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Mar 13

GS-DiT: Advancing Video Generation with Pseudo 4D Gaussian Fields through Efficient Dense 3D Point Tracking

4D video control is essential in video generation as it enables the use of sophisticated lens techniques, such as multi-camera shooting and dolly zoom, which are currently unsupported by existing methods. Training a video Diffusion Transformer (DiT) directly to control 4D content requires expensive multi-view videos. Inspired by Monocular Dynamic novel View Synthesis (MDVS) that optimizes a 4D representation and renders videos according to different 4D elements, such as camera pose and object motion editing, we bring pseudo 4D Gaussian fields to video generation. Specifically, we propose a novel framework that constructs a pseudo 4D Gaussian field with dense 3D point tracking and renders the Gaussian field for all video frames. Then we finetune a pretrained DiT to generate videos following the guidance of the rendered video, dubbed as GS-DiT. To boost the training of the GS-DiT, we also propose an efficient Dense 3D Point Tracking (D3D-PT) method for the pseudo 4D Gaussian field construction. Our D3D-PT outperforms SpatialTracker, the state-of-the-art sparse 3D point tracking method, in accuracy and accelerates the inference speed by two orders of magnitude. During the inference stage, GS-DiT can generate videos with the same dynamic content while adhering to different camera parameters, addressing a significant limitation of current video generation models. GS-DiT demonstrates strong generalization capabilities and extends the 4D controllability of Gaussian splatting to video generation beyond just camera poses. It supports advanced cinematic effects through the manipulation of the Gaussian field and camera intrinsics, making it a powerful tool for creative video production. Demos are available at https://wkbian.github.io/Projects/GS-DiT/.

Towards Category Unification of 3D Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds

Category-specific models are provenly valuable methods in 3D single object tracking (SOT) regardless of Siamese or motion-centric paradigms. However, such over-specialized model designs incur redundant parameters, thus limiting the broader applicability of 3D SOT task. This paper first introduces unified models that can simultaneously track objects across all categories using a single network with shared model parameters. Specifically, we propose to explicitly encode distinct attributes associated to different object categories, enabling the model to adapt to cross-category data. We find that the attribute variances of point cloud objects primarily occur from the varying size and shape (e.g., large and square vehicles v.s. small and slender humans). Based on this observation, we design a novel point set representation learning network inheriting transformer architecture, termed AdaFormer, which adaptively encodes the dynamically varying shape and size information from cross-category data in a unified manner. We further incorporate the size and shape prior derived from the known template targets into the model's inputs and learning objective, facilitating the learning of unified representation. Equipped with such designs, we construct two category-unified models SiamCUT and MoCUT.Extensive experiments demonstrate that SiamCUT and MoCUT exhibit strong generalization and training stability. Furthermore, our category-unified models outperform the category-specific counterparts by a significant margin (e.g., on KITTI dataset, 12% and 3% performance gains on the Siamese and motion paradigms). Our code will be available.

TrajectoryFormer: 3D Object Tracking Transformer with Predictive Trajectory Hypotheses

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is vital for many applications including autonomous driving vehicles and service robots. With the commonly used tracking-by-detection paradigm, 3D MOT has made important progress in recent years. However, these methods only use the detection boxes of the current frame to obtain trajectory-box association results, which makes it impossible for the tracker to recover objects missed by the detector. In this paper, we present TrajectoryFormer, a novel point-cloud-based 3D MOT framework. To recover the missed object by detector, we generates multiple trajectory hypotheses with hybrid candidate boxes, including temporally predicted boxes and current-frame detection boxes, for trajectory-box association. The predicted boxes can propagate object's history trajectory information to the current frame and thus the network can tolerate short-term miss detection of the tracked objects. We combine long-term object motion feature and short-term object appearance feature to create per-hypothesis feature embedding, which reduces the computational overhead for spatial-temporal encoding. Additionally, we introduce a Global-Local Interaction Module to conduct information interaction among all hypotheses and models their spatial relations, leading to accurate estimation of hypotheses. Our TrajectoryFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Waymo 3D MOT benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/poodarchu/EFG .

Privacy-preserving Pedestrian Tracking using Distributed 3D LiDARs

The growing demand for intelligent environments unleashes an extraordinary cycle of privacy-aware applications that makes individuals' life more comfortable and safe. Examples of these applications include pedestrian tracking systems in large areas. Although the ubiquity of camera-based systems, they are not a preferable solution due to the vulnerability of leaking the privacy of pedestrians. In this paper, we introduce a novel privacy-preserving system for pedestrian tracking in smart environments using multiple distributed LiDARs of non-overlapping views. The system is designed to leverage LiDAR devices to track pedestrians in partially covered areas due to practical constraints, e.g., occlusion or cost. Therefore, the system uses the point cloud captured by different LiDARs to extract discriminative features that are used to train a metric learning model for pedestrian matching purposes. To boost the system's robustness, we leverage a probabilistic approach to model and adapt the dynamic mobility patterns of individuals and thus connect their sub-trajectories. We deployed the system in a large-scale testbed with 70 colorless LiDARs and conducted three different experiments. The evaluation result at the entrance hall confirms the system's ability to accurately track the pedestrians with a 0.98 F-measure even with zero-covered areas. This result highlights the promise of the proposed system as the next generation of privacy-preserving tracking means in smart environments.

A Quantitative Evaluation of Dense 3D Reconstruction of Sinus Anatomy from Monocular Endoscopic Video

Generating accurate 3D reconstructions from endoscopic video is a promising avenue for longitudinal radiation-free analysis of sinus anatomy and surgical outcomes. Several methods for monocular reconstruction have been proposed, yielding visually pleasant 3D anatomical structures by retrieving relative camera poses with structure-from-motion-type algorithms and fusion of monocular depth estimates. However, due to the complex properties of the underlying algorithms and endoscopic scenes, the reconstruction pipeline may perform poorly or fail unexpectedly. Further, acquiring medical data conveys additional challenges, presenting difficulties in quantitatively benchmarking these models, understanding failure cases, and identifying critical components that contribute to their precision. In this work, we perform a quantitative analysis of a self-supervised approach for sinus reconstruction using endoscopic sequences paired with optical tracking and high-resolution computed tomography acquired from nine ex-vivo specimens. Our results show that the generated reconstructions are in high agreement with the anatomy, yielding an average point-to-mesh error of 0.91 mm between reconstructions and CT segmentations. However, in a point-to-point matching scenario, relevant for endoscope tracking and navigation, we found average target registration errors of 6.58 mm. We identified that pose and depth estimation inaccuracies contribute equally to this error and that locally consistent sequences with shorter trajectories generate more accurate reconstructions. These results suggest that achieving global consistency between relative camera poses and estimated depths with the anatomy is essential. In doing so, we can ensure proper synergy between all components of the pipeline for improved reconstructions that will facilitate clinical application of this innovative technology.

Relightable 3D Gaussian: Real-time Point Cloud Relighting with BRDF Decomposition and Ray Tracing

We present a novel differentiable point-based rendering framework for material and lighting decomposition from multi-view images, enabling editing, ray-tracing, and real-time relighting of the 3D point cloud. Specifically, a 3D scene is represented as a set of relightable 3D Gaussian points, where each point is additionally associated with a normal direction, BRDF parameters, and incident lights from different directions. To achieve robust lighting estimation, we further divide incident lights of each point into global and local components, as well as view-dependent visibilities. The 3D scene is optimized through the 3D Gaussian Splatting technique while BRDF and lighting are decomposed by physically-based differentiable rendering. Moreover, we introduce an innovative point-based ray-tracing approach based on the bounding volume hierarchy for efficient visibility baking, enabling real-time rendering and relighting of 3D Gaussian points with accurate shadow effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved BRDF estimation and novel view rendering results compared to state-of-the-art material estimation approaches. Our framework showcases the potential to revolutionize the mesh-based graphics pipeline with a relightable, traceable, and editable rendering pipeline solely based on point cloud. Project page:https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Relightable3DGaussian/.

