ML-SemReg: Boosting Point Cloud Registration with Multi-level Semantic Consistency

Recent advances in point cloud registration mostly leverage geometric information. Although these methods have yielded promising results, they still struggle with problems of low overlap, thus limiting their practical usage. In this paper, we propose ML-SemReg, a plug-and-play point cloud registration framework that fully exploits semantic information. Our key insight is that mismatches can be categorized into two types, i.e., inter- and intra-class, after rendering semantic clues, and can be well addressed by utilizing multi-level semantic consistency. We first propose a Group Matching module to address inter-class mismatching, outputting multiple matching groups that inherently satisfy Local Semantic Consistency. For each group, a Mask Matching module based on Scene Semantic Consistency is then introduced to suppress intra-class mismatching. Benefit from those two modules, ML-SemReg generates correspondences with a high inlier ratio. Extensive experiments demonstrate excellent performance and robustness of ML-SemReg, e.g., in hard-cases of the KITTI dataset, the Registration Recall of MAC increases by almost 34 percentage points when our ML-SemReg is equipped. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Laka-3DV/ML-SemReg}

Centerline Boundary Dice Loss for Vascular Segmentation

Vascular segmentation in medical imaging plays a crucial role in analysing morphological and functional assessments. Traditional methods, like the centerline Dice (clDice) loss, ensure topology preservation but falter in capturing geometric details, especially under translation and deformation. The combination of clDice with traditional Dice loss can lead to diameter imbalance, favoring larger vessels. Addressing these challenges, we introduce the centerline boundary Dice (cbDice) loss function, which harmonizes topological integrity and geometric nuances, ensuring consistent segmentation across various vessel sizes. cbDice enriches the clDice approach by including boundary-aware aspects, thereby improving geometric detail recognition. It matches the performance of the boundary difference over union (B-DoU) loss through a mask-distance-based approach, enhancing traslation sensitivity. Crucially, cbDice incorporates radius information from vascular skeletons, enabling uniform adaptation to vascular diameter changes and maintaining balance in branch growth and fracture impacts. Furthermore, we conducted a theoretical analysis of clDice variants (cl-X-Dice). We validated cbDice's efficacy on three diverse vascular segmentation datasets, encompassing both 2D and 3D, and binary and multi-class segmentation. Particularly, the method integrated with cbDice demonstrated outstanding performance on the MICCAI 2023 TopCoW Challenge dataset. Our code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/PengchengShi1220/cbDice.

Benchmarking the CoW with the TopCoW Challenge: Topology-Aware Anatomical Segmentation of the Circle of Willis for CTA and MRA

The Circle of Willis (CoW) is an important network of arteries connecting major circulations of the brain. Its vascular architecture is believed to affect the risk, severity, and clinical outcome of serious neuro-vascular diseases. However, characterizing the highly variable CoW anatomy is still a manual and time-consuming expert task. The CoW is usually imaged by two angiographic imaging modalities, magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and computed tomography angiography (CTA), but there exist limited public datasets with annotations on CoW anatomy, especially for CTA. Therefore we organized the TopCoW Challenge in 2023 with the release of an annotated CoW dataset and invited submissions worldwide for the CoW segmentation task, which attracted over 140 registered participants from four continents. TopCoW dataset was the first public dataset with voxel-level annotations for CoW's 13 vessel components, made possible by virtual-reality (VR) technology. It was also the first dataset with paired MRA and CTA from the same patients. TopCoW challenge aimed to tackle the CoW characterization problem as a multiclass anatomical segmentation task with an emphasis on topological metrics. The top performing teams managed to segment many CoW components to Dice scores around 90%, but with lower scores for communicating arteries and rare variants. There were also topological mistakes for predictions with high Dice scores. Additional topological analysis revealed further areas for improvement in detecting certain CoW components and matching CoW variant's topology accurately. TopCoW represented a first attempt at benchmarking the CoW anatomical segmentation task for MRA and CTA, both morphologically and topologically.

Cross-Modal Information-Guided Network using Contrastive Learning for Point Cloud Registration

The majority of point cloud registration methods currently rely on extracting features from points. However, these methods are limited by their dependence on information obtained from a single modality of points, which can result in deficiencies such as inadequate perception of global features and a lack of texture information. Actually, humans can employ visual information learned from 2D images to comprehend the 3D world. Based on this fact, we present a novel Cross-Modal Information-Guided Network (CMIGNet), which obtains global shape perception through cross-modal information to achieve precise and robust point cloud registration. Specifically, we first incorporate the projected images from the point clouds and fuse the cross-modal features using the attention mechanism. Furthermore, we employ two contrastive learning strategies, namely overlapping contrastive learning and cross-modal contrastive learning. The former focuses on features in overlapping regions, while the latter emphasizes the correspondences between 2D and 3D features. Finally, we propose a mask prediction module to identify keypoints in the point clouds. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our network achieves superior registration performance.

Evaluation and Analysis of Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently achieved remarkable success. However, LVLMs are still plagued by the hallucination problem, which limits the practicality in many scenarios. Hallucination refers to the information of LVLMs' responses that does not exist in the visual input, which poses potential risks of substantial consequences. There has been limited work studying hallucination evaluation in LVLMs. In this paper, we propose Hallucination Evaluation based on Large Language Models (HaELM), an LLM-based hallucination evaluation framework. HaELM achieves an approximate 95% performance comparable to ChatGPT and has additional advantages including low cost, reproducibility, privacy preservation and local deployment. Leveraging the HaELM, we evaluate the hallucination in current LVLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the factors contributing to hallucination in LVLMs and offer helpful suggestions to mitigate the hallucination problem. Our training data and human annotation hallucination data will be made public soon.

