A fast and accurate panoptic segmentation system for LiDAR point clouds is crucial for autonomous driving vehicles to understand the surrounding objects and scenes. Existing approaches usually rely on proposals or clustering to segment foreground instances. As a result, they struggle to achieve real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time end-to-end panoptic segmentation network for LiDAR point clouds, called CPSeg. In particular, CPSeg comprises a shared encoder, a dual-decoder, and a cluster-free instance segmentation head, which is able to dynamically pillarize foreground points according to the learned embedding. Then, it acquires instance labels by finding connected pillars with a pairwise embedding comparison. Thus, the conventional proposal-based or clustering-based instance segmentation is transformed into a binary segmentation problem on the pairwise embedding comparison matrix. To help the network regress instance embedding, a fast and deterministic depth completion algorithm is proposed to calculate the surface normal of each point cloud in real-time. The proposed method is benchmarked on two large-scale autonomous driving datasets: SemanticKITTI and nuScenes. Notably, extensive experimental results show that CPSeg achieves state-of-the-art results among real-time approaches on both datasets.
We propose Hi4D, a method and dataset for the automatic analysis of physically close human-human interaction under prolonged contact. Robustly disentangling several in-contact subjects is a challenging task due to occlusions and complex shapes. Hence, existing multi-view systems typically fuse 3D surfaces of close subjects into a single, connected mesh. To address this issue we leverage i) individually fitted neural implicit avatars; ii) an alternating optimization scheme that refines pose and surface through periods of close proximity; and iii) thus segment the fused raw scans into individual instances. From these instances we compile Hi4D dataset of 4D textured scans of 20 subject pairs, 100 sequences, and a total of more than 11K frames. Hi4D contains rich interaction-centric annotations in 2D and 3D alongside accurately registered parametric body models. We define varied human pose and shape estimation tasks on this dataset and provide results from state-of-the-art methods on these benchmarks.
This work presents a new depth- and semantics-aware conditional generative model, named TITAN-Next, for cross-domain image-to-image translation in a multi-modal setup between LiDAR and camera sensors. The proposed model leverages scene semantics as a mid-level representation and is able to translate raw LiDAR point clouds to RGB-D camera images by solely relying on semantic scene segments. We claim that this is the first framework of its kind and it has practical applications in autonomous vehicles such as providing a fail-safe mechanism and augmenting available data in the target image domain. The proposed model is evaluated on the large-scale and challenging Semantic-KITTI dataset, and experimental findings show that it considerably outperforms the original TITAN-Net and other strong baselines by 23.7$\%$ margin in terms of IoU.
Face parsing is defined as the per-pixel labeling of images containing human faces. The labels are defined to identify key facial regions like eyes, lips, nose, hair, etc. In this work, we make use of the structural consistency of the human face to propose a lightweight face-parsing method using a Local Implicit Function network, FP-LIIF. We propose a simple architecture having a convolutional encoder and a pixel MLP decoder that uses 1/26th number of parameters compared to the state-of-the-art models and yet matches or outperforms state-of-the-art models on multiple datasets, like CelebAMask-HQ and LaPa. We do not use any pretraining, and compared to other works, our network can also generate segmentation at different resolutions without any changes in the input resolution. This work enables the use of facial segmentation on low-compute or low-bandwidth devices because of its higher FPS and smaller model size.
The handling of long videos with complex and occluded sequences has recently emerged as a new challenge in the video instance segmentation (VIS) community. However, existing methods have limitations in addressing this challenge. We argue that the biggest bottleneck in current approaches is the discrepancy between training and inference. To effectively bridge this gap, we propose a Generalized framework for VIS, namely GenVIS, that achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks without designing complicated architectures or requiring extra post-processing. The key contribution of GenVIS is the learning strategy, which includes a query-based training pipeline for sequential learning with a novel target label assignment. Additionally, we introduce a memory that effectively acquires information from previous states. Thanks to the new perspective, which focuses on building relationships between separate frames or clips, GenVIS can be flexibly executed in both online and semi-online manner. We evaluate our approach on popular VIS benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS). Notably, we greatly outperform the state-of-the-art on the long VIS benchmark (OVIS), improving 5.6 AP with ResNet-50 backbone. Code is available at //github.com/miranheo/GenVIS.
