PickScan: Object discovery and reconstruction from handheld interactions

Reconstructing compositional 3D representations of scenes, where each object is represented with its own 3D model, is a highly desirable capability in robotics and augmented reality. However, most existing methods rely heavily on strong appearance priors for object discovery, therefore only working on those classes of objects on which the method has been trained, or do not allow for object manipulation, which is necessary to scan objects fully and to guide object discovery in challenging scenarios. We address these limitations with a novel interaction-guided and class-agnostic method based on object displacements that allows a user to move around a scene with an RGB-D camera, hold up objects, and finally outputs one 3D model per held-up object. Our main contribution to this end is a novel approach to detecting user-object interactions and extracting the masks of manipulated objects. On a custom-captured dataset, our pipeline discovers manipulated objects with 78.3% precision at 100% recall and reconstructs them with a mean chamfer distance of 0.90cm. Compared to Co-Fusion, the only comparable interaction-based and class-agnostic baseline, this corresponds to a reduction in chamfer distance of 73% while detecting 99% fewer false positives.

No Pose, No Problem: Surprisingly Simple 3D Gaussian Splats from Sparse Unposed Images

We introduce NoPoSplat, a feed-forward model capable of reconstructing 3D scenes parameterized by 3D Gaussians from \textit{unposed} sparse multi-view images. Our model, trained exclusively with photometric loss, achieves real-time 3D Gaussian reconstruction during inference. To eliminate the need for accurate pose input during reconstruction, we anchor one input view's local camera coordinates as the canonical space and train the network to predict Gaussian primitives for all views within this space. This approach obviates the need to transform Gaussian primitives from local coordinates into a global coordinate system, thus avoiding errors associated with per-frame Gaussians and pose estimation. To resolve scale ambiguity, we design and compare various intrinsic embedding methods, ultimately opting to convert camera intrinsics into a token embedding and concatenate it with image tokens as input to the model, enabling accurate scene scale prediction. We utilize the reconstructed 3D Gaussians for novel view synthesis and pose estimation tasks and propose a two-stage coarse-to-fine pipeline for accurate pose estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our pose-free approach can achieve superior novel view synthesis quality compared to pose-required methods, particularly in scenarios with limited input image overlap. For pose estimation, our method, trained without ground truth depth or explicit matching loss, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with substantial improvements. This work makes significant advances in pose-free generalizable 3D reconstruction and demonstrates its applicability to real-world scenarios. Code and trained models are available at https://noposplat.github.io/.

ARKit LabelMaker: A New Scale for Indoor 3D Scene Understanding

The performance of neural networks scales with both their size and the amount of data they have been trained on. This is shown in both language and image generation. However, this requires scaling-friendly network architectures as well as large-scale datasets. Even though scaling-friendly architectures like transformers have emerged for 3D vision tasks, the GPT-moment of 3D vision remains distant due to the lack of training data. In this paper, we introduce ARKit LabelMaker, the first large-scale, real-world 3D dataset with dense semantic annotations. Specifically, we complement ARKitScenes dataset with dense semantic annotations that are automatically generated at scale. To this end, we extend LabelMaker, a recent automatic annotation pipeline, to serve the needs of large-scale pre-training. This involves extending the pipeline with cutting-edge segmentation models as well as making it robust to the challenges of large-scale processing. Further, we push forward the state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet and ScanNet200 dataset with prevalent 3D semantic segmentation models, demonstrating the efficacy of our generated dataset.

DepthSplat: Connecting Gaussian Splatting and Depth

Gaussian splatting and single/multi-view depth estimation are typically studied in isolation. In this paper, we present DepthSplat to connect Gaussian splatting and depth estimation and study their interactions. More specifically, we first contribute a robust multi-view depth model by leveraging pre-trained monocular depth features, leading to high-quality feed-forward 3D Gaussian splatting reconstructions. We also show that Gaussian splatting can serve as an unsupervised pre-training objective for learning powerful depth models from large-scale unlabelled datasets. We validate the synergy between Gaussian splatting and depth estimation through extensive ablation and cross-task transfer experiments. Our DepthSplat achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet, RealEstate10K and DL3DV datasets in terms of both depth estimation and novel view synthesis, demonstrating the mutual benefits of connecting both tasks. Our code, models, and video results are available at https://haofeixu.github.io/depthsplat/.

Gravity-aligned Rotation Averaging with Circular Regression

Reconstructing a 3D scene from unordered images is pivotal in computer vision and robotics, with applications spanning crowd-sourced mapping and beyond. While global Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques are scalable and fast, they often compromise on accuracy. To address this, we introduce a principled approach that integrates gravity direction into the rotation averaging phase of global pipelines, enhancing camera orientation accuracy and reducing the degrees of freedom. This additional information is commonly available in recent consumer devices, such as smartphones, mixed-reality devices and drones, making the proposed method readily accessible. Rooted in circular regression, our algorithm has similar convergence guarantees as linear regression. It also supports scenarios where only a subset of cameras have known gravity. Additionally, we propose a mechanism to refine error-prone gravity. We achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on four large-scale datasets. Particularly, the proposed method improves upon the SfM baseline by 13 AUC@$1^\circ$ points, on average, while running eight times faster. It also outperforms the standard planar pose graph optimization technique by 23 AUC@$1^\circ$ points. The code is at https://github.com/colmap/glomap.

