This paper tackles the problem of accurately matching the points of two 3D point clouds. Most conventional methods improve their performance by extracting representative features from each point via deep-learning-based algorithms. On the other hand, the correspondence calculation between the extracted features has not been examined in depth, and non-trainable algorithms (e.g. the Sinkhorn algorithm) are frequently applied. As a result, the extracted features may be forcibly fitted to a non-trainable algorithm. Furthermore, the extracted features frequently contain stochastically unavoidable errors, which degrades the matching accuracy. In this paper, instead of using a non-trainable algorithm, we propose a differentiable matching network that can be jointly optimized with the feature extraction procedure. Our network first constructs graphs with edges connecting the points of each point cloud and then extracts discriminative edge features by using two main components: a shared set-encoder and an edge-selective cross-concatenation. These components enable us to symmetrically consider two point clouds and to extract discriminative edge features, respectively. By using the extracted discriminative edge features, our network can accurately calculate the correspondence between points. Our experimental results show that the proposed network can significantly improve the performance of point cloud matching. Our code is available at //github.com/yanarin/ESFW
Establishing dense correspondences across semantically similar images is one of the challenging tasks due to the significant intra-class variations and background clutters. To solve these problems, numerous methods have been proposed, focused on learning feature extractor or cost aggregation independently, which yields sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for jointly learning feature extraction and cost aggregation for semantic correspondence. By exploiting the pseudo labels from each module, the networks consisting of feature extraction and cost aggregation modules are simultaneously learned in a boosting fashion. Moreover, to ignore unreliable pseudo labels, we present a confidence-aware contrastive loss function for learning the networks in a weakly-supervised manner. We demonstrate our competitive results on standard benchmarks for semantic correspondence.
In this work we present point-level region contrast, a self-supervised pre-training approach for the task of object detection. This approach is motivated by the two key factors in detection: localization and recognition. While accurate localization favors models that operate at the pixel- or point-level, correct recognition typically relies on a more holistic, region-level view of objects. Incorporating this perspective in pre-training, our approach performs contrastive learning by directly sampling individual point pairs from different regions. Compared to an aggregated representation per region, our approach is more robust to the change in input region quality, and further enables us to implicitly improve initial region assignments via online knowledge distillation during training. Both advantages are important when dealing with imperfect regions encountered in the unsupervised setting. Experiments show point-level region contrast improves on state-of-the-art pre-training methods for object detection and segmentation across multiple tasks and datasets, and we provide extensive ablation studies and visualizations to aid understanding. Code will be made available.
Traditional nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) learns a new feature representation on the whole data space, which means treating all features equally. However, a subspace is often sufficient for accurate representation in practical applications, and redundant features can be invalid or even harmful. For example, if a camera has some sensors destroyed, then the corresponding pixels in the photos from this camera are not helpful to identify the content, which means only the subspace consisting of remaining pixels is worthy of attention. This paper proposes a new NMF method by introducing adaptive weights to identify key features in the original space so that only a subspace involves generating the new representation. Two strategies are proposed to achieve this: the fuzzier weighted technique and entropy regularized weighted technique, both of which result in an iterative solution with a simple form. Experimental results on several real-world datasets demonstrated that the proposed methods can generate a more accurate feature representation than existing methods. The code developed in this study is available at //github.com/WNMF1/FWNMF-ERWNMF.
Despite the recent progress, the existing multi-view unsupervised feature selection methods mostly suffer from two limitations. First, they generally utilize either cluster structure or similarity structure to guide the feature selection, neglecting the possibility of a joint formulation with mutual benefits. Second, they often learn the similarity structure by either global structure learning or local structure learning, lacking the capability of graph learning with both global and local structural awareness. In light of this, this paper presents a joint multi-view unsupervised feature selection and graph learning (JMVFG) approach. Particularly, we formulate the multi-view feature selection with orthogonal decomposition, where each target matrix is decomposed into a view-specific basis matrix and a view-consistent cluster indicator. Cross-space locality preservation is incorporated to bridge the cluster structure learning in the projected space and the similarity learning (i.e., graph learning) in the original space. Further, a unified objective function is presented to enable the simultaneous learning of the cluster structure, the global and local similarity structures, and the multi-view consistency and inconsistency, upon which an alternating optimization algorithm is developed with theoretically proved convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach for both multi-view feature selection and graph learning tasks.
