AerialVG: A Challenging Benchmark for Aerial Visual Grounding by Exploring Positional Relations

Visual grounding (VG) aims to localize target objects in an image based on natural language descriptions. In this paper, we propose AerialVG, a new task focusing on visual grounding from aerial views. Compared to traditional VG, AerialVG poses new challenges, \emph{e.g.}, appearance-based grounding is insufficient to distinguish among multiple visually similar objects, and positional relations should be emphasized. Besides, existing VG models struggle when applied to aerial imagery, where high-resolution images cause significant difficulties. To address these challenges, we introduce the first AerialVG dataset, consisting of 5K real-world aerial images, 50K manually annotated descriptions, and 103K objects. Particularly, each annotation in AerialVG dataset contains multiple target objects annotated with relative spatial relations, requiring models to perform comprehensive spatial reasoning. Furthermore, we propose an innovative model especially for the AerialVG task, where a Hierarchical Cross-Attention is devised to focus on target regions, and a Relation-Aware Grounding module is designed to infer positional relations. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our dataset and method, highlighting the importance of spatial reasoning in aerial visual grounding. The code and dataset will be released.

Implicit Event-RGBD Neural SLAM

Implicit neural SLAM has achieved remarkable progress recently. Nevertheless, existing methods face significant challenges in non-ideal scenarios, such as motion blur or lighting variation, which often leads to issues like convergence failures, localization drifts, and distorted mapping. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{EN-SLAM}$, the first event-RGBD implicit neural SLAM framework, which effectively leverages the high rate and high dynamic range advantages of event data for tracking and mapping. Specifically, EN-SLAM proposes a differentiable CRF (Camera Response Function) rendering technique to generate distinct RGB and event camera data via a shared radiance field, which is optimized by learning a unified implicit representation with the captured event and RGBD supervision. Moreover, based on the temporal difference property of events, we propose a temporal aggregating optimization strategy for the event joint tracking and global bundle adjustment, capitalizing on the consecutive difference constraints of events, significantly enhancing tracking accuracy and robustness. Finally, we construct the simulated dataset $\textbf{DEV-Indoors}$ and real captured dataset $\textbf{DEV-Reals}$ containing 6 scenes, 17 sequences with practical motion blur and lighting changes for evaluations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the SOTA methods in both tracking ATE and mapping ACC with a real-time $17$ FPS in various challenging environments. The code and dataset will be released soon.

GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting

In this paper, we introduce $\textbf{GS-SLAM}$ that first utilizes 3D Gaussian representation in the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system. It facilitates a better balance between efficiency and accuracy. Compared to recent SLAM methods employing neural implicit representations, our method utilizes a real-time differentiable splatting rendering pipeline that offers significant speedup to map optimization and RGB-D re-rendering. Specifically, we propose an adaptive expansion strategy that adds new or deletes noisy 3D Gaussian in order to efficiently reconstruct new observed scene geometry and improve the mapping of previously observed areas. This strategy is essential to extend 3D Gaussian representation to reconstruct the whole scene rather than synthesize a static object in existing methods. Moreover, in the pose tracking process, an effective coarse-to-fine technique is designed to select reliable 3D Gaussian representations to optimize camera pose, resulting in runtime reduction and robust estimation. Our method achieves competitive performance compared with existing state-of-the-art real-time methods on the Replica, TUM-RGBD datasets. The source code will be released soon.