AziNorm: Exploiting the Radial Symmetry of Point Cloud for Azimuth-Normalized 3D Perception

Studying the inherent symmetry of data is of great importance in machine learning. Point cloud, the most important data format for 3D environmental perception, is naturally endowed with strong radial symmetry. In this work, we exploit this radial symmetry via a divide-and-conquer strategy to boost 3D perception performance and ease optimization. We propose Azimuth Normalization (AziNorm), which normalizes the point clouds along the radial direction and eliminates the variability brought by the difference of azimuth. AziNorm can be flexibly incorporated into most LiDAR-based perception methods. To validate its effectiveness and generalization ability, we apply AziNorm in both object detection and semantic segmentation. For detection, we integrate AziNorm into two representative detection methods, the one-stage SECOND detector and the state-of-the-art two-stage PV-RCNN detector. Experiments on Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that AziNorm improves SECOND and PV-RCNN by 7.03 mAPH and 3.01 mAPH respectively. For segmentation, we integrate AziNorm into KPConv. On SemanticKitti dataset, AziNorm improves KPConv by 1.6/1.1 mIoU on val/test set. Besides, AziNorm remarkably improves data efficiency and accelerates convergence, reducing the requirement of data amounts or training epochs by an order of magnitude. SECOND w/ AziNorm can significantly outperform fully trained vanilla SECOND, even trained with only 10% data or 10% epochs. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/AziNorm.

Sparse Instance Activation for Real-Time Instance Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a conceptually novel, efficient, and fully convolutional framework for real-time instance segmentation. Previously, most instance segmentation methods heavily rely on object detection and perform mask prediction based on bounding boxes or dense centers. In contrast, we propose a sparse set of instance activation maps, as a new object representation, to highlight informative regions for each foreground object. Then instance-level features are obtained by aggregating features according to the highlighted regions for recognition and segmentation. Moreover, based on bipartite matching, the instance activation maps can predict objects in a one-to-one style, thus avoiding non-maximum suppression (NMS) in post-processing. Owing to the simple yet effective designs with instance activation maps, SparseInst has extremely fast inference speed and achieves 40 FPS and 37.9 AP on the COCO benchmark, which significantly outperforms the counterparts in terms of speed and accuracy. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/SparseInst.

Image-Adaptive YOLO for Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions

Though deep learning-based object detection methods have achieved promising results on the conventional datasets, it is still challenging to locate objects from the low-quality images captured in adverse weather conditions. The existing methods either have difficulties in balancing the tasks of image enhancement and object detection, or often ignore the latent information beneficial for detection. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel Image-Adaptive YOLO (IA-YOLO) framework, where each image can be adaptively enhanced for better detection performance. Specifically, a differentiable image processing (DIP) module is presented to take into account the adverse weather conditions for YOLO detector, whose parameters are predicted by a small convolutional neural net-work (CNN-PP). We learn CNN-PP and YOLOv3 jointly in an end-to-end fashion, which ensures that CNN-PP can learn an appropriate DIP to enhance the image for detection in a weakly supervised manner. Our proposed IA-YOLO approach can adaptively process images in both normal and adverse weather conditions. The experimental results are very encouraging, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed IA-YOLO method in both foggy and low-light scenarios.

Deep Level Set for Box-supervised Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images

Box-supervised instance segmentation has recently attracted lots of research efforts while little attention is received in aerial image domain. In contrast to the general object collections, aerial objects have large intra-class variances and inter-class similarity with complex background. Moreover, there are many tiny objects in the high-resolution satellite images. This makes the recent pairwise affinity modeling method inevitably to involve the noisy supervision with the inferior results. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel aerial instance segmentation approach, which drives the network to learn a series of level set functions for the aerial objects with only box annotations in an end-to-end fashion. Instead of learning the pairwise affinity, the level set method with the carefully designed energy functions treats the object segmentation as curve evolution, which is able to accurately recover the object's boundaries and prevent the interference from the indistinguishable background and similar objects. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art box-supervised instance segmentation methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiWentomng/boxlevelset.

NeuSample: Neural Sample Field for Efficient View Synthesis

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great potentials in representing 3D scenes and synthesizing novel views, but the computational overhead of NeRF at the inference stage is still heavy. To alleviate the burden, we delve into the coarse-to-fine, hierarchical sampling procedure of NeRF and point out that the coarse stage can be replaced by a lightweight module which we name a neural sample field. The proposed sample field maps rays into sample distributions, which can be transformed into point coordinates and fed into radiance fields for volume rendering. The overall framework is named as NeuSample. We perform experiments on Realistic Synthetic 360$^{\circ}$ and Real Forward-Facing, two popular 3D scene sets, and show that NeuSample achieves better rendering quality than NeRF while enjoying a faster inference speed. NeuSample is further compressed with a proposed sample field extraction method towards a better trade-off between quality and speed.

