuvers such as turning and lane changing. However, the limitations in consistent positional embedding and temporal multiple attribute learning in existing methods hinder accurate roadnet reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose TopoStreamer, an end-to-end temporal perception model for lane segment topology reasoning. Specifically, TopoStreamer introduces three key improvements: streaming attribute constraints, dynamic lane boundary positional encoding, and lane segment denoising. The streaming attribute constraints enforce temporal consistency in both centerline and boundary coordinates, along with their classifications. Meanwhile, dynamic lane boundary positional encoding enhances the learning of up-to-date positional information within queries, while lane segment denoising helps capture diverse lane segment patterns, ultimately improving model performance. Additionally, we assess the accuracy of existing models using a lane boundary classification metric, which serves as a crucial measure for lane-changing scenarios in autonomous driving. On the OpenLane-V2 dataset, TopoStreamer demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving substantial performance gains of +3.0% mAP in lane segment perception and +1.7% OLS in centerline perception tasks.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025

BEVPlace: Learning LiDAR-based Place Recognition using Bird's Eye View Images

Place recognition is a key module for long-term SLAM systems. Current LiDAR-based place recognition methods usually use representations of point clouds such as unordered points or range images. These methods achieve high recall rates of retrieval, but their performance may degrade in the case of view variation or scene changes. In this work, we explore the potential of a different representation in place recognition, i.e. bird's eye view (BEV) images. We observe that the structural contents of BEV images are less influenced by rotations and translations of point clouds. We validate that, without any delicate design, a simple VGGNet trained on BEV images achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art place recognition methods in scenes of slight viewpoint changes. For more robust place recognition, we design a rotation-invariant network called BEVPlace. We use group convolution to extract rotation-equivariant local features from the images and NetVLAD for global feature aggregation. In addition, we observe that the distance between BEV features is correlated with the geometry distance of point clouds. Based on the observation, we develop a method to estimate the position of the query cloud, extending the usage of place recognition. The experiments conducted on large-scale public datasets show that our method 1) achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of recall rates, 2) is robust to view changes, 3) shows strong generalization ability, and 4) can estimate the positions of query point clouds. Source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zjuluolun/BEVPlace.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 28, 2023

Adaptive Fusion of Multi-view Remote Sensing data for Optimal Sub-field Crop Yield Prediction

Accurate crop yield prediction is of utmost importance for informed decision-making in agriculture, aiding farmers, and industry stakeholders. However, this task is complex and depends on multiple factors, such as environmental conditions, soil properties, and management practices. Combining heterogeneous data views poses a fusion challenge, like identifying the view-specific contribution to the predictive task. We present a novel multi-view learning approach to predict crop yield for different crops (soybean, wheat, rapeseed) and regions (Argentina, Uruguay, and Germany). Our multi-view input data includes multi-spectral optical images from Sentinel-2 satellites and weather data as dynamic features during the crop growing season, complemented by static features like soil properties and topographic information. To effectively fuse the data, we introduce a Multi-view Gated Fusion (MVGF) model, comprising dedicated view-encoders and a Gated Unit (GU) module. The view-encoders handle the heterogeneity of data sources with varying temporal resolutions by learning a view-specific representation. These representations are adaptively fused via a weighted sum. The fusion weights are computed for each sample by the GU using a concatenation of the view-representations. The MVGF model is trained at sub-field level with 10 m resolution pixels. Our evaluations show that the MVGF outperforms conventional models on the same task, achieving the best results by incorporating all the data sources, unlike the usual fusion results in the literature. For Argentina, the MVGF model achieves an R2 value of 0.68 at sub-field yield prediction, while at field level evaluation (comparing field averages), it reaches around 0.80 across different countries. The GU module learned different weights based on the country and crop-type, aligning with the variable significance of each data source to the prediction task.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 22, 2024

