A Birotation Solution for Relative Pose Problems

Relative pose estimation, a fundamental computer vision problem, has been extensively studied for decades. Existing methods either estimate and decompose the essential matrix or directly estimate the rotation and translation to obtain the solution. In this article, we break the mold by tackling this traditional problem with a novel birotation solution. We first introduce three basis transformations, each associated with a geometric metric to quantify the distance between the relative pose to be estimated and its corresponding basis transformation. Three energy functions, designed based on these metrics, are then minimized on the Riemannian manifold $\mathrm{SO(3)}$ by iteratively updating the two rotation matrices. The two rotation matrices and the basis transformation corresponding to the minimum energy are ultimately utilized to recover the relative pose. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across diverse relative pose estimation tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed birotation solution. Source code, demo video, and datasets will be available at \href{https://mias.group/birotation-solution}{mias.group/birotation-solution} upon publication.

MambaFlow: A Novel and Flow-guided State Space Model for Scene Flow Estimation

Scene flow estimation aims to predict 3D motion from consecutive point cloud frames, which is of great interest in autonomous driving field. Existing methods face challenges such as insufficient spatio-temporal modeling and inherent loss of fine-grained feature during voxelization. However, the success of Mamba, a representative state space model (SSM) that enables global modeling with linear complexity, provides a promising solution. In this paper, we propose MambaFlow, a novel scene flow estimation network with a mamba-based decoder. It enables deep interaction and coupling of spatio-temporal features using a well-designed backbone. Innovatively, we steer the global attention modeling of voxel-based features with point offset information using an efficient Mamba-based decoder, learning voxel-to-point patterns that are used to devoxelize shared voxel representations into point-wise features. To further enhance the model's generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios, we propose a novel scene-adaptive loss function that automatically adapts to different motion patterns.Extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 benchmark demonstrate that MambaFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance with real-time inference speed among existing works, enabling accurate flow estimation in real-world urban scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/SCNU-RISLAB/MambaFlow.

Fully Exploiting Vision Foundation Model's Profound Prior Knowledge for Generalizable RGB-Depth Driving Scene Parsing

Recent vision foundation models (VFMs), typically based on Vision Transformer (ViT), have significantly advanced numerous computer vision tasks. Despite their success in tasks focused solely on RGB images, the potential of VFMs in RGB-depth driving scene parsing remains largely under-explored. In this article, we take one step toward this emerging research area by investigating a feasible technique to fully exploit VFMs for generalizable RGB-depth driving scene parsing. Specifically, we explore the inherent characteristics of RGB and depth data, thereby presenting a Heterogeneous Feature Integration Transformer (HFIT). This network enables the efficient extraction and integration of comprehensive heterogeneous features without re-training ViTs. Relative depth prediction results from VFMs, used as inputs to the HFIT side adapter, overcome the limitations of the dependence on depth maps. Our proposed HFIT demonstrates superior performance compared to all other traditional single-modal and data-fusion scene parsing networks, pre-trained VFMs, and ViT adapters on the Cityscapes and KITTI Semantics datasets. We believe this novel strategy paves the way for future innovations in VFM-based data-fusion techniques for driving scene parsing. Our source code is publicly available at https://mias.group/HFIT.

Environment-Driven Online LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration (LCEC) is the core for data fusion in computer vision. Existing methods typically rely on customized calibration targets or fixed scene types, lacking the flexibility to handle variations in sensor data and environmental contexts. This paper introduces EdO-LCEC, the first environment-driven, online calibration approach that achieves human-like adaptability. Inspired by the human perceptual system, EdO-LCEC incorporates a generalizable scene discriminator to actively interpret environmental conditions, creating multiple virtual cameras that capture detailed spatial and textural information. To overcome cross-modal feature matching challenges between LiDAR and camera, we propose dual-path correspondence matching (DPCM), which leverages both structural and textural consistency to achieve reliable 3D-2D correspondences. Our approach formulates the calibration process as a spatial-temporal joint optimization problem, utilizing global constraints from multiple views and scenes to improve accuracy, particularly in sparse or partially overlapping sensor views. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that EdO-LCEC achieves state-of-the-art performance, providing reliable and precise calibration across diverse, challenging environments.

SLC$^2$-SLAM: Semantic-guided Loop Closure with Shared Latent Code for NeRF SLAM

Targeting the notorious cumulative drift errors in NeRF SLAM, we propose a Semantic-guided Loop Closure with Shared Latent Code, dubbed SLC$^2$-SLAM. Especially, we argue that latent codes stored in many NeRF SLAM systems are not fully exploited, as they are only used for better reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective way to detect potential loops using the same latent codes as local features. To further improve the loop detection performance, we use the semantic information, which are also decoded from the same latent codes to guide the aggregation of local features. Finally, with the potential loops detected, we close them with a graph optimization followed by bundle adjustment to refine both the estimated poses and the reconstructed scene. To evaluate the performance of our SLC$^2$-SLAM, we conduct extensive experiments on Replica and ScanNet datasets. Our proposed semantic-guided loop closure significantly outperforms the pre-trained NetVLAD and ORB combined with Bag-of-Words, which are used in all the other NeRF SLAM with loop closure. As a result, our SLC$^2$-SLAM also demonstrated better tracking and reconstruction performance, especially in larger scenes with more loops, like ScanNet.