Decoupling Visual-Semantic Feature Learning for Robust Scene Text Recognition

Semantic information has been proved effective in scene text recognition. Most existing methods tend to couple both visual and semantic information in an attention-based decoder. As a result, the learning of semantic features is prone to have a bias on the limited vocabulary of the training set, which is called vocabulary reliance. In this paper, we propose a novel Visual-Semantic Decoupling Network (VSDN) to address the problem. Our VSDN contains a Visual Decoder (VD) and a Semantic Decoder (SD) to learn purer visual and semantic feature representation respectively. Besides, a Semantic Encoder (SE) is designed to match SD, which can be pre-trained together by additional inexpensive large vocabulary via a simple word correction task. Thus the semantic feature is more unbiased and precise to guide the visual feature alignment and enrich the final character representation. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results on the standard benchmarks, and outperforms the popular baseline by a large margin under circumstances where the training set has a small size of vocabulary.

ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box

Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims at estimating bounding boxes and identities of objects in videos. Most methods obtain identities by associating detection boxes whose scores are higher than a threshold. The objects with low detection scores, e.g. occluded objects, are simply thrown away, which brings non-negligible true object missing and fragmented trajectories. To solve this problem, we present a simple, effective and generic association method, called BYTE, tracking BY associaTing Every detection box instead of only the high score ones. For the low score detection boxes, we utilize their similarities with tracklets to recover true objects and filter out the background detections. We apply BYTE to 9 different state-of-the-art trackers and achieve consistent improvement on IDF1 score ranging from 1 to 10 points. To put forwards the state-of-the-art performance of MOT, we design a simple and strong tracker, named ByteTrack. For the first time, we achieve 80.3 MOTA, 77.3 IDF1 and 63.1 HOTA on the test set of MOT17 with 30 FPS running speed on a single V100 GPU. The source code, pre-trained models with deploy versions and tutorials of applying to other trackers are released at https://github.com/ifzhang/ByteTrack.

VoxelTrack: Multi-Person 3D Human Pose Estimation and Tracking in the Wild

We present VoxelTrack for multi-person 3D pose estimation and tracking from a few cameras which are separated by wide baselines. It employs a multi-branch network to jointly estimate 3D poses and re-identification (Re-ID) features for all people in the environment. In contrast to previous efforts which require to establish cross-view correspondence based on noisy 2D pose estimates, it directly estimates and tracks 3D poses from a 3D voxel-based representation constructed from multi-view images. We first discretize the 3D space by regular voxels and compute a feature vector for each voxel by averaging the body joint heatmaps that are inversely projected from all views. We estimate 3D poses from the voxel representation by predicting whether each voxel contains a particular body joint. Similarly, a Re-ID feature is computed for each voxel which is used to track the estimated 3D poses over time. The main advantage of the approach is that it avoids making any hard decisions based on individual images. The approach can robustly estimate and track 3D poses even when people are severely occluded in some cameras. It outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on three public datasets including Shelf, Campus and CMU Panoptic.

Hierarchical Aggregation for 3D Instance Segmentation

Instance segmentation on point clouds is a fundamental task in 3D scene perception. In this work, we propose a concise clustering-based framework named HAIS, which makes full use of spatial relation of points and point sets. Considering clustering-based methods may result in over-segmentation or under-segmentation, we introduce the hierarchical aggregation to progressively generate instance proposals, i.e., point aggregation for preliminarily clustering points to sets and set aggregation for generating complete instances from sets. Once the complete 3D instances are obtained, a sub-network of intra-instance prediction is adopted for noisy points filtering and mask quality scoring. HAIS is fast (only 410ms per frame) and does not require non-maximum suppression. It ranks 1st on the ScanNet v2 benchmark, achieving the highest 69.9% AP50 and surpassing previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by a large margin. Besides, the SOTA results on the S3DIS dataset validate the good generalization ability. Code will be available at https://github.com/hustvl/HAIS.

What Makes for Hierarchical Vision Transformer?

Recent studies show that hierarchical Vision Transformer with interleaved non-overlapped intra window self-attention \& shifted window self-attention is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in various visual recognition tasks and challenges CNN's dense sliding window paradigm. Most follow-up works try to replace shifted window operation with other kinds of cross window communication while treating self-attention as the de-facto standard for intra window information aggregation. In this short preprint, we question whether self-attention is the only choice for hierarchical Vision Transformer to attain strong performance, and what makes for hierarchical Vision Transformer? We replace self-attention layers in Swin Transformer and Shuffle Transformer with simple linear mapping and keep other components unchanged. The resulting architecture with 25.4M parameters and 4.2G FLOPs achieves 80.5\% Top-1 accuracy, compared to 81.3\% for Swin Transformer with 28.3M parameters and 4.5G FLOPs. We also experiment with other alternatives to self-attention for context aggregation inside each non-overlapped window, which all give similar competitive results under the same architecture. Our study reveals that the \textbf{macro architecture} of Swin model families (i.e., interleaved intra window \& cross window communications), other than specific aggregation layers or specific means of cross window communication, may be more responsible for its strong performance and is the real challenger to CNN's dense sliding window paradigm.