3DMOTFormer: Graph Transformer for Online 3D Multi-Object Tracking

Tracking 3D objects accurately and consistently is crucial for autonomous vehicles, enabling more reliable downstream tasks such as trajectory prediction and motion planning. Based on the substantial progress in object detection in recent years, the tracking-by-detection paradigm has become a popular choice due to its simplicity and efficiency. State-of-the-art 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) approaches typically rely on non-learned model-based algorithms such as Kalman Filter but require many manually tuned parameters. On the other hand, learning-based approaches face the problem of adapting the training to the online setting, leading to inevitable distribution mismatch between training and inference as well as suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose 3DMOTFormer, a learned geometry-based 3D MOT framework building upon the transformer architecture. We use an Edge-Augmented Graph Transformer to reason on the track-detection bipartite graph frame-by-frame and conduct data association via edge classification. To reduce the distribution mismatch between training and inference, we propose a novel online training strategy with an autoregressive and recurrent forward pass as well as sequential batch optimization. Using CenterPoint detections, our approach achieves 71.2% and 68.2% AMOTA on the nuScenes validation and test split, respectively. In addition, a trained 3DMOTFormer model generalizes well across different object detectors. Code is available at: https://github.com/dsx0511/3DMOTFormer.

Decaf: Monocular Deformation Capture for Face and Hand Interactions

Existing methods for 3D tracking from monocular RGB videos predominantly consider articulated and rigid objects. Modelling dense non-rigid object deformations in this setting remained largely unaddressed so far, although such effects can improve the realism of the downstream applications such as AR/VR and avatar communications. This is due to the severe ill-posedness of the monocular view setting and the associated challenges. While it is possible to naively track multiple non-rigid objects independently using 3D templates or parametric 3D models, such an approach would suffer from multiple artefacts in the resulting 3D estimates such as depth ambiguity, unnatural intra-object collisions and missing or implausible deformations. Hence, this paper introduces the first method that addresses the fundamental challenges depicted above and that allows tracking human hands interacting with human faces in 3D from single monocular RGB videos. We model hands as articulated objects inducing non-rigid face deformations during an active interaction. Our method relies on a new hand-face motion and interaction capture dataset with realistic face deformations acquired with a markerless multi-view camera system. As a pivotal step in its creation, we process the reconstructed raw 3D shapes with position-based dynamics and an approach for non-uniform stiffness estimation of the head tissues, which results in plausible annotations of the surface deformations, hand-face contact regions and head-hand positions. At the core of our neural approach are a variational auto-encoder supplying the hand-face depth prior and modules that guide the 3D tracking by estimating the contacts and the deformations. Our final 3D hand and face reconstructions are realistic and more plausible compared to several baselines applicable in our setting, both quantitatively and qualitatively. https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/Decaf

ShaSTA-Fuse: Camera-LiDAR Sensor Fusion to Model Shape and Spatio-Temporal Affinities for 3D Multi-Object Tracking

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is essential for an autonomous mobile agent to safely navigate a scene. In order to maximize the perception capabilities of the autonomous agent, we aim to develop a 3D MOT framework that fuses camera and LiDAR sensor information. Building on our prior LiDAR-only work, ShaSTA, which models shape and spatio-temporal affinities for 3D MOT, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion approach for learning affinities. At its core, this work proposes a fusion technique that generates a rich sensory signal incorporating information about depth and distant objects to enhance affinity estimation for improved data association, track lifecycle management, false-positive elimination, false-negative propagation, and track confidence score refinement. Our main contributions include a novel fusion approach for combining camera and LiDAR sensory signals to learn affinities, and a first-of-its-kind multimodal sequential track confidence refinement technique that fuses 2D and 3D detections. Additionally, we perform an ablative analysis on each fusion step to demonstrate the added benefits of incorporating the camera sensor, particular for small, distant objects that tend to suffer from the depth-sensing limits and sparsity of LiDAR sensors. In sum, our technique achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark amongst multimodal 3D MOT algorithms using CenterPoint detections.

EP2P-Loc: End-to-End 3D Point to 2D Pixel Localization for Large-Scale Visual Localization

Visual localization is the task of estimating a 6-DoF camera pose of a query image within a provided 3D reference map. Thanks to recent advances in various 3D sensors, 3D point clouds are becoming a more accurate and affordable option for building the reference map, but research to match the points of 3D point clouds with pixels in 2D images for visual localization remains challenging. Existing approaches that jointly learn 2D-3D feature matching suffer from low inliers due to representational differences between the two modalities, and the methods that bypass this problem into classification have an issue of poor refinement. In this work, we propose EP2P-Loc, a novel large-scale visual localization method that mitigates such appearance discrepancy and enables end-to-end training for pose estimation. To increase the number of inliers, we propose a simple algorithm to remove invisible 3D points in the image, and find all 2D-3D correspondences without keypoint detection. To reduce memory usage and search complexity, we take a coarse-to-fine approach where we extract patch-level features from 2D images, then perform 2D patch classification on each 3D point, and obtain the exact corresponding 2D pixel coordinates through positional encoding. Finally, for the first time in this task, we employ a differentiable PnP for end-to-end training. In the experiments on newly curated large-scale indoor and outdoor benchmarks based on 2D-3D-S and KITTI, we show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing visual localization and image-to-point cloud registration methods.

MD-Splatting: Learning Metric Deformation from 4D Gaussians in Highly Deformable Scenes

Accurate 3D tracking in highly deformable scenes with occlusions and shadows can facilitate new applications in robotics, augmented reality, and generative AI. However, tracking under these conditions is extremely challenging due to the ambiguity that arises with large deformations, shadows, and occlusions. We introduce MD-Splatting, an approach for simultaneous 3D tracking and novel view synthesis, using video captures of a dynamic scene from various camera poses. MD-Splatting builds on recent advances in Gaussian splatting, a method that learns the properties of a large number of Gaussians for state-of-the-art and fast novel view synthesis. MD-Splatting learns a deformation function to project a set of Gaussians with non-metric, thus canonical, properties into metric space. The deformation function uses a neural-voxel encoding and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to infer Gaussian position, rotation, and a shadow scalar. We enforce physics-inspired regularization terms based on local rigidity, conservation of momentum, and isometry, which leads to trajectories with smaller trajectory errors. MD-Splatting achieves high-quality 3D tracking on highly deformable scenes with shadows and occlusions. Compared to state-of-the-art, we improve 3D tracking by an average of 23.9 %, while simultaneously achieving high-quality novel view synthesis. With sufficient texture such as in scene 6, MD-Splatting achieves a median tracking error of 3.39 mm on a cloth of 1 x 1 meters in size. Project website: https://md-splatting.github.io/.

EdgeGaussians -- 3D Edge Mapping via Gaussian Splatting

With their meaningful geometry and their omnipresence in the 3D world, edges are extremely useful primitives in computer vision. 3D edges comprise of lines and curves, and methods to reconstruct them use either multi-view images or point clouds as input. State-of-the-art image-based methods first learn a 3D edge point cloud then fit 3D edges to it. The edge point cloud is obtained by learning a 3D neural implicit edge field from which the 3D edge points are sampled on a specific level set (0 or 1). However, such methods present two important drawbacks: i) it is not realistic to sample points on exact level sets due to float imprecision and training inaccuracies. Instead, they are sampled within a range of levels so the points do not lie accurately on the 3D edges and require further processing. ii) Such implicit representations are computationally expensive and require long training times. In this paper, we address these two limitations and propose a 3D edge mapping that is simpler, more efficient, and preserves accuracy. Our method learns explicitly the 3D edge points and their edge direction hence bypassing the need for point sampling. It casts a 3D edge point as the center of a 3D Gaussian and the edge direction as the principal axis of the Gaussian. Such a representation has the advantage of being not only geometrically meaningful but also compatible with the efficient training optimization defined in Gaussian Splatting. Results show that the proposed method produces edges as accurate and complete as the state-of-the-art while being an order of magnitude faster. Code is released at https://github.com/kunalchelani/EdgeGaussians.

