Geometric Correspondence Fields: Learned Differentiable Rendering for 3D Pose Refinement in the Wild

We present a novel 3D pose refinement approach based on differentiable rendering for objects of arbitrary categories in the wild. In contrast to previous methods, we make two main contributions: First, instead of comparing real-world images and synthetic renderings in the RGB or mask space, we compare them in a feature space optimized for 3D pose refinement. Second, we introduce a novel differentiable renderer that learns to approximate the rasterization backward pass from data instead of relying on a hand-crafted algorithm. For this purpose, we predict deep cross-domain correspondences between RGB images and 3D model renderings in the form of what we call geometric correspondence fields. These correspondence fields serve as pixel-level gradients which are analytically propagated backward through the rendering pipeline to perform a gradient-based optimization directly on the 3D pose. In this way, we precisely align 3D models to objects in RGB images which results in significantly improved 3D pose estimates. We evaluate our approach on the challenging Pix3D dataset and achieve up to 55% relative improvement compared to state-of-the-art refinement methods in multiple metrics.

Recent Advances in 3D Object and Hand Pose Estimation

3D object and hand pose estimation have huge potentials for Augmented Reality, to enable tangible interfaces, natural interfaces, and blurring the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds. In this chapter, we present the recent developments for 3D object and hand pose estimation using cameras, and discuss their abilities and limitations and the possible future development of the field.

ALCN: Adaptive Local Contrast Normalization

To make Robotics and Augmented Reality applications robust to illumination changes, the current trend is to train a Deep Network with training images captured under many different lighting conditions. Unfortunately, creating such a training set is a very unwieldy and complex task. We therefore propose a novel illumination normalization method that can easily be used for different problems with challenging illumination conditions. Our preliminary experiments show that among current normalization methods, the Difference-of Gaussians method remains a very good baseline, and we introduce a novel illumination normalization model that generalizes it. Our key insight is then that the normalization parameters should depend on the input image, and we aim to train a Convolutional Neural Network to predict these parameters from the input image. This, however, cannot be done in a supervised manner, as the optimal parameters are not known a priori. We thus designed a method to train this network jointly with another network that aims to recognize objects under different illuminations: The latter network performs well when the former network predicts good values for the normalization parameters. We show that our method significantly outperforms standard normalization methods and would also be appear to be universal since it does not have to be re-trained for each new application. Our method improves the robustness to light changes of state-of-the-art 3D object detection and face recognition methods.

S2DNet: Learning Accurate Correspondences for Sparse-to-Dense Feature Matching

Establishing robust and accurate correspondences is a fundamental backbone to many computer vision algorithms. While recent learning-based feature matching methods have shown promising results in providing robust correspondences under challenging conditions, they are often limited in terms of precision. In this paper, we introduce S2DNet, a novel feature matching pipeline, designed and trained to efficiently establish both robust and accurate correspondences. By leveraging a sparse-to-dense matching paradigm, we cast the correspondence learning problem as a supervised classification task to learn to output highly peaked correspondence maps. We show that S2DNet achieves state-of-the-art results on the HPatches benchmark, as well as on several long-term visual localization datasets.

Measuring Generalisation to Unseen Viewpoints, Articulations, Shapes and Objects for 3D Hand Pose Estimation under Hand-Object Interaction

In this work, we study how well different type of approaches generalise in the task of 3D hand pose estimation under hand-object interaction and single hand scenarios. We show that the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods can drop, and that they fail mostly on poses absent from the training set. Unfortunately, since the space of hand poses is highly dimensional, it is inherently not feasible to cover the whole space densely, despite recent efforts in collecting large-scale training datasets. This sampling problem is even more severe when hands are interacting with objects and/or inputs are RGB rather than depth images, as RGB images also vary with lighting conditions and colors. To address these issues, we designed a public challenge to evaluate the abilities of current 3D hand pose estimators~(HPEs) to interpolate and extrapolate the poses of a training set. More exactly, our challenge is designed (a) to evaluate the influence of both depth and color modalities on 3D hand pose estimation, under the presence or absence of objects; (b) to assess the generalisation abilities \wrt~four main axes: shapes, articulations, viewpoints, and objects; (c) to explore the use of a synthetic hand model to fill the gaps of current datasets. Through the challenge, the overall accuracy has dramatically improved over the baseline, especially on extrapolation tasks, from 27mm to 13mm mean joint error. Our analyses highlight the impacts of: Data pre-processing, ensemble approaches, the use of MANO model, and different HPE methods/backbones.

