NeRF-Det++: Incorporating Semantic Cues and Perspective-aware Depth Supervision for Indoor Multi-View 3D Detection

NeRF-Det has achieved impressive performance in indoor multi-view 3D detection by innovatively utilizing NeRF to enhance representation learning. Despite its notable performance, we uncover three decisive shortcomings in its current design, including semantic ambiguity, inappropriate sampling, and insufficient utilization of depth supervision. To combat the aforementioned problems, we present three corresponding solutions: 1) Semantic Enhancement. We project the freely available 3D segmentation annotations onto the 2D plane and leverage the corresponding 2D semantic maps as the supervision signal, significantly enhancing the semantic awareness of multi-view detectors. 2) Perspective-aware Sampling. Instead of employing the uniform sampling strategy, we put forward the perspective-aware sampling policy that samples densely near the camera while sparsely in the distance, more effectively collecting the valuable geometric clues. 3)Ordinal Residual Depth Supervision. As opposed to directly regressing the depth values that are difficult to optimize, we divide the depth range of each scene into a fixed number of ordinal bins and reformulate the depth prediction as the combination of the classification of depth bins as well as the regression of the residual depth values, thereby benefiting the depth learning process. The resulting algorithm, NeRF-Det++, has exhibited appealing performance in the ScanNetV2 and ARKITScenes datasets. Notably, in ScanNetV2, NeRF-Det++ outperforms the competitive NeRF-Det by +1.9% in mAP@0.25 and +3.5% in mAP@0.50$. The code will be publicly at https://github.com/mrsempress/NeRF-Detplusplus.

A Comprehensive Survey on 3D Content Generation

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in artificial intelligence generated content(AIGC), with diverse input modalities, e.g., text, image, video, audio and 3D. The 3D is the most close visual modality to real-world 3D environment and carries enormous knowledge. The 3D content generation shows both academic and practical values while also presenting formidable technical challenges. This review aims to consolidate developments within the burgeoning domain of 3D content generation. Specifically, a new taxonomy is proposed that categorizes existing approaches into three types: 3D native generative methods, 2D prior-based 3D generative methods, and hybrid 3D generative methods. The survey covers approximately 60 papers spanning the major techniques. Besides, we discuss limitations of current 3D content generation techniques, and point out open challenges as well as promising directions for future work. Accompanied with this survey, we have established a project website where the resources on 3D content generation research are provided. The project page is available at https://github.com/hitcslj/Awesome-AIGC-3D.

Self-Supervised Learning for SAR ATR with a Knowledge-Guided Predictive Architecture

Recently, the emergence of a large number of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors and target datasets has made it possible to unify downstream tasks with self-supervised learning techniques, which can pave the way for building the foundation model in the SAR target recognition field. The major challenge of self-supervised learning for SAR target recognition lies in the generalizable representation learning in low data quality and noise.To address the aforementioned problem, we propose a knowledge-guided predictive architecture that uses local masked patches to predict the multiscale SAR feature representations of unseen context. The core of the proposed architecture lies in combining traditional SAR domain feature extraction with state-of-the-art scalable self-supervised learning for accurate generalized feature representations. The proposed framework is validated on various downstream datasets (MSTAR, FUSAR-Ship, SAR-ACD and SSDD), and can bring consistent performance improvement for SAR target recognition. The experimental results strongly demonstrate the unified performance improvement of the self-supervised learning technique for SAR target recognition across diverse targets, scenes and sensors.

Point Cloud Pre-training with Diffusion Models

Pre-training a model and then fine-tuning it on downstream tasks has demonstrated significant success in the 2D image and NLP domains. However, due to the unordered and non-uniform density characteristics of point clouds, it is non-trivial to explore the prior knowledge of point clouds and pre-train a point cloud backbone. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-training method called Point cloud Diffusion pre-training (PointDif). We consider the point cloud pre-training task as a conditional point-to-point generation problem and introduce a conditional point generator. This generator aggregates the features extracted by the backbone and employs them as the condition to guide the point-to-point recovery from the noisy point cloud, thereby assisting the backbone in capturing both local and global geometric priors as well as the global point density distribution of the object. We also present a recurrent uniform sampling optimization strategy, which enables the model to uniformly recover from various noise levels and learn from balanced supervision. Our PointDif achieves substantial improvement across various real-world datasets for diverse downstream tasks such as classification, segmentation and detection. Specifically, PointDif attains 70.0% mIoU on S3DIS Area 5 for the segmentation task and achieves an average improvement of 2.4% on ScanObjectNN for the classification task compared to TAP. Furthermore, our pre-training framework can be flexibly applied to diverse point cloud backbones and bring considerable gains.

UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase

Point-, voxel-, and range-views are three representative forms of point clouds. All of them have accurate 3D measurements but lack color and texture information. RGB images are a natural complement to these point cloud views and fully utilizing the comprehensive information of them benefits more robust perceptions. In this paper, we present a unified multi-modal LiDAR segmentation network, termed UniSeg, which leverages the information of RGB images and three views of the point cloud, and accomplishes semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation simultaneously. Specifically, we first design the Learnable cross-Modal Association (LMA) module to automatically fuse voxel-view and range-view features with image features, which fully utilize the rich semantic information of images and are robust to calibration errors. Then, the enhanced voxel-view and range-view features are transformed to the point space,where three views of point cloud features are further fused adaptively by the Learnable cross-View Association module (LVA). Notably, UniSeg achieves promising results in three public benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD); it ranks 1st on two challenges of two benchmarks, including the LiDAR semantic segmentation challenge of nuScenes and panoptic segmentation challenges of SemanticKITTI. Besides, we construct the OpenPCSeg codebase, which is the largest and most comprehensive outdoor LiDAR segmentation codebase. It contains most of the popular outdoor LiDAR segmentation algorithms and provides reproducible implementations. The OpenPCSeg codebase will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSeg.

Human-centric Scene Understanding for 3D Large-scale Scenarios

Human-centric scene understanding is significant for real-world applications, but it is extremely challenging due to the existence of diverse human poses and actions, complex human-environment interactions, severe occlusions in crowds, etc. In this paper, we present a large-scale multi-modal dataset for human-centric scene understanding, dubbed HuCenLife, which is collected in diverse daily-life scenarios with rich and fine-grained annotations. Our HuCenLife can benefit many 3D perception tasks, such as segmentation, detection, action recognition, etc., and we also provide benchmarks for these tasks to facilitate related research. In addition, we design novel modules for LiDAR-based segmentation and action recognition, which are more applicable for large-scale human-centric scenarios and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

See More and Know More: Zero-shot Point Cloud Segmentation via Multi-modal Visual Data

Zero-shot point cloud segmentation aims to make deep models capable of recognizing novel objects in point cloud that are unseen in the training phase. Recent trends favor the pipeline which transfers knowledge from seen classes with labels to unseen classes without labels. They typically align visual features with semantic features obtained from word embedding by the supervision of seen classes' annotations. However, point cloud contains limited information to fully match with semantic features. In fact, the rich appearance information of images is a natural complement to the textureless point cloud, which is not well explored in previous literature. Motivated by this, we propose a novel multi-modal zero-shot learning method to better utilize the complementary information of point clouds and images for more accurate visual-semantic alignment. Extensive experiments are performed in two popular benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI and nuScenes, and our method outperforms current SOTA methods with 52% and 49% improvement on average for unseen class mIoU, respectively.

Clothes-Invariant Feature Learning by Causal Intervention for Clothes-Changing Person Re-identification

Clothes-invariant feature extraction is critical to the clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID). It can provide discriminative identity features and eliminate the negative effects caused by the confounder--clothing changes. But we argue that there exists a strong spurious correlation between clothes and human identity, that restricts the common likelihood-based ReID method P(Y|X) to extract clothes-irrelevant features. In this paper, we propose a new Causal Clothes-Invariant Learning (CCIL) method to achieve clothes-invariant feature learning by modeling causal intervention P(Y|do(X)). This new causality-based model is inherently invariant to the confounder in the causal view, which can achieve the clothes-invariant features and avoid the barrier faced by the likelihood-based methods. Extensive experiments on three CC-ReID benchmarks, including PRCC, LTCC, and VC-Clothes, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves a new state of the art.

WildRefer: 3D Object Localization in Large-scale Dynamic Scenes with Multi-modal Visual Data and Natural Language

We introduce the task of 3D visual grounding in large-scale dynamic scenes based on natural linguistic descriptions and online captured multi-modal visual data, including 2D images and 3D LiDAR point clouds. We present a novel method, WildRefer, for this task by fully utilizing the appearance features in images, the location and geometry features in point clouds, and the dynamic features in consecutive input frames to match the semantic features in language. In particular, we propose two novel datasets, STRefer and LifeRefer, which focus on large-scale human-centric daily-life scenarios with abundant 3D object and natural language annotations. Our datasets are significant for the research of 3D visual grounding in the wild and has huge potential to boost the development of autonomous driving and service robots. Extensive comparisons and ablation studies illustrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two proposed datasets. Code and dataset will be released when the paper is published.

Rethinking Range View Representation for LiDAR Segmentation

LiDAR segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving perception. Recent trends favor point- or voxel-based methods as they often yield better performance than the traditional range view representation. In this work, we unveil several key factors in building powerful range view models. We observe that the "many-to-one" mapping, semantic incoherence, and shape deformation are possible impediments against effective learning from range view projections. We present RangeFormer -- a full-cycle framework comprising novel designs across network architecture, data augmentation, and post-processing -- that better handles the learning and processing of LiDAR point clouds from the range view. We further introduce a Scalable Training from Range view (STR) strategy that trains on arbitrary low-resolution 2D range images, while still maintaining satisfactory 3D segmentation accuracy. We show that, for the first time, a range view method is able to surpass the point, voxel, and multi-view fusion counterparts in the competing LiDAR semantic and panoptic segmentation benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and ScribbleKITTI.