No Arabic abstract
Camera localization is a fundamental and key component of autonomous driving vehicles and mobile robots to localize themselves globally for further environment perception, path planning and motion control. Recently end-to-end approaches based on convolutional neural network have been much studied to achieve or even exceed 3D-geometry based traditional methods. In this work, we propose a compact network for absolute camera pose regression. Inspired from those traditional methods, a 3D scene geometry-aware constraint is also introduced by exploiting all available information including motion, depth and image contents. We add this constraint as a regularization term to our proposed network by defining a pixel-level photometric loss and an image-level structural similarity loss. To benchmark our method, different challenging scenes including indoor and outdoor environment are tested with our proposed approach and state-of-the-arts. And the experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvement of our method on both prediction accuracy and convergence efficiency.
Camera localization aims to estimate 6 DoF camera poses from RGB images. Traditional methods detect and match interest points between a query image and a pre-built 3D model. Recent learning-based approaches encode scene structures into a specific convolutional neural network (CNN) and thus are able to predict dense coordinates from RGB images. However, most of them require re-training or re-adaption for a new scene and have difficulties in handling large-scale scenes due to limited network capacity. We present a new method for scene agnostic camera localization using dense scene matching (DSM), where a cost volume is constructed between a query image and a scene. The cost volume and the corresponding coordinates are processed by a CNN to predict dense coordinates. Camera poses can then be solved by PnP algorithms. In addition, our method can be extended to temporal domain, which leads to extra performance boost during testing time. Our scene-agnostic approach achieves comparable accuracy as the existing scene-specific approaches, such as KFNet, on the 7scenes and Cambridge benchmark. This approach also remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art scene-agnostic dense coordinate regression network SANet. The Code is available at https://github.com/Tangshitao/Dense-Scene-Matching.
Scene flow estimation is the task to predict the point-wise 3D displacement vector between two consecutive frames of point clouds, which has important application in fields such as service robots and autonomous driving. Although many previous works have explored greatly on scene flow estimation based on point clouds, we point out two problems that have not been noticed or well solved before: 1) Points of adjacent frames in repetitive patterns may be wrongly associated due to similar spatial structure in their neighbourhoods; 2) Scene flow between adjacent frames of point clouds with long-distance movement may be inaccurately estimated. To solve the first problem, we propose a novel context-aware set conv layer to exploit contextual structure information of Euclidean space and learn soft aggregation weights for local point features. Our design is inspired by human perception of contextual structure information during scene understanding. We incorporate the context-aware set conv layer in a context-aware point feature pyramid module of 3D point clouds for scene flow estimation. For the second problem, we propose an explicit residual flow learning structure in the residual flow refinement layer to cope with long-distance movement. The experiments and ablation study on FlyingThings3D and KITTI scene flow datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of each proposed component and that we solve problem of ambiguous inter-frame association and long-distance movement estimation. Quantitative results on both FlyingThings3D and KITTI scene flow datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing all other previous works to the best of our knowledge by at least 25%.
We present BlockGAN, an image generative model that learns object-aware 3D scene representations directly from unlabelled 2D images. Current work on scene representation learning either ignores scene background or treats the whole scene as one object. Meanwhile, work that considers scene compositionality treats scene objects only as image patches or 2D layers with alpha maps. Inspired by the computer graphics pipeline, we design BlockGAN to learn to first generate 3D features of background and foreground objects, then combine them into 3D features for the wholes cene, and finally render them into realistic images. This allows BlockGAN to reason over occlusion and interaction between objects appearance, such as shadow and lighting, and provides control over each objects 3D pose and identity, while maintaining image realism. BlockGAN is trained end-to-end, using only unlabelled single images, without the need for 3D geometry, pose labels, object masks, or multiple views of the same scene. Our experiments show that using explicit 3D features to represent objects allows BlockGAN to learn disentangled representations both in terms of objects (foreground and background) and their properties (pose and identity).
A comprehensive semantic understanding of a scene is important for many applications - but in what space should diverse semantic information (e.g., objects, scene categories, material types, texture, etc.) be grounded and what should be its structure? Aspiring to have one unified structure that hosts diverse types of semantics, we follow the Scene Graph paradigm in 3D, generating a 3D Scene Graph. Given a 3D mesh and registered panoramic images, we construct a graph that spans the entire building and includes semantics on objects (e.g., class, material, and other attributes), rooms (e.g., scene category, volume, etc.) and cameras (e.g., location, etc.), as well as the relationships among these entities. However, this process is prohibitively labor heavy if done manually. To alleviate this we devise a semi-automatic framework that employs existing detection methods and enhances them using two main constraints: I. framing of query images sampled on panoramas to maximize the performance of 2D detectors, and II. multi-view consistency enforcement across 2D detections that originate in different camera locations.
We propose NeRF-VAE, a 3D scene generative model that incorporates geometric structure via NeRF and differentiable volume rendering. In contrast to NeRF, our model takes into account shared structure across scenes, and is able to infer the structure of a novel scene -- without the need to re-train -- using amortized inference. NeRF-VAEs explicit 3D rendering process further contrasts previous generative models with convolution-based rendering which lacks geometric structure. Our model is a VAE that learns a distribution over radiance fields by conditioning them on a latent scene representation. We show that, once trained, NeRF-VAE is able to infer and render geometrically-consistent scenes from previously unseen 3D environments using very few input images. We further demonstrate that NeRF-VAE generalizes well to out-of-distribution cameras, while convolutional models do not. Finally, we introduce and study an attention-based conditioning mechanism of NeRF-VAEs decoder, which improves model performance.