Efficient Trajectory Planning and Control for USV with Vessel Dynamics and Differential Flatness

Unmanned surface vessels (USVs) are widely used in ocean exploration and environmental protection fields. To ensure that USV can successfully perform its mission, trajectory planning and motion tracking are the two most critical technologies. In this paper, we propose a novel trajectory generation and tracking method for USV based on optimization theory. Specifically, the USV dynamic model is described with differential flatness, so that the trajectory can be generated by dynamic RRT* in a linear invariant system expression form under the objective of optimal boundary value. To reduce the sample number and improve efficiency, we adjust the trajectory through local optimization. The dynamic constraints are considered in the optimization process so that the generated trajectory conforms to the kinematic characteristics of the under-actuated hull, and makes it easier to be tracked. Finally, motion tracking is added with model predictive control under a sequential quadratic programming problem. Experimental results show the planned trajectory is more in line with the kinematic characteristics of USV, and the tracking accuracy remains a higher level.

Scatter Points in Space: 3D Detection from Multi-view Monocular Images

3D object detection from monocular image(s) is a challenging and long-standing problem of computer vision. To combine information from different perspectives without troublesome 2D instance tracking, recent methods tend to aggregate multiview feature by sampling regular 3D grid densely in space, which is inefficient. In this paper, we attempt to improve multi-view feature aggregation by proposing a learnable keypoints sampling method, which scatters pseudo surface points in 3D space, in order to keep data sparsity. The scattered points augmented by multi-view geometric constraints and visual features are then employed to infer objects location and shape in the scene. To make up the limitations of single frame and model multi-view geometry explicitly, we further propose a surface filter module for noise suppression. Experimental results show that our method achieves significantly better performance than previous works in terms of 3D detection (more than 0.1 AP improvement on some categories of ScanNet). The code will be publicly available.

Joint Learning Content and Degradation Aware Feature for Blind Super-Resolution

To achieve promising results on blind image super-resolution (SR), some attempts leveraged the low resolution (LR) images to predict the kernel and improve the SR performance. However, these Supervised Kernel Prediction (SKP) methods are impractical due to the unavailable real-world blur kernels. Although some Unsupervised Degradation Prediction (UDP) methods are proposed to bypass this problem, the \textit{inconsistency} between degradation embedding and SR feature is still challenging. By exploring the correlations between degradation embedding and SR feature, we observe that jointly learning the content and degradation aware feature is optimal. Based on this observation, a Content and Degradation aware SR Network dubbed CDSR is proposed. Specifically, CDSR contains three newly-established modules: (1) a Lightweight Patch-based Encoder (LPE) is applied to jointly extract content and degradation features; (2) a Domain Query Attention based module (DQA) is employed to adaptively reduce the inconsistency; (3) a Codebook-based Space Compress module (CSC) that can suppress the redundant information. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed CDSR outperforms the existing UDP models and achieves competitive performance on PSNR and SSIM even compared with the state-of-the-art SKP methods.

Ctrl-VIO: Continuous-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry for Rolling Shutter Cameras

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic continuous-time visual-inertial odometry (VIO) for rolling shutter cameras. The continuous-time trajectory formulation naturally facilitates the fusion of asynchronized high-frequency IMU data and motion-distorted rolling shutter images. To prevent intractable computation load, the proposed VIO is sliding-window and keyframe-based. We propose to probabilistically marginalize the control points to keep the constant number of keyframes in the sliding window. Furthermore, the line exposure time difference (line delay) of the rolling shutter camera can be online calibrated in our continuous-time VIO. To extensively examine the performance of our continuous-time VIO, experiments are conducted on publicly-available WHU-RSVI, TUM-RSVI, and SenseTime-RSVI rolling shutter datasets. The results demonstrate the proposed continuous-time VIO significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art VIO methods. The codebase of this paper will also be open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/APRIL-ZJU/Ctrl-VIO}.

Revisiting Item Promotion in GNN-based Collaborative Filtering: A Masked Targeted Topological Attack Perspective

Graph neural networks (GNN) based collaborative filtering (CF) have attracted increasing attention in e-commerce and social media platforms. However, there still lack efforts to evaluate the robustness of such CF systems in deployment. Fundamentally different from existing attacks, this work revisits the item promotion task and reformulates it from a targeted topological attack perspective for the first time. Specifically, we first develop a targeted attack formulation to maximally increase a target item's popularity. We then leverage gradient-based optimizations to find a solution. However, we observe the gradient estimates often appear noisy due to the discrete nature of a graph, which leads to a degradation of attack ability. To resolve noisy gradient effects, we then propose a masked attack objective that can remarkably enhance the topological attack ability. Furthermore, we design a computationally efficient approach to the proposed attack, thus making it feasible to evaluate large-large CF systems. Experiments on two real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our attack in analyzing the robustness of GNN-based CF more practically.