Point-DETR3D: Leveraging Imagery Data with Spatial Point Prior for Weakly Semi-supervised 3D Object Detection

Training high-accuracy 3D detectors necessitates massive labeled 3D annotations with 7 degree-of-freedom, which is laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, the form of point annotations is proposed to offer significant prospects for practical applications in 3D detection, which is not only more accessible and less expensive but also provides strong spatial information for object localization. In this paper, we empirically discover that it is non-trivial to merely adapt Point-DETR to its 3D form, encountering two main bottlenecks: 1) it fails to encode strong 3D prior into the model, and 2) it generates low-quality pseudo labels in distant regions due to the extreme sparsity of LiDAR points. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Point-DETR3D, a teacher-student framework for weakly semi-supervised 3D detection, designed to fully capitalize on point-wise supervision within a constrained instance-wise annotation budget.Different from Point-DETR which encodes 3D positional information solely through a point encoder, we propose an explicit positional query initialization strategy to enhance the positional prior. Considering the low quality of pseudo labels at distant regions produced by the teacher model, we enhance the detector's perception by incorporating dense imagery data through a novel Cross-Modal Deformable RoI Fusion (D-RoI).Moreover, an innovative point-guided self-supervised learning technique is proposed to allow for fully exploiting point priors, even in student models.Extensive experiments on representative nuScenes dataset demonstrate our Point-DETR3D obtains significant improvements compared to previous works. Notably, with only 5% of labeled data, Point-DETR3D achieves over 90% performance of its fully supervised counterpart.

MSF: Motion-guided Sequential Fusion for Efficient 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences

Point cloud sequences are commonly used to accurately detect 3D objects in applications such as autonomous driving. Current top-performing multi-frame detectors mostly follow a Detect-and-Fuse framework, which extracts features from each frame of the sequence and fuses them to detect the objects in the current frame. However, this inevitably leads to redundant computation since adjacent frames are highly correlated. In this paper, we propose an efficient Motion-guided Sequential Fusion (MSF) method, which exploits the continuity of object motion to mine useful sequential contexts for object detection in the current frame. We first generate 3D proposals on the current frame and propagate them to preceding frames based on the estimated velocities. The points-of-interest are then pooled from the sequence and encoded as proposal features. A novel Bidirectional Feature Aggregation (BiFA) module is further proposed to facilitate the interactions of proposal features across frames. Besides, we optimize the point cloud pooling by a voxel-based sampling technique so that millions of points can be processed in several milliseconds. The proposed MSF method achieves not only better efficiency than other multi-frame detectors but also leading accuracy, with 83.12% and 78.30% mAP on the LEVEL1 and LEVEL2 test sets of Waymo Open Dataset, respectively. Codes can be found at https://github.com/skyhehe123/MSF.

DetZero: Rethinking Offboard 3D Object Detection with Long-term Sequential Point Clouds

Existing offboard 3D detectors always follow a modular pipeline design to take advantage of unlimited sequential point clouds. We have found that the full potential of offboard 3D detectors is not explored mainly due to two reasons: (1) the onboard multi-object tracker cannot generate sufficient complete object trajectories, and (2) the motion state of objects poses an inevitable challenge for the object-centric refining stage in leveraging the long-term temporal context representation. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel paradigm of offboard 3D object detection, named DetZero. Concretely, an offline tracker coupled with a multi-frame detector is proposed to focus on the completeness of generated object tracks. An attention-mechanism refining module is proposed to strengthen contextual information interaction across long-term sequential point clouds for object refining with decomposed regression methods. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset show our DetZero outperforms all state-of-the-art onboard and offboard 3D detection methods. Notably, DetZero ranks 1st place on Waymo 3D object detection leaderboard with 85.15 mAPH (L2) detection performance. Further experiments validate the application of taking the place of human labels with such high-quality results. Our empirical study leads to rethinking conventions and interesting findings that can guide future research on offboard 3D object detection.

Fast Encoder-Based 3D from Casual Videos via Point Track Processing

This paper addresses the long-standing challenge of reconstructing 3D structures from videos with dynamic content. Current approaches to this problem were not designed to operate on casual videos recorded by standard cameras or require a long optimization time. Aiming to significantly improve the efficiency of previous approaches, we present TracksTo4D, a learning-based approach that enables inferring 3D structure and camera positions from dynamic content originating from casual videos using a single efficient feed-forward pass. To achieve this, we propose operating directly over 2D point tracks as input and designing an architecture tailored for processing 2D point tracks. Our proposed architecture is designed with two key principles in mind: (1) it takes into account the inherent symmetries present in the input point tracks data, and (2) it assumes that the movement patterns can be effectively represented using a low-rank approximation. TracksTo4D is trained in an unsupervised way on a dataset of casual videos utilizing only the 2D point tracks extracted from the videos, without any 3D supervision. Our experiments show that TracksTo4D can reconstruct a temporal point cloud and camera positions of the underlying video with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while drastically reducing runtime by up to 95\%. We further show that TracksTo4D generalizes well to unseen videos of unseen semantic categories at inference time.

Clustering based Point Cloud Representation Learning for 3D Analysis

Point cloud analysis (such as 3D segmentation and detection) is a challenging task, because of not only the irregular geometries of many millions of unordered points, but also the great variations caused by depth, viewpoint, occlusion, etc. Current studies put much focus on the adaption of neural networks to the complex geometries of point clouds, but are blind to a fundamental question: how to learn an appropriate point embedding space that is aware of both discriminative semantics and challenging variations? As a response, we propose a clustering based supervised learning scheme for point cloud analysis. Unlike current de-facto, scene-wise training paradigm, our algorithm conducts within-class clustering on the point embedding space for automatically discovering subclass patterns which are latent yet representative across scenes. The mined patterns are, in turn, used to repaint the embedding space, so as to respect the underlying distribution of the entire training dataset and improve the robustness to the variations. Our algorithm is principled and readily pluggable to modern point cloud segmentation networks during training, without extra overhead during testing. With various 3D network architectures (i.e., voxel-based, point-based, Transformer-based, automatically searched), our algorithm shows notable improvements on famous point cloud segmentation datasets (i.e.,2.0-2.6% on single-scan and 2.0-2.2% multi-scan of SemanticKITTI, 1.8-1.9% on S3DIS, in terms of mIoU). Our algorithm also demonstrates utility in 3D detection, showing 2.0-3.4% mAP gains on KITTI.

3D-MuPPET: 3D Multi-Pigeon Pose Estimation and Tracking

Markerless methods for animal posture tracking have been rapidly developing recently, but frameworks and benchmarks for tracking large animal groups in 3D are still lacking. To overcome this gap in the literature, we present 3D-MuPPET, a framework to estimate and track 3D poses of up to 10 pigeons at interactive speed using multiple camera views. We train a pose estimator to infer 2D keypoints and bounding boxes of multiple pigeons, then triangulate the keypoints to 3D. For identity matching of individuals in all views, we first dynamically match 2D detections to global identities in the first frame, then use a 2D tracker to maintain IDs across views in subsequent frames. We achieve comparable accuracy to a state of the art 3D pose estimator in terms of median error and Percentage of Correct Keypoints. Additionally, we benchmark the inference speed of 3D-MuPPET, with up to 9.45 fps in 2D and 1.89 fps in 3D, and perform quantitative tracking evaluation, which yields encouraging results. Finally, we showcase two novel applications for 3D-MuPPET. First, we train a model with data of single pigeons and achieve comparable results in 2D and 3D posture estimation for up to 5 pigeons. Second, we show that 3D-MuPPET also works in outdoors without additional annotations from natural environments. Both use cases simplify the domain shift to new species and environments, largely reducing annotation effort needed for 3D posture tracking. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a framework for 2D/3D animal posture and trajectory tracking that works in both indoor and outdoor environments for up to 10 individuals. We hope that the framework can open up new opportunities in studying animal collective behaviour and encourages further developments in 3D multi-animal posture tracking.

