ToddlerAct: A Toddler Action Recognition Dataset for Gross Motor Development Assessment

Assessing gross motor development in toddlers is crucial for understanding their physical development and identifying potential developmental delays or disorders. However, existing datasets for action recognition primarily focus on adults, lacking the diversity and specificity required for accurate assessment in toddlers. In this paper, we present ToddlerAct, a toddler gross motor action recognition dataset, aiming to facilitate research in early childhood development. The dataset consists of video recordings capturing a variety of gross motor activities commonly observed in toddlers aged under three years old. We describe the data collection process, annotation methodology, and dataset characteristics. Furthermore, we benchmarked multiple state-of-the-art methods including image-based and skeleton-based action recognition methods on our datasets. Our findings highlight the importance of domain-specific datasets for accurate assessment of gross motor development in toddlers and lay the foundation for future research in this critical area. Our dataset will be available at https://github.com/ipl-uw/ToddlerAct.

ScalingGaussian: Enhancing 3D Content Creation with Generative Gaussian Splatting

The creation of high-quality 3D assets is paramount for applications in digital heritage preservation, entertainment, and robotics. Traditionally, this process necessitates skilled professionals and specialized software for the modeling, texturing, and rendering of 3D objects. However, the rising demand for 3D assets in gaming and virtual reality (VR) has led to the creation of accessible image-to-3D technologies, allowing non-professionals to produce 3D content and decreasing dependence on expert input. Existing methods for 3D content generation struggle to simultaneously achieve detailed textures and strong geometric consistency. We introduce a novel 3D content creation framework, ScalingGaussian, which combines 3D and 2D diffusion models to achieve detailed textures and geometric consistency in generated 3D assets. Initially, a 3D diffusion model generates point clouds, which are then densified through a process of selecting local regions, introducing Gaussian noise, followed by using local density-weighted selection. To refine the 3D gaussians, we utilize a 2D diffusion model with Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss, guiding the 3D Gaussians to clone and split. Finally, the 3D Gaussians are converted into meshes, and the surface textures are optimized using Mean Square Error(MSE) and Gradient Profile Prior(GPP) losses. Our method addresses the common issue of sparse point clouds in 3D diffusion, resulting in improved geometric structure and detailed textures. Experiments on image-to-3D tasks demonstrate that our approach efficiently generates high-quality 3D assets.

Boosting Online 3D Multi-Object Tracking through Camera-Radar Cross Check

In the domain of autonomous driving, the integration of multi-modal perception techniques based on data from diverse sensors has demonstrated substantial progress. Effectively surpassing the capabilities of state-of-the-art single-modality detectors through sensor fusion remains an active challenge. This work leverages the respective advantages of cameras in perspective view and radars in Bird's Eye View (BEV) to greatly enhance overall detection and tracking performance. Our approach, Camera-Radar Associated Fusion Tracking Booster (CRAFTBooster), represents a pioneering effort to enhance radar-camera fusion in the tracking stage, contributing to improved 3D MOT accuracy. The superior experimental results on the K-Radaar dataset, which exhibit 5-6% on IDF1 tracking performance gain, validate the potential of effective sensor fusion in advancing autonomous driving.

RT-Pose: A 4D Radar Tensor-based 3D Human Pose Estimation and Localization Benchmark

Traditional methods for human localization and pose estimation (HPE), which mainly rely on RGB images as an input modality, confront substantial limitations in real-world applications due to privacy concerns. In contrast, radar-based HPE methods emerge as a promising alternative, characterized by distinctive attributes such as through-wall recognition and privacy-preserving, rendering the method more conducive to practical deployments. This paper presents a Radar Tensor-based human pose (RT-Pose) dataset and an open-source benchmarking framework. The RT-Pose dataset comprises 4D radar tensors, LiDAR point clouds, and RGB images, and is collected for a total of 72k frames across 240 sequences with six different complexity-level actions. The 4D radar tensor provides raw spatio-temporal information, differentiating it from other radar point cloud-based datasets. We develop an annotation process using RGB images and LiDAR point clouds to accurately label 3D human skeletons. In addition, we propose HRRadarPose, the first single-stage architecture that extracts the high-resolution representation of 4D radar tensors in 3D space to aid human keypoint estimation. HRRadarPose outperforms previous radar-based HPE work on the RT-Pose benchmark. The overall HRRadarPose performance on the RT-Pose dataset, as reflected in a mean per joint position error (MPJPE) of 9.91cm, indicates the persistent challenges in achieving accurate HPE in complex real-world scenarios. RT-Pose is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/uwipl/RT-Pose.

CityCraft: A Real Crafter for 3D City Generation

City scene generation has gained significant attention in autonomous driving, smart city development, and traffic simulation. It helps enhance infrastructure planning and monitoring solutions. Existing methods have employed a two-stage process involving city layout generation, typically using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), or Transformers, followed by neural rendering. These techniques often exhibit limited diversity and noticeable artifacts in the rendered city scenes. The rendered scenes lack variety, resembling the training images, resulting in monotonous styles. Additionally, these methods lack planning capabilities, leading to less realistic generated scenes. In this paper, we introduce CityCraft, an innovative framework designed to enhance both the diversity and quality of urban scene generation. Our approach integrates three key stages: initially, a diffusion transformer (DiT) model is deployed to generate diverse and controllable 2D city layouts. Subsequently, a Large Language Model(LLM) is utilized to strategically make land-use plans within these layouts based on user prompts and language guidelines. Based on the generated layout and city plan, we utilize the asset retrieval module and Blender for precise asset placement and scene construction. Furthermore, we contribute two new datasets to the field: 1)CityCraft-OSM dataset including 2D semantic layouts of urban areas, corresponding satellite images, and detailed annotations. 2) CityCraft-Buildings dataset, featuring thousands of diverse, high-quality 3D building assets. CityCraft achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic 3D cities.