Graph-based Topology Reasoning for Driving Scenes

Understanding the road genome is essential to realize autonomous driving. This highly intelligent problem contains two aspects - the connection relationship of lanes, and the assignment relationship between lanes and traffic elements, where a comprehensive topology reasoning method is vacant. On one hand, previous map learning techniques struggle in deriving lane connectivity with segmentation or laneline paradigms; or prior lane topology-oriented approaches focus on centerline detection and neglect the interaction modeling. On the other hand, the traffic element to lane assignment problem is limited in the image domain, leaving how to construct the correspondence from two views an unexplored challenge. To address these issues, we present TopoNet, the first end-to-end framework capable of abstracting traffic knowledge beyond conventional perception tasks. To capture the driving scene topology, we introduce three key designs: (1) an embedding module to incorporate semantic knowledge from 2D elements into a unified feature space; (2) a curated scene graph neural network to model relationships and enable feature interaction inside the network; (3) instead of transmitting messages arbitrarily, a scene knowledge graph is devised to differentiate prior knowledge from various types of the road genome. We evaluate TopoNet on the challenging scene understanding benchmark, OpenLane-V2, where our approach outperforms all previous works by a great margin on all perceptual and topological metrics. The code is released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/TopoNet

OpenDriveLab OpenDriveLab
·
Apr 11, 2023

Fisheye Camera and Ultrasonic Sensor Fusion For Near-Field Obstacle Perception in Bird's-Eye-View

Accurate obstacle identification represents a fundamental challenge within the scope of near-field perception for autonomous driving. Conventionally, fisheye cameras are frequently employed for comprehensive surround-view perception, including rear-view obstacle localization. However, the performance of such cameras can significantly deteriorate in low-light conditions, during nighttime, or when subjected to intense sun glare. Conversely, cost-effective sensors like ultrasonic sensors remain largely unaffected under these conditions. Therefore, we present, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end multimodal fusion model tailored for efficient obstacle perception in a bird's-eye-view (BEV) perspective, utilizing fisheye cameras and ultrasonic sensors. Initially, ResNeXt-50 is employed as a set of unimodal encoders to extract features specific to each modality. Subsequently, the feature space associated with the visible spectrum undergoes transformation into BEV. The fusion of these two modalities is facilitated via concatenation. At the same time, the ultrasonic spectrum-based unimodal feature maps pass through content-aware dilated convolution, applied to mitigate the sensor misalignment between two sensors in the fused feature space. Finally, the fused features are utilized by a two-stage semantic occupancy decoder to generate grid-wise predictions for precise obstacle perception. We conduct a systematic investigation to determine the optimal strategy for multimodal fusion of both sensors. We provide insights into our dataset creation procedures, annotation guidelines, and perform a thorough data analysis to ensure adequate coverage of all scenarios. When applied to our dataset, the experimental results underscore the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed multimodal fusion approach.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 1, 2024

Beyond Image Borders: Learning Feature Extrapolation for Unbounded Image Composition

For improving image composition and aesthetic quality, most existing methods modulate the captured images by striking out redundant content near the image borders. However, such image cropping methods are limited in the range of image views. Some methods have been suggested to extrapolate the images and predict cropping boxes from the extrapolated image. Nonetheless, the synthesized extrapolated regions may be included in the cropped image, making the image composition result not real and potentially with degraded image quality. In this paper, we circumvent this issue by presenting a joint framework for both unbounded recommendation of camera view and image composition (i.e., UNIC). In this way, the cropped image is a sub-image of the image acquired by the predicted camera view, and thus can be guaranteed to be real and consistent in image quality. Specifically, our framework takes the current camera preview frame as input and provides a recommendation for view adjustment, which contains operations unlimited by the image borders, such as zooming in or out and camera movement. To improve the prediction accuracy of view adjustment prediction, we further extend the field of view by feature extrapolation. After one or several times of view adjustments, our method converges and results in both a camera view and a bounding box showing the image composition recommendation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the datasets constructed upon existing image cropping datasets, showing the effectiveness of our UNIC in unbounded recommendation of camera view and image composition. The source code, dataset, and pretrained models is available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/UNIC.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 21, 2023

Simple-BEV: What Really Matters for Multi-Sensor BEV Perception?

Building 3D perception systems for autonomous vehicles that do not rely on high-density LiDAR is a critical research problem because of the expense of LiDAR systems compared to cameras and other sensors. Recent research has developed a variety of camera-only methods, where features are differentiably "lifted" from the multi-camera images onto the 2D ground plane, yielding a "bird's eye view" (BEV) feature representation of the 3D space around the vehicle. This line of work has produced a variety of novel "lifting" methods, but we observe that other details in the training setups have shifted at the same time, making it unclear what really matters in top-performing methods. We also observe that using cameras alone is not a real-world constraint, considering that additional sensors like radar have been integrated into real vehicles for years already. In this paper, we first of all attempt to elucidate the high-impact factors in the design and training protocol of BEV perception models. We find that batch size and input resolution greatly affect performance, while lifting strategies have a more modest effect -- even a simple parameter-free lifter works well. Second, we demonstrate that radar data can provide a substantial boost to performance, helping to close the gap between camera-only and LiDAR-enabled systems. We analyze the radar usage details that lead to good performance, and invite the community to re-consider this commonly-neglected part of the sensor platform.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 16, 2022

