Zhejiang University
Abstract:In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view stereo (MVS) framework that gets rid of the depth range prior. Unlike recent prior-free MVS methods that work in a pair-wise manner, our method simultaneously considers all the source images. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-view Disparity Attention (MDA) module to aggregate long-range context information within and across multi-view images. Considering the asymmetry of the epipolar disparity flow, the key to our method lies in accurately modeling multi-view geometric constraints. We integrate pose embedding to encapsulate information such as multi-view camera poses, providing implicit geometric constraints for multi-view disparity feature fusion dominated by attention. Additionally, we construct corresponding hidden states for each source image due to significant differences in the observation quality of the same pixel in the reference frame across multiple source frames. We explicitly estimate the quality of the current pixel corresponding to sampled points on the epipolar line of the source image and dynamically update hidden states through the uncertainty estimation module. Extensive results on the DTU dataset and Tanks&Temple benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at our project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/GD-PoseMVS/.
Abstract:We tackle the efficiency problem of learning local feature matching. Recent advancements have given rise to purely CNN-based and transformer-based approaches, each augmented with deep learning techniques. While CNN-based methods often excel in matching speed, transformer-based methods tend to provide more accurate matches. We propose an efficient transformer-based network architecture for local feature matching. This technique is built on constructing multiple homography hypotheses to approximate the continuous correspondence in the real world and uni-directional cross-attention to accelerate the refinement. On the YFCC100M dataset, our matching accuracy is competitive with LoFTR, a state-of-the-art transformer-based architecture, while the inference speed is boosted to 4 times, even outperforming the CNN-based methods. Comprehensive evaluations on other open datasets such as Megadepth, ScanNet, and HPatches demonstrate our method's efficacy, highlighting its potential to significantly enhance a wide array of downstream applications.
Abstract:Recent advances in event-based vision suggest that these systems complement traditional cameras by providing continuous observation without frame rate limitations and a high dynamic range, making them well-suited for correspondence tasks such as optical flow and point tracking. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive benchmarks for correspondence tasks that include both event data and images. To address this gap, we propose BlinkVision, a large-scale and diverse benchmark with multiple modalities and dense correspondence annotations. BlinkVision offers several valuable features: 1) Rich modalities: It includes both event data and RGB images. 2) Extensive annotations: It provides dense per-pixel annotations covering optical flow, scene flow, and point tracking. 3) Large vocabulary: It contains 410 everyday categories, sharing common classes with popular 2D and 3D datasets like LVIS and ShapeNet. 4) Naturalistic: It delivers photorealistic data and covers various naturalistic factors, such as camera shake and deformation. BlinkVision enables extensive benchmarks on three types of correspondence tasks (optical flow, point tracking, and scene flow estimation) for both image-based and event-based methods, offering new observations, practices, and insights for future research. The benchmark website is https://www.blinkvision.net/.
Abstract:Feature tracking is crucial for, structure from motion (SFM), simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), object tracking and various computer vision tasks. Event cameras, known for their high temporal resolution and ability to capture asynchronous changes, have gained significant attention for their potential in feature tracking, especially in challenging conditions. However, event cameras lack the fine-grained texture information that conventional cameras provide, leading to error accumulation in tracking. To address this, we propose a novel framework, BlinkTrack, which integrates event data with RGB images for high-frequency feature tracking. Our method extends the traditional Kalman filter into a learning-based framework, utilizing differentiable Kalman filters in both event and image branches. This approach improves single-modality tracking, resolves ambiguities, and supports asynchronous data fusion. We also introduce new synthetic and augmented datasets to better evaluate our model. Experimental results indicate that BlinkTrack significantly outperforms existing event-based methods, exceeding 100 FPS with preprocessed event data and 80 FPS with multi-modality data.
Abstract:Visual localization plays an important role in the applications of Augmented Reality (AR), which enable AR devices to obtain their 6-DoF pose in the pre-build map in order to render virtual content in real scenes. However, most existing approaches can not perform novel view rendering and require large storage capacities for maps. To overcome these limitations, we propose an efficient visual localization method capable of high-quality rendering with fewer parameters. Specifically, our approach leverages 3D Gaussian primitives as the scene representation. To ensure precise 2D-3D correspondences for pose estimation, we develop an unbiased 3D scene-specific descriptor decoder for Gaussian primitives, distilled from a constructed feature volume. Additionally, we introduce a salient 3D landmark selection algorithm that selects a suitable primitive subset based on the saliency score for localization. We further regularize key Gaussian primitives to prevent anisotropic effects, which also improves localization performance. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior or comparable rendering and localization performance to state-of-the-art implicit-based visual localization approaches. Project page: \href{https://zju3dv.github.io/splatloc}{https://zju3dv.github.io/splatloc}.
