A Benchmark Dataset for Collaborative SLAM in Service Environments

As service environments have become diverse, they have started to demand complicated tasks that are difficult for a single robot to complete. This change has led to an interest in multiple robots instead of a single robot. C-SLAM, as a fundamental technique for multiple service robots, needs to handle diverse challenges such as homogeneous scenes and dynamic objects to ensure that robots operate smoothly and perform their tasks safely. However, existing C-SLAM datasets do not include the various indoor service environments with the aforementioned challenges. To close this gap, we introduce a new multi-modal C-SLAM dataset for multiple service robots in various indoor service environments, called C-SLAM dataset in Service Environments (CSE). We use the NVIDIA Isaac Sim to generate data in various indoor service environments with the challenges that may occur in real-world service environments. By using simulation, we can provide accurate and precisely time-synchronized sensor data, such as stereo RGB, stereo depth, IMU, and ground truth (GT) poses. We configure three common indoor service environments (Hospital, Office, and Warehouse), each of which includes various dynamic objects that perform motions suitable to each environment. In addition, we drive three robots to mimic the actions of real service robots. Through these factors, we generate a more realistic C-SLAM dataset for multiple service robots. We demonstrate our dataset by evaluating diverse state-of-the-art single-robot SLAM and multi-robot SLAM methods. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/vision3d-lab/CSE_Dataset.

VPOcc: Exploiting Vanishing Point for Monocular 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction

Monocular 3D semantic occupancy prediction is becoming important in robot vision due to the compactness of using a single RGB camera. However, existing methods often do not adequately account for camera perspective geometry, resulting in information imbalance along the depth range of the image. To address this issue, we propose a vanishing point (VP) guided monocular 3D semantic occupancy prediction framework named VPOcc. Our framework consists of three novel modules utilizing VP. First, in the VPZoomer module, we initially utilize VP in feature extraction to achieve information balanced feature extraction across the scene by generating a zoom-in image based on VP. Second, we perform perspective geometry-aware feature aggregation by sampling points towards VP using a VP-guided cross-attention (VPCA) module. Finally, we create an information-balanced feature volume by effectively fusing original and zoom-in voxel feature volumes with a balanced feature volume fusion (BVFV) module. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for both IoU and mIoU on SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI360. These results are obtained by effectively addressing the information imbalance in images through the utilization of VP. Our code will be available at www.github.com/anonymous.

DITTO: Dual and Integrated Latent Topologies for Implicit 3D Reconstruction

We propose a novel concept of dual and integrated latent topologies (DITTO in short) for implicit 3D reconstruction from noisy and sparse point clouds. Most existing methods predominantly focus on single latent type, such as point or grid latents. In contrast, the proposed DITTO leverages both point and grid latents (i.e., dual latent) to enhance their strengths, the stability of grid latents and the detail-rich capability of point latents. Concretely, DITTO consists of dual latent encoder and integrated implicit decoder. In the dual latent encoder, a dual latent layer, which is the key module block composing the encoder, refines both latents in parallel, maintaining their distinct shapes and enabling recursive interaction. Notably, a newly proposed dynamic sparse point transformer within the dual latent layer effectively refines point latents. Then, the integrated implicit decoder systematically combines these refined latents, achieving high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods on object- and scene-level datasets, especially in thin and detailed structures.

AiSDF: Structure-aware Neural Signed Distance Fields in Indoor Scenes

Indoor scenes we are living in are visually homogenous or textureless, while they inherently have structural forms and provide enough structural priors for 3D scene reconstruction. Motivated by this fact, we propose a structure-aware online signed distance fields (SDF) reconstruction framework in indoor scenes, especially under the Atlanta world (AW) assumption. Thus, we dub this incremental SDF reconstruction for AW as AiSDF. Within the online framework, we infer the underlying Atlanta structure of a given scene and then estimate planar surfel regions supporting the Atlanta structure. This Atlanta-aware surfel representation provides an explicit planar map for a given scene. In addition, based on these Atlanta planar surfel regions, we adaptively sample and constrain the structural regularity in the SDF reconstruction, which enables us to improve the reconstruction quality by maintaining a high-level structure while enhancing the details of a given scene. We evaluate the proposed AiSDF on the ScanNet and ReplicaCAD datasets, where we demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of reconstructing fine details of objects implicitly, as well as structures explicitly in room-scale scenes.

ContactGen: Contact-Guided Interactive 3D Human Generation for Partners

Among various interactions between humans, such as eye contact and gestures, physical interactions by contact can act as an essential moment in understanding human behaviors. Inspired by this fact, given a 3D partner human with the desired interaction label, we introduce a new task of 3D human generation in terms of physical contact. Unlike previous works of interacting with static objects or scenes, a given partner human can have diverse poses and different contact regions according to the type of interaction. To handle this challenge, we propose a novel method of generating interactive 3D humans for a given partner human based on a guided diffusion framework. Specifically, we newly present a contact prediction module that adaptively estimates potential contact regions between two input humans according to the interaction label. Using the estimated potential contact regions as complementary guidances, we dynamically enforce ContactGen to generate interactive 3D humans for a given partner human within a guided diffusion model. We demonstrate ContactGen on the CHI3D dataset, where our method generates physically plausible and diverse poses compared to comparison methods.

