EMIE-MAP: Large-Scale Road Surface Reconstruction Based on Explicit Mesh and Implicit Encoding

Road surface reconstruction plays a vital role in autonomous driving systems, enabling road lane perception and high-precision mapping. Recently, neural implicit encoding has achieved remarkable results in scene representation, particularly in the realistic rendering of scene textures. However, it faces challenges in directly representing geometric information for large-scale scenes. To address this, we propose EMIE-MAP, a novel method for large-scale road surface reconstruction based on explicit mesh and implicit encoding. The road geometry is represented using explicit mesh, where each vertex stores implicit encoding representing the color and semantic information. To overcome the difficulty in optimizing road elevation, we introduce a trajectory-based elevation initialization and an elevation residual learning method based on Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Additionally, by employing implicit encoding and multi-camera color MLPs decoding, we achieve separate modeling of scene physical properties and camera characteristics, allowing surround-view reconstruction compatible with different camera models. Our method achieves remarkable road surface reconstruction performance in a variety of real-world challenging scenarios.

DVN-SLAM: Dynamic Visual Neural SLAM Based on Local-Global Encoding

Recent research on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) based on implicit representation has shown promising results in indoor environments. However, there are still some challenges: the limited scene representation capability of implicit encodings, the uncertainty in the rendering process from implicit representations, and the disruption of consistency by dynamic objects. To address these challenges, we propose a real-time dynamic visual SLAM system based on local-global fusion neural implicit representation, named DVN-SLAM. To improve the scene representation capability, we introduce a local-global fusion neural implicit representation that enables the construction of an implicit map while considering both global structure and local details. To tackle uncertainties arising from the rendering process, we design an information concentration loss for optimization, aiming to concentrate scene information on object surfaces. The proposed DVN-SLAM achieves competitive performance in localization and mapping across multiple datasets. More importantly, DVN-SLAM demonstrates robustness in dynamic scenes, a trait that sets it apart from other NeRF-based methods.

3D Hierarchical Refinement and Augmentation for Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Pose from Monocular Video

Depth and ego-motion estimations are essential for the localization and navigation of autonomous robots and autonomous driving. Recent studies make it possible to learn the per-pixel depth and ego-motion from the unlabeled monocular video. A novel unsupervised training framework is proposed with 3D hierarchical refinement and augmentation using explicit 3D geometry. In this framework, the depth and pose estimations are hierarchically and mutually coupled to refine the estimated pose layer by layer. The intermediate view image is proposed and synthesized by warping the pixels in an image with the estimated depth and coarse pose. Then, the residual pose transformation can be estimated from the new view image and the image of the adjacent frame to refine the coarse pose. The iterative refinement is implemented in a differentiable manner in this paper, making the whole framework optimized uniformly. Meanwhile, a new image augmentation method is proposed for the pose estimation by synthesizing a new view image, which creatively augments the pose in 3D space but gets a new augmented 2D image. The experiments on KITTI demonstrate that our depth estimation achieves state-of-the-art performance and even surpasses recent approaches that utilize other auxiliary tasks. Our visual odometry outperforms all recent unsupervised monocular learning-based methods and achieves competitive performance to the geometry-based method, ORB-SLAM2 with back-end optimization.