No Arabic abstract
3D scene understanding from point clouds plays a vital role for various robotic applications. Unfortunately, current state-of-the-art methods use separate neural networks for different tasks like object detection or room layout estimation. Such a scheme has two limitations: 1) Storing and running several networks for different tasks are expensive for typical robotic platforms. 2) The intrinsic structure of separate outputs are ignored and potentially violated. To this end, we propose the first transformer architecture that predicts 3D objects and layouts simultaneously, using point cloud inputs. Unlike existing methods that either estimate layout keypoints or edges, we directly parameterize room layout as a set of quads. As such, the proposed architecture is termed as P(oint)Q(uad)-Transformer. Along with the novel quad representation, we propose a tailored physical constraint loss function that discourages object-layout interference. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the public benchmark ScanNet show that the proposed PQ-Transformer succeeds to jointly parse 3D objects and layouts, running at a quasi-real-time (8.91 FPS) rate without efficiency-oriented optimization. Moreover, the new physical constraint loss can improve strong baselines, and the F1-score of the room layout is significantly promoted from 37.9% to 57.9%.
We develop new representations and algorithms for three-dimensional (3D) object detection and spatial layout prediction in cluttered indoor scenes. We first propose a clouds of oriented gradient (COG) descriptor that links the 2D appearance and 3D pose of object categories, and thus accurately models how perspective projection affects perceived image gradients. To better represent the 3D visual styles of large objects and provide contextual cues to improve the detection of small objects, we introduce latent support surfaces. We then propose a Manhattan voxel representation which better captures the 3D room layout geometry of common indoor environments. Effective classification rules are learned via a latent structured prediction framework. Contextual relationships among categories and layout are captured via a cascade of classifiers, leading to holistic scene hypotheses that exceed the state-of-the-art on the SUN RGB-D database.
3D single object tracking is a key issue for robotics. In this paper, we propose a transformer module called Point-Track-Transformer (PTT) for point cloud-based 3D single object tracking. PTT module contains three blocks for feature embedding, position encoding, and self-attention feature computation. Feature embedding aims to place features closer in the embedding space if they have similar semantic information. Position encoding is used to encode coordinates of point clouds into high dimension distinguishable features. Self-attention generates refined attention features by computing attention weights. Besides, we embed the PTT module into the open-source state-of-the-art method P2B to construct PTT-Net. Experiments on the KITTI dataset reveal that our PTT-Net surpasses the state-of-the-art by a noticeable margin (~10%). Additionally, PTT-Net could achieve real-time performance (~40FPS) on NVIDIA 1080Ti GPU. Our code is open-sourced for the robotics community at https://github.com/shanjiayao/PTT.
We introduce PC2WF, the first end-to-end trainable deep network architecture to convert a 3D point cloud into a wireframe model. The network takes as input an unordered set of 3D points sampled from the surface of some object, and outputs a wireframe of that object, i.e., a sparse set of corner points linked by line segments. Recovering the wireframe is a challenging task, where the numbers of both vertices and edges are different for every instance, and a-priori unknown. Our architecture gradually builds up the model: It starts by encoding the points into feature vectors. Based on those features, it identifies a pool of candidate vertices, then prunes those candidates to a final set of corner vertices and refines their locations. Next, the corners are linked with an exhaustive set of candidate edges, which is again pruned to obtain the final wireframe. All steps are trainable, and errors can be backpropagated through the entire sequence. We validate the proposed model on a publicly available synthetic dataset, for which the ground truth wireframes are accessible, as well as on a new real-world dataset. Our model produces wireframe abstractions of good quality and outperforms several baselines.
Currently, existing state-of-the-art 3D object detectors are in two-stage paradigm. These methods typically comprise two steps: 1) Utilize region proposal network to propose a fraction of high-quality proposals in a bottom-up fashion. 2) Resize and pool the semantic features from the proposed regions to summarize RoI-wise representations for further refinement. Note that these RoI-wise representations in step 2) are considered individually as an uncorrelated entry when fed to following detection headers. Nevertheless, we observe these proposals generated by step 1) offset from ground truth somehow, emerging in local neighborhood densely with an underlying probability. Challenges arise in the case where a proposal largely forsakes its boundary information due to coordinate offset while existing networks lack corresponding information compensation mechanism. In this paper, we propose BANet for 3D object detection from point clouds. Specifically, instead of refining each proposal independently as previous works do, we represent each proposal as a node for graph construction within a given cut-off threshold, associating proposals in the form of local neighborhood graph, with boundary correlations of an object being explicitly exploited. Besides, we devise a lightweight Region Feature Aggregation Network to fully exploit voxel-wise, pixel-wise, and point-wise feature with expanding receptive fields for more informative RoI-wise representations. As of Apr. 17th, 2021, our BANet achieves on par performance on KITTI 3D detection leaderboard and ranks $1^{st}$ on $Moderate$ difficulty of $Car$ category on KITTI BEV detection leaderboard. The source code will be released once the paper is accepted.
A crucial task in scene understanding is 3D object detection, which aims to detect and localize the 3D bounding boxes of objects belonging to specific classes. Existing 3D object detectors heavily rely on annotated 3D bounding boxes during training, while these annotations could be expensive to obtain and only accessible in limited scenarios. Weakly supervised learning is a promising approach to reducing the annotation requirement, but existing weakly supervised object detectors are mostly for 2D detection rather than 3D. In this work, we propose VS3D, a framework for weakly supervised 3D object detection from point clouds without using any ground truth 3D bounding box for training. First, we introduce an unsupervised 3D proposal module that generates object proposals by leveraging normalized point cloud densities. Second, we present a cross-modal knowledge distillation strategy, where a convolutional neural network learns to predict the final results from the 3D object proposals by querying a teacher network pretrained on image datasets. Comprehensive experiments on the challenging KITTI dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our VS3D in diverse evaluation settings. The source code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Zengyi-Qin/Weakly-Supervised-3D-Object-Detection.