Deep Fusion Transformer Network with Weighted Vector-Wise Keypoints Voting for Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation

One critical challenge in 6D object pose estimation from a single RGBD image is efficient integration of two different modalities, i.e., color and depth. In this work, we tackle this problem by a novel Deep Fusion Transformer~(DFTr) block that can aggregate cross-modality features for improving pose estimation. Unlike existing fusion methods, the proposed DFTr can better model cross-modality semantic correlation by leveraging their semantic similarity, such that globally enhanced features from different modalities can be better integrated for improved information extraction. Moreover, to further improve robustness and efficiency, we introduce a novel weighted vector-wise voting algorithm that employs a non-iterative global optimization strategy for precise 3D keypoint localization while achieving near real-time inference. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and strong generalization capability of our proposed 3D keypoint voting algorithm. Results on four widely used benchmarks also demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by large margins.

Dynamic Clustering Transformer Network for Point Cloud Segmentation

Point cloud segmentation is one of the most important tasks in computer vision with widespread scientific, industrial, and commercial applications. The research thereof has resulted in many breakthroughs in 3D object and scene understanding. Previous methods typically utilized hierarchical architectures for feature representation. However, the commonly used sampling and grouping methods in hierarchical networks are only based on point-wise three-dimensional coordinates, ignoring local semantic homogeneity of point clusters. Additionally, the prevalent Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) method is often a computational bottleneck. To address these issues, we propose a novel 3D point cloud representation network, called Dynamic Clustering Transformer Network (DCTNet). It has an encoder-decoder architecture, allowing for both local and global feature learning. Specifically, we propose novel semantic feature-based dynamic sampling and clustering methods in the encoder, which enables the model to be aware of local semantic homogeneity for local feature aggregation. Furthermore, in the decoder, we propose an efficient semantic feature-guided upsampling method. Our method was evaluated on an object-based dataset (ShapeNet), an urban navigation dataset (Toronto-3D), and a multispectral LiDAR dataset, verifying the performance of DCTNet across a wide variety of practical engineering applications. The inference speed of DCTNet is 3.8-16.8$\times$ faster than existing State-of-the-Art (SOTA) models on the ShapeNet dataset, while achieving an instance-wise mIoU of $86.6\%$, the current top score. Our method similarly outperforms previous methods on the other datasets, verifying it as the new State-of-the-Art in point cloud segmentation.

NeRF: Neural Radiance Field in 3D Vision, A Comprehensive Review

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), a new novel view synthesis with implicit scene representation has taken the field of Computer Vision by storm. As a novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction method, NeRF models find applications in robotics, urban mapping, autonomous navigation, virtual reality/augmented reality, and more. Since the original paper by Mildenhall et al., more than 250 preprints were published, with more than 100 eventually being accepted in tier one Computer Vision Conferences. Given NeRF popularity and the current interest in this research area, we believe it necessary to compile a comprehensive survey of NeRF papers from the past two years, which we organized into both architecture, and application based taxonomies. We also provide an introduction to the theory of NeRF based novel view synthesis, and a benchmark comparison of the performance and speed of key NeRF models. By creating this survey, we hope to introduce new researchers to NeRF, provide a helpful reference for influential works in this field, as well as motivate future research directions with our discussion section.

3DPCT: 3D Point Cloud Transformer with Dual Self-attention

Transformers have resulted in remarkable achievements in the field of image processing. Inspired by this great success, the application of Transformers to 3D point cloud processing has drawn more and more attention. This paper presents a novel point cloud representational learning network, 3D Point Cloud Transformer with Dual Self-attention (3DPCT) and an encoder-decoder structure. Specifically, 3DPCT has a hierarchical encoder, which contains two local-global dual-attention modules for the classification task (three modules for the segmentation task), with each module consisting of a Local Feature Aggregation (LFA) block and a Global Feature Learning (GFL) block. The GFL block is dual self-attention, with both point-wise and channel-wise self-attention to improve feature extraction. Moreover, in LFA, to better leverage the local information extracted, a novel point-wise self-attention model, named as Point-Patch Self-Attention (PPSA), is designed. The performance is evaluated on both classification and segmentation datasets, containing both synthetic and real-world data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results on both classification and segmentation tasks.

Transformers in 3D Point Clouds: A Survey

In recent years, Transformer models have been proven to have the remarkable ability of long-range dependencies modeling. They have achieved satisfactory results both in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and image processing. This significant achievement sparks great interest among researchers in 3D point cloud processing to apply them to various 3D tasks. Due to the inherent permutation invariance and strong global feature learning ability, 3D Transformers are well suited for point cloud processing and analysis. They have achieved competitive or even better performance compared to the state-of-the-art non-Transformer algorithms. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of 3D Transformers designed for various tasks (e.g. point cloud classification, segmentation, object detection, and so on). We start by introducing the fundamental components of the general Transformer and providing a brief description of its application in 2D and 3D fields. Then, we present three different taxonomies (i.e., Transformer implementation-based taxonomy, data representation-based taxonomy, and task-based taxonomy) for method classification, which allows us to analyze involved methods from multiple perspectives. Furthermore, we also conduct an investigation of 3D self-attention mechanism variants designed for performance improvement. To demonstrate the superiority of 3D Transformers, we compare the performance of Transformer-based algorithms in terms of point cloud classification, segmentation, and object detection. Finally, we point out three potential future research directions, expecting to provide some benefit references for the development of 3D Transformers.

