LaserHuman: Language-guided Scene-aware Human Motion Generation in Free Environment

Language-guided scene-aware human motion generation has great significance for entertainment and robotics. In response to the limitations of existing datasets, we introduce LaserHuman, a pioneering dataset engineered to revolutionize Scene-Text-to-Motion research. LaserHuman stands out with its inclusion of genuine human motions within 3D environments, unbounded free-form natural language descriptions, a blend of indoor and outdoor scenarios, and dynamic, ever-changing scenes. Diverse modalities of capture data and rich annotations present great opportunities for the research of conditional motion generation, and can also facilitate the development of real-life applications. Moreover, to generate semantically consistent and physically plausible human motions, we propose a multi-conditional diffusion model, which is simple but effective, achieving state-of-the-art performance on existing datasets.

GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation

The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently brought about a revolution in the field of neural rendering, facilitating high-quality renderings at real-time speed. However, 3DGS heavily depends on the initialized point cloud produced by Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques. When tackling with large-scale scenes that unavoidably contain texture-less surfaces, the SfM techniques always fail to produce enough points in these surfaces and cannot provide good initialization for 3DGS. As a result, 3DGS suffers from difficult optimization and low-quality renderings. In this paper, inspired by classical multi-view stereo (MVS) techniques, we propose GaussianPro, a novel method that applies a progressive propagation strategy to guide the densification of the 3D Gaussians. Compared to the simple split and clone strategies used in 3DGS, our method leverages the priors of the existing reconstructed geometries of the scene and patch matching techniques to produce new Gaussians with accurate positions and orientations. Experiments on both large-scale and small-scale scenes validate the effectiveness of our method, where our method significantly surpasses 3DGS on the Waymo dataset, exhibiting an improvement of 1.15dB in terms of PSNR.

Unveiling the Depths: A Multi-Modal Fusion Framework for Challenging Scenarios

Monocular depth estimation from RGB images plays a pivotal role in 3D vision. However, its accuracy can deteriorate in challenging environments such as nighttime or adverse weather conditions. While long-wave infrared cameras offer stable imaging in such challenging conditions, they are inherently low-resolution, lacking rich texture and semantics as delivered by the RGB image. Current methods focus solely on a single modality due to the difficulties to identify and integrate faithful depth cues from both sources. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel approach that identifies and integrates dominant cross-modality depth features with a learning-based framework. Concretely, we independently compute the coarse depth maps with separate networks by fully utilizing the individual depth cues from each modality. As the advantageous depth spreads across both modalities, we propose a novel confidence loss steering a confidence predictor network to yield a confidence map specifying latent potential depth areas. With the resulting confidence map, we propose a multi-modal fusion network that fuses the final depth in an end-to-end manner. Harnessing the proposed pipeline, our method demonstrates the ability of robust depth estimation in a variety of difficult scenarios. Experimental results on the challenging MS$^2$ and ViViD++ datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

UC-NeRF: Neural Radiance Field for Under-Calibrated multi-view cameras in autonomous driving

Multi-camera setups find widespread use across various applications, such as autonomous driving, as they greatly expand sensing capabilities. Despite the fast development of Neural radiance field (NeRF) techniques and their wide applications in both indoor and outdoor scenes, applying NeRF to multi-camera systems remains very challenging. This is primarily due to the inherent under-calibration issues in multi-camera setup, including inconsistent imaging effects stemming from separately calibrated image signal processing units in diverse cameras, and system errors arising from mechanical vibrations during driving that affect relative camera poses. In this paper, we present UC-NeRF, a novel method tailored for novel view synthesis in under-calibrated multi-view camera systems. Firstly, we propose a layer-based color correction to rectify the color inconsistency in different image regions. Second, we propose virtual warping to generate more viewpoint-diverse but color-consistent virtual views for color correction and 3D recovery. Finally, a spatiotemporally constrained pose refinement is designed for more robust and accurate pose calibration in multi-camera systems. Our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance of novel view synthesis in multi-camera setups, but also effectively facilitates depth estimation in large-scale outdoor scenes with the synthesized novel views.

