Unsupervised learning of depth from indoor monocular videos is challenging as the artificial environment contains many textureless regions. Fortunately, the indoor scenes are full of specific structures, such as planes and lines, which should help guide unsupervised depth learning. This paper proposes PLNet that leverages the plane and line priors to enhance the depth estimation. We first represent the scene geometry using local planar coefficients and impose the smoothness constraint on the representation. Moreover, we enforce the planar and linear consistency by randomly selecting some sets of points that are probably coplanar or collinear to construct simple and effective consistency losses. To verify the proposed method's effectiveness, we further propose to evaluate the flatness and straightness of the predicted point cloud on the reliable planar and linear regions. The regularity of these regions indicates quality indoor reconstruction. Experiments on NYU Depth V2 and ScanNet show that PLNet outperforms existing methods. The code is available at \url{//github.com/HalleyJiang/PLNet}.
Existing 3D human pose estimation algorithms trained on distortion-free datasets suffer performance drop when applied to new scenarios with a specific camera distortion. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective model for 3D human pose estimation in video that can quickly adapt to any distortion environment by utilizing MAML, a representative optimization-based meta-learning algorithm. We consider a sequence of 2D keypoints in a particular distortion as a single task of MAML. However, due to the absence of a large-scale dataset in a distorted environment, we propose an efficient method to generate synthetic distorted data from undistorted 2D keypoints. For the evaluation, we assume two practical testing situations depending on whether a motion capture sensor is available or not. In particular, we propose Inference Stage Optimization using bone-length symmetry and consistency. Extensive evaluation shows that our proposed method successfully adapts to various degrees of distortion in the testing phase and outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed method is useful in practice because it does not require camera calibration and additional computations in a testing set-up.
Heatmap-based methods dominate in the field of human pose estimation by modelling the output distribution through likelihood heatmaps. In contrast, regression-based methods are more efficient but suffer from inferior performance. In this work, we explore maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to develop an efficient and effective regression-based methods. From the perspective of MLE, adopting different regression losses is making different assumptions about the output density function. A density function closer to the true distribution leads to a better regression performance. In light of this, we propose a novel regression paradigm with Residual Log-likelihood Estimation (RLE) to capture the underlying output distribution. Concretely, RLE learns the change of the distribution instead of the unreferenced underlying distribution to facilitate the training process. With the proposed reparameterization design, our method is compatible with off-the-shelf flow models. The proposed method is effective, efficient and flexible. We show its potential in various human pose estimation tasks with comprehensive experiments. Compared to the conventional regression paradigm, regression with RLE bring 12.4 mAP improvement on MSCOCO without any test-time overhead. Moreover, for the first time, especially on multi-person pose estimation, our regression method is superior to the heatmap-based methods. Our code is available at //github.com/Jeff-sjtu/res-loglikelihood-regression
The key challenge in learning dense correspondences lies in the lack of ground-truth matches for real image pairs. While photometric consistency losses provide unsupervised alternatives, they struggle with large appearance changes, which are ubiquitous in geometric and semantic matching tasks. Moreover, methods relying on synthetic training pairs often suffer from poor generalisation to real data. We propose Warp Consistency, an unsupervised learning objective for dense correspondence regression. Our objective is effective even in settings with large appearance and view-point changes. Given a pair of real images, we first construct an image triplet by applying a randomly sampled warp to one of the original images. We derive and analyze all flow-consistency constraints arising between the triplet. From our observations and empirical results, we design a general unsupervised objective employing two of the derived constraints. We validate our warp consistency loss by training three recent dense correspondence networks for the geometric and semantic matching tasks. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art on several challenging benchmarks, including MegaDepth, RobotCar and TSS. Code and models will be released at //github.com/PruneTruong/DenseMatching.
Human pose estimation aims to locate the human body parts and build human body representation (e.g., body skeleton) from input data such as images and videos. It has drawn increasing attention during the past decade and has been utilized in a wide range of applications including human-computer interaction, motion analysis, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Although the recently developed deep learning-based solutions have achieved high performance in human pose estimation, there still remain challenges due to insufficient training data, depth ambiguities, and occlusions. The goal of this survey paper is to provide a comprehensive review of recent deep learning-based solutions for both 2D and 3D pose estimation via a systematic analysis and comparison of these solutions based on their input data and inference procedures. More than 240 research papers since 2014 are covered in this survey. Furthermore, 2D and 3D human pose estimation datasets and evaluation metrics are included. Quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on popular datasets are summarized and discussed. Finally, the challenges involved, applications, and future research directions are concluded. We also provide a regularly updated project page on: \url{//github.com/zczcwh/DL-HPE}
This work focuses on mitigating two limitations in the joint learning of local feature detectors and descriptors. First, the ability to estimate the local shape (scale, orientation, etc.) of feature points is often neglected during dense feature extraction, while the shape-awareness is crucial to acquire stronger geometric invariance. Second, the localization accuracy of detected keypoints is not sufficient to reliably recover camera geometry, which has become the bottleneck in tasks such as 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we present ASLFeat, with three light-weight yet effective modifications to mitigate above issues. First, we resort to deformable convolutional networks to densely estimate and apply local transformation. Second, we take advantage of the inherent feature hierarchy to restore spatial resolution and low-level details for accurate keypoint localization. Finally, we use a peakiness measurement to relate feature responses and derive more indicative detection scores. The effect of each modification is thoroughly studied, and the evaluation is extensively conducted across a variety of practical scenarios. State-of-the-art results are reported that demonstrate the superiority of our methods.