3D-SPS: Single-Stage 3D Visual Grounding via Referred Point Progressive Selection

3D visual grounding aims to locate the referred target object in 3D point cloud scenes according to a free-form language description. Previous methods mostly follow a two-stage paradigm, i.e., language-irrelevant detection and cross-modal matching, which is limited by the isolated architecture. In such a paradigm, the detector needs to sample keypoints from raw point clouds due to the inherent properties of 3D point clouds (irregular and large-scale), to generate the corresponding object proposal for each keypoint. However, sparse proposals may leave out the target in detection, while dense proposals may confuse the matching model. Moreover, the language-irrelevant detection stage can only sample a small proportion of keypoints on the target, deteriorating the target prediction. In this paper, we propose a 3D Single-Stage Referred Point Progressive Selection (3D-SPS) method, which progressively selects keypoints with the guidance of language and directly locates the target. Specifically, we propose a Description-aware Keypoint Sampling (DKS) module to coarsely focus on the points of language-relevant objects, which are significant clues for grounding. Besides, we devise a Target-oriented Progressive Mining (TPM) module to finely concentrate on the points of the target, which is enabled by progressive intra-modal relation modeling and inter-modal target mining. 3D-SPS bridges the gap between detection and matching in the 3D visual grounding task, localizing the target at a single stage. Experiments demonstrate that 3D-SPS achieves state-of-the-art performance on both ScanRefer and Nr3D/Sr3D datasets.

Online Unsupervised Feature Learning for Visual Tracking

Feature encoding with respect to an over-complete dictionary learned by unsupervised methods, followed by spatial pyramid pooling, and linear classification, has exhibited powerful strength in various vision applications. Here we propose to use the feature learning pipeline for visual tracking. Tracking is implemented using tracking-by-detection and the resulted framework is very simple yet effective. First, online dictionary learning is used to build a dictionary, which captures the appearance changes of the tracking target as well as the background changes. Given a test image window, we extract local image patches from it and each local patch is encoded with respect to the dictionary. The encoded features are then pooled over a spatial pyramid to form an aggregated feature vector. Finally, a simple linear classifier is trained on these features. Our experiments show that the proposed powerful---albeit simple---tracker, outperforms all the state-of-the-art tracking methods that we have tested. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of different dictionary learning and feature encoding methods in the proposed tracking framework, and analyse the impact of each component in the tracking scenario. We also demonstrate the flexibility of feature learning by plugging it into Hare et al.'s tracking method. The outcome is, to our knowledge, the best tracker ever reported, which facilitates the advantages of both feature learning and structured output prediction.

Flying Triangulation - towards the 3D movie camera

Flying Triangulation sensors enable a free-hand and motion-robust 3D data acquisition of complex shaped objects. The measurement principle is based on a multi-line light-sectioning approach and uses sophisticated algorithms for real-time registration (S. Ettl et al., Appl. Opt. 51 (2012) 281-289). As "single-shot principle", light sectioning enables the option to get surface data from one single camera exposure. But there is a drawback: A pixel-dense measurement is not possible because of fundamental information-theoretical reasons. By "pixel-dense" we understand that each pixel displays individually measured distance information, neither interpolated from its neighbour pixels nor using lateral context information. Hence, for monomodal single-shot principles, the 3D data generated from one 2D raw image display a significantly lower space-bandwidth than the camera permits. This is the price one must pay for motion robustness. Currently, our sensors project about 10 lines (each with 1000 pixels), reaching an considerable lower data efficiency than theoretically possible for a single-shot sensor. Our aim is to push Flying Triangulation to its information-theoretical limits. Therefore, the line density as well as the measurement depth needs to be significantly increased. This causes serious indexing ambiguities. On the road to a single-shot 3D movie camera, we are working on solutions to overcome the problem of false line indexing by utilizing yet unexploited information. We will present several approaches and will discuss profound information-theoretical questions about the information efficiency of 3D sensors.

Physically Embodied Gaussian Splatting: A Realtime Correctable World Model for Robotics

For robots to robustly understand and interact with the physical world, it is highly beneficial to have a comprehensive representation - modelling geometry, physics, and visual observations - that informs perception, planning, and control algorithms. We propose a novel dual Gaussian-Particle representation that models the physical world while (i) enabling predictive simulation of future states and (ii) allowing online correction from visual observations in a dynamic world. Our representation comprises particles that capture the geometrical aspect of objects in the world and can be used alongside a particle-based physics system to anticipate physically plausible future states. Attached to these particles are 3D Gaussians that render images from any viewpoint through a splatting process thus capturing the visual state. By comparing the predicted and observed images, our approach generates visual forces that correct the particle positions while respecting known physical constraints. By integrating predictive physical modelling with continuous visually-derived corrections, our unified representation reasons about the present and future while synchronizing with reality. Our system runs in realtime at 30Hz using only 3 cameras. We validate our approach on 2D and 3D tracking tasks as well as photometric reconstruction quality. Videos are found at https://embodied-gaussians.github.io/.

Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering

Real-time rendering and animation of humans is a core function in games, movies, and telepresence applications. Existing methods have a number of drawbacks we aim to address with our work. Triangle meshes have difficulty modeling thin structures like hair, volumetric representations like Neural Volumes are too low-resolution given a reasonable memory budget, and high-resolution implicit representations like Neural Radiance Fields are too slow for use in real-time applications. We present Mixture of Volumetric Primitives (MVP), a representation for rendering dynamic 3D content that combines the completeness of volumetric representations with the efficiency of primitive-based rendering, e.g., point-based or mesh-based methods. Our approach achieves this by leveraging spatially shared computation with a deconvolutional architecture and by minimizing computation in empty regions of space with volumetric primitives that can move to cover only occupied regions. Our parameterization supports the integration of correspondence and tracking constraints, while being robust to areas where classical tracking fails, such as around thin or translucent structures and areas with large topological variability. MVP is a hybrid that generalizes both volumetric and primitive-based representations. Through a series of extensive experiments we demonstrate that it inherits the strengths of each, while avoiding many of their limitations. We also compare our approach to several state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate that MVP produces superior results in terms of quality and runtime performance.

3D-VField: Adversarial Augmentation of Point Clouds for Domain Generalization in 3D Object Detection

As 3D object detection on point clouds relies on the geometrical relationships between the points, non-standard object shapes can hinder a method's detection capability. However, in safety-critical settings, robustness to out-of-domain and long-tail samples is fundamental to circumvent dangerous issues, such as the misdetection of damaged or rare cars. In this work, we substantially improve the generalization of 3D object detectors to out-of-domain data by deforming point clouds during training. We achieve this with 3D-VField: a novel data augmentation method that plausibly deforms objects via vector fields learned in an adversarial fashion. Our approach constrains 3D points to slide along their sensor view rays while neither adding nor removing any of them. The obtained vectors are transferable, sample-independent and preserve shape and occlusions. Despite training only on a standard dataset, such as KITTI, augmenting with our vector fields significantly improves the generalization to differently shaped objects and scenes. Towards this end, we propose and share CrashD: a synthetic dataset of realistic damaged and rare cars, with a variety of crash scenarios. Extensive experiments on KITTI, Waymo, our CrashD and SUN RGB-D show the generalizability of our techniques to out-of-domain data, different models and sensors, namely LiDAR and ToF cameras, for both indoor and outdoor scenes. Our CrashD dataset is available at https://crashd-cars.github.io.

