VEnvision3D: A Synthetic Perception Dataset for 3D Multi-Task Model Research

Developing a unified multi-task foundation model has become a critical challenge in computer vision research. In the current field of 3D computer vision, most datasets only focus on single task, which complicates the concurrent training requirements of various downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce VEnvision3D, a large 3D synthetic perception dataset for multi-task learning, including depth completion, segmentation, upsampling, place recognition, and 3D reconstruction. Since the data for each task is collected in the same environmental domain, sub-tasks are inherently aligned in terms of the utilized data. Therefore, such a unique attribute can assist in exploring the potential for the multi-task model and even the foundation model without separate training methods. Meanwhile, capitalizing on the advantage of virtual environments being freely editable, we implement some novel settings such as simulating temporal changes in the environment and sampling point clouds on model surfaces. These characteristics enable us to present several new benchmarks. We also perform extensive studies on multi-task end-to-end models, revealing new observations, challenges, and opportunities for future research. Our dataset and code will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

SparseDC: Depth Completion from sparse and non-uniform inputs

We propose SparseDC, a model for Depth Completion of Sparse and non-uniform depth inputs. Unlike previous methods focusing on completing fixed distributions on benchmark datasets (e.g., NYU with 500 points, KITTI with 64 lines), SparseDC is specifically designed to handle depth maps with poor quality in real usage. The key contributions of SparseDC are two-fold. First, we design a simple strategy, called SFFM, to improve the robustness under sparse input by explicitly filling the unstable depth features with stable image features. Second, we propose a two-branch feature embedder to predict both the precise local geometry of regions with available depth values and accurate structures in regions with no depth. The key of the embedder is an uncertainty-based fusion module called UFFM to balance the local and long-term information extracted by CNNs and ViTs. Extensive indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrate the robustness of our framework when facing sparse and non-uniform input depths. The pre-trained model and code are available at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/SparseDC.

FreeReg: Image-to-Point Cloud Registration Leveraging Pretrained Diffusion Models and Monocular Depth Estimators

Matching cross-modality features between images and point clouds is a fundamental problem for image-to-point cloud registration. However, due to the modality difference between images and points, it is difficult to learn robust and discriminative cross-modality features by existing metric learning methods for feature matching. Instead of applying metric learning on cross-modality data, we propose to unify the modality between images and point clouds by pretrained large-scale models first, and then establish robust correspondence within the same modality. We show that the intermediate features, called diffusion features, extracted by depth-to-image diffusion models are semantically consistent between images and point clouds, which enables the building of coarse but robust cross-modality correspondences. We further extract geometric features on depth maps produced by the monocular depth estimator. By matching such geometric features, we significantly improve the accuracy of the coarse correspondences produced by diffusion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that without any task-specific training, direct utilization of both features produces accurate image-to-point cloud registration. On three public indoor and outdoor benchmarks, the proposed method averagely achieves a 20.6 percent improvement in Inlier Ratio, a three-fold higher Inlier Number, and a 48.6 percent improvement in Registration Recall than existing state-of-the-arts.

Robust Multiview Point Cloud Registration with Reliable Pose Graph Initialization and History Reweighting

In this paper, we present a new method for the multiview registration of point cloud. Previous multiview registration methods rely on exhaustive pairwise registration to construct a densely-connected pose graph and apply Iteratively Reweighted Least Square (IRLS) on the pose graph to compute the scan poses. However, constructing a densely-connected graph is time-consuming and contains lots of outlier edges, which makes the subsequent IRLS struggle to find correct poses. To address the above problems, we first propose to use a neural network to estimate the overlap between scan pairs, which enables us to construct a sparse but reliable pose graph. Then, we design a novel history reweighting function in the IRLS scheme, which has strong robustness to outlier edges on the graph. In comparison with existing multiview registration methods, our method achieves 11% higher registration recall on the 3DMatch dataset and ~13% lower registration errors on the ScanNet dataset while reducing ~70% required pairwise registrations. Comprehensive ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our designs.

CG-SSD: Corner Guided Single Stage 3D Object Detection from LiDAR Point Cloud

At present, the anchor-based or anchor-free models that use LiDAR point clouds for 3D object detection use the center assigner strategy to infer the 3D bounding boxes. However, in a real world scene, the LiDAR can only acquire a limited object surface point clouds, but the center point of the object does not exist. Obtaining the object by aggregating the incomplete surface point clouds will bring a loss of accuracy in direction and dimension estimation. To address this problem, we propose a corner-guided anchor-free single-stage 3D object detection model (CG-SSD ).Firstly, 3D sparse convolution backbone network composed of residual layers and sub-manifold sparse convolutional layers are used to construct bird's eye view (BEV) features for further deeper feature mining by a lite U-shaped network; Secondly, a novel corner-guided auxiliary module (CGAM) is proposed to incorporate corner supervision signals into the neural network. CGAM is explicitly designed and trained to detect partially visible and invisible corners to obtains a more accurate object feature representation, especially for small or partial occluded objects; Finally, the deep features from both the backbone networks and CGAM module are concatenated and fed into the head module to predict the classification and 3D bounding boxes of the objects in the scene. The experiments demonstrate CG-SSD achieves the state-of-art performance on the ONCE benchmark for supervised 3D object detection using single frame point cloud data, with 62.77%mAP. Additionally, the experiments on ONCE and Waymo Open Dataset show that CGAM can be extended to most anchor-based models which use the BEV feature to detect objects, as a plug-in and bring +1.17%-+14.27%AP improvement.

You Only Hypothesize Once: Point Cloud Registration with Rotation-equivariant Descriptors

In this paper, we propose a novel local descriptor-based framework, called You Only Hypothesize Once (YOHO), for the registration of two unaligned point clouds. In contrast to most existing local descriptors which rely on a fragile local reference frame to gain rotation invariance, the proposed descriptor achieves the rotation invariance by recent technologies of group equivariant feature learning, which brings more robustness to point density and noise. Meanwhile, the descriptor in YOHO also has a rotation equivariant part, which enables us to estimate the registration from just one correspondence hypothesis. Such property reduces the searching space for feasible transformations, thus greatly improves both the accuracy and the efficiency of YOHO. Extensive experiments show that YOHO achieves superior performances with much fewer needed RANSAC iterations on four widely-used datasets, the 3DMatch/3DLoMatch datasets, the ETH dataset and the WHU-TLS dataset. More details are shown in our project page: https://hpwang-whu.github.io/YOHO/.