Language Driven Occupancy Prediction

We introduce LOcc, an effective and generalizable framework for open-vocabulary occupancy (OVO) prediction. Previous approaches typically supervise the networks through coarse voxel-to-text correspondences via image features as intermediates or noisy and sparse correspondences from voxel-based model-view projections. To alleviate the inaccurate supervision, we propose a semantic transitive labeling pipeline to generate dense and finegrained 3D language occupancy ground truth. Our pipeline presents a feasible way to dig into the valuable semantic information of images, transferring text labels from images to LiDAR point clouds and utimately to voxels, to establish precise voxel-to-text correspondences. By replacing the original prediction head of supervised occupancy models with a geometry head for binary occupancy states and a language head for language features, LOcc effectively uses the generated language ground truth to guide the learning of 3D language volume. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our semantic transitive labeling pipeline can produce more accurate pseudo-labeled ground truth, diminishing labor-intensive human annotations. Additionally, we validate LOcc across various architectures, where all models consistently outperform state-ofthe-art zero-shot occupancy prediction approaches on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset. Notably, even based on the simpler BEVDet model, with an input resolution of 256 * 704,Occ-BEVDet achieves an mIoU of 20.29, surpassing previous approaches that rely on temporal images, higher-resolution inputs, or larger backbone networks. The code for the proposed method is available at https://github.com/pkqbajng/LOcc.

RestorerID: Towards Tuning-Free Face Restoration with ID Preservation

Blind face restoration has made great progress in producing high-quality and lifelike images. Yet it remains challenging to preserve the ID information especially when the degradation is heavy. Current reference-guided face restoration approaches either require face alignment or personalized test-tuning, which are unfaithful or time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a tuning-free method named RestorerID that incorporates ID preservation during face restoration. RestorerID is a diffusion model-based method that restores low-quality images with varying levels of degradation by using a single reference image. To achieve this, we propose a unified framework to combine the ID injection with the base blind face restoration model. In addition, we design a novel Face ID Rebalancing Adapter (FIR-Adapter) to tackle the problems of content unconsistency and contours misalignment that are caused by information conflicts between the low-quality input and reference image. Furthermore, by employing an Adaptive ID-Scale Adjusting strategy, RestorerID can produce superior restored images across various levels of degradation. Experimental results on the Celeb-Ref dataset and real-world scenarios demonstrate that RestorerID effectively delivers high-quality face restoration with ID preservation, achieving a superior performance compared to the test-tuning approaches and other reference-guided ones. The code of RestorerID is available at \url{https://github.com/YingJiacheng/RestorerID}.

SCPNet: Unsupervised Cross-modal Homography Estimation via Intra-modal Self-supervised Learning

We propose a novel unsupervised cross-modal homography estimation framework based on intra-modal Self-supervised learning, Correlation, and consistent feature map Projection, namely SCPNet. The concept of intra-modal self-supervised learning is first presented to facilitate the unsupervised cross-modal homography estimation. The correlation-based homography estimation network and the consistent feature map projection are combined to form the learnable architecture of SCPNet, boosting the unsupervised learning framework. SCPNet is the first to achieve effective unsupervised homography estimation on the satellite-map image pair cross-modal dataset, GoogleMap, under [-32,+32] offset on a 128x128 image, leading the supervised approach MHN by 14.0% of mean average corner error (MACE). We further conduct extensive experiments on several cross-modal/spectral and manually-made inconsistent datasets, on which SCPNet achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among unsupervised approaches, and owns 49.0%, 25.2%, 36.4%, and 10.7% lower MACEs than the supervised approach MHN. Source code is available at https://github.com/RM-Zhang/SCPNet.

Rethinking Early-Fusion Strategies for Improved Multispectral Object Detection

Most recent multispectral object detectors employ a two-branch structure to extract features from RGB and thermal images. While the two-branch structure achieves better performance than a single-branch structure, it overlooks inference efficiency. This conflict is increasingly aggressive, as recent works solely pursue higher performance rather than both performance and efficiency. In this paper, we address this issue by improving the performance of efficient single-branch structures. We revisit the reasons causing the performance gap between these structures. For the first time, we reveal the information interference problem in the naive early-fusion strategy adopted by previous single-branch structures. Besides, we find that the domain gap between multispectral images, and weak feature representation of the single-branch structure are also key obstacles for performance. Focusing on these three problems, we propose corresponding solutions, including a novel shape-priority early-fusion strategy, a weakly supervised learning method, and a core knowledge distillation technique. Experiments demonstrate that single-branch networks equipped with these three contributions achieve significant performance enhancements while retaining high efficiency. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/XueZ-phd/Efficient-RGB-T-Early-Fusion-Detection}.

SGDFormer: One-stage Transformer-based Architecture for Cross-Spectral Stereo Image Guided Denoising

Cross-spectral image guided denoising has shown its great potential in recovering clean images with rich details, such as using the near-infrared image to guide the denoising process of the visible one. To obtain such image pairs, a feasible and economical way is to employ a stereo system, which is widely used on mobile devices. Current works attempt to generate an aligned guidance image to handle the disparity between two images. However, due to occlusion, spectral differences and noise degradation, the aligned guidance image generally exists ghosting and artifacts, leading to an unsatisfactory denoised result. To address this issue, we propose a one-stage transformer-based architecture, named SGDFormer, for cross-spectral Stereo image Guided Denoising. The architecture integrates the correspondence modeling and feature fusion of stereo images into a unified network. Our transformer block contains a noise-robust cross-attention (NRCA) module and a spatially variant feature fusion (SVFF) module. The NRCA module captures the long-range correspondence of two images in a coarse-to-fine manner to alleviate the interference of noise. The SVFF module further enhances salient structures and suppresses harmful artifacts through dynamically selecting useful information. Thanks to the above design, our SGDFormer can restore artifact-free images with fine structures, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on various datasets. Additionally, our SGDFormer can be extended to handle other unaligned cross-model guided restoration tasks such as guided depth super-resolution.

