Semantic understanding of 3D point clouds is important for various robotics applications. Given that point-wise semantic annotation is expensive, in this paper, we address the challenge of learning models with extremely sparse labels. The core problem is how to leverage numerous unlabeled points. To this end, we propose a self-supervised 3D representation learning framework named viewpoint bottleneck. It optimizes a mutual-information based objective, which is applied on point clouds under different viewpoints. A principled analysis shows that viewpoint bottleneck leads to an elegant surrogate loss function that is suitable for large-scale point cloud data. Compared with former arts based upon contrastive learning, viewpoint bottleneck operates on the feature dimension instead of the sample dimension. This paradigm shift has several advantages: It is easy to implement and tune, does not need negative samples and performs better on our goal down-streaming task. We evaluate our method on the public benchmark ScanNet, under the pointly-supervised setting. We achieve the best quantitative results among comparable solutions. Meanwhile we provide an extensive qualitative inspection on various challenging scenes. They demonstrate that our models can produce fairly good scene parsing results for robotics applications. Our code, data and models will be made public.
A video autoencoder is proposed for learning disentan- gled representations of 3D structure and camera pose from videos in a self-supervised manner. Relying on temporal continuity in videos, our work assumes that the 3D scene structure in nearby video frames remains static. Given a sequence of video frames as input, the video autoencoder extracts a disentangled representation of the scene includ- ing: (i) a temporally-consistent deep voxel feature to represent the 3D structure and (ii) a 3D trajectory of camera pose for each frame. These two representations will then be re-entangled for rendering the input video frames. This video autoencoder can be trained directly using a pixel reconstruction loss, without any ground truth 3D or camera pose annotations. The disentangled representation can be applied to a range of tasks, including novel view synthesis, camera pose estimation, and video generation by motion following. We evaluate our method on several large- scale natural video datasets, and show generalization results on out-of-domain images.
One significant factor we expect the video representation learning to capture, especially in contrast with the image representation learning, is the object motion. However, we found that in the current mainstream video datasets, some action categories are highly related with the scene where the action happens, making the model tend to degrade to a solution where only the scene information is encoded. For example, a trained model may predict a video as playing football simply because it sees the field, neglecting that the subject is dancing as a cheerleader on the field. This is against our original intention towards the video representation learning and may bring scene bias on different dataset that can not be ignored. In order to tackle this problem, we propose to decouple the scene and the motion (DSM) with two simple operations, so that the model attention towards the motion information is better paid. Specifically, we construct a positive clip and a negative clip for each video. Compared to the original video, the positive/negative is motion-untouched/broken but scene-broken/untouched by Spatial Local Disturbance and Temporal Local Disturbance. Our objective is to pull the positive closer while pushing the negative farther to the original clip in the latent space. In this way, the impact of the scene is weakened while the temporal sensitivity of the network is further enhanced. We conduct experiments on two tasks with various backbones and different pre-training datasets, and find that our method surpass the SOTA methods with a remarkable 8.1% and 8.8% improvement towards action recognition task on the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets respectively using the same backbone.
Visual and audio modalities are highly correlated, yet they contain different information. Their strong correlation makes it possible to predict the semantics of one from the other with good accuracy. Their intrinsic differences make cross-modal prediction a potentially more rewarding pretext task for self-supervised learning of video and audio representations compared to within-modality learning. Based on this intuition, we propose Cross-Modal Deep Clustering (XDC), a novel self-supervised method that leverages unsupervised clustering in one modality (e.g., audio) as a supervisory signal for the other modality (e.g., video). This cross-modal supervision helps XDC utilize the semantic correlation and the differences between the two modalities. Our experiments show that XDC outperforms single-modality clustering and other multi-modal variants. XDC achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among self-supervised methods on multiple video and audio benchmarks. Most importantly, our video model pretrained on large-scale unlabeled data significantly outperforms the same model pretrained with full-supervision on ImageNet and Kinetics for action recognition on HMDB51 and UCF101. To the best of our knowledge, XDC is the first self-supervised learning method that outperforms large-scale fully-supervised pretraining for action recognition on the same architecture.
This work addresses a novel and challenging problem of estimating the full 3D hand shape and pose from a single RGB image. Most current methods in 3D hand analysis from monocular RGB images only focus on estimating the 3D locations of hand keypoints, which cannot fully express the 3D shape of hand. In contrast, we propose a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (Graph CNN) based method to reconstruct a full 3D mesh of hand surface that contains richer information of both 3D hand shape and pose. To train networks with full supervision, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset containing both ground truth 3D meshes and 3D poses. When fine-tuning the networks on real-world datasets without 3D ground truth, we propose a weakly-supervised approach by leveraging the depth map as a weak supervision in training. Through extensive evaluations on our proposed new datasets and two public datasets, we show that our proposed method can produce accurate and reasonable 3D hand mesh, and can achieve superior 3D hand pose estimation accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
In this paper, we propose PointRCNN for 3D object detection from raw point cloud. The whole framework is composed of two stages: stage-1 for the bottom-up 3D proposal generation and stage-2 for refining proposals in the canonical coordinates to obtain the final detection results. Instead of generating proposals from RGB image or projecting point cloud to bird's view or voxels as previous methods do, our stage-1 sub-network directly generates a small number of high-quality 3D proposals from point cloud in a bottom-up manner via segmenting the point cloud of whole scene into foreground points and background. The stage-2 sub-network transforms the pooled points of each proposal to canonical coordinates to learn better local spatial features, which is combined with global semantic features of each point learned in stage-1 for accurate box refinement and confidence prediction. Extensive experiments on the 3D detection benchmark of KITTI dataset show that our proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art methods with remarkable margins by using only point cloud as input.