Learning to Aggregate Multi-Scale Context for Instance Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images

The task of instance segmentation in remote sensing images, aiming at performing per-pixel labeling of objects at instance level, is of great importance for various civil applications. Despite previous successes, most existing instance segmentation methods designed for natural images encounter sharp performance degradations when they are directly applied to top-view remote sensing images. Through careful analysis, we observe that the challenges mainly come from the lack of discriminative object features due to severe scale variations, low contrasts, and clustered distributions. In order to address these problems, a novel context aggregation network (CATNet) is proposed to improve the feature extraction process. The proposed model exploits three lightweight plug-and-play modules, namely dense feature pyramid network (DenseFPN), spatial context pyramid (SCP), and hierarchical region of interest extractor (HRoIE), to aggregate global visual context at feature, spatial, and instance domains, respectively. DenseFPN is a multi-scale feature propagation module that establishes more flexible information flows by adopting inter-level residual connections, cross-level dense connections, and feature re-weighting strategy. Leveraging the attention mechanism, SCP further augments the features by aggregating global spatial context into local regions. For each instance, HRoIE adaptively generates RoI features for different downstream tasks. Extensive evaluations of the proposed scheme on iSAID, DIOR, NWPU VHR-10, and HRSID datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-arts under similar computational costs. Source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/yeliudev/CATNet.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 22, 2021

DrivingDiffusion: Layout-Guided multi-view driving scene video generation with latent diffusion model

With the increasing popularity of autonomous driving based on the powerful and unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation, a demand for high-quality and large-scale multi-view video data with accurate annotation is urgently required. However, such large-scale multi-view data is hard to obtain due to expensive collection and annotation costs. To alleviate the problem, we propose a spatial-temporal consistent diffusion framework DrivingDiffusion, to generate realistic multi-view videos controlled by 3D layout. There are three challenges when synthesizing multi-view videos given a 3D layout: How to keep 1) cross-view consistency and 2) cross-frame consistency? 3) How to guarantee the quality of the generated instances? Our DrivingDiffusion solves the problem by cascading the multi-view single-frame image generation step, the single-view video generation step shared by multiple cameras, and post-processing that can handle long video generation. In the multi-view model, the consistency of multi-view images is ensured by information exchange between adjacent cameras. In the temporal model, we mainly query the information that needs attention in subsequent frame generation from the multi-view images of the first frame. We also introduce the local prompt to effectively improve the quality of generated instances. In post-processing, we further enhance the cross-view consistency of subsequent frames and extend the video length by employing temporal sliding window algorithm. Without any extra cost, our model can generate large-scale realistic multi-camera driving videos in complex urban scenes, fueling the downstream driving tasks. The code will be made publicly available.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 11, 2023

Optimizing Feature Set for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-through prediction (CTR) models transform features into latent vectors and enumerate possible feature interactions to improve performance based on the input feature set. Therefore, when selecting an optimal feature set, we should consider the influence of both feature and its interaction. However, most previous works focus on either feature field selection or only select feature interaction based on the fixed feature set to produce the feature set. The former restricts search space to the feature field, which is too coarse to determine subtle features. They also do not filter useless feature interactions, leading to higher computation costs and degraded model performance. The latter identifies useful feature interaction from all available features, resulting in many redundant features in the feature set. In this paper, we propose a novel method named OptFS to address these problems. To unify the selection of feature and its interaction, we decompose the selection of each feature interaction into the selection of two correlated features. Such a decomposition makes the model end-to-end trainable given various feature interaction operations. By adopting feature-level search space, we set a learnable gate to determine whether each feature should be within the feature set. Because of the large-scale search space, we develop a learning-by-continuation training scheme to learn such gates. Hence, OptFS generates the feature set only containing features which improve the final prediction results. Experimentally, we evaluate OptFS on three public datasets, demonstrating OptFS can optimize feature sets which enhance the model performance and further reduce both the storage and computational cost.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 25, 2023