Abstract:We present a novel method for recovering world-grounded human motion from monocular video. The main challenge lies in the ambiguity of defining the world coordinate system, which varies between sequences. Previous approaches attempt to alleviate this issue by predicting relative motion in an autoregressive manner, but are prone to accumulating errors. Instead, we propose estimating human poses in a novel Gravity-View (GV) coordinate system, which is defined by the world gravity and the camera view direction. The proposed GV system is naturally gravity-aligned and uniquely defined for each video frame, largely reducing the ambiguity of learning image-pose mapping. The estimated poses can be transformed back to the world coordinate system using camera rotations, forming a global motion sequence. Additionally, the per-frame estimation avoids error accumulation in the autoregressive methods. Experiments on in-the-wild benchmarks demonstrate that our method recovers more realistic motion in both the camera space and world-grounded settings, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/gvhmr/.
Abstract:Neural implicit reconstruction via volume rendering has demonstrated its effectiveness in recovering dense 3D surfaces. However, it is non-trivial to simultaneously recover meticulous geometry and preserve smoothness across regions with differing characteristics. To address this issue, previous methods typically employ geometric priors, which are often constrained by the performance of the prior models. In this paper, we propose ND-SDF, which learns a Normal Ddeflection field to represent the angular deviation between the scene normal and the prior normal. Unlike previous methods that uniformly apply geometric priors on all samples, introducing significant bias in accuracy, our proposed normal deflection field dynamically learns and adapts the utilization of samples based on their specific characteristics, thereby improving both the accuracy and effectiveness of the model. Our method not only obtains smooth weakly textured regions such as walls and floors but also preserves the geometric details of complex structures. In addition, we introduce a novel ray sampling strategy based on the deflection angle to facilitate the unbiased rendering process, which significantly improves the quality and accuracy of intricate surfaces, especially on thin structures. Consistent improvements on various challenging datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Abstract:In recent years, the paradigm of neural implicit representations has gained substantial attention in the field of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). However, a notable gap exists in the existing approaches when it comes to scene understanding. In this paper, we introduce NIS-SLAM, an efficient neural implicit semantic RGB-D SLAM system, that leverages a pre-trained 2D segmentation network to learn consistent semantic representations. Specifically, for high-fidelity surface reconstruction and spatial consistent scene understanding, we combine high-frequency multi-resolution tetrahedron-based features and low-frequency positional encoding as the implicit scene representations. Besides, to address the inconsistency of 2D segmentation results from multiple views, we propose a fusion strategy that integrates the semantic probabilities from previous non-keyframes into keyframes to achieve consistent semantic learning. Furthermore, we implement a confidence-based pixel sampling and progressive optimization weight function for robust camera tracking. Extensive experimental results on various datasets show the better or more competitive performance of our system when compared to other existing neural dense implicit RGB-D SLAM approaches. Finally, we also show that our approach can be used in augmented reality applications. Project page: \href{https://zju3dv.github.io/nis_slam}{https://zju3dv.github.io/nis\_slam}.
Abstract:Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has attracted widespread attention due to its high-quality rendering, and ultra-fast training and rendering speed. However, due to the unstructured and irregular nature of Gaussian point clouds, it is difficult to guarantee geometric reconstruction accuracy and multi-view consistency simply by relying on image reconstruction loss. Although many studies on surface reconstruction based on 3DGS have emerged recently, the quality of their meshes is generally unsatisfactory. To address this problem, we propose a fast planar-based Gaussian splatting reconstruction representation (PGSR) to achieve high-fidelity surface reconstruction while ensuring high-quality rendering. Specifically, we first introduce an unbiased depth rendering method, which directly renders the distance from the camera origin to the Gaussian plane and the corresponding normal map based on the Gaussian distribution of the point cloud, and divides the two to obtain the unbiased depth. We then introduce single-view geometric, multi-view photometric, and geometric regularization to preserve global geometric accuracy. We also propose a camera exposure compensation model to cope with scenes with large illumination variations. Experiments on indoor and outdoor scenes show that our method achieves fast training and rendering while maintaining high-fidelity rendering and geometric reconstruction, outperforming 3DGS-based and NeRF-based methods.
Abstract:Forecasting future scenarios in dynamic environments is essential for intelligent decision-making and navigation, a challenge yet to be fully realized in computer vision and robotics. Traditional approaches like video prediction and novel-view synthesis either lack the ability to forecast from arbitrary viewpoints or to predict temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce GaussianPrediction, a novel framework that empowers 3D Gaussian representations with dynamic scene modeling and future scenario synthesis in dynamic environments. GaussianPrediction can forecast future states from any viewpoint, using video observations of dynamic scenes. To this end, we first propose a 3D Gaussian canonical space with deformation modeling to capture the appearance and geometry of dynamic scenes, and integrate the lifecycle property into Gaussians for irreversible deformations. To make the prediction feasible and efficient, a concentric motion distillation approach is developed by distilling the scene motion with key points. Finally, a Graph Convolutional Network is employed to predict the motions of key points, enabling the rendering of photorealistic images of future scenarios. Our framework shows outstanding performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its efficacy in predicting and rendering future environments.