In the last decade, numerous supervised deep learning approaches requiring large amounts of labeled data have been proposed for visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and depth map estimation. To overcome the data limitation, self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising alternative, exploiting constraints such as geometric and photometric consistency in the scene. In this study, we introduce a novel self-supervised deep learning-based VIO and depth map recovery approach (SelfVIO) using adversarial training and self-adaptive visual-inertial sensor fusion. SelfVIO learns to jointly estimate 6 degrees-of-freedom (6-DoF) ego-motion and a depth map of the scene from unlabeled monocular RGB image sequences and inertial measurement unit (IMU) readings. The proposed approach is able to perform VIO without the need for IMU intrinsic parameters and/or the extrinsic calibration between the IMU and the camera. estimation and single-view depth recovery network. We provide comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the proposed framework comparing its performance with state-of-the-art VIO, VO, and visual simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM) approaches on the KITTI, EuRoC and Cityscapes datasets. Detailed comparisons prove that SelfVIO outperforms state-of-the-art VIO approaches in terms of pose estimation and depth recovery, making it a promising approach among existing methods in the literature.
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.
Recent techniques in self-supervised monocular depth estimation are approaching the performance of supervised methods, but operate in low resolution only. We show that high resolution is key towards high-fidelity self-supervised monocular depth prediction. Inspired by recent deep learning methods for Single-Image Super-Resolution, we propose a sub-pixel convolutional layer extension for depth super-resolution that accurately synthesizes high-resolution disparities from their corresponding low-resolution convolutional features. In addition, we introduce a differentiable flip-augmentation layer that accurately fuses predictions from the image and its horizontally flipped version, reducing the effect of left and right shadow regions generated in the disparity map due to occlusions. Both contributions provide significant performance gains over the state-of-the-art in self-supervised depth and pose estimation on the public KITTI benchmark. A video of our approach can be found at //youtu.be/jKNgBeBMx0I.
Various 3D reconstruction methods have enabled civil engineers to detect damage on a road surface. To achieve the millimetre accuracy required for road condition assessment, a disparity map with subpixel resolution needs to be used. However, none of the existing stereo matching algorithms are specially suitable for the reconstruction of the road surface. Hence in this paper, we propose a novel dense subpixel disparity estimation algorithm with high computational efficiency and robustness. This is achieved by first transforming the perspective view of the target frame into the reference view, which not only increases the accuracy of the block matching for the road surface but also improves the processing speed. The disparities are then estimated iteratively using our previously published algorithm where the search range is propagated from three estimated neighbouring disparities. Since the search range is obtained from the previous iteration, errors may occur when the propagated search range is not sufficient. Therefore, a correlation maxima verification is performed to rectify this issue, and the subpixel resolution is achieved by conducting a parabola interpolation enhancement. Furthermore, a novel disparity global refinement approach developed from the Markov Random Fields and Fast Bilateral Stereo is introduced to further improve the accuracy of the estimated disparity map, where disparities are updated iteratively by minimising the energy function that is related to their interpolated correlation polynomials. The algorithm is implemented in C language with a near real-time performance. The experimental results illustrate that the absolute error of the reconstruction varies from 0.1 mm to 3 mm.
Purpose: MR image reconstruction exploits regularization to compensate for missing k-space data. In this work, we propose to learn the probability distribution of MR image patches with neural networks and use this distribution as prior information constraining images during reconstruction, effectively employing it as regularization. Methods: We use variational autoencoders (VAE) to learn the distribution of MR image patches, which models the high-dimensional distribution by a latent parameter model of lower dimensions in a non-linear fashion. The proposed algorithm uses the learned prior in a Maximum-A-Posteriori estimation formulation. We evaluate the proposed reconstruction method with T1 weighted images and also apply our method on images with white matter lesions. Results: Visual evaluation of the samples showed that the VAE algorithm can approximate the distribution of MR patches well. The proposed reconstruction algorithm using the VAE prior produced high quality reconstructions. The algorithm achieved normalized RMSE, CNR and CN values of 2.77\%, 0.43, 0.11; 4.29\%, 0.43, 0.11, 6.36\%, 0.47, 0.11 and 10.00\%, 0.42, 0.10 for undersampling ratios of 2, 3, 4 and 5, respectively, where it outperformed most of the alternative methods. In the experiments on images with white matter lesions, the method faithfully reconstructed the lesions. Conclusion: We introduced a novel method for MR reconstruction, which takes a new perspective on regularization by using priors learned by neural networks. Results suggest the method compares favorably against the other evaluated methods and can reconstruct lesions as well. Keywords: Reconstruction, MRI, prior probability, MAP estimation, machine learning, variational inference, deep learning