Abstract:Accurate and reliable multi-object tracking (MOT) in 3D space is essential for advancing robotics and computer vision applications. However, it remains a significant challenge in monocular setups due to the difficulty of mining 3D spatiotemporal associations from 2D video streams. In this work, we present three innovative techniques to enhance the fusion and exploitation of heterogeneous cues for monocular 3D MOT: (1) we introduce the Hungarian State Space Model (HSSM), a novel data association mechanism that compresses contextual tracking cues across multiple paths, enabling efficient and comprehensive assignment decisions with linear complexity. HSSM features a global receptive field and dynamic weights, in contrast to traditional linear assignment algorithms that rely on hand-crafted association costs. (2) We propose Fully Convolutional One-stage Embedding (FCOE), which eliminates ROI pooling by directly using dense feature maps for contrastive learning, thus improving object re-identification accuracy under challenging conditions such as varying viewpoints and lighting. (3) We enhance 6-DoF pose estimation through VeloSSM, an encoder-decoder architecture that models temporal dependencies in velocity to capture motion dynamics, overcoming the limitations of frame-based 3D inference. Experiments on the KITTI public test benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance of 76.86~HOTA at 31~FPS. Our approach outperforms the previous best by significant margins of +2.63~HOTA and +3.62~AssA, showcasing its robustness and efficiency for monocular 3D MOT tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/bytepioneerX/s3mot.
Abstract:For high-level geo-spatial applications and intelligent robotics, accurate global pose information is of crucial importance. Map-aided localization is an important and universal approach to overcome the limitations of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) in challenging environments. However, current solutions face challenges in terms of mapping flexibility, storage burden and re-localization performance. In this work, we present SF-Loc, a lightweight visual mapping and map-aided localization system, whose core idea is the map representation based on sparse frames with dense (though downsampled) depth, termed as visual structure frames. In the mapping phase, multi-sensor dense bundle adjustment (MS-DBA) is applied to construct geo-referenced visual structure frames. The local co-visbility is checked to keep the map sparsity and achieve incremental mapping. In the localization phase, coarse-to-fine vision-based localization is performed, in which multi-frame information and the map distribution are fully integrated. To be specific, the concept of spatially smoothed similarity (SSS) is proposed to overcome the place ambiguity, and pairwise frame matching is applied for efficient and robust pose estimation. Experimental results on both public and self-made datasets verify the effectiveness of the system. In complex urban road scenarios, the map size is down to 3 MB per kilometer and stable decimeter-level re-localization can be achieved. The code will be made open-source soon (https://github.com/GREAT-WHU/SF-Loc).
Abstract:Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM) has broad applications, with state-of-the-art methods leveraging deep neural networks for better robustness and applicability. However, there is a lack of research in fusing these learning-based methods with multi-sensor information, which could be indispensable to push related applications to large-scale and complex scenarios. In this paper, we tightly integrate the trainable deep dense bundle adjustment (DBA) with multi-sensor information through a factor graph. In the framework, recurrent optical flow and DBA are performed among sequential images. The Hessian information derived from DBA is fed into a generic factor graph for multi-sensor fusion, which employs a sliding window and supports probabilistic marginalization. A pipeline for visual-inertial integration is firstly developed, which provides the minimum ability of metric-scale localization and mapping. Furthermore, other sensors (e.g., global navigation satellite system) are integrated for driftless and geo-referencing functionality. Extensive tests are conducted on both public datasets and self-collected datasets. The results validate the superior localization performance of our approach, which enables real-time dense mapping in large-scale environments. The code has been made open-source (https://github.com/GREAT-WHU/DBA-Fusion).