MovieChat+: Question-aware Sparse Memory for Long Video Question Answering

Recently, integrating video foundation models and large language models to build a video understanding system can overcome the limitations of specific pre-defined vision tasks. Yet, existing methods either employ complex spatial-temporal modules or rely heavily on additional perception models to extract temporal features for video understanding, and they only perform well on short videos. For long videos, the computational complexity and memory costs associated with long-term temporal connections are significantly increased, posing additional challenges.Taking advantage of the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model, with tokens in Transformers being employed as the carriers of memory in combination with our specially designed memory mechanism, we propose MovieChat to overcome these challenges. We lift pre-trained multi-modal large language models for understanding long videos without incorporating additional trainable temporal modules, employing a zero-shot approach. MovieChat achieves state-of-the-art performance in long video understanding, along with the released MovieChat-1K benchmark with 1K long video, 2K temporal grounding labels, and 14K manual annotations for validation of the effectiveness of our method. The code along with the dataset can be accessed via the following https://github.com/rese1f/MovieChat.

Single-image driven 3d viewpoint training data augmentation for effective wine label recognition

Confronting the critical challenge of insufficient training data in the field of complex image recognition, this paper introduces a novel 3D viewpoint augmentation technique specifically tailored for wine label recognition. This method enhances deep learning model performance by generating visually realistic training samples from a single real-world wine label image, overcoming the challenges posed by the intricate combinations of text and logos. Classical Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) methods fall short in synthesizing such intricate content combination. Our proposed solution leverages time-tested computer vision and image processing strategies to expand our training dataset, thereby broadening the range of training samples for deep learning applications. This innovative approach to data augmentation circumvents the constraints of limited training resources. Using the augmented training images through batch-all triplet metric learning on a Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture, we can get the most discriminative embedding features for every wine label, enabling us to perform one-shot recognition of existing wine labels in the training classes or future newly collected wine labels unavailable in the training. Experimental results show a significant increase in recognition accuracy over conventional 2D data augmentation techniques.

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

Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) is an indispensable research topic in autonomous driving, thanks to the cost-effective monocular camera sensors and its wide range of applications. Since the image perspective has depth ambiguity, the challenges of Mono3D lie in understanding 3D scene geometry and reconstructing 3D object information from a single image. Previous methods attempted to transfer 3D information directly from the LiDAR-based teacher to the camera-based student. However, a considerable gap in feature representation makes direct cross-modal distillation inefficient, resulting in a significant performance deterioration between the LiDAR-based teacher and the camera-based student. To address this issue, we propose the Teaching Assistant Knowledge Distillation (MonoTAKD) to break down the learning objective by integrating intra-modal distillation with cross-modal residual distillation. In particular, we employ a strong camera-based teaching assistant model to distill powerful visual knowledge effectively through intra-modal distillation. Subsequently, we introduce the cross-modal residual distillation to transfer the 3D spatial cues. By acquiring both visual knowledge and 3D spatial cues, the predictions of our approach are rigorously evaluated on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance in Mono3D.

Contrastive Pre-Training with Multi-View Fusion for No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment

No-reference point cloud quality assessment (NR-PCQA) aims to automatically evaluate the perceptual quality of distorted point clouds without available reference, which have achieved tremendous improvements due to the utilization of deep neural networks. However, learning-based NR-PCQA methods suffer from the scarcity of labeled data and usually perform suboptimally in terms of generalization. To solve the problem, we propose a novel contrastive pre-training framework tailored for PCQA (CoPA), which enables the pre-trained model to learn quality-aware representations from unlabeled data. To obtain anchors in the representation space, we project point clouds with different distortions into images and randomly mix their local patches to form mixed images with multiple distortions. Utilizing the generated anchors, we constrain the pre-training process via a quality-aware contrastive loss following the philosophy that perceptual quality is closely related to both content and distortion. Furthermore, in the model fine-tuning stage, we propose a semantic-guided multi-view fusion module to effectively integrate the features of projected images from multiple perspectives. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art PCQA methods on popular benchmarks. Further investigations demonstrate that CoPA can also benefit existing learning-based PCQA models.

VersaT2I: Improving Text-to-Image Models with Versatile Reward

Recent text-to-image (T2I) models have benefited from large-scale and high-quality data, demonstrating impressive performance. However, these T2I models still struggle to produce images that are aesthetically pleasing, geometrically accurate, faithful to text, and of good low-level quality. We present VersaT2I, a versatile training framework that can boost the performance with multiple rewards of any T2I model. We decompose the quality of the image into several aspects such as aesthetics, text-image alignment, geometry, low-level quality, etc. Then, for every quality aspect, we select high-quality images in this aspect generated by the model as the training set to finetune the T2I model using the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Furthermore, we introduce a gating function to combine multiple quality aspects, which can avoid conflicts between different quality aspects. Our method is easy to extend and does not require any manual annotation, reinforcement learning, or model architecture changes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VersaT2I outperforms the baseline methods across various quality criteria.