SuperLine3D: Self-supervised Line Segmentation and Description for LiDAR Point Cloud

Poles and building edges are frequently observable objects on urban roads, conveying reliable hints for various computer vision tasks. To repetitively extract them as features and perform association between discrete LiDAR frames for registration, we propose the first learning-based feature segmentation and description model for 3D lines in LiDAR point cloud. To train our model without the time consuming and tedious data labeling process, we first generate synthetic primitives for the basic appearance of target lines, and build an iterative line auto-labeling process to gradually refine line labels on real LiDAR scans. Our segmentation model can extract lines under arbitrary scale perturbations, and we use shared EdgeConv encoder layers to train the two segmentation and descriptor heads jointly. Base on the model, we can build a highly-available global registration module for point cloud registration, in conditions without initial transformation hints. Experiments have demonstrated that our line-based registration method is highly competitive to state-of-the-art point-based approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zxrzju/SuperLine3D.git.

DA$^2$ Dataset: Toward Dexterity-Aware Dual-Arm Grasping

In this paper, we introduce DA$^2$, the first large-scale dual-arm dexterity-aware dataset for the generation of optimal bimanual grasping pairs for arbitrary large objects. The dataset contains about 9M pairs of parallel-jaw grasps, generated from more than 6000 objects and each labeled with various grasp dexterity measures. In addition, we propose an end-to-end dual-arm grasp evaluation model trained on the rendered scenes from this dataset. We utilize the evaluation model as our baseline to show the value of this novel and nontrivial dataset by both online analysis and real robot experiments. All data and related code will be open-sourced at https://sites.google.com/view/da2dataset.

Layer-refined Graph Convolutional Networks for Recommendation

Recommendation models utilizing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance, as they can integrate both the node information and the topological structure of the user-item interaction graph. However, these GCN-based recommendation models not only suffer from over-smoothing when stacking too many layers but also bear performance degeneration resulting from the existence of noise in user-item interactions. In this paper, we first identify a recommendation dilemma of over-smoothing and solution collapsing in current GCN-based models. Specifically, these models usually aggregate all layer embeddings for node updating and achieve their best recommendation performance within a few layers because of over-smoothing. Conversely, if we place learnable weights on layer embeddings for node updating, the weight space will always collapse to a fixed point, at which the weighting of the ego layer almost holds all. We propose a layer-refined GCN model, dubbed LayerGCN, that refines layer representations during information propagation and node updating of GCN. Moreover, previous GCN-based recommendation models aggregate all incoming information from neighbors without distinguishing the noise nodes, which deteriorates the recommendation performance. Our model further prunes the edges of the user-item interaction graph following a degree-sensitive probability instead of the uniform distribution. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models significantly on four public datasets with fast training convergence. The implementation code of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/enoche/ImRec.

Adaptive Assignment for Geometry Aware Local Feature Matching

Local image feature matching, aiming to identify and correspond similar regions from image pairs, is an essential concept in computer vision. Most existing image matching approaches follow a one-to-one assignment principle and employ mutual nearest neighbor to guarantee unique correspondence between local features across images. However, images from different conditions may hold large-scale variations or viewpoint diversification so that one-to-one assignment may cause ambiguous or missing representations in dense matching. In this paper, we introduce AdaMatcher, a novel detector-free local feature matching method, which first correlates dense features by a lightweight feature interaction module and estimates co-visible area of the paired images, then performs a patch-level many-to-one assignment to predict match proposals, and finally refines them based on a one-to-one refinement module. Extensive experiments show that AdaMatcher outperforms solid baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results on many downstream tasks. Additionally, the many-to-one assignment and one-to-one refinement module can be used as a refinement network for other matching methods, such as SuperGlue, to boost their performance further. Code will be available upon publication.

E-NeRV: Expedite Neural Video Representation with Disentangled Spatial-Temporal Context

Recently, the image-wise implicit neural representation of videos, NeRV, has gained popularity for its promising results and swift speed compared to regular pixel-wise implicit representations. However, the redundant parameters within the network structure can cause a large model size when scaling up for desirable performance. The key reason of this phenomenon is the coupled formulation of NeRV, which outputs the spatial and temporal information of video frames directly from the frame index input. In this paper, we propose E-NeRV, which dramatically expedites NeRV by decomposing the image-wise implicit neural representation into separate spatial and temporal context. Under the guidance of this new formulation, our model greatly reduces the redundant model parameters, while retaining the representation ability. We experimentally find that our method can improve the performance to a large extent with fewer parameters, resulting in a more than $8\times$ faster speed on convergence. Code is available at https://github.com/kyleleey/E-NeRV.