Learning Environment-Aware Affordance for 3D Articulated Object Manipulation under Occlusions

Perceiving and manipulating 3D articulated objects in diverse environments is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent studies have shown that point-level affordance provides actionable priors for downstream manipulation tasks. However, existing works primarily focus on single-object scenarios with homogeneous agents, overlooking the realistic constraints imposed by the environment and the agent's morphology, e.g., occlusions and physical limitations. In this paper, we propose an environment-aware affordance framework that incorporates both object-level actionable priors and environment constraints. Unlike object-centric affordance approaches, learning environment-aware affordance faces the challenge of combinatorial explosion due to the complexity of various occlusions, characterized by their quantities, geometries, positions and poses. To address this and enhance data efficiency, we introduce a novel contrastive affordance learning framework capable of training on scenes containing a single occluder and generalizing to scenes with complex occluder combinations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in learning affordance considering environment constraints. Project page at https://chengkaiacademycity.github.io/EnvAwareAfford/

FrozenRecon: Pose-free 3D Scene Reconstruction with Frozen Depth Models

3D scene reconstruction is a long-standing vision task. Existing approaches can be categorized into geometry-based and learning-based methods. The former leverages multi-view geometry but can face catastrophic failures due to the reliance on accurate pixel correspondence across views. The latter was proffered to mitigate these issues by learning 2D or 3D representation directly. However, without a large-scale video or 3D training data, it can hardly generalize to diverse real-world scenarios due to the presence of tens of millions or even billions of optimization parameters in the deep network. Recently, robust monocular depth estimation models trained with large-scale datasets have been proven to possess weak 3D geometry prior, but they are insufficient for reconstruction due to the unknown camera parameters, the affine-invariant property, and inter-frame inconsistency. Here, we propose a novel test-time optimization approach that can transfer the robustness of affine-invariant depth models such as LeReS to challenging diverse scenes while ensuring inter-frame consistency, with only dozens of parameters to optimize per video frame. Specifically, our approach involves freezing the pre-trained affine-invariant depth model's depth predictions, rectifying them by optimizing the unknown scale-shift values with a geometric consistency alignment module, and employing the resulting scale-consistent depth maps to robustly obtain camera poses and achieve dense scene reconstruction, even in low-texture regions. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art cross-dataset reconstruction on five zero-shot testing datasets.

Configurable Spatial-Temporal Hierarchical Analysis for Flexible Video Anomaly Detection

Video anomaly detection (VAD) is a vital task with great practical applications in industrial surveillance, security system, and traffic control. Unlike previous unsupervised VAD methods that adopt a fixed structure to learn normality without considering different detection demands, we design a spatial-temporal hierarchical architecture (STHA) as a configurable architecture to flexibly detect different degrees of anomaly. The comprehensive structure of the STHA is delineated into a tripartite hierarchy, encompassing the following tiers: the stream level, the stack level, and the block level. Specifically, we design several auto-encoder-based blocks that possess varying capacities for extracting normal patterns. Then, we stack blocks according to the complexity degrees with both intra-stack and inter-stack residual links to learn hierarchical normality gradually. Considering the multisource knowledge of videos, we also model the spatial normality of video frames and temporal normality of RGB difference by designing two parallel streams consisting of stacks. Thus, STHA can provide various representation learning abilities by expanding or contracting hierarchically to detect anomalies of different degrees. Since the anomaly set is complicated and unbounded, our STHA can adjust its detection ability to adapt to the human detection demands and the complexity degree of anomaly that happened in the history of a scene. We conduct experiments on three benchmarks and perform extensive analysis, and the results demonstrate that our method performs comparablely to the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we design a toy dataset to prove that our model can better balance the learning ability to adapt to different detection demands.

The Second Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge

This paper discusses the results for the second edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC). This edition was open to methods using any form of supervision, including fully-supervised, self-supervised, multi-task or proxy depth. The challenge was based around the SYNS-Patches dataset, which features a wide diversity of environments with high-quality dense ground-truth. This includes complex natural environments, e.g. forests or fields, which are greatly underrepresented in current benchmarks. The challenge received eight unique submissions that outperformed the provided SotA baseline on any of the pointcloud- or image-based metrics. The top supervised submission improved relative F-Score by 27.62%, while the top self-supervised improved it by 16.61%. Supervised submissions generally leveraged large collections of datasets to improve data diversity. Self-supervised submissions instead updated the network architecture and pretrained backbones. These results represent a significant progress in the field, while highlighting avenues for future research, such as reducing interpolation artifacts at depth boundaries, improving self-supervised indoor performance and overall natural image accuracy.