Panoptic-FlashOcc: An Efficient Baseline to Marry Semantic Occupancy with Panoptic via Instance Center

Panoptic occupancy poses a novel challenge by aiming to integrate instance occupancy and semantic occupancy within a unified framework. However, there is still a lack of efficient solutions for panoptic occupancy. In this paper, we propose Panoptic-FlashOcc, a straightforward yet robust 2D feature framework that enables realtime panoptic occupancy. Building upon the lightweight design of FlashOcc, our approach simultaneously learns semantic occupancy and class-aware instance clustering in a single network, these outputs are jointly incorporated through panoptic occupancy procession for panoptic occupancy. This approach effectively addresses the drawbacks of high memory and computation requirements associated with three-dimensional voxel-level representations. With its straightforward and efficient design that facilitates easy deployment, Panoptic-FlashOcc demonstrates remarkable achievements in panoptic occupancy prediction. On the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark, it achieves exceptional performance, with 38.5 RayIoU and 29.1 mIoU for semantic occupancy, operating at a rapid speed of 43.9 FPS. Furthermore, it attains a notable score of 16.0 RayPQ for panoptic occupancy, accompanied by a fast inference speed of 30.2 FPS. These results surpass the performance of existing methodologies in terms of both speed and accuracy. The source code and trained models can be found at the following github repository: https://github.com/Yzichen/FlashOCC.

FlashOcc: Fast and Memory-Efficient Occupancy Prediction via Channel-to-Height Plugin

Given the capability of mitigating the long-tail deficiencies and intricate-shaped absence prevalent in 3D object detection, occupancy prediction has become a pivotal component in autonomous driving systems. However, the procession of three-dimensional voxel-level representations inevitably introduces large overhead in both memory and computation, obstructing the deployment of to-date occupancy prediction approaches. In contrast to the trend of making the model larger and more complicated, we argue that a desirable framework should be deployment-friendly to diverse chips while maintaining high precision. To this end, we propose a plug-and-play paradigm, namely FlashOCC, to consolidate rapid and memory-efficient occupancy prediction while maintaining high precision. Particularly, our FlashOCC makes two improvements based on the contemporary voxel-level occupancy prediction approaches. Firstly, the features are kept in the BEV, enabling the employment of efficient 2D convolutional layers for feature extraction. Secondly, a channel-to-height transformation is introduced to lift the output logits from the BEV into the 3D space. We apply the FlashOCC to diverse occupancy prediction baselines on the challenging Occ3D-nuScenes benchmarks and conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness. The results substantiate the superiority of our plug-and-play paradigm over previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, runtime efficiency, and memory costs, demonstrating its potential for deployment. The code will be made available.

3D Point Positional Encoding for Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection Transformers

Multi-camera 3D object detection, a critical component for vision-only driving systems, has achieved impressive progress. Notably, transformer-based methods with 2D features augmented by 3D positional encodings (PE) have enjoyed great success. However, the mechanism and options of 3D PE have not been thoroughly explored. In this paper, we first explore, analyze and compare various 3D positional encodings. In particular, we devise 3D point PE and show its superior performance since more precise positioning may lead to superior 3D detection. In practice, we utilize monocular depth estimation to obtain the 3D point positions for multi-camera 3D object detection. The PE with estimated 3D point locations can bring significant improvements compared to the commonly used camera-ray PE. Among DETR-based strategies, our method achieves state-of-the-art 45.6 mAP and 55.1 NDS on the competitive nuScenes valuation set. It's the first time that the performance gap between the vision-only (DETR-based) and LiDAR-based methods is reduced within 5\% mAP and 6\% NDS.

Few-Shot Head Swapping in the Wild

The head swapping task aims at flawlessly placing a source head onto a target body, which is of great importance to various entertainment scenarios. While face swapping has drawn much attention, the task of head swapping has rarely been explored, particularly under the few-shot setting. It is inherently challenging due to its unique needs in head modeling and background blending. In this paper, we present the Head Swapper (HeSer), which achieves few-shot head swapping in the wild through two delicately designed modules. Firstly, a Head2Head Aligner is devised to holistically migrate pose and expression information from the target to the source head by examining multi-scale information. Secondly, to tackle the challenges of skin color variations and head-background mismatches in the swapping procedure, a Head2Scene Blender is introduced to simultaneously modify facial skin color and fill mismatched gaps in the background around the head. Particularly, seamless blending is achieved with the help of a Semantic-Guided Color Reference Creation procedure and a Blending UNet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method produces superior head swapping results in a variety of scenes.

Channel-wise Distillation for Semantic Segmentation

Knowledge distillation (KD) has been proven to be a simple and effective tool for training compact models. Almost all KD variants for semantic segmentation align the student and teacher networks' feature maps in the spatial domain, typically by minimizing point-wise and/or pair-wise discrepancy. Observing that in semantic segmentation, some layers' feature activations of each channel tend to encode saliency of scene categories (analogue to class activation mapping), we propose to align features channel-wise between the student and teacher networks. To this end, we first transform the feature map of each channel into a distribution using softmax normalization, and then minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of the corresponding channels of the two networks. By doing so, our method focuses on mimicking the soft distributions of channels between networks. In particular, the KL divergence enables learning to pay more attention to the most salient regions of the channel-wise maps, presumably corresponding to the most useful signals for semantic segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that our channel-wise distillation outperforms almost all existing spatial distillation methods for semantic segmentation considerably, and requires less computational cost during training. We consistently achieve superior performance on three benchmarks with various network structures. Code is available at: https://git.io/ChannelDis