We introduce a Transformer based 6D Object Pose Estimation framework VideoPose, comprising an end-to-end attention based modelling architecture, that attends to previous frames in order to estimate accurate 6D Object Poses in videos. Our approach leverages the temporal information from a video sequence for pose refinement, along with being computationally efficient and robust. Compared to existing methods, our architecture is able to capture and reason from long-range dependencies efficiently, thus iteratively refining over video sequences. Experimental evaluation on the YCB-Video dataset shows that our approach is on par with the state-of-the-art Transformer methods, and performs significantly better relative to CNN based approaches. Further, with a speed of 33 fps, it is also more efficient and therefore applicable to a variety of applications that require real-time object pose estimation. Training code and pretrained models are available at //github.com/ApoorvaBeedu/VideoPose
We propose a new self-supervised method for pre-training the backbone of deep perception models operating on point clouds. The core idea is to train the model on a pretext task which is the reconstruction of the surface on which the 3D points are sampled, and to use the underlying latent vectors as input to the perception head. The intuition is that if the network is able to reconstruct the scene surface, given only sparse input points, then it probably also captures some fragments of semantic information, that can be used to boost an actual perception task. This principle has a very simple formulation, which makes it both easy to implement and widely applicable to a large range of 3D sensors and deep networks performing semantic segmentation or object detection. In fact, it supports a single-stream pipeline, as opposed to most contrastive learning approaches, allowing training on limited resources. We conducted extensive experiments on various autonomous driving datasets, involving very different kinds of lidars, for both semantic segmentation and object detection. The results show the effectiveness of our method to learn useful representations without any annotation, compared to existing approaches. Code is available at \href{//github.com/valeoai/ALSO}{github.com/valeoai/ALSO}
The exploration of mutual-benefit cross-domains has shown great potential toward accurate self-supervised depth estimation. In this work, we revisit feature fusion between depth and semantic information and propose an efficient local adaptive attention method for geometric aware representation enhancement. Instead of building global connections or deforming attention across the feature space without restraint, we bound the spatial interaction within a learnable region of interest. In particular, we leverage geometric cues from semantic information to learn local adaptive bounding boxes to guide unsupervised feature aggregation. The local areas preclude most irrelevant reference points from attention space, yielding more selective feature learning and faster convergence. We naturally extend the paradigm into a multi-head and hierarchic way to enable the information distillation in different semantic levels and improve the feature discriminative ability for fine-grained depth estimation. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our proposed method establishes a new state-of-the-art in self-supervised monocular depth estimation task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach over former Transformer variants.
6D object pose estimation has been a research topic in the field of computer vision and robotics. Many modern world applications like robot grasping, manipulation, autonomous navigation etc, require the correct pose of objects present in a scene to perform their specific task. It becomes even harder when the objects are placed in a cluttered scene and the level of occlusion is high. Prior works have tried to overcome this problem but could not achieve accuracy that can be considered reliable in real-world applications. In this paper, we present an architecture that, unlike prior work, is context-aware. It utilizes the context information available to us about the objects. Our proposed architecture treats the objects separately according to their types i.e; symmetric and non-symmetric. A deeper estimator and refiner network pair is used for non-symmetric objects as compared to symmetric due to their intrinsic differences. Our experiments show an enhancement in the accuracy of about 3.2% over the LineMOD dataset, which is considered a benchmark for pose estimation in the occluded and cluttered scenes, against the prior state-of-the-art DenseFusion. Our results also show that the inference time we got is sufficient for real-time usage.
Transformer models have shown great success handling long-range interactions, making them a promising tool for modeling video. However they lack inductive biases and scale quadratically with input length. These limitations are further exacerbated when dealing with the high dimensionality introduced with the temporal dimension. While there are surveys analyzing the advances of Transformers for vision, none focus on an in-depth analysis of video-specific designs. In this survey we analyze main contributions and trends of works leveraging Transformers to model video. Specifically, we delve into how videos are handled as input-level first. Then, we study the architectural changes made to deal with video more efficiently, reduce redundancy, re-introduce useful inductive biases, and capture long-term temporal dynamics. In addition we provide an overview of different training regimes and explore effective self-supervised learning strategies for video. Finally, we conduct a performance comparison on the most common benchmark for Video Transformers (i.e., action classification), finding them to outperform 3D ConvNets even with less computational complexity.