Leveraging line features to improve localization accuracy of point-based visual-inertial SLAM (VINS) is gaining interest as they provide additional constraints on scene structure. However, real-time performance when incorporating line features in VINS has not been addressed. This paper presents PL-VINS, a real-time optimization-based monocular VINS method with point and line features, developed based on the state-of-the-art point-based VINS-Mono \cite{vins}. We observe that current works use the LSD \cite{lsd} algorithm to extract line features; however, LSD is designed for scene shape representation instead of the pose estimation problem, which becomes the bottleneck for the real-time performance due to its high computational cost. In this paper, a modified LSD algorithm is presented by studying a hidden parameter tuning and length rejection strategy. The modified LSD can run at least three times as fast as LSD. Further, by representing space lines with the Pl\"{u}cker coordinates, the residual error in line estimation is modeled in terms of the point-to-line distance, which is then minimized by iteratively updating the minimum four-parameter orthonormal representation of the Pl\"{u}cker coordinates. Experiments in a public benchmark dataset show that the localization error of our method is 12-16\% less than that of VINS-Mono at the same pose update frequency. %For the benefit of the community, The source code of our method is available at: //github.com/cnqiangfu/PL-VINS.
In this paper we propose a novel sparse optical flow (SOF)-based line feature tracking method for the camera pose estimation problem. This method is inspired by the point-based SOF algorithm and developed based on an observation that two adjacent images in time-varying image sequences satisfy brightness invariant. Based on this observation, we re-define the goal of line feature tracking: track two endpoints of a line feature instead of the entire line based on gray value matching instead of descriptor matching. To achieve this goal, an efficient two endpoint tracking (TET) method is presented: first, describe a given line feature with its two endpoints; next, track the two endpoints based on SOF to obtain two new tracked endpoints by minimizing a pixel-level grayscale residual function; finally, connect the two tracked endpoints to generate a new line feature. The correspondence is established between the given and the new line feature. Compared with current descriptor-based methods, our TET method needs not to compute descriptors and detect line features repeatedly. Naturally, it has an obvious advantage over computation. Experiments in several public benchmark datasets show our method yields highly competitive accuracy with an obvious advantage over speed.
Deep learning depends on large amounts of labeled training data. Manual labeling is expensive and represents a bottleneck, especially for tasks such as segmentation, where labels must be assigned down to the level of individual points. That challenge is even more daunting for 3D data: 3D point clouds contain millions of points per scene, and their accurate annotation is markedly more time-consuming. The situation is further aggravated by the added complexity of user interfaces for 3D point clouds, which slows down annotation even more. For the case of 2D image segmentation, interactive techniques have become common, where user feedback in the form of a few clicks guides a segmentation algorithm -- nowadays usually a neural network -- to achieve an accurate labeling with minimal effort. Surprisingly, interactive segmentation of 3D scenes has not been explored much. Previous work has attempted to obtain accurate 3D segmentation masks using human feedback from the 2D domain, which is only possible if correctly aligned images are available together with the 3D point cloud, and it involves switching between the 2D and 3D domains. Here, we present an interactive 3D object segmentation method in which the user interacts directly with the 3D point cloud. Importantly, our model does not require training data from the target domain: when trained on ScanNet, it performs well on several other datasets with different data characteristics as well as different object classes. Moreover, our method is orthogonal to supervised (instance) segmentation methods and can be combined with them to refine automatic segmentations with minimal human effort.
In the domain generalization literature, a common objective is to learn representations independent of the domain after conditioning on the class label. We show that this objective is not sufficient: there exist counter-examples where a model fails to generalize to unseen domains even after satisfying class-conditional domain invariance. We formalize this observation through a structural causal model and show the importance of modeling within-class variations for generalization. Specifically, classes contain objects that characterize specific causal features, and domains can be interpreted as interventions on these objects that change non-causal features. We highlight an alternative condition: inputs across domains should have the same representation if they are derived from the same object. Based on this objective, we propose matching-based algorithms when base objects are observed (e.g., through data augmentation) and approximate the objective when objects are not observed (MatchDG). Our simple matching-based algorithms are competitive to prior work on out-of-domain accuracy for rotated MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, PACS, and Chest-Xray datasets. Our method MatchDG also recovers ground-truth object matches: on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, top-10 matches from MatchDG have over 50% overlap with ground-truth matches.
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.