PCF-Lift: Panoptic Lifting by Probabilistic Contrastive Fusion

Panoptic lifting is an effective technique to address the 3D panoptic segmentation task by unprojecting 2D panoptic segmentations from multi-views to 3D scene. However, the quality of its results largely depends on the 2D segmentations, which could be noisy and error-prone, so its performance often drops significantly for complex scenes. In this work, we design a new pipeline coined PCF-Lift based on our Probabilis-tic Contrastive Fusion (PCF) to learn and embed probabilistic features throughout our pipeline to actively consider inaccurate segmentations and inconsistent instance IDs. Technical-wise, we first model the probabilistic feature embeddings through multivariate Gaussian distributions. To fuse the probabilistic features, we incorporate the probability product kernel into the contrastive loss formulation and design a cross-view constraint to enhance the feature consistency across different views. For the inference, we introduce a new probabilistic clustering method to effectively associate prototype features with the underlying 3D object instances for the generation of consistent panoptic segmentation results. Further, we provide a theoretical analysis to justify the superiority of the proposed probabilistic solution. By conducting extensive experiments, our PCF-lift not only significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on widely used benchmarks including the ScanNet dataset and the challenging Messy Room dataset (4.4% improvement of scene-level PQ), but also demonstrates strong robustness when incorporating various 2D segmentation models or different levels of hand-crafted noise.

Embodiment-Agnostic Action Planning via Object-Part Scene Flow

Observing that the key for robotic action planning is to understand the target-object motion when its associated part is manipulated by the end effector, we propose to generate the 3D object-part scene flow and extract its transformations to solve the action trajectories for diverse embodiments. The advantage of our approach is that it derives the robot action explicitly from object motion prediction, yielding a more robust policy by understanding the object motions. Also, beyond policies trained on embodiment-centric data, our method is embodiment-agnostic, generalizable across diverse embodiments, and being able to learn from human demonstrations. Our method comprises three components: an object-part predictor to locate the part for the end effector to manipulate, an RGBD video generator to predict future RGBD videos, and a trajectory planner to extract embodiment-agnostic transformation sequences and solve the trajectory for diverse embodiments. Trained on videos even without trajectory data, our method still outperforms existing works significantly by 27.7% and 26.2% on the prevailing virtual environments MetaWorld and Franka-Kitchen, respectively. Furthermore, we conducted real-world experiments, showing that our policy, trained only with human demonstration, can be deployed to various embodiments.

Unveiling Deep Shadows: A Survey on Image and Video Shadow Detection, Removal, and Generation in the Era of Deep Learning

Shadows are formed when light encounters obstacles, leading to areas of diminished illumination. In computer vision, shadow detection, removal, and generation are crucial for enhancing scene understanding, refining image quality, ensuring visual consistency in video editing, and improving virtual environments. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of shadow detection, removal, and generation in images and videos within the deep learning landscape over the past decade, covering tasks, deep models, datasets, and evaluation metrics. Our key contributions include a comprehensive survey of shadow analysis, standardization of experimental comparisons, exploration of the relationships among model size, speed, and performance, a cross-dataset generalization study, identification of open issues and future directions, and provision of publicly available resources to support further research.

Towards Real-World Adverse Weather Image Restoration: Enhancing Clearness and Semantics with Vision-Language Models

This paper addresses the limitations of adverse weather image restoration approaches trained on synthetic data when applied to real-world scenarios. We formulate a semi-supervised learning framework employing vision-language models to enhance restoration performance across diverse adverse weather conditions in real-world settings. Our approach involves assessing image clearness and providing semantics using vision-language models on real data, serving as supervision signals for training restoration models. For clearness enhancement, we use real-world data, utilizing a dual-step strategy with pseudo-labels assessed by vision-language models and weather prompt learning. For semantic enhancement, we integrate real-world data by adjusting weather conditions in vision-language model descriptions while preserving semantic meaning. Additionally, we introduce an effective training strategy to bootstrap restoration performance. Our approach achieves superior results in real-world adverse weather image restoration, demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art works.

PointRegGPT: Boosting 3D Point Cloud Registration using Generative Point-Cloud Pairs for Training

Data plays a crucial role in training learning-based methods for 3D point cloud registration. However, the real-world dataset is expensive to build, while rendering-based synthetic data suffers from domain gaps. In this work, we present PointRegGPT, boosting 3D point cloud registration using generative point-cloud pairs for training. Given a single depth map, we first apply a random camera motion to re-project it into a target depth map. Converting them to point clouds gives a training pair. To enhance the data realism, we formulate a generative model as a depth inpainting diffusion to process the target depth map with the re-projected source depth map as the condition. Also, we design a depth correction module to alleviate artifacts caused by point penetration during the re-projection. To our knowledge, this is the first generative approach that explores realistic data generation for indoor point cloud registration. When equipped with our approach, several recent algorithms can improve their performance significantly and achieve SOTA consistently on two common benchmarks. The code and dataset will be released on https://github.com/Chen-Suyi/PointRegGPT.

