Designing Robots to Help Women

Robots are being designed to help people in an increasing variety of settings--but seemingly little attention has been given so far to the specific needs of women, who represent roughly half of the world's population but are highly underrepresented in robotics. Here we used a speculative prototyping approach to explore this expansive design space: First, we identified some potential challenges of interest, including crimes and illnesses that disproportionately affect women, as well as potential opportunities for designers, which were visualized in five sketches. Then, one of the sketched scenarios was further explored by developing a prototype, of a robotic helper drone equipped with computer vision to detect hidden cameras that could be used to spy on women. While object detection introduced some errors, hidden cameras were identified with a reasonable accuracy of 80\% (Intersection over Union (IoU) score: 0.40). Our aim is that the identified challenges and opportunities could help spark discussion and inspire designers, toward realizing a safer, more inclusive future through responsible use of technology.

Detect2Interact: Localizing Object Key Field in Visual Question Answering (VQA) with LLMs

Localization plays a crucial role in enhancing the practicality and precision of VQA systems. By enabling fine-grained identification and interaction with specific parts of an object, it significantly improves the system's ability to provide contextually relevant and spatially accurate responses, crucial for applications in dynamic environments like robotics and augmented reality. However, traditional systems face challenges in accurately mapping objects within images to generate nuanced and spatially aware responses. In this work, we introduce "Detect2Interact", which addresses these challenges by introducing an advanced approach for fine-grained object visual key field detection. First, we use the segment anything model (SAM) to generate detailed spatial maps of objects in images. Next, we use Vision Studio to extract semantic object descriptions. Third, we employ GPT-4's common sense knowledge, bridging the gap between an object's semantics and its spatial map. As a result, Detect2Interact achieves consistent qualitative results on object key field detection across extensive test cases and outperforms the existing VQA system with object detection by providing a more reasonable and finer visual representation.

SAFDNet: A Simple and Effective Network for Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection

LiDAR-based 3D object detection plays an essential role in autonomous driving. Existing high-performing 3D object detectors usually build dense feature maps in the backbone network and prediction head. However, the computational costs introduced by the dense feature maps grow quadratically as the perception range increases, making these models hard to scale up to long-range detection. Some recent works have attempted to construct fully sparse detectors to solve this issue; nevertheless, the resulting models either rely on a complex multi-stage pipeline or exhibit inferior performance. In this work, we propose SAFDNet, a straightforward yet highly effective architecture, tailored for fully sparse 3D object detection. In SAFDNet, an adaptive feature diffusion strategy is designed to address the center feature missing problem. We conducted extensive experiments on Waymo Open, nuScenes, and Argoverse2 datasets. SAFDNet performed slightly better than the previous SOTA on the first two datasets but much better on the last dataset, which features long-range detection, verifying the efficacy of SAFDNet in scenarios where long-range detection is required. Notably, on Argoverse2, SAFDNet surpassed the previous best hybrid detector HEDNet by 2.6% mAP while being 2.1x faster, and yielded 2.1% mAP gains over the previous best sparse detector FSDv2 while being 1.3x faster. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhanggang001/HEDNet.

CN-RMA: Combined Network with Ray Marching Aggregation for 3D Indoors Object Detection from Multi-view Images

This paper introduces CN-RMA, a novel approach for 3D indoor object detection from multi-view images. We observe the key challenge as the ambiguity of image and 3D correspondence without explicit geometry to provide occlusion information. To address this issue, CN-RMA leverages the synergy of 3D reconstruction networks and 3D object detection networks, where the reconstruction network provides a rough Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) and guides image features to vote to 3D space correctly in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we associate weights to sampled points of each ray through ray marching, representing the contribution of a pixel in an image to corresponding 3D locations. Such weights are determined by the predicted signed distances so that image features vote only to regions near the reconstructed surface. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D object detection from multi-view images, as measured by mAP@0.25 and mAP@0.5 on the ScanNet and ARKitScenes datasets. The code and models are released at https://github.com/SerCharles/CN-RMA.

Object-level Copy-Move Forgery Image Detection based on Inconsistency Mining

In copy-move tampering operations, perpetrators often employ techniques, such as blurring, to conceal tampering traces, posing significant challenges to the detection of object-level targets with intact structures. Focus on these challenges, this paper proposes an Object-level Copy-Move Forgery Image Detection based on Inconsistency Mining (IMNet). To obtain complete object-level targets, we customize prototypes for both the source and tampered regions and dynamically update them. Additionally, we extract inconsistent regions between coarse similar regions obtained through self-correlation calculations and regions composed of prototypes. The detected inconsistent regions are used as supplements to coarse similar regions to refine pixel-level detection. We operate experiments on three public datasets which validate the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed IMNet.