TFDet: Target-aware Fusion for RGB-T Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian detection is a critical task in computer vision because of its role in ensuring traffic safety. However, existing methods that rely solely on RGB images suffer from performance degradation under low-light conditions due to the lack of useful information. To address this issue, recent multispectral detection approaches combine thermal images to provide complementary information. Nevertheless, these approaches have limitations such as the noisy fused feature maps and the loss of informative features. In this paper, we propose a novel target-aware fusion strategy for multispectral pedestrian detection, named TFDet. Unlike existing methods, TFDet enhances features by supervising the fusion process with a correlation-maximum loss function. Our fusion strategy highlights the pedestrian-related features while suppressing the unrelated ones. TFDet achieves state-of-the-art performances on both KAIST and LLVIP benchmarks, with a speed comparable to the previous state-of-the-art counterpart. Importantly, TFDet performs remarkably well under low-light conditions, which is a significant advancement for road safety.

I2P-Rec: Recognizing Images on Large-scale Point Cloud Maps through Bird's Eye View Projections

Place recognition is an important technique for autonomous cars to achieve full autonomy since it can provide an initial guess to online localization algorithms. Although current methods based on images or point clouds have achieved satisfactory performance, localizing the images on a large-scale point cloud map remains a fairly unexplored problem. This cross-modal matching task is challenging due to the difficulty in extracting consistent descriptors from images and point clouds. In this paper, we propose the I2P-Rec method to solve the problem by transforming the cross-modal data into the same modality. Specifically, we leverage on the recent success of depth estimation networks to recover point clouds from images. We then project the point clouds into Bird's Eye View (BEV) images. Using the BEV image as an intermediate representation, we extract global features with a Convolutional Neural Network followed by a NetVLAD layer to perform matching. We evaluate our method on the KITTI dataset. The experimental results show that, with only a small set of training data, I2P-Rec can achieve a recall rate at Top-1 over 90\%. Also, it can generalize well to unknown environments, achieving recall rates at Top-1\% over 80\% and 90\%, when localizing monocular images and stereo images on point cloud maps, respectively.

Iterative Deep Homography Estimation

We propose Iterative Homography Network, namely IHN, a new deep homography estimation architecture. Different from previous works that achieve iterative refinement by network cascading or untrainable IC-LK iterator, the iterator of IHN has tied weights and is completely trainable. IHN achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on several datasets including challenging scenes. We propose 2 versions of IHN: (1) IHN for static scenes, (2) IHN-mov for dynamic scenes with moving objects. Both versions can be arranged in 1-scale for efficiency or 2-scale for accuracy. We show that the basic 1-scale IHN already outperforms most of the existing methods. On a variety of datasets, the 2-scale IHN outperforms all competitors by a large gap. We introduce IHN-mov by producing an inlier mask to further improve the estimation accuracy of moving-objects scenes. We experimentally show that the iterative framework of IHN can achieve 95% error reduction while considerably saving network parameters. When processing sequential image pairs, IHN can achieve 32.7 fps, which is about 8x the speed of IC-LK iterator. Source code is available at https://github.com/imdumpl78/IHN.

ClonalNet: Classifying Better by Focusing on Confusing Categories

Existing neural classification networks predominately adopt one-hot encoding due to its simplicity in representing categorical data. However, the one-hot representation neglects inter-category correlations, which may result in poor generalization. Herein, we observe that a pre-trained baseline network has paid attention to the target image region even though it incorrectly predicts the image, revealing which categories confuse the baseline. This observation motivates us to consider inter-category correlations. Therefore, we propose a clonal network, named ClonalNet, which learns to discriminate between confusing categories derived from the pre-trained baseline. The ClonalNet architecture can be identical or smaller than the baseline architecture. When identical, ClonalNet is a clonal version of the baseline but does not share weights. When smaller, the training process of ClonalNet resembles that of the standard knowledge distillation. The difference from knowledge distillation is that we design a focusing-picking loss to optimize ClonalNet. This novel loss enforces ClonalNet to concentrate on confusing categories and make more confident predictions on ground-truth labels with the baseline reference. Experiments show that ClonalNet significantly outperforms baseline networks and knowledge distillation.

BVMatch: Lidar-based Place Recognition Using Bird's-eye View Images

Recognizing places using Lidar in large-scale environments is challenging due to the sparse nature of point cloud data. In this paper we present BVMatch, a Lidar-based frame-to-frame place recognition framework, that is capable of estimating 2D relative poses. Based on the assumption that the ground area can be approximated as a plane, we uniformly discretize the ground area into grids and project 3D Lidar scans to bird's-eye view (BV) images. We further use a bank of Log-Gabor filters to build a maximum index map (MIM) that encodes the orientation information of the structures in the images. We analyze the orientation characteristics of MIM theoretically and introduce a novel descriptor called bird's-eye view feature transform (BVFT). The proposed BVFT is insensitive to rotation and intensity variations of BV images. Leveraging the BVFT descriptors, we unify the Lidar place recognition and pose estimation tasks into the BVMatch framework. The experiments conducted on three large-scale datasets show that BVMatch outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both recall rate of place recognition and pose estimation accuracy.