3DCTN: 3D Convolution-Transformer Network for Point Cloud Classification

Although accurate and fast point cloud classification is a fundamental task in 3D applications, it is difficult to achieve this purpose due to the irregularity and disorder of point clouds that make it challenging to achieve effective and efficient global discriminative feature learning. Lately, 3D Transformers have been adopted to improve point cloud processing. Nevertheless, massive Transformer layers tend to incur huge computational and memory costs. This paper presents a novel hierarchical framework that incorporates convolution with Transformer for point cloud classification, named 3D Convolution-Transformer Network (3DCTN), to combine the strong and efficient local feature learning ability of convolution with the remarkable global context modeling capability of Transformer. Our method has two main modules operating on the downsampling point sets, and each module consists of a multi-scale local feature aggregating (LFA) block and a global feature learning (GFL) block, which are implemented by using Graph Convolution and Transformer respectively. We also conduct a detailed investigation on a series of Transformer variants to explore better performance for our network. Various experiments on ModelNet40 demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art classification performance, in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.

Sentinel-1 Additive Noise Removal from Cross-Polarization Extra-Wide TOPSAR with Dynamic Least-Squares

Sentinel-1 is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) platform with an operational mode called extra wide (EW) that offers large regions of ocean areas to be observed. A major issue with EW images is that the cross-polarized HV and VH channels have prominent additive noise patterns relative to low backscatter intensity, which disrupts tasks that require manual or automated interpretation. The European Space Agency (ESA) provides a method for removing the additive noise pattern by means of lookup tables, but applying them directly produces unsatisfactory results because characteristics of the noise still remain. Furthermore, evidence suggests that the magnitude of the additive noise dynamically depends on factors that are not considered by the ESA estimated noise field. To address these issues we propose a quadratic objective function to model the mis-scale of the provided noise field on an image. We consider a linear denoising model that re-scales the noise field for each subswath, whose parameters are found from a least-squares solution over the objective function. This method greatly reduces the presence of additive noise while not requiring a set of training images, is robust to heterogeneity in images, dynamically estimates parameters for each image, and finds parameters using a closed-form solution. Two experiments were performed to validate the proposed method. The first experiment simulated noise removal on a set of RADARSAT-2 images with noise fields artificially imposed on them. The second experiment conducted noise removal on a set of Sentinel-1 images taken over the five oceans. Afterwards, quality of the noise removal was evaluated based on the appearance of open-water. The two experiments indicate that the proposed method marks an improvement both visually and through numerical measures.

A comparative study of deep learning methods for building footprints detection using high spatial resolution aerial images

Building footprints data is of importance in several urban applications and natural disaster management. In contrast to traditional surveying and mapping, using high spatial resolution aerial images, deep learning-based building footprints extraction methods can extract building footprints accurately and efficiently. With rapidly development of deep learning methods, it is hard for novice to harness the powerful tools in building footprints extraction. The paper aims at providing the whole process of building footprints extraction from high spatial resolution images using deep learning-based methods. In addition, we also compare the commonly used methods, including Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN)-8s, U-Net and DeepLabv3+. At the end of the work, we change the data size used in models training to explore the influence of data size to the performance of the algorithms. The experiments show that, in different data size, DeepLabv3+ is the best algorithm among them with the highest accuracy and moderate efficiency; FCN-8s has the worst accuracy and highest efficiency; U-Net shows the moderate accuracy and lowest efficiency. In addition, with more training data, algorithms converged faster with higher accuracy in extraction results.

DML-GANR: Deep Metric Learning With Generative Adversarial Network Regularization for High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

With a small number of labeled samples for training, it can save considerable manpower and material resources, especially when the amount of high spatial resolution remote sensing images (HSR-RSIs) increases considerably. However, many deep models face the problem of overfitting when using a small number of labeled samples. This might degrade HSRRSI retrieval accuracy. Aiming at obtaining more accurate HSR-RSI retrieval performance with small training samples, we develop a deep metric learning approach with generative adversarial network regularization (DML-GANR) for HSR-RSI retrieval. The DML-GANR starts from a high-level feature extraction (HFE) to extract high-level features, which includes convolutional layers and fully connected (FC) layers. Each of the FC layers is constructed by deep metric learning (DML) to maximize the interclass variations and minimize the intraclass variations. The generative adversarial network (GAN) is adopted to mitigate the overfitting problem and validate the qualities of extracted high-level features. DML-GANR is optimized through a customized approach, and the optimal parameters are obtained. The experimental results on the three data sets demonstrate the superior performance of DML-GANR over state-of-the-art techniques in HSR-RSI retrieval.

Quantization in Relative Gradient Angle Domain For Building Polygon Estimation

Building footprint extraction in remote sensing data benefits many important applications, such as urban planning and population estimation. Recently, rapid development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and open-sourced high resolution satellite building image datasets have pushed the performance boundary further for automated building extractions. However, CNN approaches often generate imprecise building morphologies including noisy edges and round corners. In this paper, we leverage the performance of CNNs, and propose a module that uses prior knowledge of building corners to create angular and concise building polygons from CNN segmentation outputs. We describe a new transform, Relative Gradient Angle Transform (RGA Transform) that converts object contours from time vs. space to time vs. angle. We propose a new shape descriptor, Boundary Orientation Relation Set (BORS), to describe angle relationship between edges in RGA domain, such as orthogonality and parallelism. Finally, we develop an energy minimization framework that makes use of the angle relationship in BORS to straighten edges and reconstruct sharp corners, and the resulting corners create a polygon. Experimental results demonstrate that our method refines CNN output from a rounded approximation to a more clear-cut angular shape of the building footprint.