Gaussian Splatting with Localized Points Management

Point management is a critical component in optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models, as the point initiation (e.g., via structure from motion) is distributionally inappropriate. Typically, the Adaptive Density Control (ADC) algorithm is applied, leveraging view-averaged gradient magnitude thresholding for point densification, opacity thresholding for pruning, and regular all-points opacity reset. However, we reveal that this strategy is limited in tackling intricate/special image regions (e.g., transparent) as it is unable to identify all the 3D zones that require point densification, and lacking an appropriate mechanism to handle the ill-conditioned points with negative impacts (occlusion due to false high opacity). To address these limitations, we propose a Localized Point Management (LPM) strategy, capable of identifying those error-contributing zones in the highest demand for both point addition and geometry calibration. Zone identification is achieved by leveraging the underlying multiview geometry constraints, with the guidance of image rendering errors. We apply point densification in the identified zone, whilst resetting the opacity of those points residing in front of these regions so that a new opportunity is created to correct ill-conditioned points. Serving as a versatile plugin, LPM can be seamlessly integrated into existing 3D Gaussian Splatting models. Experimental evaluation across both static 3D and dynamic 4D scenes validate the efficacy of our LPM strategy in boosting a variety of existing 3DGS models both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, LPM improves both vanilla 3DGS and SpaceTimeGS to achieve state-of-the-art rendering quality while retaining real-time speeds, outperforming on challenging datasets such as Tanks & Temples and the Neural 3D Video Dataset.

6DOPE-GS: Online 6D Object Pose Estimation using Gaussian Splatting

Efficient and accurate object pose estimation is an essential component for modern vision systems in many applications such as Augmented Reality, autonomous driving, and robotics. While research in model-based 6D object pose estimation has delivered promising results, model-free methods are hindered by the high computational load in rendering and inferring consistent poses of arbitrary objects in a live RGB-D video stream. To address this issue, we present 6DOPE-GS, a novel method for online 6D object pose estimation \& tracking with a single RGB-D camera by effectively leveraging advances in Gaussian Splatting. Thanks to the fast differentiable rendering capabilities of Gaussian Splatting, 6DOPE-GS can simultaneously optimize for 6D object poses and 3D object reconstruction. To achieve the necessary efficiency and accuracy for live tracking, our method uses incremental 2D Gaussian Splatting with an intelligent dynamic keyframe selection procedure to achieve high spatial object coverage and prevent erroneous pose updates. We also propose an opacity statistic-based pruning mechanism for adaptive Gaussian density control, to ensure training stability and efficiency. We evaluate our method on the HO3D and YCBInEOAT datasets and show that 6DOPE-GS matches the performance of state-of-the-art baselines for model-free simultaneous 6D pose tracking and reconstruction while providing a 5times speedup. We also demonstrate the method's suitability for live, dynamic object tracking and reconstruction in a real-world setting.

Points-to-3D: Bridging the Gap between Sparse Points and Shape-Controllable Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation has recently garnered significant attention, fueled by 2D diffusion models trained on billions of image-text pairs. Existing methods primarily rely on score distillation to leverage the 2D diffusion priors to supervise the generation of 3D models, e.g., NeRF. However, score distillation is prone to suffer the view inconsistency problem, and implicit NeRF modeling can also lead to an arbitrary shape, thus leading to less realistic and uncontrollable 3D generation. In this work, we propose a flexible framework of Points-to-3D to bridge the gap between sparse yet freely available 3D points and realistic shape-controllable 3D generation by distilling the knowledge from both 2D and 3D diffusion models. The core idea of Points-to-3D is to introduce controllable sparse 3D points to guide the text-to-3D generation. Specifically, we use the sparse point cloud generated from the 3D diffusion model, Point-E, as the geometric prior, conditioned on a single reference image. To better utilize the sparse 3D points, we propose an efficient point cloud guidance loss to adaptively drive the NeRF's geometry to align with the shape of the sparse 3D points. In addition to controlling the geometry, we propose to optimize the NeRF for a more view-consistent appearance. To be specific, we perform score distillation to the publicly available 2D image diffusion model ControlNet, conditioned on text as well as depth map of the learned compact geometry. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate that Points-to-3D improves view consistency and achieves good shape controllability for text-to-3D generation. Points-to-3D provides users with a new way to improve and control text-to-3D generation.

Image-to-Lidar Self-Supervised Distillation for Autonomous Driving Data

Segmenting or detecting objects in sparse Lidar point clouds are two important tasks in autonomous driving to allow a vehicle to act safely in its 3D environment. The best performing methods in 3D semantic segmentation or object detection rely on a large amount of annotated data. Yet annotating 3D Lidar data for these tasks is tedious and costly. In this context, we propose a self-supervised pre-training method for 3D perception models that is tailored to autonomous driving data. Specifically, we leverage the availability of synchronized and calibrated image and Lidar sensors in autonomous driving setups for distilling self-supervised pre-trained image representations into 3D models. Hence, our method does not require any point cloud nor image annotations. The key ingredient of our method is the use of superpixels which are used to pool 3D point features and 2D pixel features in visually similar regions. We then train a 3D network on the self-supervised task of matching these pooled point features with the corresponding pooled image pixel features. The advantages of contrasting regions obtained by superpixels are that: (1) grouping together pixels and points of visually coherent regions leads to a more meaningful contrastive task that produces features well adapted to 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection; (2) all the different regions have the same weight in the contrastive loss regardless of the number of 3D points sampled in these regions; (3) it mitigates the noise produced by incorrect matching of points and pixels due to occlusions between the different sensors. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving datasets demonstrate the ability of our image-to-Lidar distillation strategy to produce 3D representations that transfer well on semantic segmentation and object detection tasks.

Volumetric Capture of Humans with a Single RGBD Camera via Semi-Parametric Learning

Volumetric (4D) performance capture is fundamental for AR/VR content generation. Whereas previous work in 4D performance capture has shown impressive results in studio settings, the technology is still far from being accessible to a typical consumer who, at best, might own a single RGBD sensor. Thus, in this work, we propose a method to synthesize free viewpoint renderings using a single RGBD camera. The key insight is to leverage previously seen "calibration" images of a given user to extrapolate what should be rendered in a novel viewpoint from the data available in the sensor. Given these past observations from multiple viewpoints, and the current RGBD image from a fixed view, we propose an end-to-end framework that fuses both these data sources to generate novel renderings of the performer. We demonstrate that the method can produce high fidelity images, and handle extreme changes in subject pose and camera viewpoints. We also show that the system generalizes to performers not seen in the training data. We run exhaustive experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed semi-parametric model (i.e. calibration images available to the neural network) compared to other state of the art machine learned solutions. Further, we compare the method with more traditional pipelines that employ multi-view capture. We show that our framework is able to achieve compelling results, with substantially less infrastructure than previously required.