Parametric Depth Based Feature Representation Learning for Object Detection and Segmentation in Bird's Eye View

Recent vision-only perception models for autonomous driving achieved promising results by encoding multi-view image features into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space. A critical step and the main bottleneck of these methods is transforming image features into the BEV coordinate frame. This paper focuses on leveraging geometry information, such as depth, to model such feature transformation. Existing works rely on non-parametric depth distribution modeling leading to significant memory consumption, or ignore the geometry information to address this problem. In contrast, we propose to use parametric depth distribution modeling for feature transformation. We first lift the 2D image features to the 3D space defined for the ego vehicle via a predicted parametric depth distribution for each pixel in each view. Then, we aggregate the 3D feature volume based on the 3D space occupancy derived from depth to the BEV frame. Finally, we use the transformed features for downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Existing semantic segmentation methods do also suffer from an hallucination problem as they do not take visibility information into account. This hallucination can be particularly problematic for subsequent modules such as control and planning. To mitigate the issue, our method provides depth uncertainty and reliable visibility-aware estimations. We further leverage our parametric depth modeling to present a novel visibility-aware evaluation metric that, when taken into account, can mitigate the hallucination problem. Extensive experiments on object detection and semantic segmentation on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods on both tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 9, 2023

MultiSensor-Home: A Wide-area Multi-modal Multi-view Dataset for Action Recognition and Transformer-based Sensor Fusion

Multi-modal multi-view action recognition is a rapidly growing field in computer vision, offering significant potential for applications in surveillance. However, current datasets often fail to address real-world challenges such as wide-area distributed settings, asynchronous data streams, and the lack of frame-level annotations. Furthermore, existing methods face difficulties in effectively modeling inter-view relationships and enhancing spatial feature learning. In this paper, we introduce the MultiSensor-Home dataset, a novel benchmark designed for comprehensive action recognition in home environments, and also propose the Multi-modal Multi-view Transformer-based Sensor Fusion (MultiTSF) method. The proposed MultiSensor-Home dataset features untrimmed videos captured by distributed sensors, providing high-resolution RGB and audio data along with detailed multi-view frame-level action labels. The proposed MultiTSF method leverages a Transformer-based fusion mechanism to dynamically model inter-view relationships. Furthermore, the proposed method integrates a human detection module to enhance spatial feature learning, guiding the model to prioritize frames with human activity to enhance action the recognition accuracy. Experiments on the proposed MultiSensor-Home and the existing MM-Office datasets demonstrate the superiority of MultiTSF over the state-of-the-art methods. Quantitative and qualitative results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed method in advancing real-world multi-modal multi-view action recognition. The source code is available at https://github.com/thanhhff/MultiTSF.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 3, 2025

Rethinking Multi-view Representation Learning via Distilled Disentangling

Multi-view representation learning aims to derive robust representations that are both view-consistent and view-specific from diverse data sources. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of existing approaches in this domain, highlighting a commonly overlooked aspect: the redundancy between view-consistent and view-specific representations. To this end, we propose an innovative framework for multi-view representation learning, which incorporates a technique we term 'distilled disentangling'. Our method introduces the concept of masked cross-view prediction, enabling the extraction of compact, high-quality view-consistent representations from various sources without incurring extra computational overhead. Additionally, we develop a distilled disentangling module that efficiently filters out consistency-related information from multi-view representations, resulting in purer view-specific representations. This approach significantly reduces redundancy between view-consistent and view-specific representations, enhancing the overall efficiency of the learning process. Our empirical evaluations reveal that higher mask ratios substantially improve the quality of view-consistent representations. Moreover, we find that reducing the dimensionality of view-consistent representations relative to that of view-specific representations further refines the quality of the combined representations. Our code is accessible at: https://github.com/Guanzhou-Ke/MRDD.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 16, 2024

BLOS-BEV: Navigation Map Enhanced Lane Segmentation Network, Beyond Line of Sight

Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation is crucial for the perception function in autonomous driving tasks. It is difficult to balance the accuracy, efficiency and range of BEV representation. The existing works are restricted to a limited perception range within 50 meters. Extending the BEV representation range can greatly benefit downstream tasks such as topology reasoning, scene understanding, and planning by offering more comprehensive information and reaction time. The Standard-Definition (SD) navigation maps can provide a lightweight representation of road structure topology, characterized by ease of acquisition and low maintenance costs. An intuitive idea is to combine the close-range visual information from onboard cameras with the beyond line-of-sight (BLOS) environmental priors from SD maps to realize expanded perceptual capabilities. In this paper, we propose BLOS-BEV, a novel BEV segmentation model that incorporates SD maps for accurate beyond line-of-sight perception, up to 200m. Our approach is applicable to common BEV architectures and can achieve excellent results by incorporating information derived from SD maps. We explore various feature fusion schemes to effectively integrate the visual BEV representations and semantic features from the SD map, aiming to leverage the complementary information from both sources optimally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in BEV segmentation on nuScenes and Argoverse benchmark. Through multi-modal inputs, BEV segmentation is significantly enhanced at close ranges below 50m, while also demonstrating superior performance in long-range scenarios, surpassing other methods by over 20% mIoU at distances ranging from 50-200m.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024

NEV-NCD: Negative Learning, Entropy, and Variance regularization based novel action categories discovery

Novel Categories Discovery (NCD) facilitates learning from a partially annotated label space and enables deep learning (DL) models to operate in an open-world setting by identifying and differentiating instances of novel classes based on the labeled data notions. One of the primary assumptions of NCD is that the novel label space is perfectly disjoint and can be equipartitioned, but it is rarely realized by most NCD approaches in practice. To better align with this assumption, we propose a novel single-stage joint optimization-based NCD method, Negative learning, Entropy, and Variance regularization NCD (NEV-NCD). We demonstrate the efficacy of NEV-NCD in previously unexplored NCD applications of video action recognition (VAR) with the public UCF101 dataset and a curated in-house partial action-space annotated multi-view video dataset. We perform a thorough ablation study by varying the composition of final joint loss and associated hyper-parameters. During our experiments with UCF101 and multi-view action dataset, NEV-NCD achieves ~ 83% classification accuracy in test instances of labeled data. NEV-NCD achieves ~ 70% clustering accuracy over unlabeled data outperforming both naive baselines (by ~ 40%) and state-of-the-art pseudo-labeling-based approaches (by ~ 3.5%) over both datasets. Further, we propose to incorporate optional view-invariant feature learning with the multiview dataset to identify novel categories from novel viewpoints. Our additional view-invariance constraint improves the discriminative accuracy for both known and unknown categories by ~ 10% for novel viewpoints.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 14, 2023

Omniview-Tuning: Boosting Viewpoint Invariance of Vision-Language Pre-training Models

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models like CLIP have achieved remarkable success in computer vision and particularly demonstrated superior robustness to distribution shifts of 2D images. However, their robustness under 3D viewpoint variations is still limited, which can hinder the development for real-world applications. This paper successfully addresses this concern while keeping VLPs' original performance by breaking through two primary obstacles: 1) the scarcity of training data and 2) the suboptimal fine-tuning paradigms. To combat data scarcity, we build the Multi-View Caption (MVCap) dataset -- a comprehensive collection of over four million multi-view image-text pairs across more than 100K objects, providing more potential for VLP models to develop generalizable viewpoint-invariant representations. To address the limitations of existing paradigms in performance trade-offs and training efficiency, we design a novel fine-tuning framework named Omniview-Tuning (OVT). Specifically, OVT introduces a Cross-Viewpoint Alignment objective through a minimax-like optimization strategy, which effectively aligns representations of identical objects from diverse viewpoints without causing overfitting. Additionally, OVT fine-tunes VLP models in a parameter-efficient manner, leading to minimal computational cost. Extensive experiments on various VLP models with different architectures validate that OVT significantly improves the models' resilience to viewpoint shifts and keeps the original performance, establishing a pioneering standard for boosting the viewpoint invariance of VLP models.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 18, 2024

UpFusion: Novel View Diffusion from Unposed Sparse View Observations

We propose UpFusion, a system that can perform novel view synthesis and infer 3D representations for an object given a sparse set of reference images without corresponding pose information. Current sparse-view 3D inference methods typically rely on camera poses to geometrically aggregate information from input views, but are not robust in-the-wild when such information is unavailable/inaccurate. In contrast, UpFusion sidesteps this requirement by learning to implicitly leverage the available images as context in a conditional generative model for synthesizing novel views. We incorporate two complementary forms of conditioning into diffusion models for leveraging the input views: a) via inferring query-view aligned features using a scene-level transformer, b) via intermediate attentional layers that can directly observe the input image tokens. We show that this mechanism allows generating high-fidelity novel views while improving the synthesis quality given additional (unposed) images. We evaluate our approach on the Co3Dv2 and Google Scanned Objects datasets and demonstrate the benefits of our method over pose-reliant sparse-view methods as well as single-view methods that cannot leverage additional views. Finally, we also show that our learned model can generalize beyond the training categories and even allow reconstruction from self-captured images of generic objects in-the-wild.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 11, 2023

