No Arabic abstract
Aligning partial views of a scene into a single whole is essential to understanding ones environment and is a key component of numerous robotics tasks such as SLAM and SfM. Recent approaches have proposed end-to-end systems that can outperform traditional methods by leveraging pose supervision. However, with the rising prevalence of cameras with depth sensors, we can expect a new stream of raw RGB-D data without the annotations needed for supervision. We propose UnsupervisedR&R: an end-to-end unsupervised approach to learning point cloud registration from raw RGB-D video. The key idea is to leverage differentiable alignment and rendering to enforce photometric and geometric consistency between frames. We evaluate our approach on indoor scene datasets and find that we outperform existing traditional approaches with classic and learned descriptors while being competitive with supervised geometric point cloud registration approaches.
We propose a self-supervised method for partial point set registration. While recent proposed learning-based methods have achieved impressive registration performance on the full shape observations, these methods mostly suffer from performance degradation when dealing with partial shapes. To bridge the performance gaps between partial point set registration with full point set registration, we proposed to incorporate a shape completion network to benefit the registration process. To achieve this, we design a latent code for each pair of shapes, which can be regarded as a geometric encoding of the target shape. By doing so, our model does need an explicit feature embedding network to learn the feature encodings. More importantly, both our shape completion network and the point set registration network take the shared latent codes as input, which are optimized along with the parameters of two decoder networks in the training process. Therefore, the point set registration process can thus benefit from the joint optimization process of latent codes, which are enforced to represent the information of full shape instead of partial ones. In the inference stage, we fix the network parameter and optimize the latent codes to get the optimal shape completion and registration results. Our proposed method is pure unsupervised and does not need any ground truth supervision. Experiments on the ModelNet40 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for partial point set registration.
Point cloud registration is a fundamental problem in 3D computer vision. In this paper, we cast point cloud registration into a planning problem in reinforcement learning, which can seek the transformation between the source and target point clouds through trial and error. By modeling the point cloud registration process as a Markov decision process (MDP), we develop a latent dynamic model of point clouds, consisting of a transformation network and evaluation network. The transformation network aims to predict the new transformed feature of the point cloud after performing a rigid transformation (i.e., action) on it while the evaluation network aims to predict the alignment precision between the transformed source point cloud and target point cloud as the reward signal. Once the dynamic model of the point cloud is trained, we employ the cross-entropy method (CEM) to iteratively update the planning policy by maximizing the rewards in the point cloud registration process. Thus, the optimal policy, i.e., the transformation between the source and target point clouds, can be obtained via gradually narrowing the search space of the transformation. Experimental results on ModelNet40 and 7Scene benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can yield good registration performance in an unsupervised manner.
In this paper, by modeling the point cloud registration task as a Markov decision process, we propose an end-to-end deep model embedded with the cross-entropy method (CEM) for unsupervised 3D registration. Our model consists of a sampling network module and a differentiable CEM module. In our sampling network module, given a pair of point clouds, the sampling network learns a prior sampling distribution over the transformation space. The learned sampling distribution can be used as a good initialization of the differentiable CEM module. In our differentiable CEM module, we first propose a maximum consensus criterion based alignment metric as the reward function for the point cloud registration task. Based on the reward function, for each state, we then construct a fused score function to evaluate the sampled transformations, where we weight the current and future rewards of the transformations. Particularly, the future rewards of the sampled transforms are obtained by performing the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm on the transformed state. By selecting the top-k transformations with the highest scores, we iteratively update the sampling distribution. Furthermore, in order to make the CEM differentiable, we use the sparsemax function to replace the hard top-$k$ selection. Finally, we formulate a Geman-McClure estimator based loss to train our end-to-end registration model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the good registration performance of our method on benchmark datasets.
We describe a simple pre-training approach for point clouds. It works in three steps: 1. Mask all points occluded in a camera view; 2. Learn an encoder-decoder model to reconstruct the occluded points; 3. Use the encoder weights as initialisation for downstream point cloud tasks. We find that even when we construct a single pre-training dataset (from ModelNet40), this pre-training method improves accuracy across different datasets and encoders, on a wide range of downstream tasks. Specifically, we show that our method outperforms previous pre-training methods in object classification, and both part-based and semantic segmentation tasks. We study the pre-trained features and find that they lead to wide downstream minima, have high transformation invariance, and have activations that are highly correlated with part labels. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/hansen7/OcCo
We present a method for differentiable rendering of 3D surfaces that supports both explicit and implicit representations, provides derivatives at occlusion boundaries, and is fast and simple to implement. The method first samples the surface using non-differentiable rasterization, then applies differentiable, depth-aware point splatting to produce the final image. Our approach requires no differentiable meshing or rasterization steps, making it efficient for large 3D models and applicable to isosurfaces extracted from implicit surface definitions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for implicit-, mesh-, and parametric-surface-based inverse rendering and neural-network training applications. In particular, we show for the first time efficient, differentiable rendering of an isosurface extracted from a neural radiance field (NeRF), and demonstrate surface-based, rather than volume-based, rendering of a NeRF.