FaVoR: Features via Voxel Rendering for Camera Relocalization

Camera relocalization methods range from dense image alignment to direct camera pose regression from a query image. Among these, sparse feature matching stands out as an efficient, versatile, and generally lightweight approach with numerous applications. However, feature-based methods often struggle with significant viewpoint and appearance changes, leading to matching failures and inaccurate pose estimates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that leverages a globally sparse yet locally dense 3D representation of 2D features. By tracking and triangulating landmarks over a sequence of frames, we construct a sparse voxel map optimized to render image patch descriptors observed during tracking. Given an initial pose estimate, we first synthesize descriptors from the voxels using volumetric rendering and then perform feature matching to estimate the camera pose. This methodology enables the generation of descriptors for unseen views, enhancing robustness to view changes. We extensively evaluate our method on the 7-Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets. Our results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art feature representation techniques in indoor environments, achieving up to a 39% improvement in median translation error. Additionally, our approach yields comparable results to other methods for outdoor scenarios while maintaining lower memory and computational costs.

RAR: Region-Aware Point Cloud Registration

This paper concerns the research problem of point cloud registration to find the rigid transformation to optimally align the source point set with the target one. Learning robust point cloud registration models with deep neural networks has emerged as a powerful paradigm, offering promising performance in predicting the global geometric transformation for a pair of point sets. Existing methods firstly leverage an encoder to regress a latent shape embedding, which is then decoded into a shape-conditioned transformation via concatenation-based conditioning. However, different regions of a 3D shape vary in their geometric structures which makes it more sense that we have a region-conditioned transformation instead of the shape-conditioned one. In this paper we present a Region-Aware point cloud Registration, denoted as RAR, to predict transformation for pairwise point sets in the self-supervised learning fashion. More specifically, we develop a novel region-aware decoder (RAD) module that is formed with an implicit neural region representation parameterized by neural networks. The implicit neural region representation is learned with a self-supervised 3D shape reconstruction loss without the need for region labels. Consequently, the region-aware decoder (RAD) module guides the training of the region-aware transformation (RAT) module and region-aware weight (RAW) module, which predict the transforms and weights for different regions respectively. The global geometric transformation from source point set to target one is then formed by the weighted fusion of region-aware transforms. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, our experiments show that our RAR achieves superior registration performance over various benchmark datasets (e.g. ModelNet40).

InterTrack: Tracking Human Object Interaction without Object Templates

Tracking human object interaction from videos is important to understand human behavior from the rapidly growing stream of video data. Previous video-based methods require predefined object templates while single-image-based methods are template-free but lack temporal consistency. In this paper, we present a method to track human object interaction without any object shape templates. We decompose the 4D tracking problem into per-frame pose tracking and canonical shape optimization. We first apply a single-view reconstruction method to obtain temporally-inconsistent per-frame interaction reconstructions. Then, for the human, we propose an efficient autoencoder to predict SMPL vertices directly from the per-frame reconstructions, introducing temporally consistent correspondence. For the object, we introduce a pose estimator that leverages temporal information to predict smooth object rotations under occlusions. To train our model, we propose a method to generate synthetic interaction videos and synthesize in total 10 hour videos of 8.5k sequences with full 3D ground truth. Experiments on BEHAVE and InterCap show that our method significantly outperforms previous template-based video tracking and single-frame reconstruction methods. Our proposed synthetic video dataset also allows training video-based methods that generalize to real-world videos. Our code and dataset will be publicly released.

G3Reg: Pyramid Graph-based Global Registration using Gaussian Ellipsoid Model

This study introduces a novel framework, G3Reg, for fast and robust global registration of LiDAR point clouds. In contrast to conventional complex keypoints and descriptors, we extract fundamental geometric primitives, including planes, clusters, and lines (PCL) from the raw point cloud to obtain low-level semantic segments. Each segment is represented as a unified Gaussian Ellipsoid Model (GEM), using a probability ellipsoid to ensure the ground truth centers are encompassed with a certain degree of probability. Utilizing these GEMs, we present a distrust-and-verify scheme based on a Pyramid Compatibility Graph for Global Registration (PAGOR). Specifically, we establish an upper bound, which can be traversed based on the confidence level for compatibility testing to construct the pyramid graph. Then, we solve multiple maximum cliques (MAC) for each level of the pyramid graph, thus generating the corresponding transformation candidates. In the verification phase, we adopt a precise and efficient metric for point cloud alignment quality, founded on geometric primitives, to identify the optimal candidate. The algorithm's performance is validated on three publicly available datasets and a self-collected multi-session dataset. Parameter settings remained unchanged during the experiment evaluations. The results exhibit superior robustness and real-time performance of the G3Reg framework compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential for integrating individual GEM and PAGOR components into other registration frameworks to enhance their efficacy. Code: https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/G3Reg

Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R

Image Matching is a core component of all best-performing algorithms and pipelines in 3D vision. Yet despite matching being fundamentally a 3D problem, intrinsically linked to camera pose and scene geometry, it is typically treated as a 2D problem. This makes sense as the goal of matching is to establish correspondences between 2D pixel fields, but also seems like a potentially hazardous choice. In this work, we take a different stance and propose to cast matching as a 3D task with DUSt3R, a recent and powerful 3D reconstruction framework based on Transformers. Based on pointmaps regression, this method displayed impressive robustness in matching views with extreme viewpoint changes, yet with limited accuracy. We aim here to improve the matching capabilities of such an approach while preserving its robustness. We thus propose to augment the DUSt3R network with a new head that outputs dense local features, trained with an additional matching loss. We further address the issue of quadratic complexity of dense matching, which becomes prohibitively slow for downstream applications if not carefully treated. We introduce a fast reciprocal matching scheme that not only accelerates matching by orders of magnitude, but also comes with theoretical guarantees and, lastly, yields improved results. Extensive experiments show that our approach, coined MASt3R, significantly outperforms the state of the art on multiple matching tasks. In particular, it beats the best published methods by 30% (absolute improvement) in VCRE AUC on the extremely challenging Map-free localization dataset.

MonoTAKD: Teaching Assistant Knowledge Distillation for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) holds noteworthy promise for autonomous driving applications owing to the cost-effectiveness and rich visual context of monocular camera sensors. However, depth ambiguity poses a significant challenge, as it requires extracting precise 3D scene geometry from a single image, resulting in suboptimal performance when transferring knowledge from a LiDAR-based teacher model to a camera-based student model. To address this issue, we introduce {\em Monocular Teaching Assistant Knowledge Distillation (MonoTAKD)} to enhance 3D perception in Mono3D. Our approach presents a robust camera-based teaching assistant model that effectively bridges the representation gap between different modalities for teacher and student models, addressing the challenge of inaccurate depth estimation. By defining 3D spatial cues as residual features that capture the differences between the teacher and the teaching assistant models, we leverage these cues into the student model, improving its 3D perception capabilities. Experimental results show that our MonoTAKD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI3D dataset. Additionally, we evaluate the performance on nuScenes and KITTI raw datasets to demonstrate the generalization of our model to multi-view 3D and unsupervised data settings. Our code will be available at https://github.com/hoiliu-0801/MonoTAKD.

YOCO: You Only Calibrate Once for Accurate Extrinsic Parameter in LiDAR-Camera Systems

In a multi-sensor fusion system composed of cameras and LiDAR, precise extrinsic calibration contributes to the system's long-term stability and accurate perception of the environment. However, methods based on extracting and registering corresponding points still face challenges in terms of automation and precision. This paper proposes a novel fully automatic extrinsic calibration method for LiDAR-camera systems that circumvents the need for corresponding point registration. In our approach, a novel algorithm to extract required LiDAR correspondence point is proposed. This method can effectively filter out irrelevant points by computing the orientation of plane point clouds and extracting points by applying distance- and density-based thresholds. We avoid the need for corresponding point registration by introducing extrinsic parameters between the LiDAR and camera into the projection of extracted points and constructing co-planar constraints. These parameters are then optimized to solve for the extrinsic. We validated our method across multiple sets of LiDAR-camera systems. In synthetic experiments, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to current calibration techniques. Real-world data experiments further confirm the precision and robustness of the proposed algorithm, with average rotation and translation calibration errors between LiDAR and camera of less than 0.05 degree and 0.015m, respectively. This method enables automatic and accurate extrinsic calibration in a single one step, emphasizing the potential of calibration algorithms beyond using corresponding point registration to enhance the automation and precision of LiDAR-camera system calibration.

