RCP: Recurrent Closest Point for Scene Flow Estimation on 3D Point Clouds

3D motion estimation including scene flow and point cloud registration has drawn increasing interest. Inspired by 2D flow estimation, recent methods employ deep neural networks to construct the cost volume for estimating accurate 3D flow. However, these methods are limited by the fact that it is difficult to define a search window on point clouds because of the irregular data structure. In this paper, we avoid this irregularity by a simple yet effective method.We decompose the problem into two interlaced stages, where the 3D flows are optimized point-wisely at the first stage and then globally regularized in a recurrent network at the second stage. Therefore, the recurrent network only receives the regular point-wise information as the input. In the experiments, we evaluate the proposed method on both the 3D scene flow estimation and the point cloud registration task. For 3D scene flow estimation, we make comparisons on the widely used FlyingThings3D and KITTIdatasets. For point cloud registration, we follow previous works and evaluate the data pairs with large pose and partially overlapping from ModelNet40. The results show that our method outperforms the previous method and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on both 3D scene flow estimation and point cloud registration, which demonstrates the superiority of the proposed zero-order method on irregular point cloud data.

NeW CRFs: Neural Window Fully-connected CRFs for Monocular Depth Estimation

Estimating the accurate depth from a single image is challenging since it is inherently ambiguous and ill-posed. While recent works design increasingly complicated and powerful networks to directly regress the depth map, we take the path of CRFs optimization. Due to the expensive computation, CRFs are usually performed between neighborhoods rather than the whole graph. To leverage the potential of fully-connected CRFs, we split the input into windows and perform the FC-CRFs optimization within each window, which reduces the computation complexity and makes FC-CRFs feasible. To better capture the relationships between nodes in the graph, we exploit the multi-head attention mechanism to compute a multi-head potential function, which is fed to the networks to output an optimized depth map. Then we build a bottom-up-top-down structure, where this neural window FC-CRFs module serves as the decoder, and a vision transformer serves as the encoder. The experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance across all metrics on both the KITTI and NYUv2 datasets, compared to previous methods. Furthermore, the proposed method can be directly applied to panorama images and outperforms all previous panorama methods on the MatterPort3D dataset. The source code of our method will be made public.

MFuseNet: Robust Depth Estimation with Learned Multiscopic Fusion

We design a multiscopic vision system that utilizes a low-cost monocular RGB camera to acquire accurate depth estimation. Unlike multi-view stereo with images captured at unconstrained camera poses, the proposed system controls the motion of a camera to capture a sequence of images in horizontally or vertically aligned positions with the same parallax. In this system, we propose a new heuristic method and a robust learning-based method to fuse multiple cost volumes between the reference image and its surrounding images. To obtain training data, we build a synthetic dataset with multiscopic images. The experiments on the real-world Middlebury dataset and real robot demonstration show that our multiscopic vision system outperforms traditional two-frame stereo matching methods in depth estimation. Our code and dataset are available at https://sites.google.com/view/multiscopic.

Cluster Contrast for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID) attracts increasing attention due to its practical applications in industry. State-of-the-art unsupervised re-ID methods train the neural networks using a memory-based non-parametric softmax loss. They store the pre-computed instance feature vectors inside the memory, assign pseudo labels to them us-ing clustering algorithm, and compare the query instances to the cluster using a form of contrastive loss. During training, the instance feature vectors are updated. How-ever, due to the varying cluster size, the updating progress for each cluster is inconsistent. To solve this problem, we present Cluster Contrast which stores feature vectors and computes contrast loss in the cluster level. We demonstrate that the inconsistency problem for cluster feature representation can be solved by the cluster-level memory dictionary.By straightforwardly applying Cluster Contrast to a standard unsupervised re-ID pipeline, it achieves considerable improvements of 9.5%, 7.5%, 6.6% compared to state-of-the-art purely unsupervised re-ID methods and 5.1%, 4.0%,6.5% mAP compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation re-ID methods on the Market, Duke, andMSMT17 datasets.Our source code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/cluster-contrast.