DEtection TRansformer (DETR) started a trend that uses a group of learnable queries for unified visual perception. This work begins by applying this appealing paradigm to LiDAR-based point cloud segmentation and obtains a simple yet effective baseline. Although the naive adaptation obtains fair results, the instance segmentation performance is noticeably inferior to previous works. By diving into the details, we observe that instances in the sparse point clouds are relatively small to the whole scene and often have similar geometry but lack distinctive appearance for segmentation, which are rare in the image domain. Considering instances in 3D are more featured by their positional information, we emphasize their roles during the modeling and design a robust Mixed-parameterized Positional Embedding (MPE) to guide the segmentation process. It is embedded into backbone features and later guides the mask prediction and query update processes iteratively, leading to Position-Aware Segmentation (PA-Seg) and Masked Focal Attention (MFA). All these designs impel the queries to attend to specific regions and identify various instances. The method, named Position-guided Point cloud Panoptic segmentation transFormer (P3Former), outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 3.4% and 1.2% PQ on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes benchmark, respectively. The source code and models are available at //github.com/SmartBot-PJLab/P3Former .
Interactive segmentation enables users to segment as needed by providing cues of objects, which introduces human-computer interaction for many fields, such as image editing and medical image analysis. Typically, massive and expansive pixel-level annotations are spent to train deep models by object-oriented interactions with manually labeled object masks. In this work, we reveal that informative interactions can be made by simulation with semantic-consistent yet diverse region exploration in an unsupervised paradigm. Concretely, we introduce a Multi-granularity Interaction Simulation (MIS) approach to open up a promising direction for unsupervised interactive segmentation. Drawing on the high-quality dense features produced by recent self-supervised models, we propose to gradually merge patches or regions with similar features to form more extensive regions and thus, every merged region serves as a semantic-meaningful multi-granularity proposal. By randomly sampling these proposals and simulating possible interactions based on them, we provide meaningful interaction at multiple granularities to teach the model to understand interactions. Our MIS significantly outperforms non-deep learning unsupervised methods and is even comparable with some previous deep-supervised methods without any annotation.
CLIP has enabled new and exciting joint vision-language applications, one of which is open-vocabulary segmentation, which can locate any segment given an arbitrary text query. In our research, we ask whether it is possible to discover semantic segments without any user guidance in the form of text queries or predefined classes, and label them using natural language automatically? We propose a novel problem zero-guidance segmentation and the first baseline that leverages two pre-trained generalist models, DINO and CLIP, to solve this problem without any fine-tuning or segmentation dataset. The general idea is to first segment an image into small over-segments, encode them into CLIP's visual-language space, translate them into text labels, and merge semantically similar segments together. The key challenge, however, is how to encode a visual segment into a segment-specific embedding that balances global and local context information, both useful for recognition. Our main contribution is a novel attention-masking technique that balances the two contexts by analyzing the attention layers inside CLIP. We also introduce several metrics for the evaluation of this new task. With CLIP's innate knowledge, our method can precisely locate the Mona Lisa painting among a museum crowd. Project page: //zero-guide-seg.github.io/.
In this paper, we propose a one-stage online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, the positive and negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations and then projected into a feature space. Therein, the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted in the row and column space by maximizing the similarities of positive pairs while minimizing those of negative ones. Our key observation is that the rows of the feature matrix could be regarded as soft labels of instances, and accordingly the columns could be further regarded as cluster representations. By simultaneously optimizing the instance- and cluster-level contrastive loss, the model jointly learns representations and cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show that CC remarkably outperforms 17 competitive clustering methods on six challenging image benchmarks. In particular, CC achieves an NMI of 0.705 (0.431) on the CIFAR-10 (CIFAR-100) dataset, which is an up to 19\% (39\%) performance improvement compared with the best baseline.
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 study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Extensive experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass with up to 200X faster than existing approaches. Moreover, our RandLA-Net clearly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for semantic segmentation on two large-scale benchmarks Semantic3D and SemanticKITTI.