Attention-Guided Lidar Segmentation and Odometry Using Image-to-Point Cloud Saliency Transfer

LiDAR odometry estimation and 3D semantic segmentation are crucial for autonomous driving, which has achieved remarkable advances recently. However, these tasks are challenging due to the imbalance of points in different semantic categories for 3D semantic segmentation and the influence of dynamic objects for LiDAR odometry estimation, which increases the importance of using representative/salient landmarks as reference points for robust feature learning. To address these challenges, we propose a saliency-guided approach that leverages attention information to improve the performance of LiDAR odometry estimation and semantic segmentation models. Unlike in the image domain, only a few studies have addressed point cloud saliency information due to the lack of annotated training data. To alleviate this, we first present a universal framework to transfer saliency distribution knowledge from color images to point clouds, and use this to construct a pseudo-saliency dataset (i.e. FordSaliency) for point clouds. Then, we adopt point cloud-based backbones to learn saliency distribution from pseudo-saliency labels, which is followed by our proposed SalLiDAR module. SalLiDAR is a saliency-guided 3D semantic segmentation model that integrates saliency information to improve segmentation performance. Finally, we introduce SalLONet, a self-supervised saliency-guided LiDAR odometry network that uses the semantic and saliency predictions of SalLiDAR to achieve better odometry estimation. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SalLiDAR and SalLONet models achieve state-of-the-art performance against existing methods, highlighting the effectiveness of image-to-LiDAR saliency knowledge transfer. Source code will be available at https://github.com/nevrez/SalLONet.

RGB-D SLAM Using Attention Guided Frame Association

Deep learning models as an emerging topic have shown great progress in various fields. Especially, visualization tools such as class activation mapping methods provided visual explanation on the reasoning of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). By using the gradients of the network layers, it is possible to demonstrate where the networks pay attention during a specific image recognition task. Moreover, these gradients can be integrated with CNN features for localizing more generalized task dependent attentive (salient) objects in scenes. Despite this progress, there is not much explicit usage of this gradient (network attention) information to integrate with CNN representations for object semantics. This can be very useful for visual tasks such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) where CNN representations of spatially attentive object locations may lead to improved performance. Therefore, in this work, we propose the use of task specific network attention for RGB-D indoor SLAM. To do so, we integrate layer-wise object attention information (layer gradients) with CNN layer representations to improve frame association performance in a state-of-the-art RGB-D indoor SLAM method. Experiments show promising initial results with improved performance.

SalFBNet: Learning Pseudo-Saliency Distribution via Feedback Convolutional Networks

Feed-forward only convolutional neural networks (CNNs) may ignore intrinsic relationships and potential benefits of feedback connections in vision tasks such as saliency detection, despite their significant representation capabilities. In this work, we propose a feedback-recursive convolutional framework (SalFBNet) for saliency detection. The proposed feedback model can learn abundant contextual representations by bridging a recursive pathway from higher-level feature blocks to low-level layer. Moreover, we create a large-scale Pseudo-Saliency dataset to alleviate the problem of data deficiency in saliency detection. We first use the proposed feedback model to learn saliency distribution from pseudo-ground-truth. Afterwards, we fine-tune the feedback model on existing eye-fixation datasets. Furthermore, we present a novel Selective Fixation and Non-Fixation Error (sFNE) loss to make proposed feedback model better learn distinguishable eye-fixation-based features. Extensive experimental results show that our SalFBNet with fewer parameters achieves competitive results on the public saliency detection benchmarks, which demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed feedback model and Pseudo-Saliency data. Source codes and Pseudo-Saliency dataset can be found at https://github.com/gqding/SalFBNet

When CNNs Meet Random RNNs: Towards Multi-Level Analysis for RGB-D Object and Scene Recognition

Recognizing objects and scenes are two challenging but essential tasks in image understanding. In particular, the use of RGB-D sensors in handling these tasks has emerged as an important area of focus for better visual understanding. Meanwhile, deep neural networks, specifically convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have become widespread and have been applied to many visual tasks by replacing hand-crafted features with effective deep features. However, it is an open problem how to exploit deep features from a multi-layer CNN model effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage framework that extracts discriminative feature representations from multi-modal RGB-D images for object and scene recognition tasks. In the first stage, a pretrained CNN model has been employed as a backbone to extract visual features at multiple levels. The second stage maps these features into high level representations with a fully randomized structure of recursive neural networks (RNNs) efficiently. In order to cope with the high dimensionality of CNN activations, a random weighted pooling scheme has been proposed by extending the idea of randomness in RNNs. Multi-modal fusion has been performed through a soft voting approach by computing weights based on individual recognition confidences (i.e. SVM scores) of RGB and depth streams separately. This produces consistent class label estimation in final RGB-D classification performance. Extensive experiments verify that fully randomized structure in RNN stage encodes CNN activations to discriminative solid features successfully. Comparative experimental results on the popular Washington RGB-D Object and SUN RGB-D Scene datasets show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods both in object and scene recognition tasks.