Stereo Matching by Self-supervision of Multiscopic Vision

Self-supervised learning for depth estimation possesses several advantages over supervised learning. The benefits of no need for ground-truth depth, online fine-tuning, and better generalization with unlimited data attract researchers to seek self-supervised solutions. In this work, we propose a new self-supervised framework for stereo matching utilizing multiple images captured at aligned camera positions. A cross photometric loss, an uncertainty-aware mutual-supervision loss, and a new smoothness loss are introduced to optimize the network in learning disparity maps end-to-end without ground-truth depth information. To train this framework, we build a new multiscopic dataset consisting of synthetic images rendered by 3D engines and real images captured by real cameras. After being trained with only the synthetic images, our network can perform well in unseen outdoor scenes. Our experiment shows that our model obtains better disparity maps than previous unsupervised methods on the KITTI dataset and is comparable to supervised methods when generalized to unseen data. Our source code and dataset will be made public, and more results are provided in the supplement.

DRO: Deep Recurrent Optimizer for Structure-from-Motion

There are increasing interests of studying the structure-from-motion (SfM) problem with machine learning techniques. While earlier methods directly learn a mapping from images to depth maps and camera poses, more recent works enforce multi-view geometry through optimization embed in the learning framework. This paper presents a novel optimization method based on recurrent neural networks to further exploit the potential of neural networks in SfM. Our neural optimizer alternatively updates the depth and camera poses through iterations to minimize a feature-metric cost. Two gated recurrent units are designed to trace the historical information during the iterations. Our network works as a zeroth-order optimizer, where the computation and memory expensive cost volume or gradients are avoided. Experiments demonstrate that our recurrent optimizer effectively reduces the feature-metric cost while refining the depth and poses. Our method outperforms previous methods and is more efficient in computation and memory consumption than cost-volume-based methods. The code of our method will be made public.

Self-supervised Object Tracking with Cycle-consistent Siamese Networks

Self-supervised learning for visual object tracking possesses valuable advantages compared to supervised learning, such as the non-necessity of laborious human annotations and online training. In this work, we exploit an end-to-end Siamese network in a cycle-consistent self-supervised framework for object tracking. Self-supervision can be performed by taking advantage of the cycle consistency in the forward and backward tracking. To better leverage the end-to-end learning of deep networks, we propose to integrate a Siamese region proposal and mask regression network in our tracking framework so that a fast and more accurate tracker can be learned without the annotation of each frame. The experiments on the VOT dataset for visual object tracking and on the DAVIS dataset for video object segmentation propagation show that our method outperforms prior approaches on both tasks.

Active Perception with A Monocular Camera for Multiscopic Vision

We design a multiscopic vision system that utilizes a low-cost monocular RGB camera to acquire accurate depth estimation for robotic applications. Unlike multi-view stereo with images captured at unconstrained camera poses, the proposed system actively controls a robot arm with a mounted camera to capture a sequence of images in horizontally or vertically aligned positions with the same parallax. In this system, we combine the cost volumes for stereo matching between the reference image and the surrounding images to form a fused cost volume that is robust to outliers. Experiments on the Middlebury dataset and real robot experiments show that our obtained disparity maps are more accurate than two-frame stereo matching: the average absolute error is reduced by 50.2% in our experiments.

Multi-Object Rearrangement with Monte Carlo Tree Search:A Case Study on Planar Nonprehensile Sorting

In this work, we address a planar non-prehensile sorting task. Here, a robot needs to push many densely packed objects belonging to different classes into a configuration where these classes are clearly separated from each other. To achieve this, we propose to employ Monte Carlo tree search equipped with a task-specific heuristic function. We evaluate the algorithm on various simulated sorting tasks and observe its effectiveness in reliably sorting up to 40 convex objects. In addition, we observe that the algorithm is capable to also sort non-convex objects, as well as convex objects in the presence of immovable obstacles.