Probabilistic 3D Multi-Object Cooperative Tracking for Autonomous Driving via Differentiable Multi-Sensor Kalman Filter

Current state-of-the-art autonomous driving vehicles mainly rely on each individual sensor system to perform perception tasks. Such a framework's reliability could be limited by occlusion or sensor failure. To address this issue, more recent research proposes using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to share perception information with others. However, most relevant works focus only on cooperative detection and leave cooperative tracking an underexplored research field. A few recent datasets, such as V2V4Real, provide 3D multi-object cooperative tracking benchmarks. However, their proposed methods mainly use cooperative detection results as input to a standard single-sensor Kalman Filter-based tracking algorithm. In their approach, the measurement uncertainty of different sensors from different connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) may not be properly estimated to utilize the theoretical optimality property of Kalman Filter-based tracking algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D multi-object cooperative tracking algorithm for autonomous driving via a differentiable multi-sensor Kalman Filter. Our algorithm learns to estimate measurement uncertainty for each detection that can better utilize the theoretical property of Kalman Filter-based tracking methods. The experiment results show that our algorithm improves the tracking accuracy by 17% with only 0.037x communication costs compared with the state-of-the-art method in V2V4Real. Our code and videos are available at https://github.com/eddyhkchiu/DMSTrack/ and https://eddyhkchiu.github.io/dmstrack.github.io/ .

CoherentGS: Sparse Novel View Synthesis with Coherent 3D Gaussians

The field of 3D reconstruction from images has rapidly evolved in the past few years, first with the introduction of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and more recently with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). The latter provides a significant edge over NeRF in terms of the training and inference speed, as well as the reconstruction quality. Although 3DGS works well for dense input images, the unstructured point-cloud like representation quickly overfits to the more challenging setup of extremely sparse input images (e.g., 3 images), creating a representation that appears as a jumble of needles from novel views. To address this issue, we propose regularized optimization and depth-based initialization. Our key idea is to introduce a structured Gaussian representation that can be controlled in 2D image space. We then constraint the Gaussians, in particular their position, and prevent them from moving independently during optimization. Specifically, we introduce single and multiview constraints through an implicit convolutional decoder and a total variation loss, respectively. With the coherency introduced to the Gaussians, we further constrain the optimization through a flow-based loss function. To support our regularized optimization, we propose an approach to initialize the Gaussians using monocular depth estimates at each input view. We demonstrate significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art sparse-view NeRF-based approaches on a variety of scenes.

LiftImage3D: Lifting Any Single Image to 3D Gaussians with Video Generation Priors

Single-image 3D reconstruction remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision due to inherent geometric ambiguities and limited viewpoint information. Recent advances in Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs) offer promising 3D priors learned from large-scale video data. However, leveraging these priors effectively faces three key challenges: (1) degradation in quality across large camera motions, (2) difficulties in achieving precise camera control, and (3) geometric distortions inherent to the diffusion process that damage 3D consistency. We address these challenges by proposing LiftImage3D, a framework that effectively releases LVDMs' generative priors while ensuring 3D consistency. Specifically, we design an articulated trajectory strategy to generate video frames, which decomposes video sequences with large camera motions into ones with controllable small motions. Then we use robust neural matching models, i.e. MASt3R, to calibrate the camera poses of generated frames and produce corresponding point clouds. Finally, we propose a distortion-aware 3D Gaussian splatting representation, which can learn independent distortions between frames and output undistorted canonical Gaussians. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiftImage3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging datasets, i.e. LLFF, DL3DV, and Tanks and Temples, and generalizes well to diverse in-the-wild images, from cartoon illustrations to complex real-world scenes.

LoRA3D: Low-Rank Self-Calibration of 3D Geometric Foundation Models

Emerging 3D geometric foundation models, such as DUSt3R, offer a promising approach for in-the-wild 3D vision tasks. However, due to the high-dimensional nature of the problem space and scarcity of high-quality 3D data, these pre-trained models still struggle to generalize to many challenging circumstances, such as limited view overlap or low lighting. To address this, we propose LoRA3D, an efficient self-calibration pipeline to specialize the pre-trained models to target scenes using their own multi-view predictions. Taking sparse RGB images as input, we leverage robust optimization techniques to refine multi-view predictions and align them into a global coordinate frame. In particular, we incorporate prediction confidence into the geometric optimization process, automatically re-weighting the confidence to better reflect point estimation accuracy. We use the calibrated confidence to generate high-quality pseudo labels for the calibrating views and use low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the models on the pseudo-labeled data. Our method does not require any external priors or manual labels. It completes the self-calibration process on a single standard GPU within just 5 minutes. Each low-rank adapter requires only 18MB of storage. We evaluated our method on more than 160 scenes from the Replica, TUM and Waymo Open datasets, achieving up to 88% performance improvement on 3D reconstruction, multi-view pose estimation and novel-view rendering.

GS-LIVO: Real-Time LiDAR, Inertial, and Visual Multi-sensor Fused Odometry with Gaussian Mapping

In recent years, 3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) has emerged as a novel scene representation approach. However, existing vision-only 3D-GS methods often rely on hand-crafted heuristics for point-cloud densification and face challenges in handling occlusions and high GPU memory and computation consumption. LiDAR-Inertial-Visual (LIV) sensor configuration has demonstrated superior performance in localization and dense mapping by leveraging complementary sensing characteristics: rich texture information from cameras, precise geometric measurements from LiDAR, and high-frequency motion data from IMU. Inspired by this, we propose a novel real-time Gaussian-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system. Our map system comprises a global Gaussian map and a sliding window of Gaussians, along with an IESKF-based odometry. The global Gaussian map consists of hash-indexed voxels organized in a recursive octree, effectively covering sparse spatial volumes while adapting to different levels of detail and scales. The Gaussian map is initialized through multi-sensor fusion and optimized with photometric gradients. Our system incrementally maintains a sliding window of Gaussians, significantly reducing GPU computation and memory consumption by only optimizing the map within the sliding window. Moreover, we implement a tightly coupled multi-sensor fusion odometry with an iterative error state Kalman filter (IESKF), leveraging real-time updating and rendering of the Gaussian map. Our system represents the first real-time Gaussian-based SLAM framework deployable on resource-constrained embedded systems, demonstrated on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX platform. The framework achieves real-time performance while maintaining robust multi-sensor fusion capabilities. All implementation algorithms, hardware designs, and CAD models will be publicly available.

SVDFormer: Complementing Point Cloud via Self-view Augmentation and Self-structure Dual-generator

In this paper, we propose a novel network, SVDFormer, to tackle two specific challenges in point cloud completion: understanding faithful global shapes from incomplete point clouds and generating high-accuracy local structures. Current methods either perceive shape patterns using only 3D coordinates or import extra images with well-calibrated intrinsic parameters to guide the geometry estimation of the missing parts. However, these approaches do not always fully leverage the cross-modal self-structures available for accurate and high-quality point cloud completion. To this end, we first design a Self-view Fusion Network that leverages multiple-view depth image information to observe incomplete self-shape and generate a compact global shape. To reveal highly detailed structures, we then introduce a refinement module, called Self-structure Dual-generator, in which we incorporate learned shape priors and geometric self-similarities for producing new points. By perceiving the incompleteness of each point, the dual-path design disentangles refinement strategies conditioned on the structural type of each point. SVDFormer absorbs the wisdom of self-structures, avoiding any additional paired information such as color images with precisely calibrated camera intrinsic parameters. Comprehensive experiments indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely-used benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/czvvd/SVDFormer.

