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We propose a novel, conceptually simple and general framework for instance segmentation on 3D point clouds. Our method, called 3D-BoNet, follows the simple design philosophy of per-point multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). The framework directly regresses 3D bounding boxes for all instances in a point cloud, while simultaneously predicting a point-level mask for each instance. It consists of a backbone network followed by two parallel network branches for 1) bounding box regression and 2) point mask prediction. 3D-BoNet is single-stage, anchor-free and end-to-end trainable. Moreover, it is remarkably computationally efficient as, unlike existing approaches, it does not require any post-processing steps such as non-maximum suppression, feature sampling, clustering or voting. Extensive experiments show that our approach surpasses existing work on both ScanNet and S3DIS datasets while being approximately 10x more computationally efficient. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our design.
Vanilla models for object detection and instance segmentation suffer from the heavy bias toward detecting frequent objects in the long-tailed setting. Existing methods address this issue mostly during training, e.g., by re-sampling or re-weighting. In this paper, we investigate a largely overlooked approach -- post-processing calibration of confidence scores. We propose NorCal, Normalized Calibration for long-tailed object detection and instance segmentation, a simple and straightforward recipe that reweighs the predicted scores of each class by its training sample size. We show that separately handling the background class and normalizing the scores over classes for each proposal are keys to achieving superior performance. On the LVIS dataset, NorCal can effectively improve nearly all the baseline models not only on rare classes but also on common and frequent classes. Finally, we conduct extensive analysis and ablation studies to offer insights into various modeling choices and mechanisms of our approach.
A robust 3D object tracker which continuously tracks surrounding objects and estimates their trajectories is key for self-driving vehicles. Most existing tracking methods employ a tracking-by-detection strategy, which usually requires complex pair-wise similarity computation and neglects the nature of continuous object motion. In this paper, we propose to directly learn 3D object correspondences from temporal point cloud data and infer the motion information from correspondence patterns. We modify the standard 3D object detector to process two lidar frames at the same time and predict bounding box pairs for the association and motion estimation tasks. We also equip our pipeline with a simple yet effective velocity smoothing module to estimate consistent object motion. Benifiting from the learned correspondences and motion refinement, our method exceeds the existing 3D tracking methods on both the KITTI and larger scale Nuscenes dataset.
Despite the substantial progress of active learning for image recognition, there still lacks an instance-level active learning method specified for object detection. In this paper, we propose Multiple Instance Active Object Detection (MI-AOD), to select the most informative images for detector training by observing instance-level uncertainty. MI-AOD defines an instance uncertainty learning module, which leverages the discrepancy of two adversarial instance classifiers trained on the labeled set to predict instance uncertainty of the unlabeled set. MI-AOD treats unlabeled images as instance bags and feature anchors in images as instances, and estimates the image uncertainty by re-weighting instances in a multiple instance learning (MIL) fashion. Iterative instance uncertainty learning and re-weighting facilitate suppressing noisy instances, toward bridging the gap between instance uncertainty and image-level uncertainty. Experiments validate that MI-AOD sets a solid baseline for instance-level active learning. On commonly used object detection datasets, MI-AOD outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant margins, particularly when the labeled sets are small. Code is available at https://github.com/yuantn/MI-AOD.
We propose an approach to instance segmentation from 3D point clouds based on dynamic convolution. This enables it to adapt, at inference, to varying feature and object scales. Doing so avoids some pitfalls of bottom up approaches, including a dependence on hyper-parameter tuning and heuristic post-processing pipelines to compensate for the inevitable variability in object sizes, even within a single scene. The representation capability of the network is greatly improved by gathering homogeneous points that have identical semantic categories and close votes for the geometric centroids. Instances are then decoded via several simple convolution layers, where the parameters are generated conditioned on the input. The proposed approach is proposal-free, and instead exploits a convolution process that adapts to the spatial and semantic characteristics of each instance. A light-weight transformer, built on the bottleneck layer, allows the model to capture long-range dependencies, with limited computational overhead. The result is a simple, efficient, and robust approach that yields strong performance on various datasets: ScanNetV2, S3DIS, and PartNet. The consistent improvements on both voxel- and point-based architectures imply the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is available at: https://git.io/DyCo3D
Instance segmentation on 3D point clouds is one of the most extensively researched areas toward the realization of autonomous cars and robots. Certain existing studies have split input point clouds into small regions such as 1m x 1m; one reason for this is that models in the studies cannot consume a large number of points because of the large space complexity. However, because such small regions occasionally include a very small number of instances belonging to the same class, an evaluation using existing metrics such as mAP is largely affected by the category recognition performance. To address these problems, we propose a new method with space complexity O(Np) such that large regions can be consumed, as well as novel metrics for tasks that are independent of the categories or size of the inputs. Our method learns a mapping from input point clouds to an embedding space, where the embeddings form clusters for each instance and distinguish instances using these clusters during testing. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance using both existing and the proposed metrics. Moreover, we show that our new metric can evaluate the performance of a task without being affected by any other condition.