PIRATR: Parametric Object Inference for Robotic Applications with Transformers in 3D Point Clouds

We present PIRATR, an end-to-end 3D object detection framework for robotic use cases in point clouds. Extending PI3DETR, our method streamlines parametric 3D object detection by jointly estimating multi-class 6-DoF poses and class-specific parametric attributes directly from occlusion-affected point cloud data. This formulation enables not only geometric localization but also the estimation of task-relevant properties for parametric objects, such as a gripper's opening, where the 3D model is adjusted according to simple, predefined rules. The architecture employs modular, class-specific heads, making it straightforward to extend to novel object types without re-designing the pipeline. We validate PIRATR on an automated forklift platform, focusing on three structurally and functionally diverse categories: crane grippers, loading platforms, and pallets. Trained entirely in a synthetic environment, PIRATR generalizes effectively to real outdoor LiDAR scans, achieving a detection mAP of 0.919 without additional fine-tuning. PIRATR establishes a new paradigm of pose-aware, parameterized perception. This bridges the gap between low-level geometric reasoning and actionable world models, paving the way for scalable, simulation-trained perception systems that can be deployed in dynamic robotic environments. Code available at https://github.com/swingaxe/piratr.

Synthetic Defect Geometries of Cast Metal Objects Modeled via 2d Voronoi Tessellations

In industry, defect detection is crucial for quality control. Non-destructive testing (NDT) methods are preferred as they do not influence the functionality of the object while inspecting. Automated data evaluation for automated defect detection is a growing field of research. In particular, machine learning approaches show promising results. To provide training data in sufficient amount and quality, synthetic data can be used. Rule-based approaches enable synthetic data generation in a controllable environment. Therefore, a digital twin of the inspected object including synthetic defects is needed. We present parametric methods to model 3d mesh objects of various defect types that can then be added to the object geometry to obtain synthetic defective objects. The models are motivated by common defects in metal casting but can be transferred to other machining procedures that produce similar defect shapes. Synthetic data resembling the real inspection data can then be created by using a physically based Monte Carlo simulation of the respective testing method. Using our defect models, a variable and arbitrarily large synthetic data set can be generated with the possibility to include rarely occurring defects in sufficient quantity. Pixel-perfect annotation can be created in parallel. As an example, we will use visual surface inspection, but the procedure can be applied in combination with simulations for any other NDT method.

Inlier-Centric Post-Training Quantization for Object Detection Models

Object detection is pivotal in computer vision, yet its immense computational demands make deployment slow and power-hungry, motivating quantization. However, task-irrelevant morphologies such as background clutter and sensor noise induce redundant activations (or anomalies). These anomalies expand activation ranges and skew activation distributions toward task-irrelevant responses, complicating bit allocation and weakening the preservation of informative features. Without a clear criterion to distinguish anomalies, suppressing them can inadvertently discard useful information. To address this, we present InlierQ, an inlier-centric post-training quantization approach that separates anomalies from informative inliers. InlierQ computes gradient-aware volume saliency scores, classifies each volume as an inlier or anomaly, and fits a posterior distribution over these scores using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. This design suppresses anomalies while preserving informative features. InlierQ is label-free, drop-in, and requires only 64 calibration samples. Experiments on the COCO and nuScenes benchmarks show consistent reductions in quantization error for camera-based (2D and 3D) and LiDAR-based (3D) object detection.

Seeing Through Clutter: Structured 3D Scene Reconstruction via Iterative Object Removal

We present SeeingThroughClutter, a method for reconstructing structured 3D representations from single images by segmenting and modeling objects individually. Prior approaches rely on intermediate tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation, which often underperform in complex scenes, particularly in the presence of occlusion and clutter. We address this by introducing an iterative object removal and reconstruction pipeline that decomposes complex scenes into a sequence of simpler subtasks. Using VLMs as orchestrators, foreground objects are removed one at a time via detection, segmentation, object removal, and 3D fitting. We show that removing objects allows for cleaner segmentations of subsequent objects, even in highly occluded scenes. Our method requires no task-specific training and benefits directly from ongoing advances in foundation models. We demonstrate stateof-the-art robustness on 3D-Front and ADE20K datasets. Project Page: https://rioak.github.io/seeingthroughclutter/

DRMOT: A Dataset and Framework for RGBD Referring Multi-Object Tracking

Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT) aims to track specific targets based on language descriptions and is vital for interactive AI systems such as robotics and autonomous driving. However, existing RMOT models rely solely on 2D RGB data, making it challenging to accurately detect and associate targets characterized by complex spatial semantics (e.g., ``the person closest to the camera'') and to maintain reliable identities under severe occlusion, due to the absence of explicit 3D spatial information. In this work, we propose a novel task, RGBD Referring Multi-Object Tracking (DRMOT), which explicitly requires models to fuse RGB, Depth (D), and Language (L) modalities to achieve 3D-aware tracking. To advance research on the DRMOT task, we construct a tailored RGBD referring multi-object tracking dataset, named DRSet, designed to evaluate models' spatial-semantic grounding and tracking capabilities. Specifically, DRSet contains RGB images and depth maps from 187 scenes, along with 240 language descriptions, among which 56 descriptions incorporate depth-related information. Furthermore, we propose DRTrack, a MLLM-guided depth-referring tracking framework. DRTrack performs depth-aware target grounding from joint RGB-D-L inputs and enforces robust trajectory association by incorporating depth cues. Extensive experiments on the DRSet dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Model Optimization for Multi-Camera 3D Detection and Tracking