Estimating 3D human motion from an egocentric video sequence is critical to human behavior understanding and applications in VR/AR. However, naively learning a mapping between egocentric videos and human motions is challenging, because the user's body is often unobserved by the front-facing camera placed on the head of the user. In addition, collecting large-scale, high-quality datasets with paired egocentric videos and 3D human motions requires accurate motion capture devices, which often limit the variety of scenes in the videos to lab-like environments. To eliminate the need for paired egocentric video and human motions, we propose a new method, Ego-Body Pose Estimation via Ego-Head Pose Estimation (EgoEgo), that decomposes the problem into two stages, connected by the head motion as an intermediate representation. EgoEgo first integrates SLAM and a learning approach to estimate accurate head motion. Then, taking the estimated head pose as input, it leverages conditional diffusion to generate multiple plausible full-body motions. This disentanglement of head and body pose eliminates the need for training datasets with paired egocentric videos and 3D human motion, enabling us to leverage large-scale egocentric video datasets and motion capture datasets separately. Moreover, for systematic benchmarking, we develop a synthetic dataset, AMASS-Replica-Ego-Syn (ARES), with paired egocentric videos and human motion. On both ARES and real data, our EgoEgo model performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art.
In this paper, we propose a novel 3D graph convolution based pipeline for category-level 6D pose and size estimation from monocular RGB-D images. The proposed method leverages an efficient 3D data augmentation and a novel vector-based decoupled rotation representation. Specifically, we first design an orientation-aware autoencoder with 3D graph convolution for latent feature learning. The learned latent feature is insensitive to point shift and size thanks to the shift and scale-invariance properties of the 3D graph convolution. Then, to efficiently decode the rotation information from the latent feature, we design a novel flexible vector-based decomposable rotation representation that employs two decoders to complementarily access the rotation information. The proposed rotation representation has two major advantages: 1) decoupled characteristic that makes the rotation estimation easier; 2) flexible length and rotated angle of the vectors allow us to find a more suitable vector representation for specific pose estimation task. Finally, we propose a 3D deformation mechanism to increase the generalization ability of the pipeline. Extensive experiments show that the proposed pipeline achieves state-of-the-art performance on category-level tasks. Further, the experiments demonstrate that the proposed rotation representation is more suitable for the pose estimation tasks than other rotation representations.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Autonomous driving is regarded as one of the most promising remedies to shield human beings from severe crashes. To this end, 3D object detection serves as the core basis of such perception system especially for the sake of path planning, motion prediction, collision avoidance, etc. Generally, stereo or monocular images with corresponding 3D point clouds are already standard layout for 3D object detection, out of which point clouds are increasingly prevalent with accurate depth information being provided. Despite existing efforts, 3D object detection on point clouds is still in its infancy due to high sparseness and irregularity of point clouds by nature, misalignment view between camera view and LiDAR bird's eye of view for modality synergies, occlusions and scale variations at long distances, etc. Recently, profound progress has been made in 3D object detection, with a large body of literature being investigated to address this vision task. As such, we present a comprehensive review of the latest progress in this field covering all the main topics including sensors, fundamentals, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods with their pros and cons. Furthermore, we introduce metrics and provide quantitative comparisons on popular public datasets. The avenues for future work are going to be judiciously identified after an in-deep analysis of the surveyed works. Finally, we conclude this paper.
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 paper introduces an online model for object detection in videos designed to run in real-time on low-powered mobile and embedded devices. Our approach combines fast single-image object detection with convolutional long short term memory (LSTM) layers to create an interweaved recurrent-convolutional architecture. Additionally, we propose an efficient Bottleneck-LSTM layer that significantly reduces computational cost compared to regular LSTMs. Our network achieves temporal awareness by using Bottleneck-LSTMs to refine and propagate feature maps across frames. This approach is substantially faster than existing detection methods in video, outperforming the fastest single-frame models in model size and computational cost while attaining accuracy comparable to much more expensive single-frame models on the Imagenet VID 2015 dataset. Our model reaches a real-time inference speed of up to 15 FPS on a mobile CPU.