HoloSpot: Intuitive Object Manipulation via Mixed Reality Drag-and-Drop

Human-robot interaction through mixed reality (MR) technologies enables novel, intuitive interfaces to control robots in remote operations. Such interfaces facilitate operations in hazardous environments, where human presence is risky, yet human oversight remains crucial. Potential environments include disaster response scenarios and areas with high radiation or toxic chemicals. In this paper we present an interface system projecting a 3D representation of a scanned room as a scaled-down 'dollhouse' hologram, allowing users to select and manipulate objects using a straightforward drag-and-drop interface. We then translate these drag-and-drop user commands into real-time robot actions based on the recent Spot-Compose framework. The Unity-based application provides an interactive tutorial and a user-friendly experience, ensuring ease of use. Through comprehensive end-to-end testing, we validate the system's capability in executing pick-and-place tasks and a complementary user study affirms the interface's intuitive controls. Our findings highlight the advantages of this interface in improving user experience and operational efficiency. This work lays the groundwork for a robust framework that advances the potential for seamless human-robot collaboration in diverse applications. Paper website: https://holospot.github.io/

Robust Incremental Structure-from-Motion with Hybrid Features

Structure-from-Motion (SfM) has become a ubiquitous tool for camera calibration and scene reconstruction with many downstream applications in computer vision and beyond. While the state-of-the-art SfM pipelines have reached a high level of maturity in well-textured and well-configured scenes over the last decades, they still fall short of robustly solving the SfM problem in challenging scenarios. In particular, weakly textured scenes and poorly constrained configurations oftentimes cause catastrophic failures or large errors for the primarily keypoint-based pipelines. In these scenarios, line segments are often abundant and can offer complementary geometric constraints. Their large spatial extent and typically structured configurations lead to stronger geometric constraints as compared to traditional keypoint-based methods. In this work, we introduce an incremental SfM system that, in addition to points, leverages lines and their structured geometric relations. Our technical contributions span the entire pipeline (mapping, triangulation, registration) and we integrate these into a comprehensive end-to-end SfM system that we share as an open-source software with the community. We also present the first analytical method to propagate uncertainties for 3D optimized lines via sensitivity analysis. Experiments show that our system is consistently more robust and accurate compared to the widely used point-based state of the art in SfM -- achieving richer maps and more precise camera registrations, especially under challenging conditions. In addition, our uncertainty-aware localization module alone is able to consistently improve over the state of the art under both point-alone and hybrid setups.

SpotLight: Robotic Scene Understanding through Interaction and Affordance Detection

Despite increasing research efforts on household robotics, robots intended for deployment in domestic settings still struggle with more complex tasks such as interacting with functional elements like drawers or light switches, largely due to limited task-specific understanding and interaction capabilities. These tasks require not only detection and pose estimation but also an understanding of the affordances these elements provide. To address these challenges and enhance robotic scene understanding, we introduce SpotLight: A comprehensive framework for robotic interaction with functional elements, specifically light switches. Furthermore, this framework enables robots to improve their environmental understanding through interaction. Leveraging VLM-based affordance prediction to estimate motion primitives for light switch interaction, we achieve up to 84% operation success in real world experiments. We further introduce a specialized dataset containing 715 images as well as a custom detection model for light switch detection. We demonstrate how the framework can facilitate robot learning through physical interaction by having the robot explore the environment and discover previously unknown relationships in a scene graph representation. Lastly, we propose an extension to the framework to accommodate other functional interactions such as swing doors, showcasing its flexibility. Videos and Code: timengelbracht.github.io/SpotLight/

GeoCalib: Learning Single-image Calibration with Geometric Optimization

From a single image, visual cues can help deduce intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters like the focal length and the gravity direction. This single-image calibration can benefit various downstream applications like image editing and 3D mapping. Current approaches to this problem are based on either classical geometry with lines and vanishing points or on deep neural networks trained end-to-end. The learned approaches are more robust but struggle to generalize to new environments and are less accurate than their classical counterparts. We hypothesize that they lack the constraints that 3D geometry provides. In this work, we introduce GeoCalib, a deep neural network that leverages universal rules of 3D geometry through an optimization process. GeoCalib is trained end-to-end to estimate camera parameters and learns to find useful visual cues from the data. Experiments on various benchmarks show that GeoCalib is more robust and more accurate than existing classical and learned approaches. Its internal optimization estimates uncertainties, which help flag failure cases and benefit downstream applications like visual localization. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/GeoCalib.

EgoPressure: A Dataset for Hand Pressure and Pose Estimation in Egocentric Vision

Estimating touch contact and pressure in egocentric vision is a central task for downstream applications in Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, as well as many robotic applications, because it provides precise physical insights into hand-object interaction and object manipulation. However, existing contact pressure datasets lack egocentric views and hand poses, which are essential for accurate estimation during in-situ operation, both for AR/VR interaction and robotic manipulation. In this paper, we introduce EgoPressure,a novel dataset of touch contact and pressure interaction from an egocentric perspective, complemented with hand pose meshes and fine-grained pressure intensities for each contact. The hand poses in our dataset are optimized using our proposed multi-view sequence-based method that processes footage from our capture rig of 8 accurately calibrated RGBD cameras. EgoPressure comprises 5.0 hours of touch contact and pressure interaction from 21 participants captured by a moving egocentric camera and 7 stationary Kinect cameras, which provided RGB images and depth maps at 30 Hz. In addition, we provide baselines for estimating pressure with different modalities, which will enable future developments and benchmarking on the dataset. Overall, we demonstrate that pressure and hand poses are complementary, which supports our intention to better facilitate the physical understanding of hand-object interactions in AR/VR and robotics research.