Object-level Scene Deocclusion

Deoccluding the hidden portions of objects in a scene is a formidable task, particularly when addressing real-world scenes. In this paper, we present a new self-supervised PArallel visible-to-COmplete diffusion framework, named PACO, a foundation model for object-level scene deocclusion. Leveraging the rich prior of pre-trained models, we first design the parallel variational autoencoder, which produces a full-view feature map that simultaneously encodes multiple complete objects, and the visible-to-complete latent generator, which learns to implicitly predict the full-view feature map from partial-view feature map and text prompts extracted from the incomplete objects in the input image. To train PACO, we create a large-scale dataset with 500k samples to enable self-supervised learning, avoiding tedious annotations of the amodal masks and occluded regions. At inference, we devise a layer-wise deocclusion strategy to improve efficiency while maintaining the deocclusion quality. Extensive experiments on COCOA and various real-world scenes demonstrate the superior capability of PACO for scene deocclusion, surpassing the state of the arts by a large margin. Our method can also be extended to cross-domain scenes and novel categories that are not covered by the training set. Further, we demonstrate the deocclusion applicability of PACO in single-view 3D scene reconstruction and object recomposition.

HandBooster: Boosting 3D Hand-Mesh Reconstruction by Conditional Synthesis and Sampling of Hand-Object Interactions

Reconstructing 3D hand mesh robustly from a single image is very challenging, due to the lack of diversity in existing real-world datasets. While data synthesis helps relieve the issue, the syn-to-real gap still hinders its usage. In this work, we present HandBooster, a new approach to uplift the data diversity and boost the 3D hand-mesh reconstruction performance by training a conditional generative space on hand-object interactions and purposely sampling the space to synthesize effective data samples. First, we construct versatile content-aware conditions to guide a diffusion model to produce realistic images with diverse hand appearances, poses, views, and backgrounds; favorably, accurate 3D annotations are obtained for free. Then, we design a novel condition creator based on our similarity-aware distribution sampling strategies to deliberately find novel and realistic interaction poses that are distinctive from the training set. Equipped with our method, several baselines can be significantly improved beyond the SOTA on the HO3D and DexYCB benchmarks. Our code will be released on https://github.com/hxwork/HandBooster_Pytorch.

CNS-Edit: 3D Shape Editing via Coupled Neural Shape Optimization

This paper introduces a new approach based on a coupled representation and a neural volume optimization to implicitly perform 3D shape editing in latent space. This work has three innovations. First, we design the coupled neural shape (CNS) representation for supporting 3D shape editing. This representation includes a latent code, which captures high-level global semantics of the shape, and a 3D neural feature volume, which provides a spatial context to associate with the local shape changes given by the editing. Second, we formulate the coupled neural shape optimization procedure to co-optimize the two coupled components in the representation subject to the editing operation. Last, we offer various 3D shape editing operators, i.e., copy, resize, delete, and drag, and derive each into an objective for guiding the CNS optimization, such that we can iteratively co-optimize the latent code and neural feature volume to match the editing target. With our approach, we can achieve a rich variety of editing results that are not only aware of the shape semantics but are also not easy to achieve by existing approaches. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the strong capabilities of our approach over the state-of-the-art solutions.

SiMA-Hand: Boosting 3D Hand-Mesh Reconstruction by Single-to-Multi-View Adaptation

Estimating 3D hand mesh from RGB images is a longstanding track, in which occlusion is one of the most challenging problems. Existing attempts towards this task often fail when the occlusion dominates the image space. In this paper, we propose SiMA-Hand, aiming to boost the mesh reconstruction performance by Single-to-Multi-view Adaptation. First, we design a multi-view hand reconstructor to fuse information across multiple views by holistically adopting feature fusion at image, joint, and vertex levels. Then, we introduce a single-view hand reconstructor equipped with SiMA. Though taking only one view as input at inference, the shape and orientation features in the single-view reconstructor can be enriched by learning non-occluded knowledge from the extra views at training, enhancing the reconstruction precision on the occluded regions. We conduct experiments on the Dex-YCB and HanCo benchmarks with challenging object- and self-caused occlusion cases, manifesting that SiMA-Hand consistently achieves superior performance over the state of the arts. Code will be released on https://github.com/JoyboyWang/SiMA-Hand Pytorch.

Make-A-Shape: a Ten-Million-scale 3D Shape Model

Significant progress has been made in training large generative models for natural language and images. Yet, the advancement of 3D generative models is hindered by their substantial resource demands for training, along with inefficient, non-compact, and less expressive representations. This paper introduces Make-A-Shape, a new 3D generative model designed for efficient training on a vast scale, capable of utilizing 10 millions publicly-available shapes. Technical-wise, we first innovate a wavelet-tree representation to compactly encode shapes by formulating the subband coefficient filtering scheme to efficiently exploit coefficient relations. We then make the representation generatable by a diffusion model by devising the subband coefficients packing scheme to layout the representation in a low-resolution grid. Further, we derive the subband adaptive training strategy to train our model to effectively learn to generate coarse and detail wavelet coefficients. Last, we extend our framework to be controlled by additional input conditions to enable it to generate shapes from assorted modalities, e.g., single/multi-view images, point clouds, and low-resolution voxels. In our extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate various applications, such as unconditional generation, shape completion, and conditional generation on a wide range of modalities. Our approach not only surpasses the state of the art in delivering high-quality results but also efficiently generates shapes within a few seconds, often achieving this in just 2 seconds for most conditions.