FishRecGAN: An End to End GAN Based Network for Fisheye Rectification and Calibration

We propose an end-to-end deep learning approach to rectify fisheye images and simultaneously calibrate camera intrinsic and distortion parameters. Our method consists of two parts: a Quick Image Rectification Module developed with a Pix2Pix GAN and Wasserstein GAN (W-Pix2PixGAN), and a Calibration Module with a CNN architecture. Our Quick Rectification Network performs robust rectification with good resolution, making it suitable for constant calibration in camera-based surveillance equipment. To achieve high-quality calibration, we use the straightened output from the Quick Rectification Module as a guidance-like semantic feature map for the Calibration Module to learn the geometric relationship between the straightened feature and the distorted feature. We train and validate our method with a large synthesized dataset labeled with well-simulated parameters applied to a perspective image dataset. Our solution has achieved robust performance in high-resolution with a significant PSNR value of 22.343.

Unified 3D Mesh Recovery of Humans and Animals by Learning Animal Exercise

We propose an end-to-end unified 3D mesh recovery of humans and quadruped animals trained in a weakly-supervised way. Unlike recent work focusing on a single target class only, we aim to recover 3D mesh of broader classes with a single multi-task model. However, there exists no dataset that can directly enable multi-task learning due to the absence of both human and animal annotations for a single object, e.g., a human image does not have animal pose annotations; thus, we have to devise a new way to exploit heterogeneous datasets. To make the unstable disjoint multi-task learning jointly trainable, we propose to exploit the morphological similarity between humans and animals, motivated by animal exercise where humans imitate animal poses. We realize the morphological similarity by semantic correspondences, called sub-keypoint, which enables joint training of human and animal mesh regression branches. Besides, we propose class-sensitive regularization methods to avoid a mean-shape bias and to improve the distinctiveness across multi-classes. Our method performs favorably against recent uni-modal models on various human and animal datasets while being far more compact.

Volumetric Propagation Network: Stereo-LiDAR Fusion for Long-Range Depth Estimation

Stereo-LiDAR fusion is a promising task in that we can utilize two different types of 3D perceptions for practical usage -- dense 3D information (stereo cameras) and highly-accurate sparse point clouds (LiDAR). However, due to their different modalities and structures, the method of aligning sensor data is the key for successful sensor fusion. To this end, we propose a geometry-aware stereo-LiDAR fusion network for long-range depth estimation, called volumetric propagation network. The key idea of our network is to exploit sparse and accurate point clouds as a cue for guiding correspondences of stereo images in a unified 3D volume space. Unlike existing fusion strategies, we directly embed point clouds into the volume, which enables us to propagate valid information into nearby voxels in the volume, and to reduce the uncertainty of correspondences. Thus, it allows us to fuse two different input modalities seamlessly and regress a long-range depth map. Our fusion is further enhanced by a newly proposed feature extraction layer for point clouds guided by images: FusionConv. FusionConv extracts point cloud features that consider both semantic (2D image domain) and geometric (3D domain) relations and aid fusion at the volume. Our network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI and the Virtual-KITTI datasets among recent stereo-LiDAR fusion methods.

Stereo Object Matching Network

This paper presents a stereo object matching method that exploits both 2D contextual information from images as well as 3D object-level information. Unlike existing stereo matching methods that exclusively focus on the pixel-level correspondence between stereo images within a volumetric space (i.e., cost volume), we exploit this volumetric structure in a different manner. The cost volume explicitly encompasses 3D information along its disparity axis, therefore it is a privileged structure that can encapsulate the 3D contextual information from objects. However, it is not straightforward since the disparity values map the 3D metric space in a non-linear fashion. Thus, we present two novel strategies to handle 3D objectness in the cost volume space: selective sampling (RoISelect) and 2D-3D fusion (fusion-by-occupancy), which allow us to seamlessly incorporate 3D object-level information and achieve accurate depth performance near the object boundary regions. Our depth estimation achieves competitive performance in the KITTI dataset and the Virtual-KITTI 2.0 dataset.

Non-Local Spatial Propagation Network for Depth Completion

In this paper, we propose a robust and efficient end-to-end non-local spatial propagation network for depth completion. The proposed network takes RGB and sparse depth images as inputs and estimates non-local neighbors and their affinities of each pixel, as well as an initial depth map with pixel-wise confidences. The initial depth prediction is then iteratively refined by its confidence and non-local spatial propagation procedure based on the predicted non-local neighbors and corresponding affinities. Unlike previous algorithms that utilize fixed-local neighbors, the proposed algorithm effectively avoids irrelevant local neighbors and concentrates on relevant non-local neighbors during propagation. In addition, we introduce a learnable affinity normalization to better learn the affinity combinations compared to conventional methods. The proposed algorithm is inherently robust to the mixed-depth problem on depth boundaries, which is one of the major issues for existing depth estimation/completion algorithms. Experimental results on indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is superior to conventional algorithms in terms of depth completion accuracy and robustness to the mixed-depth problem. Our implementation is publicly available on the project page.