IDLL: Inverse Depth Line based Visual Localization in Challenging Environments

Precise and real-time localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or robots in GNSS denied indoor environments are critically important for various logistics and surveillance applications. Vision-based simultaneously locating and mapping (VSLAM) are key solutions but suffer location drifts in texture-less, man-made indoor environments. Line features are rich in man-made environments which can be exploited to improve the localization robustness, but existing point-line based VSLAM methods still lack accuracy and efficiency for the representation of lines introducing unnecessary degrees of freedoms. In this paper, we propose Inverse Depth Line Localization(IDLL), which models each extracted line feature using two inverse depth variables exploiting the fact that the projected pixel coordinates on the image plane are rather accurate, which partially restrict the lines. This freedom-reduced representation of lines enables easier line determination and faster convergence of bundle adjustment in each step, therefore achieves more accurate and more efficient frame-to-frame registration and frame-to-map registration using both point and line visual features. We redesign the whole front-end and back-end modules of VSLAM using this line model. IDLL is extensively evaluated in multiple perceptually-challenging datasets. The results show it is more accurate, robust, and needs lower computational overhead than the current state-of-the-art of feature-based VSLAM methods.

ViPFormer: Efficient Vision-and-Pointcloud Transformer for Unsupervised Pointcloud Understanding

Recently, a growing number of work design unsupervised paradigms for point cloud processing to alleviate the limitation of expensive manual annotation and poor transferability of supervised methods. Among them, CrossPoint follows the contrastive learning framework and exploits image and point cloud data for unsupervised point cloud understanding. Although the promising performance is presented, the unbalanced architecture makes it unnecessarily complex and inefficient. For example, the image branch in CrossPoint is $\sim$8.3x heavier than the point cloud branch leading to higher complexity and latency. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a lightweight Vision-and-Pointcloud Transformer (ViPFormer) to unify image and point cloud processing in a single architecture. ViPFormer learns in an unsupervised manner by optimizing intra-modal and cross-modal contrastive objectives. Then the pretrained model is transferred to various downstream tasks, including 3D shape classification and semantic segmentation. Experiments on different datasets show ViPFormer surpasses previous state-of-the-art unsupervised methods with higher accuracy, lower model complexity and runtime latency. Finally, the effectiveness of each component in ViPFormer is validated by extensive ablation studies. The implementation of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/auniquesun/ViPFormer.