Estimation of Appearance and Occupancy Information in Birds Eye View from Surround Monocular Images

Autonomous driving requires efficient reasoning about the location and appearance of the different agents in the scene, which aids in downstream tasks such as object detection, object tracking, and path planning. The past few years have witnessed a surge in approaches that combine the different taskbased modules of the classic self-driving stack into an End-toEnd(E2E) trainable learning system. These approaches replace perception, prediction, and sensor fusion modules with a single contiguous module with shared latent space embedding, from which one extracts a human-interpretable representation of the scene. One of the most popular representations is the Birds-eye View (BEV), which expresses the location of different traffic participants in the ego vehicle frame from a top-down view. However, a BEV does not capture the chromatic appearance information of the participants. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel representation that captures various traffic participants appearance and occupancy information from an array of monocular cameras covering 360 deg field of view (FOV). We use a learned image embedding of all camera images to generate a BEV of the scene at any instant that captures both appearance and occupancy of the scene, which can aid in downstream tasks such as object tracking and executing language-based commands. We test the efficacy of our approach on synthetic dataset generated from CARLA. The code, data set, and results can be found at https://rebrand.ly/APP OCC-results.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 8, 2022

Search is All You Need for Few-shot Anomaly Detection

Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) has emerged as a crucial yet challenging task in industrial inspection, where normal distribution modeling must be accomplished with only a few normal images. While existing approaches typically employ multi-modal foundation models combining language and vision modalities for prompt-guided anomaly detection, these methods often demand sophisticated prompt engineering and extensive manual tuning. In this paper, we demonstrate that a straightforward nearest-neighbor search framework can surpass state-of-the-art performance in both single-class and multi-class FSAD scenarios. Our proposed method, VisionAD, consists of four simple yet essential components: (1) scalable vision foundation models that extract universal and discriminative features; (2) dual augmentation strategies - support augmentation to enhance feature matching adaptability and query augmentation to address the oversights of single-view prediction; (3) multi-layer feature integration that captures both low-frequency global context and high-frequency local details with minimal computational overhead; and (4) a class-aware visual memory bank enabling efficient one-for-all multi-class detection. Extensive evaluations across MVTec-AD, VisA, and Real-IAD benchmarks demonstrate VisionAD's exceptional performance. Using only 1 normal images as support, our method achieves remarkable image-level AUROC scores of 97.4%, 94.8%, and 70.8% respectively, outperforming current state-of-the-art approaches by significant margins (+1.6%, +3.2%, and +1.4%). The training-free nature and superior few-shot capabilities of VisionAD make it particularly appealing for real-world applications where samples are scarce or expensive to obtain. Code is available at https://github.com/Qiqigeww/VisionAD.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 16, 2025

In the Search for Optimal Multi-view Learning Models for Crop Classification with Global Remote Sensing Data

Studying and analyzing cropland is a difficult task due to its dynamic and heterogeneous growth behavior. Usually, diverse data sources can be collected for its estimation. Although deep learning models have proven to excel in the crop classification task, they face substantial challenges when dealing with multiple inputs, named Multi-View Learning (MVL). The methods used in the MVL scenario can be structured based on the encoder architecture, the fusion strategy, and the optimization technique. The literature has primarily focused on using specific encoder architectures for local regions, lacking a deeper exploration of other components in the MVL methodology. In contrast, we investigate the simultaneous selection of the fusion strategy and encoder architecture, assessing global-scale cropland and crop-type classifications. We use a range of five fusion strategies (Input, Feature, Decision, Ensemble, Hybrid) and five temporal encoders (LSTM, GRU, TempCNN, TAE, L-TAE) as possible configurations in the MVL method. We use the CropHarvest dataset for validation, which provides optical, radar, weather time series, and topographic information as input data. We found that in scenarios with a limited number of labeled samples, a unique configuration is insufficient for all the cases. Instead, a specialized combination should be meticulously sought, including an encoder and fusion strategy. To streamline this search process, we suggest identifying the optimal encoder architecture tailored for a particular fusion strategy, and then determining the most suitable fusion strategy for the classification task. We provide a methodological framework for researchers exploring crop classification through an MVL methodology.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024 1

What Makes for Text to 360-degree Panorama Generation with Stable Diffusion?