GFlow: Recovering 4D World from Monocular Video

Reconstructing 4D scenes from video inputs is a crucial yet challenging task. Conventional methods usually rely on the assumptions of multi-view video inputs, known camera parameters, or static scenes, all of which are typically absent under in-the-wild scenarios. In this paper, we relax all these constraints and tackle a highly ambitious but practical task, which we termed as AnyV4D: we assume only one monocular video is available without any camera parameters as input, and we aim to recover the dynamic 4D world alongside the camera poses. To this end, we introduce GFlow, a new framework that utilizes only 2D priors (depth and optical flow) to lift a video (3D) to a 4D explicit representation, entailing a flow of Gaussian splatting through space and time. GFlow first clusters the scene into still and moving parts, then applies a sequential optimization process that optimizes camera poses and the dynamics of 3D Gaussian points based on 2D priors and scene clustering, ensuring fidelity among neighboring points and smooth movement across frames. Since dynamic scenes always introduce new content, we also propose a new pixel-wise densification strategy for Gaussian points to integrate new visual content. Moreover, GFlow transcends the boundaries of mere 4D reconstruction; it also enables tracking of any points across frames without the need for prior training and segments moving objects from the scene in an unsupervised way. Additionally, the camera poses of each frame can be derived from GFlow, allowing for rendering novel views of a video scene through changing camera pose. By employing the explicit representation, we may readily conduct scene-level or object-level editing as desired, underscoring its versatility and power. Visit our project website at: https://littlepure2333.github.io/GFlow

FrozenRecon: Pose-free 3D Scene Reconstruction with Frozen Depth Models

3D scene reconstruction is a long-standing vision task. Existing approaches can be categorized into geometry-based and learning-based methods. The former leverages multi-view geometry but can face catastrophic failures due to the reliance on accurate pixel correspondence across views. The latter was proffered to mitigate these issues by learning 2D or 3D representation directly. However, without a large-scale video or 3D training data, it can hardly generalize to diverse real-world scenarios due to the presence of tens of millions or even billions of optimization parameters in the deep network. Recently, robust monocular depth estimation models trained with large-scale datasets have been proven to possess weak 3D geometry prior, but they are insufficient for reconstruction due to the unknown camera parameters, the affine-invariant property, and inter-frame inconsistency. Here, we propose a novel test-time optimization approach that can transfer the robustness of affine-invariant depth models such as LeReS to challenging diverse scenes while ensuring inter-frame consistency, with only dozens of parameters to optimize per video frame. Specifically, our approach involves freezing the pre-trained affine-invariant depth model's depth predictions, rectifying them by optimizing the unknown scale-shift values with a geometric consistency alignment module, and employing the resulting scale-consistent depth maps to robustly obtain camera poses and achieve dense scene reconstruction, even in low-texture regions. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art cross-dataset reconstruction on five zero-shot testing datasets.

CenterNet3D: An Anchor Free Object Detector for Point Cloud

Accurate and fast 3D object detection from point clouds is a key task in autonomous driving. Existing one-stage 3D object detection methods can achieve real-time performance, however, they are dominated by anchor-based detectors which are inefficient and require additional post-processing. In this paper, we eliminate anchors and model an object as a single point--the center point of its bounding box. Based on the center point, we propose an anchor-free CenterNet3D network that performs 3D object detection without anchors. Our CenterNet3D uses keypoint estimation to find center points and directly regresses 3D bounding boxes. However, because inherent sparsity of point clouds, 3D object center points are likely to be in empty space which makes it difficult to estimate accurate boundaries. To solve this issue, we propose an extra corner attention module to enforce the CNN backbone to pay more attention to object boundaries. Besides, considering that one-stage detectors suffer from the discordance between the predicted bounding boxes and corresponding classification confidences, we develop an efficient keypoint-sensitive warping operation to align the confidences to the predicted bounding boxes. Our proposed CenterNet3D is non-maximum suppression free which makes it more efficient and simpler. We evaluate CenterNet3D on the widely used KITTI dataset and more challenging nuScenes dataset. Our method outperforms all state-of-the-art anchor-based one-stage methods and has comparable performance to two-stage methods as well. It has an inference speed of 20 FPS and achieves the best speed and accuracy trade-off. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/wangguojun2018/CenterNet3d.

CATSplat: Context-Aware Transformer with Spatial Guidance for Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting from A Single-View Image

Recently, generalizable feed-forward methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting have gained significant attention for their potential to reconstruct 3D scenes using finite resources. These approaches create a 3D radiance field, parameterized by per-pixel 3D Gaussian primitives, from just a few images in a single forward pass. However, unlike multi-view methods that benefit from cross-view correspondences, 3D scene reconstruction with a single-view image remains an underexplored area. In this work, we introduce CATSplat, a novel generalizable transformer-based framework designed to break through the inherent constraints in monocular settings. First, we propose leveraging textual guidance from a visual-language model to complement insufficient information from a single image. By incorporating scene-specific contextual details from text embeddings through cross-attention, we pave the way for context-aware 3D scene reconstruction beyond relying solely on visual cues. Moreover, we advocate utilizing spatial guidance from 3D point features toward comprehensive geometric understanding under single-view settings. With 3D priors, image features can capture rich structural insights for predicting 3D Gaussians without multi-view techniques. Extensive experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CATSplat in single-view 3D scene reconstruction with high-quality novel view synthesis.

Deep Implicit Surface Point Prediction Networks

Deep neural representations of 3D shapes as implicit functions have been shown to produce high fidelity models surpassing the resolution-memory trade-off faced by the explicit representations using meshes and point clouds. However, most such approaches focus on representing closed shapes. Unsigned distance function (UDF) based approaches have been proposed recently as a promising alternative to represent both open and closed shapes. However, since the gradients of UDFs vanish on the surface, it is challenging to estimate local (differential) geometric properties like the normals and tangent planes which are needed for many downstream applications in vision and graphics. There are additional challenges in computing these properties efficiently with a low-memory footprint. This paper presents a novel approach that models such surfaces using a new class of implicit representations called the closest surface-point (CSP) representation. We show that CSP allows us to represent complex surfaces of any topology (open or closed) with high fidelity. It also allows for accurate and efficient computation of local geometric properties. We further demonstrate that it leads to efficient implementation of downstream algorithms like sphere-tracing for rendering the 3D surface as well as to create explicit mesh-based representations. Extensive experimental evaluation on the ShapeNet dataset validate the above contributions with results surpassing the state-of-the-art.

Transformation Decoupling Strategy based on Screw Theory for Deterministic Point Cloud Registration with Gravity Prior

Point cloud registration is challenging in the presence of heavy outlier correspondences. This paper focuses on addressing the robust correspondence-based registration problem with gravity prior that often arises in practice. The gravity directions are typically obtained by inertial measurement units (IMUs) and can reduce the degree of freedom (DOF) of rotation from 3 to 1. We propose a novel transformation decoupling strategy by leveraging screw theory. This strategy decomposes the original 4-DOF problem into three sub-problems with 1-DOF, 2-DOF, and 1-DOF, respectively, thereby enhancing the computation efficiency. Specifically, the first 1-DOF represents the translation along the rotation axis and we propose an interval stabbing-based method to solve it. The second 2-DOF represents the pole which is an auxiliary variable in screw theory and we utilize a branch-and-bound method to solve it. The last 1-DOF represents the rotation angle and we propose a global voting method for its estimation. The proposed method sequentially solves three consensus maximization sub-problems, leading to efficient and deterministic registration. In particular, it can even handle the correspondence-free registration problem due to its significant robustness. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method is more efficient and robust than state-of-the-art methods, even when dealing with outlier rates exceeding 99%.