Direct Sparse Odometry with Continuous 3D Gaussian Maps for Indoor Environments

Accurate localization is essential for robotics and augmented reality applications such as autonomous navigation. Vision-based methods combining prior maps aim to integrate LiDAR-level accuracy with camera cost efficiency for robust pose estimation. Existing approaches, however, often depend on unreliable interpolation procedures when associating discrete point cloud maps with dense image pixels, which inevitably introduces depth errors and degrades pose estimation accuracy. We propose a monocular visual odometry framework utilizing a continuous 3D Gaussian map, which directly assigns geometrically consistent depth values to all extracted high-gradient points without interpolation. Evaluations on two public datasets demonstrate superior tracking accuracy compared to existing methods. We have released the source code of this work for the development of the community.

A Survey of Sample-Efficient Deep Learning for Change Detection in Remote Sensing: Tasks, Strategies, and Challenges

In the last decade, the rapid development of deep learning (DL) has made it possible to perform automatic, accurate, and robust Change Detection (CD) on large volumes of Remote Sensing Images (RSIs). However, despite advances in CD methods, their practical application in real-world contexts remains limited due to the diverse input data and the applicational context. For example, the collected RSIs can be time-series observations, and more informative results are required to indicate the time of change or the specific change category. Moreover, training a Deep Neural Network (DNN) requires a massive amount of training samples, whereas in many cases these samples are difficult to collect. To address these challenges, various specific CD methods have been developed considering different application scenarios and training resources. Additionally, recent advancements in image generation, self-supervision, and visual foundation models (VFMs) have opened up new approaches to address the 'data-hungry' issue of DL-based CD. The development of these methods in broader application scenarios requires further investigation and discussion. Therefore, this article summarizes the literature methods for different CD tasks and the available strategies and techniques to train and deploy DL-based CD methods in sample-limited scenarios. We expect that this survey can provide new insights and inspiration for researchers in this field to develop more effective CD methods that can be applied in a wider range of contexts.

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.

Medical Visual Prompting (MVP): A Unified Framework for Versatile and High-Quality Medical Image Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of lesion regions is crucial for clinical diagnosis and treatment across various diseases. While deep convolutional networks have achieved satisfactory results in medical image segmentation, they face challenges such as loss of lesion shape information due to continuous convolution and downsampling, as well as the high cost of manually labeling lesions with varying shapes and sizes. To address these issues, we propose a novel medical visual prompting (MVP) framework that leverages pre-training and prompting concepts from natural language processing (NLP). The framework utilizes three key components: Super-Pixel Guided Prompting (SPGP) for superpixelating the input image, Image Embedding Guided Prompting (IEGP) for freezing patch embedding and merging with superpixels to provide visual prompts, and Adaptive Attention Mechanism Guided Prompting (AAGP) for pinpointing prompt content and efficiently adapting all layers. By integrating SPGP, IEGP, and AAGP, the MVP enables the segmentation network to better learn shape prompting information and facilitates mutual learning across different tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate superior performance of this method in various challenging medical image tasks, while simplifying single-task medical segmentation models. This novel framework offers improved performance with fewer parameters and holds significant potential for accurate segmentation of lesion regions in various medical tasks, making it clinically valuable.

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.

SR-LIVO: LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry and Mapping with Sweep Reconstruction

Existing LiDAR-inertial-visual odometry and mapping (LIV-SLAM) systems mainly utilize the LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) module for structure reconstruction and the visual-inertial odometry (VIO) module for color rendering. However, the accuracy of VIO is often compromised by photometric changes, weak textures and motion blur, unlike the more robust LIO. This paper introduces SR-LIVO, an advanced and novel LIV-SLAM system employing sweep reconstruction to align reconstructed sweeps with image timestamps. This allows the LIO module to accurately determine states at all imaging moments, enhancing pose accuracy and processing efficiency. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that: 1) our SRLIVO outperforms existing state-of-the-art LIV-SLAM systems in both pose accuracy and time efficiency; 2) our LIO-based pose estimation prove more accurate than VIO-based ones in several mainstream LIV-SLAM systems (including ours). We have released our source code to contribute to the community development in this field.

CityGen: Infinite and Controllable 3D City Layout Generation

City layout generation has recently gained significant attention. The goal of this task is to automatically generate the layout of a city scene, including elements such as roads, buildings, vegetation, as well as other urban infrastructures. Previous methods using VAEs or GANs for 3D city layout generation offer limited diversity and constrained interactivity, only allowing users to selectively regenerate parts of the layout, which greatly limits customization. In this paper, we propose CityGen, a novel end-to-end framework for infinite, diverse and controllable 3D city layout generation.First, we propose an outpainting pipeline to extend the local layout to an infinite city layout. Then, we utilize a multi-scale diffusion model to generate diverse and controllable local semantic layout patches. The extensive experiments show that CityGen achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under FID and KID in generating an infinite and controllable 3D city layout. CityGen demonstrates promising applicability in fields like smart cities, urban planning, and digital simulation.