Object Segmentation by Mining Cross-Modal Semantics

Multi-sensor clues have shown promise for object segmentation, but inherent noise in each sensor, as well as the calibration error in practice, may bias the segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach by mining the Cross-Modal Semantics to guide the fusion and decoding of multimodal features, with the aim of controlling the modal contribution based on relative entropy. We explore semantics among the multimodal inputs in two aspects: the modality-shared consistency and the modality-specific variation. Specifically, we propose a novel network, termed XMSNet, consisting of (1) all-round attentive fusion (AF), (2) coarse-to-fine decoder (CFD), and (3) cross-layer self-supervision. On the one hand, the AF block explicitly dissociates the shared and specific representation and learns to weight the modal contribution by adjusting the proportion, region, and pattern, depending upon the quality. On the other hand, our CFD initially decodes the shared feature and then refines the output through specificity-aware querying. Further, we enforce semantic consistency across the decoding layers to enable interaction across network hierarchies, improving feature discriminability. Exhaustive comparison on eleven datasets with depth or thermal clues, and on two challenging tasks, namely salient and camouflage object segmentation, validate our effectiveness in terms of both performance and robustness.

DSEC-MOS: Segment Any Moving Object with Moving Ego Vehicle

Moving Object Segmentation (MOS), a crucial task in computer vision, has numerous applications such as surveillance, autonomous driving, and video analytics. Existing datasets for moving object segmentation mainly focus on RGB or Lidar videos, but lack additional event information that can enhance the understanding of dynamic scenes. To address this limitation, we propose a novel dataset, called DSEC-MOS. Our dataset includes frames captured by RGB cameras embedded on moving vehicules and incorporates event data, which provide high temporal resolution and low-latency information about changes in the scenes. To generate accurate segmentation mask annotations for moving objects, we apply the recently emerged large model SAM - Segment Anything Model - with moving object bounding boxes from DSEC-MOD serving as prompts and calibrated RGB frames, then further revise the results. Our DSEC-MOS dataset contains in total 16 sequences (13314 images). To the best of our knowledge, DSEC-MOS is also the first moving object segmentation dataset that includes event camera in autonomous driving. Project Page: https://github.com/ZZY-Zhou/DSEC-MOS.

RGB-Event Fusion for Moving Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Moving Object Detection (MOD) is a critical vision task for successfully achieving safe autonomous driving. Despite plausible results of deep learning methods, most existing approaches are only frame-based and may fail to reach reasonable performance when dealing with dynamic traffic participants. Recent advances in sensor technologies, especially the Event camera, can naturally complement the conventional camera approach to better model moving objects. However, event-based works often adopt a pre-defined time window for event representation, and simply integrate it to estimate image intensities from events, neglecting much of the rich temporal information from the available asynchronous events. Therefore, from a new perspective, we propose RENet, a novel RGB-Event fusion Network, that jointly exploits the two complementary modalities to achieve more robust MOD under challenging scenarios for autonomous driving. Specifically, we first design a temporal multi-scale aggregation module to fully leverage event frames from both the RGB exposure time and larger intervals. Then we introduce a bi-directional fusion module to attentively calibrate and fuse multi-modal features. To evaluate the performance of our network, we carefully select and annotate a sub-MOD dataset from the commonly used DSEC dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art RGB-Event fusion alternatives.