We present a unified framework tackling two problems: class-specific 3D reconstruction from a single image, and generation of new 3D shape samples. These tasks have received considerable attention recently; however, existing approaches rely on 3D supervision, annotation of 2D images with keypoints or poses, and/or training with multiple views of each object instance. Our framework is very general: it can be trained in similar settings to these existing approaches, while also supporting weaker supervision scenarios. Importantly, it can be trained purely from 2D images, without ground-truth pose annotations, and with a single view per instance. We employ meshes as an output representation, instead of voxels used in most prior work. This allows us to exploit shading information during training, which previous 2D-supervised methods cannot. Thus, our method can learn to generate and reconstruct concave object classes. We evaluate our approach on synthetic data in various settings, showing that (i) it learns to disentangle shape from pose; (ii) using shading in the loss improves performance; (iii) our model is comparable or superior to state-of-the-art voxel-based approaches on quantitative metrics, while producing results that are visually more pleasing; (iv) it still performs well when given supervision weaker than in prior works.
We present PPF-FoldNet for unsupervised learning of 3D local descriptors on pure point cloud geometry. Based on the folding-based auto-encoding of well known point pair features, PPF-FoldNet offers many desirable properties: it necessitates neither supervision, nor a sensitive local reference frame, benefits from point-set sparsity, is end-to-end, fast, and can extract powerful rotation invariant descriptors. Thanks to a novel feature visualization, its evolution can be monitored to provide interpretable insights. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that despite having six degree-of-freedom invariance and lack of training labels, our network achieves state of the art results in standard benchmark datasets and outperforms its competitors when rotations and varying point densities are present. PPF-FoldNet achieves $9\%$ higher recall on standard benchmarks, $23\%$ higher recall when rotations are introduced into the same datasets and finally, a margin of $>35\%$ is attained when point density is significantly decreased.
In this paper, we study the problem of parsing structured knowledge graphs from textual descriptions. In particular, we consider the scene graph representation that considers objects together with their attributes and relations: this representation has been proved useful across a variety of vision and language applications. We begin by introducing an alternative but equivalent edge-centric view of scene graphs that connect to dependency parses. Together with a careful redesign of label and action space, we combine the two-stage pipeline used in prior work (generic dependency parsing followed by simple post-processing) into one, enabling end-to-end training. The scene graphs generated by our learned neural dependency parser achieve an F-score similarity of 49.67% to ground truth graphs on our evaluation set, surpassing best previous approaches by 5%. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned parser on image retrieval applications.
Collecting training data from the physical world is usually time-consuming and even dangerous for fragile robots, and thus, recent advances in robot learning advocate the use of simulators as the training platform. Unfortunately, the reality gap between synthetic and real visual data prohibits direct migration of the models trained in virtual worlds to the real world. This paper proposes a modular architecture for tackling the virtual-to-real problem. The proposed architecture separates the learning model into a perception module and a control policy module, and uses semantic image segmentation as the meta representation for relating these two modules. The perception module translates the perceived RGB image to semantic image segmentation. The control policy module is implemented as a deep reinforcement learning agent, which performs actions based on the translated image segmentation. Our architecture is evaluated in an obstacle avoidance task and a target following task. Experimental results show that our architecture significantly outperforms all of the baseline methods in both virtual and real environments, and demonstrates a faster learning curve than them. We also present a detailed analysis for a variety of variant configurations, and validate the transferability of our modular architecture.
Lidar based 3D object detection is inevitable for autonomous driving, because it directly links to environmental understanding and therefore builds the base for prediction and motion planning. The capacity of inferencing highly sparse 3D data in real-time is an ill-posed problem for lots of other application areas besides automated vehicles, e.g. augmented reality, personal robotics or industrial automation. We introduce Complex-YOLO, a state of the art real-time 3D object detection network on point clouds only. In this work, we describe a network that expands YOLOv2, a fast 2D standard object detector for RGB images, by a specific complex regression strategy to estimate multi-class 3D boxes in Cartesian space. Thus, we propose a specific Euler-Region-Proposal Network (E-RPN) to estimate the pose of the object by adding an imaginary and a real fraction to the regression network. This ends up in a closed complex space and avoids singularities, which occur by single angle estimations. The E-RPN supports to generalize well during training. Our experiments on the KITTI benchmark suite show that we outperform current leading methods for 3D object detection specifically in terms of efficiency. We achieve state of the art results for cars, pedestrians and cyclists by being more than five times faster than the fastest competitor. Further, our model is capable of estimating all eight KITTI-classes, including Vans, Trucks or sitting pedestrians simultaneously with high accuracy.