Establishing Reality-Virtuality Interconnections in Urban Digital Twins for Superior Intelligent Road Inspection

Road inspection is essential for ensuring road maintenance and traffic safety, as road defects gradually emerge and compromise road functionality. Traditional methods, which rely on manual evaluations, are labor-intensive, costly, and time-consuming. Although data-driven approaches are gaining traction, the scarcity and spatial sparsity of road defects in the real world pose significant challenges in acquiring high-quality datasets. Existing simulators designed to generate detailed synthetic driving scenes, however, lack models for road defects. Furthermore, advanced driving tasks involving interactions with road surfaces, such as planning and control in defective areas, remain underexplored. To address these limitations, we propose a system based on Urban Digital Twin (UDT) technology for intelligent road inspection. First, hierarchical road models are constructed from real-world driving data, creating highly detailed representations of road defect structures and surface elevations. Next, digital road twins are generated to create simulation environments for comprehensive analysis and evaluation. These scenarios are subsequently imported into a simulator to enable both data acquisition and physical simulation. Experimental results demonstrate that driving tasks, including perception and decision-making, can be significantly improved using the high-fidelity road defect scenes generated by our system.

ViPOcc: Leveraging Visual Priors from Vision Foundation Models for Single-View 3D Occupancy Prediction

Inferring the 3D structure of a scene from a single image is an ill-posed and challenging problem in the field of vision-centric autonomous driving. Existing methods usually employ neural radiance fields to produce voxelized 3D occupancy, lacking instance-level semantic reasoning and temporal photometric consistency. In this paper, we propose ViPOcc, which leverages the visual priors from vision foundation models (VFMs) for fine-grained 3D occupancy prediction. Unlike previous works that solely employ volume rendering for RGB and depth image reconstruction, we introduce a metric depth estimation branch, in which an inverse depth alignment module is proposed to bridge the domain gap in depth distribution between VFM predictions and the ground truth. The recovered metric depth is then utilized in temporal photometric alignment and spatial geometric alignment to ensure accurate and consistent 3D occupancy prediction. Additionally, we also propose a semantic-guided non-overlapping Gaussian mixture sampler for efficient, instance-aware ray sampling, which addresses the redundant and imbalanced sampling issue that still exists in previous state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of ViPOcc in both 3D occupancy prediction and depth estimation tasks on the KITTI-360 and KITTI Raw datasets. Our code is available at: \url{https://mias.group/ViPOcc}.

Real-Time Metric-Semantic Mapping for Autonomous Navigation in Outdoor Environments

The creation of a metric-semantic map, which encodes human-prior knowledge, represents a high-level abstraction of environments. However, constructing such a map poses challenges related to the fusion of multi-modal sensor data, the attainment of real-time mapping performance, and the preservation of structural and semantic information consistency. In this paper, we introduce an online metric-semantic mapping system that utilizes LiDAR-Visual-Inertial sensing to generate a global metric-semantic mesh map of large-scale outdoor environments. Leveraging GPU acceleration, our mapping process achieves exceptional speed, with frame processing taking less than 7ms, regardless of scenario scale. Furthermore, we seamlessly integrate the resultant map into a real-world navigation system, enabling metric-semantic-based terrain assessment and autonomous point-to-point navigation within a campus environment. Through extensive experiments conducted on both publicly available and self-collected datasets comprising 24 sequences, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our mapping and navigation methodologies. Code has been publicly released: https://github.com/gogojjh/cobra

These Maps Are Made by Propagation: Adapting Deep Stereo Networks to Road Scenarios with Decisive Disparity Diffusion

Stereo matching has emerged as a cost-effective solution for road surface 3D reconstruction, garnering significant attention towards improving both computational efficiency and accuracy. This article introduces decisive disparity diffusion (D3Stereo), marking the first exploration of dense deep feature matching that adapts pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) to previously unseen road scenarios. A pyramid of cost volumes is initially created using various levels of learned representations. Subsequently, a novel recursive bilateral filtering algorithm is employed to aggregate these costs. A key innovation of D3Stereo lies in its alternating decisive disparity diffusion strategy, wherein intra-scale diffusion is employed to complete sparse disparity images, while inter-scale inheritance provides valuable prior information for higher resolutions. Extensive experiments conducted on our created UDTIRI-Stereo and Stereo-Road datasets underscore the effectiveness of D3Stereo strategy in adapting pre-trained DCNNs and its superior performance compared to all other explicit programming-based algorithms designed specifically for road surface 3D reconstruction. Additional experiments conducted on the Middlebury dataset with backbone DCNNs pre-trained on the ImageNet database further validate the versatility of D3Stereo strategy in tackling general stereo matching problems.

RoadFormer+: Delivering RGB-X Scene Parsing through Scale-Aware Information Decoupling and Advanced Heterogeneous Feature Fusion

Task-specific data-fusion networks have marked considerable achievements in urban scene parsing. Among these networks, our recently proposed RoadFormer successfully extracts heterogeneous features from RGB images and surface normal maps and fuses these features through attention mechanisms, demonstrating compelling efficacy in RGB-Normal road scene parsing. However, its performance significantly deteriorates when handling other types/sources of data or performing more universal, all-category scene parsing tasks. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces RoadFormer+, an efficient, robust, and adaptable model capable of effectively fusing RGB-X data, where ``X'', represents additional types/modalities of data such as depth, thermal, surface normal, and polarization. Specifically, we propose a novel hybrid feature decoupling encoder to extract heterogeneous features and decouple them into global and local components. These decoupled features are then fused through a dual-branch multi-scale heterogeneous feature fusion block, which employs parallel Transformer attentions and convolutional neural network modules to merge multi-scale features across different scales and receptive fields. The fused features are subsequently fed into a decoder to generate the final semantic predictions. Notably, our proposed RoadFormer+ ranks first on the KITTI Road benchmark and achieves state-of-the-art performance in mean intersection over union on the Cityscapes, MFNet, FMB, and ZJU datasets. Moreover, it reduces the number of learnable parameters by 65\% compared to RoadFormer. Our source code will be publicly available at mias.group/RoadFormerPlus.