Recent prosperity of text-to-image diffusion models, e.g. Stable Diffusion, has stimulated research to adapt them to 360-degree panorama generation. Prior work has demonstrated the feasibility of using conventional low-rank adaptation techniques on pre-trained diffusion models to generate panoramic images. However, the substantial domain gap between perspective and panoramic images raises questions about the underlying mechanisms enabling this empirical success. We hypothesize and examine that the trainable counterparts exhibit distinct behaviors when fine-tuned on panoramic data, and such an adaptation conceals some intrinsic mechanism to leverage the prior knowledge within the pre-trained diffusion models. Our analysis reveals the following: 1) the query and key matrices in the attention modules are responsible for common information that can be shared between the panoramic and perspective domains, thus are less relevant to panorama generation; and 2) the value and output weight matrices specialize in adapting pre-trained knowledge to the panoramic domain, playing a more critical role during fine-tuning for panorama generation. We empirically verify these insights by introducing a simple framework called UniPano, with the objective of establishing an elegant baseline for future research. UniPano not only outperforms existing methods but also significantly reduces memory usage and training time compared to prior dual-branch approaches, making it scalable for end-to-end panorama generation with higher resolution. The code will be released.

  • 4 authors
·
May 28, 2025 2

FocalLens: Instruction Tuning Enables Zero-Shot Conditional Image Representations

Visual understanding is inherently contextual -- what we focus on in an image depends on the task at hand. For instance, given an image of a person holding a bouquet of flowers, we may focus on either the person such as their clothing, or the type of flowers, depending on the context of interest. Yet, most existing image encoding paradigms represent an image as a fixed, generic feature vector, overlooking the potential needs of prioritizing varying visual information for different downstream use cases. In this work, we introduce FocalLens, a conditional visual encoding method that produces different representations for the same image based on the context of interest, expressed flexibly through natural language. We leverage vision instruction tuning data and contrastively finetune a pretrained vision encoder to take natural language instructions as additional inputs for producing conditional image representations. Extensive experiments validate that conditional image representation from FocalLens better pronounce the visual features of interest compared to generic features produced by standard vision encoders like CLIP. In addition, we show FocalLens further leads to performance improvements on a range of downstream tasks including image-image retrieval, image classification, and image-text retrieval, with an average gain of 5 and 10 points on the challenging SugarCrepe and MMVP-VLM benchmarks, respectively.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 11, 2025

3DiffTection: 3D Object Detection with Geometry-Aware Diffusion Features

We present 3DiffTection, a state-of-the-art method for 3D object detection from single images, leveraging features from a 3D-aware diffusion model. Annotating large-scale image data for 3D detection is resource-intensive and time-consuming. Recently, pretrained large image diffusion models have become prominent as effective feature extractors for 2D perception tasks. However, these features are initially trained on paired text and image data, which are not optimized for 3D tasks, and often exhibit a domain gap when applied to the target data. Our approach bridges these gaps through two specialized tuning strategies: geometric and semantic. For geometric tuning, we fine-tune a diffusion model to perform novel view synthesis conditioned on a single image, by introducing a novel epipolar warp operator. This task meets two essential criteria: the necessity for 3D awareness and reliance solely on posed image data, which are readily available (e.g., from videos) and does not require manual annotation. For semantic refinement, we further train the model on target data with detection supervision. Both tuning phases employ ControlNet to preserve the integrity of the original feature capabilities. In the final step, we harness these enhanced capabilities to conduct a test-time prediction ensemble across multiple virtual viewpoints. Through our methodology, we obtain 3D-aware features that are tailored for 3D detection and excel in identifying cross-view point correspondences. Consequently, our model emerges as a powerful 3D detector, substantially surpassing previous benchmarks, e.g., Cube-RCNN, a precedent in single-view 3D detection by 9.43\% in AP3D on the Omni3D-ARkitscene dataset. Furthermore, 3DiffTection showcases robust data efficiency and generalization to cross-domain data.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 7, 2023