Outside-in multi-camera perception is increasingly important in indoor environments, where networks of static cameras must support multi-target tracking under occlusion and heterogeneous viewpoints. We evaluate Sparse4D, a query-based spatiotemporal 3D detection and tracking framework that fuses multi-view features in a shared world frame and propagates sparse object queries via instance memory. We study reduced input frame rates, post-training quantization (INT8 and FP8), transfer to the WILDTRACK benchmark, and Transformer Engine mixed-precision fine-tuning. To better capture identity stability, we report Average Track Duration (AvgTrackDur), which measures identity persistence in seconds. Sparse4D remains stable under moderate FPS reductions, but below 2 FPS, identity association collapses even when detections are stable. Selective quantization of the backbone and neck offers the best speed-accuracy trade-off, while attention-related modules are consistently sensitive to low precision. On WILDTRACK, low-FPS pretraining yields large zero-shot gains over the base checkpoint, while small-scale fine-tuning provides limited additional benefit. Transformer Engine mixed precision reduces latency and improves camera scalability, but can destabilize identity propagation, motivating stability-aware validation.

UniGeo: A Unified 3D Indoor Object Detection Framework Integrating Geometry-Aware Learning and Dynamic Channel Gating

The growing adoption of robotics and augmented reality in real-world applications has driven considerable research interest in 3D object detection based on point clouds. While previous methods address unified training across multiple datasets, they fail to model geometric relationships in sparse point cloud scenes and ignore the feature distribution in significant areas, which ultimately restricts their performance. To deal with this issue, a unified 3D indoor detection framework, called UniGeo, is proposed. To model geometric relations in scenes, we first propose a geometry-aware learning module that establishes a learnable mapping from spatial relationships to feature weights, which enabes explicit geometric feature enhancement. Then, to further enhance point cloud feature representation, we propose a dynamic channel gating mechanism that leverages learnable channel-wise weighting. This mechanism adaptively optimizes features generated by the sparse 3D U-Net network, significantly enhancing key geometric information. Extensive experiments on six different indoor scene datasets clearly validate the superior performance of our method.

Instance-Guided Radar Depth Estimation for 3D Object Detection

Accurate depth estimation is fundamental to 3D perception in autonomous driving, supporting tasks such as detection, tracking, and motion planning. However, monocular camera-based 3D detection suffers from depth ambiguity and reduced robustness under challenging conditions. Radar provides complementary advantages such as resilience to poor lighting and adverse weather, but its sparsity and low resolution limit its direct use in detection frameworks. This motivates the need for effective Radar-camera fusion with improved preprocessing and depth estimation strategies. We propose an end-to-end framework that enhances monocular 3D object detection through two key components. First, we introduce InstaRadar, an instance segmentation-guided expansion method that leverages pre-trained segmentation masks to enhance Radar density and semantic alignment, producing a more structured representation. InstaRadar achieves state-of-the-art results in Radar-guided depth estimation, showing its effectiveness in generating high-quality depth features. Second, we integrate the pre-trained RCDPT into the BEVDepth framework as a replacement for its depth module. With InstaRadar-enhanced inputs, the RCDPT integration consistently improves 3D detection performance. Overall, these components yield steady gains over the baseline BEVDepth model, demonstrating the effectiveness of InstaRadar and the advantage of explicit depth supervision in 3D object detection. Although the framework lags behind Radar-camera fusion models that directly extract BEV features, since Radar serves only as guidance rather than an independent feature stream, this limitation highlights potential for improvement. Future work will extend InstaRadar to point cloud-like representations and integrate a dedicated Radar branch with temporal cues for enhanced BEV fusion.

FlowCalib: LiDAR-to-Vehicle Miscalibration Detection using Scene Flows

Accurate sensor-to-vehicle calibration is essential for safe autonomous driving. Angular misalignments of LiDAR sensors can lead to safety-critical issues during autonomous operation. However, current methods primarily focus on correcting sensor-to-sensor errors without considering the miscalibration of individual sensors that cause these errors in the first place. We introduce FlowCalib, the first framework that detects LiDAR-to-vehicle miscalibration using motion cues from the scene flow of static objects. Our approach leverages the systematic bias induced by rotational misalignment in the flow field generated from sequential 3D point clouds, eliminating the need for additional sensors. The architecture integrates a neural scene flow prior for flow estimation and incorporates a dual-branch detection network that fuses learned global flow features with handcrafted geometric descriptors. These combined representations allow the system to perform two complementary binary classification tasks: a global binary decision indicating whether misalignment is present and separate, axis-specific binary decisions indicating whether each rotational axis is misaligned. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate FlowCalib's ability to robustly detect miscalibration, establishing a benchmark for sensor-to-vehicle miscalibration detection.

Test-Time Adaptation for Anomaly Segmentation via Topology-Aware Optimal Transport Chaining

Deep topological data analysis (TDA) offers a principled framework for capturing structural invariants such as connectivity and cycles that persist across scales, making it a natural fit for anomaly segmentation (AS). Unlike thresholdbased binarisation, which produces brittle masks under distribution shift, TDA allows anomalies to be characterised as disruptions to global structure rather than local fluctuations. We introduce TopoOT, a topology-aware optimal transport (OT) framework that integrates multi-filtration persistence diagrams (PDs) with test-time adaptation (TTA). Our key innovation is Optimal Transport Chaining, which sequentially aligns PDs across thresholds and filtrations, yielding geodesic stability scores that identify features consistently preserved across scales. These stabilityaware pseudo-labels supervise a lightweight head trained online with OT-consistency and contrastive objectives, ensuring robust adaptation under domain shift. Across standard 2D and 3D anomaly detection benchmarks, TopoOT achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the most competitive methods by up to +24.1% mean F1 on 2D datasets and +10.2% on 3D AS benchmarks.