Predicting Sharp and Accurate Occlusion Boundaries in Monocular Depth Estimation Using Displacement Fields

Current methods for depth map prediction from monocular images tend to predict smooth, poorly localized contours for the occlusion boundaries in the input image. This is unfortunate as occlusion boundaries are important cues to recognize objects, and as we show, may lead to a way to discover new objects from scene reconstruction. To improve predicted depth maps, recent methods rely on various forms of filtering or predict an additive residual depth map to refine a first estimate. We instead learn to predict, given a depth map predicted by some reconstruction method, a 2D displacement field able to re-sample pixels around the occlusion boundaries into sharper reconstructions. Our method can be applied to the output of any depth estimation method, in an end-to-end trainable fashion. For evaluation, we manually annotated the occlusion boundaries in all the images in the test split of popular NYUv2-Depth dataset. We show that our approach improves the localization of occlusion boundaries for all state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods that we could evaluate, without degrading the depth accuracy for the rest of the images.

General 3D Room Layout from a Single View by Render-and-Compare

We present a novel method to reconstruct the 3D layout of a room -- walls,floors, ceilings -- from a single perspective view, even for the case of general configurations. This input view can consist of a color image only, but considering a depth map will result in a more accurate reconstruction. Our approach is based on solving a constrained discrete optimization problem, which selects the polygons which are part of the layout from a large set of potential polygons. In order to deal with occlusions between components of the layout, which is a problem ignored by previous works, we introduce an analysis-by-synthesis method to iteratively refine the 3D layout estimate. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first that can estimate a layout in such general conditions from a single view. We additionally introduce a new annotation dataset made of 91 images from the ScanNet dataset and several metrics, in order to evaluate our results quantitatively.

AssemblyNet: A large ensemble of CNNs for 3D Whole Brain MRI Segmentation

Whole brain segmentation using deep learning (DL) is a very challenging task since the number of anatomical labels is very high compared to the number of available training images. To address this problem, previous DL methods proposed to use a single convolution neural network (CNN) or few independent CNNs. In this paper, we present a novel ensemble method based on a large number of CNNs processing different overlapping brain areas. Inspired by parliamentary decision-making systems, we propose a framework called AssemblyNet, made of two "assemblies" of U-Nets. Such a parliamentary system is capable of dealing with complex decisions, unseen problem and reaching a consensus quickly. AssemblyNet introduces sharing of knowledge among neighboring U-Nets, an "amendment" procedure made by the second assembly at higher-resolution to refine the decision taken by the first one, and a final decision obtained by majority voting. During our validation, AssemblyNet showed competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods such as U-Net, Joint label fusion and SLANT. Moreover, we investigated the scan-rescan consistency and the robustness to disease effects of our method. These experiences demonstrated the reliability of AssemblyNet. Finally, we showed the interest of using semi-supervised learning to improve the performance of our method.

Smart Hypothesis Generation for Efficient and Robust Room Layout Estimation

We propose a novel method to efficiently estimate the spatial layout of a room from a single monocular RGB image. As existing approaches based on low-level feature extraction, followed by a vanishing point estimation are very slow and often unreliable in realistic scenarios, we build on semantic segmentation of the input image. To obtain better segmentations, we introduce a robust, accurate and very efficient hypothesize-and-test scheme. The key idea is to use three segmentation hypotheses, each based on a different number of visible walls. For each hypothesis, we predict the image locations of the room corners and select the hypothesis for which the layout estimated from the room corners is consistent with the segmentation. We demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our method on three challenging benchmark datasets, where we significantly outperform the state-of-the-art.

LU-Net: An Efficient Network for 3D LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation Based on End-to-End-Learned 3D Features and U-Net

We propose LU-Net -- for LiDAR U-Net, a new method for the semantic segmentation of a 3D LiDAR point cloud. Instead of applying some global 3D segmentation method such as PointNet, we propose an end-to-end architecture for LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation that efficiently solves the problem as an image processing problem. We first extract high-level 3D features for each point given its 3D neighbors. Then, these features are projected into a 2D multichannel range-image by considering the topology of the sensor. Thanks to these learned features and this projection, we can finally perform the segmentation using a simple U-Net segmentation network, which performs very well while being very efficient. In this way, we can exploit both the 3D nature of the data and the specificity of the LiDAR sensor. This approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the KITTI dataset, as our experiments show. Moreover, this approach operates at 24fps on a single GPU. This is above the acquisition rate of common LiDAR sensors which makes it suitable for real-time applications.