MST: Adaptive Multi-Scale Tokens Guided Interactive Segmentation

In the field of Industrial Informatics, interactive segmentation has gained significant attention for its application in human-computer interaction and data annotation. Existing algorithms, however, face challenges in balancing the segmentation accuracy between large and small targets, often leading to an increased number of user interactions. To tackle this, a novel multi-scale token adaptation algorithm, leveraging token similarity, has been devised to enhance segmentation across varying target sizes. This algorithm utilizes a differentiable top-k tokens selection mechanism, allowing for fewer tokens to be used while maintaining efficient multi-scale token interaction. Furthermore, a contrastive loss is introduced to better discriminate between target and background tokens, improving the correctness and robustness of the tokens similar to the target. Extensive benchmarking shows that the algorithm achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to current methods. An interactive demo and all reproducible codes will be released at https://github.com/hahamyt/mst.

An Efficient Trajectory Planner for Car-like Robots on Uneven Terrain

Autonomous navigation of ground robots on uneven terrain is being considered in more and more tasks. However, uneven terrain will bring two problems to motion planning: how to assess the traversability of the terrain and how to cope with the dynamics model of the robot associated with the terrain. The trajectories generated by existing methods are often too conservative or cannot be tracked well by the controller since the second problem is not well solved. In this paper, we propose terrain pose mapping to describe the impact of terrain on the robot. With this mapping, we can obtain the SE(3) state of the robot on uneven terrain for a given state in SE(2). Then, based on it, we present a trajectory optimization framework for car-like robots on uneven terrain that can consider both of the above problems. The trajectories generated by our method conform to the dynamics model of the system without being overly conservative and yet able to be tracked well by the controller. We perform simulations and real-world experiments to validate the efficiency and trajectory quality of our algorithm.

Towards Efficient Trajectory Generation for Ground Robots beyond 2D Environment

With the development of robotics, ground robots are no longer limited to planar motion. Passive height variation due to complex terrain and active height control provided by special structures on robots require a more general navigation planning framework beyond 2D. Existing methods rarely considers both simultaneously, limiting the capabilities and applications of ground robots. In this paper, we proposed an optimization-based planning framework for ground robots considering both active and passive height changes on the z-axis. The proposed planner first constructs a penalty field for chassis motion constraints defined in R3 such that the optimal solution space of the trajectory is continuous, resulting in a high-quality smooth chassis trajectory. Also, by constructing custom constraints in the z-axis direction, it is possible to plan trajectories for different types of ground robots which have z-axis degree of freedom. We performed simulations and realworld experiments to verify the efficiency and trajectory quality of our algorithm.

Decentralized Planning for Car-Like Robotic Swarm in Unstructured Environments

Robot swarm is a hot spot in robotic research community. In this paper, we propose a decentralized framework for car-like robotic swarm which is capable of real-time planning in unstructured environments. In this system, path finding is guided by environmental topology information to avoid frequent topological change, and search-based speed planning is leveraged to escape from infeasible initial value's local minima. Then spatial-temporal optimization is employed to generate a safe, smooth and dynamically feasible trajectory. During optimization, penalty is imposed on signed distance between agents to realize collision avoidance, and differential flatness cooperated with limitation on front steer angle satisfies the non-holonomic constraints. With trajectories broadcast to the wireless network, agents are able to check and prevent from potential collisions. We validate the robustness of our system in simulation and real-world experiments. Code will be released as open-source packages.

Contextual Modeling for 3D Dense Captioning on Point Clouds

3D dense captioning, as an emerging vision-language task, aims to identify and locate each object from a set of point clouds and generate a distinctive natural language sentence for describing each located object. However, the existing methods mainly focus on mining inter-object relationship, while ignoring contextual information, especially the non-object details and background environment within the point clouds, thus leading to low-quality descriptions, such as inaccurate relative position information. In this paper, we make the first attempt to utilize the point clouds clustering features as the contextual information to supply the non-object details and background environment of the point clouds and incorporate them into the 3D dense captioning task. We propose two separate modules, namely the Global Context Modeling (GCM) and Local Context Modeling (LCM), in a coarse-to-fine manner to perform the contextual modeling of the point clouds. Specifically, the GCM module captures the inter-object relationship among all objects with global contextual information to obtain more complete scene information of the whole point clouds. The LCM module exploits the influence of the neighboring objects of the target object and local contextual information to enrich the object representations. With such global and local contextual modeling strategies, our proposed model can effectively characterize the object representations and contextual information and thereby generate comprehensive and detailed descriptions of the located objects. Extensive experiments on the ScanRefer and Nr3D datasets demonstrate that our proposed method sets a new record on the 3D dense captioning task, and verify the effectiveness of our raised contextual modeling of point clouds.