Rotation-Invariant Completion Network

Real-world point clouds usually suffer from incompleteness and display different poses. While current point cloud completion methods excel in reproducing complete point clouds with consistent poses as seen in the training set, their performance tends to be unsatisfactory when handling point clouds with diverse poses. We propose a network named Rotation-Invariant Completion Network (RICNet), which consists of two parts: a Dual Pipeline Completion Network (DPCNet) and an enhancing module. Firstly, DPCNet generates a coarse complete point cloud. The feature extraction module of DPCNet can extract consistent features, no matter if the input point cloud has undergone rotation or translation. Subsequently, the enhancing module refines the fine-grained details of the final generated point cloud. RICNet achieves better rotation invariance in feature extraction and incorporates structural relationships in man-made objects. To assess the performance of RICNet and existing methods on point clouds with various poses, we applied random transformations to the point clouds in the MVP dataset and conducted experiments on them. Our experiments demonstrate that RICNet exhibits superior completion performance compared to existing methods.

Semantic-Human: Neural Rendering of Humans from Monocular Video with Human Parsing

The neural rendering of humans is a topic of great research significance. However, previous works mostly focus on achieving photorealistic details, neglecting the exploration of human parsing. Additionally, classical semantic work are all limited in their ability to efficiently represent fine results in complex motions. Human parsing is inherently related to radiance reconstruction, as similar appearance and geometry often correspond to similar semantic part. Furthermore, previous works often design a motion field that maps from the observation space to the canonical space, while it tends to exhibit either underfitting or overfitting, resulting in limited generalization. In this paper, we present Semantic-Human, a novel method that achieves both photorealistic details and viewpoint-consistent human parsing for the neural rendering of humans. Specifically, we extend neural radiance fields (NeRF) to jointly encode semantics, appearance and geometry to achieve accurate 2D semantic labels using noisy pseudo-label supervision. Leveraging the inherent consistency and smoothness properties of NeRF, Semantic-Human achieves consistent human parsing in both continuous and novel views. We also introduce constraints derived from the SMPL surface for the motion field and regularization for the recovered volumetric geometry. We have evaluated the model using the ZJU-MoCap dataset, and the obtained highly competitive results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Semantic-Human. We also showcase various compelling applications, including label denoising, label synthesis and image editing, and empirically validate its advantageous properties.

Overlap Bias Matching is Necessary for Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration is a fundamental problem in many domains. Practically, the overlap between point clouds to be registered may be relatively small. Most unsupervised methods lack effective initial evaluation of overlap, leading to suboptimal registration accuracy. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised network Overlap Bias Matching Network (OBMNet) for partial point cloud registration. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play Overlap Bias Matching Module (OBMM) comprising two integral components, overlap sampling module and bias prediction module. These two components are utilized to capture the distribution of overlapping regions and predict bias coefficients of point cloud common structures, respectively. Then, we integrate OBMM with the neighbor map matching module to robustly identify correspondences by precisely merging matching scores of points within the neighborhood, which addresses the ambiguities in single-point features. OBMNet can maintain efficacy even in pair-wise registration scenarios with low overlap ratios. Experimental results on extensive datasets demonstrate that our approach's performance achieves a significant improvement compared to the state-of-the-art registration approach.

LiDAR-Based Place Recognition For Autonomous Driving: A Survey

LiDAR-based place recognition (LPR) plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving, which assists Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems in reducing accumulated errors and achieving reliable localization. However, existing reviews predominantly concentrate on visual place recognition (VPR) methods. Despite notable advancements in LPR in recent years, there is yet a systematic review dedicated to this field to the best of our knowledge. This paper bridges the gap by providing a comprehensive review of place recognition methods employing LiDAR sensors, thus facilitating and encouraging further research. We commence by delving into the problem formulation of place recognition and exploring existing challenges, describing relations to previous surveys. Subsequently, we conduct an in-depth review of related research, which offers detailed classifications, strengths and weaknesses, and architectures. Finally, we summarize existing datasets, commonly used evaluation metrics, and comprehensive evaluation results from various methods on public datasets. This paper can serve as a valuable tutorial for newcomers entering the realm of place recognition and researchers interested in long-term robot localization. We pledge to maintain an up-to-date project on our website https://github.com/ShiPC-AI/LPR-Survey.

NexToU: Efficient Topology-Aware U-Net for Medical Image Segmentation

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Transformer variants have emerged as the leading medical image segmentation backbones. Nonetheless, due to their limitations in either preserving global image context or efficiently processing irregular shapes in visual objects, these backbones struggle to effectively integrate information from diverse anatomical regions and reduce inter-individual variability, particularly for the vasculature. Motivated by the successful breakthroughs of graph neural networks (GNN) in capturing topological properties and non-Euclidean relationships across various fields, we propose NexToU, a novel hybrid architecture for medical image segmentation. NexToU comprises improved Pool GNN and Swin GNN modules from Vision GNN (ViG) for learning both global and local topological representations while minimizing computational costs. To address the containment and exclusion relationships among various anatomical structures, we reformulate the topological interaction (TI) module based on the nature of binary trees, rapidly encoding the topological constraints into NexToU. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets (including distinct imaging dimensions, disease types, and imaging modalities) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) architectures. All the code is publicly available at https://github.com/PengchengShi1220/NexToU.