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Meta Prompt Representation and Instance Contrastive Optimization

Classical object detectors are incapable of detecting novel class objects that are not encountered before. Regarding this issue, Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) is proposed, which aims to detect the objects in the candidate class list. However, current OVOD models are suffering from overfitting on the base classes, heavily relying on the large-scale extra data, and complex training process. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel framework with Meta prompt and Instance Contrastive learning (MIC) schemes. Firstly, we simulate a novel-class-emerging scenario to help the prompt learner that learns class and background prompts generalize to novel classes. Secondly, we design an instance-level contrastive strategy to promote intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, which benefits generalization of the detector to novel class objects. Without using knowledge distillation, ensemble model or extra training data during detector training, our proposed MIC outperforms previous SOTA methods trained with these complex techniques on LVIS. Most importantly, MIC shows great generalization ability on novel classes, e.g., with $+4.3\%$ and $+1.9\% \ \mathrm{AP}$ improvement compared with previous SOTA on COCO and Objects365, respectively.

RadarDistill: Boosting Radar-based Object Detection Performance via Knowledge Distillation from LiDAR Features

The inherent noisy and sparse characteristics of radar data pose challenges in finding effective representations for 3D object detection. In this paper, we propose RadarDistill, a novel knowledge distillation (KD) method, which can improve the representation of radar data by leveraging LiDAR data. RadarDistill successfully transfers desirable characteristics of LiDAR features into radar features using three key components: Cross-Modality Alignment (CMA), Activation-based Feature Distillation (AFD), and Proposal-based Feature Distillation (PFD). CMA enhances the density of radar features through multiple layers of dilation operations, effectively addressing the challenges of inefficient knowledge transfer from LiDAR to radar. AFD is designed to transfer knowledge from significant areas of the LiDAR features, specifically those regions where activation intensity exceeds a predetermined threshold. PFD guides the radar network to mimic LiDAR network features in the object proposals for accurately detected results while moderating features for misdetected proposals like false positives. Our comparative analyses conducted on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that RadarDistill achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for radar-only object detection task, recording 20.5% in mAP and 43.7% in NDS. Also, RadarDistill significantly improves the performance of the camera-radar fusion model.

UniMODE: Unified Monocular 3D Object Detection

Realizing unified monocular 3D object detection, including both indoor and outdoor scenes, holds great importance in applications like robot navigation. However, involving various scenarios of data to train models poses challenges due to their significantly different characteristics, e.g., diverse geometry properties and heterogeneous domain distributions. To address these challenges, we build a detector based on the bird's-eye-view (BEV) detection paradigm, where the explicit feature projection is beneficial to addressing the geometry learning ambiguity when employing multiple scenarios of data to train detectors. Then, we split the classical BEV detection architecture into two stages and propose an uneven BEV grid design to handle the convergence instability caused by the aforementioned challenges. Moreover, we develop a sparse BEV feature projection strategy to reduce computational cost and a unified domain alignment method to handle heterogeneous domains. Combining these techniques, a unified detector UniMODE is derived, which surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on the challenging Omni3D dataset (a large-scale dataset including both indoor and outdoor scenes) by 4.9% AP_3D, revealing the first successful generalization of a BEV detector to unified 3D object detection.

Road Obstacle Detection based on Unknown Objectness Scores

The detection of unknown traffic obstacles is vital to ensure safe autonomous driving. The standard object-detection methods cannot identify unknown objects that are not included under predefined categories. This is because object-detection methods are trained to assign a background label to pixels corresponding to the presence of unknown objects. To address this problem, the pixel-wise anomaly-detection approach has attracted increased research attention. Anomaly-detection techniques, such as uncertainty estimation and perceptual difference from reconstructed images, make it possible to identify pixels of unknown objects as out-of-distribution (OoD) samples. However, when applied to images with many unknowns and complex components, such as driving scenes, these methods often exhibit unstable performance. The purpose of this study is to achieve stable performance for detecting unknown objects by incorporating the object-detection fashions into the pixel-wise anomaly detection methods. To achieve this goal, we adopt a semantic-segmentation network with a sigmoid head that simultaneously provides pixel-wise anomaly scores and objectness scores. Our experimental results show that the objectness scores play an important role in improving the detection performance. Based on these results, we propose a novel anomaly score by integrating these two scores, which we term as unknown objectness score. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods when applied to the publicly available datasets.

A Fourier-enhanced multi-modal 3D small object optical mark recognition and positioning method for percutaneous abdominal puncture surgical navigation

Navigation for thoracoabdominal puncture surgery is used to locate the needle entry point on the patient's body surface. The traditional reflective ball navigation method is difficult to position the needle entry point on the soft, irregular, smooth chest and abdomen. Due to the lack of clear characteristic points on the body surface using structured light technology, it is difficult to identify and locate arbitrary needle insertion points. Based on the high stability and high accuracy requirements of surgical navigation, this paper proposed a novel method, a muti-modal 3D small object medical marker detection method, which identifies the center of a small single ring as the needle insertion point. Moreover, this novel method leverages Fourier transform enhancement technology to augment the dataset, enrich image details, and enhance the network's capability. The method extracts the Region of Interest (ROI) of the feature image from both enhanced and original images, followed by generating a mask map. Subsequently, the point cloud of the ROI from the depth map is obtained through the registration of ROI point cloud contour fitting. In addition, this method employs Tukey loss for optimal precision. The experimental results show this novel method proposed in this paper not only achieves high-precision and high-stability positioning, but also enables the positioning of any needle insertion point.