Differential Flatness-Based Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Vehicles

As a core part of autonomous driving systems, motion planning has received extensive attention from academia and industry. However, there is no efficient trajectory planning solution capable of spatial-temporal joint optimization due to nonholonomic dynamics, particularly in the presence of unstructured environments and dynamic obstacles. To bridge the gap, we propose a versatile and real-time trajectory optimization method that can generate a high-quality feasible trajectory using a full vehicle model under arbitrary constraints. By leveraging the differential flatness property of car-like robots, we use flat outputs to analytically formulate all feasibility constraints to simplify the trajectory planning problem. Moreover, obstacle avoidance is achieved with full dimensional polygons to generate less conservative trajectories with safety guarantees, especially in tightly constrained spaces. We present comprehensive benchmarks with cutting-edge methods, demonstrating the significance of the proposed method in terms of efficiency and trajectory quality. Real-world experiments verify the practicality of our algorithm. We will release our codes as open-source packages with the purpose for the reference of the research community.

Deep Learning Eliminates Massive Dust Storms from Images of Tianwen-1

Dust storms may remarkably degrade the imaging quality of Martian orbiters and delay the progress of mapping the global topography and geomorphology. To address this issue, this paper presents an approach that reuses the image dehazing knowledge obtained on Earth to resolve the dust-removal problem on Mars. In this approach, we collect remote-sensing images captured by Tianwen-1 and manually select hundreds of clean and dusty images. Inspired by the haze formation process on Earth, we formulate a similar visual degradation process on clean images and synthesize dusty images sharing a similar feature distribution with realistic dusty images. These realistic clean and synthetic dusty image pairs are used to train a deep model that inherently encodes dust irrelevant features and decodes them into dust-free images. Qualitative and quantitative results show that dust storms can be effectively eliminated by the proposed approach, leading to obviously improved topographical and geomorphological details of Mars.

Hybrid Local-Global Transformer for Image Dehazing

Recently, the Vision Transformer (ViT) has shown impressive performance on high-level and low-level vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a new ViT architecture, named Hybrid Local-Global Vision Transformer (HyLoG-ViT), for single image dehazing. The HyLoG-ViT block consists of two paths, the local ViT path and the global ViT path, which are used to capture local and global dependencies. The hybrid features are fused via convolution layers. As a result, the HyLoG-ViT reduces the computational complexity and introduces locality in the networks. Then, the HyLoG-ViT blocks are incorporated within our dehazing networks, which jointly learn the intrinsic image decomposition and image dehazing. Specifically, the network consists of one shared encoder and three decoders for reflectance prediction, shading prediction, and haze-free image generation. The tasks of reflectance and shading prediction can produce meaningful intermediate features that can serve as complementary features for haze-free image generation. To effectively aggregate the complementary features, we propose a complementary features selection module (CFSM) to select the useful ones for image dehazing. Extensive experiments on homogeneous, non-homogeneous, and nighttime dehazing tasks reveal that our proposed Transformer-based dehazing network can achieve comparable or even better performance than CNNs-based dehazing models.

Image Quality Assessment for Omnidirectional Cross-reference Stitching

Along with the development of virtual reality (VR), omnidirectional images play an important role in producing multimedia content with immersive experience. However, despite various existing approaches for omnidirectional image stitching, how to quantitatively assess the quality of stitched images is still insufficiently explored. To address this problem, we establish a novel omnidirectional image dataset containing stitched images as well as dual-fisheye images captured from standard quarters of 0$^\circ$, 90$^\circ$, 180$^\circ$ and 270$^\circ$. In this manner, when evaluating the quality of an image stitched from a pair of fisheye images (e.g., 0$^\circ$ and 180$^\circ$), the other pair of fisheye images (e.g., 90$^\circ$ and 270$^\circ$) can be used as the cross-reference to provide ground-truth observations of the stitching regions. Based on this dataset, we further benchmark six widely used stitching models with seven evaluation metrics for IQA. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first dataset that focuses on assessing the stitching quality of omnidirectional images.