Abstract:This paper presents the results of the fourth edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC), which focuses on zero-shot generalization to the SYNS-Patches benchmark, a dataset featuring challenging environments in both natural and indoor settings. In this edition, we revised the evaluation protocol to use least-squares alignment with two degrees of freedom to support disparity and affine-invariant predictions. We also revised the baselines and included popular off-the-shelf methods: Depth Anything v2 and Marigold. The challenge received a total of 24 submissions that outperformed the baselines on the test set; 10 of these included a report describing their approach, with most leading methods relying on affine-invariant predictions. The challenge winners improved the 3D F-Score over the previous edition's best result, raising it from 22.58% to 23.05%.
Abstract:The distinguishing geometric features determine the success of point cloud registration. However, most point clouds are partially overlapping, corrupted by noise, and comprised of indistinguishable surfaces, which makes it a challenge to extract discriminative features. Here, we propose the Neighborhood-aware Geometric Encoding Network (NgeNet) for accurate point cloud registration. NgeNet utilizes a geometric guided encoding module to take geometric characteristics into consideration, a multi-scale architecture to focus on the semantically rich regions in different scales, and a consistent voting strategy to select features with proper neighborhood size and reject the specious features. The awareness of adaptive neighborhood points is obtained through the multi-scale architecture accompanied by voting. Specifically, the proposed techniques in NgeNet are model-agnostic, which could be easily migrated to other networks. Comprehensive experiments on indoor, outdoor and object-centric synthetic datasets demonstrate that NgeNet surpasses all of the published state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhulf0804/NgeNet.