In this paper, we propose to employ a Gaussian map representation to estimate precise location and count of 3D surface features, addressing the limitations of state-of-the-art methods based on density estimation which struggle in presence of local disturbances. Gaussian maps indicate probable object location and can be generated directly from keypoint annotations avoiding laborious and costly per-pixel annotations. We apply this method to the 3D spheroidal class of objects which can be projected into 2D shape representation enabling efficient processing by a neural network GNet, an improved UNet architecture, which generates the likely locations of surface features and their precise count. We demonstrate a practical use of this technique for counting strawberry achenes which is used as a fruit quality measure in phenotyping applications. The results of training the proposed system on several hundreds of 3D scans of strawberries from a publicly available dataset demonstrate the accuracy and precision of the system which outperforms the state-of-the-art density-based methods for this application.
The ongoing biodiversity crysis calls for accurate estimation of animal density and abundance to identify, for example, sources of biodiversity decline and effectiveness of conservation interventions. Camera traps together with abundance estimation methods are often employed for this purpose. The necessary distances between camera and observed animal are traditionally derived in a laborious, fully manual or semi-automatic process. Both approaches require reference image material, which is both difficult to acquire and not available for existing datasets. In this study, we propose a fully automatic approach to estimate camera-to-animal distances, based on monocular depth estimation (MDE), and without the need of reference image material. We leverage state-of-the-art relative MDE and a novel alignment procedure to estimate metric distances. We evaluate the approach on a zoo scenario dataset unseen during training. We achieve a mean absolute distance estimation error of only 0.9864 meters at a precision of 90.3% and recall of 63.8%, while completely eliminating the previously required manual effort for biodiversity researchers. The code will be made available.
3D object detection often involves complicated training and testing pipelines, which require substantial domain knowledge about individual datasets. Inspired by recent non-maximum suppression-free 2D object detection models, we propose a 3D object detection architecture on point clouds. Our method models 3D object detection as message passing on a dynamic graph, generalizing the DGCNN framework to predict a set of objects. In our construction, we remove the necessity of post-processing via object confidence aggregation or non-maximum suppression. To facilitate object detection from sparse point clouds, we also propose a set-to-set distillation approach customized to 3D detection. This approach aligns the outputs of the teacher model and the student model in a permutation-invariant fashion, significantly simplifying knowledge distillation for the 3D detection task. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on autonomous driving benchmarks. We also provide abundant analysis of the detection model and distillation framework.
We present DeepICP - a novel end-to-end learning-based 3D point cloud registration framework that achieves comparable registration accuracy to prior state-of-the-art geometric methods. Different from other keypoint based methods where a RANSAC procedure is usually needed, we implement the use of various deep neural network structures to establish an end-to-end trainable network. Our keypoint detector is trained through this end-to-end structure and enables the system to avoid the inference of dynamic objects, leverages the help of sufficiently salient features on stationary objects, and as a result, achieves high robustness. Rather than searching the corresponding points among existing points, the key contribution is that we innovatively generate them based on learned matching probabilities among a group of candidates, which can boost the registration accuracy. Our loss function incorporates both the local similarity and the global geometric constraints to ensure all above network designs can converge towards the right direction. We comprehensively validate the effectiveness of our approach using both the KITTI dataset and the Apollo-SouthBay dataset. Results demonstrate that our method achieves comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-art geometry-based methods. Detailed ablation and visualization analysis are included to further illustrate the behavior and insights of our network. The low registration error and high robustness of our method makes it attractive for substantial applications relying on the point cloud registration task.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
The task of detecting 3D objects in point cloud has a pivotal role in many real-world applications. However, 3D object detection performance is behind that of 2D object detection due to the lack of powerful 3D feature extraction methods. In order to address this issue, we propose to build a 3D backbone network to learn rich 3D feature maps by using sparse 3D CNN operations for 3D object detection in point cloud. The 3D backbone network can inherently learn 3D features from almost raw data without compressing point cloud into multiple 2D images and generate rich feature maps for object detection. The sparse 3D CNN takes full advantages of the sparsity in the 3D point cloud to accelerate computation and save memory, which makes the 3D backbone network achievable. Empirical experiments are conducted on the KITTI benchmark and results show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance for 3D object detection.
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.
3D vehicle detection and tracking from a monocular camera requires detecting and associating vehicles, and estimating their locations and extents together. It is challenging because vehicles are in constant motion and it is practically impossible to recover the 3D positions from a single image. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that jointly detects and tracks 3D vehicle bounding boxes. Our approach leverages 3D pose estimation to learn 2D patch association overtime and uses temporal information from tracking to obtain stable 3D estimation. Our method also leverages 3D box depth ordering and motion to link together the tracks of occluded objects. We train our system on realistic 3D virtual environments, collecting a new diverse, large-scale and densely annotated dataset with accurate 3D trajectory annotations. Our experiments demonstrate that our method benefits from inferring 3D for both data association and tracking robustness, leveraging our dynamic 3D tracking dataset.
Finding correspondences between images or 3D scans is at the heart of many computer vision and image retrieval applications and is often enabled by matching local keypoint descriptors. Various learning approaches have been applied in the past to different stages of the matching pipeline, considering detector, descriptor, or metric learning objectives. These objectives were typically addressed separately and most previous work has focused on image data. This paper proposes an end-to-end learning framework for keypoint detection and its representation (descriptor) for 3D depth maps or 3D scans, where the two can be jointly optimized towards task-specific objectives without a need for separate annotations. We employ a Siamese architecture augmented by a sampling layer and a novel score loss function which in turn affects the selection of region proposals. The positive and negative examples are obtained automatically by sampling corresponding region proposals based on their consistency with known 3D pose labels. Matching experiments with depth data on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, showing significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.
We propose an attentive local feature descriptor suitable for large-scale image retrieval, referred to as DELF (DEep Local Feature). The new feature is based on convolutional neural networks, which are trained only with image-level annotations on a landmark image dataset. To identify semantically useful local features for image retrieval, we also propose an attention mechanism for keypoint selection, which shares most network layers with the descriptor. This framework can be used for image retrieval as a drop-in replacement for other keypoint detectors and descriptors, enabling more accurate feature matching and geometric verification. Our system produces reliable confidence scores to reject false positives---in particular, it is robust against queries that have no correct match in the database. To evaluate the proposed descriptor, we introduce a new large-scale dataset, referred to as Google-Landmarks dataset, which involves challenges in both database and query such as background clutter, partial occlusion, multiple landmarks, objects in variable scales, etc. We show that DELF outperforms the state-of-the-art global and local descriptors in the large-scale setting by significant margins. Code and dataset can be found at the project webpage: //github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/delf .
Recent works have shown that exploiting multi-scale representations deeply learned via convolutional neural networks (CNN) is of tremendous importance for accurate contour detection. This paper presents a novel approach for predicting contours which advances the state of the art in two fundamental aspects, i.e. multi-scale feature generation and fusion. Different from previous works directly consider- ing multi-scale feature maps obtained from the inner layers of a primary CNN architecture, we introduce a hierarchical deep model which produces more rich and complementary representations. Furthermore, to refine and robustly fuse the representations learned at different scales, the novel Attention-Gated Conditional Random Fields (AG-CRFs) are proposed. The experiments ran on two publicly available datasets (BSDS500 and NYUDv2) demonstrate the effectiveness of the latent AG-CRF model and of the overall hierarchical framework.