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Jul 29

Search-TTA: A Multimodal Test-Time Adaptation Framework for Visual Search in the Wild

To perform autonomous visual search for environmental monitoring, a robot may leverage satellite imagery as a prior map. This can help inform coarse, high-level search and exploration strategies, even when such images lack sufficient resolution to allow fine-grained, explicit visual recognition of targets. However, there are some challenges to overcome with using satellite images to direct visual search. For one, targets that are unseen in satellite images are underrepresented (compared to ground images) in most existing datasets, and thus vision models trained on these datasets fail to reason effectively based on indirect visual cues. Furthermore, approaches which leverage large Vision Language Models (VLMs) for generalization may yield inaccurate outputs due to hallucination, leading to inefficient search. To address these challenges, we introduce Search-TTA, a multimodal test-time adaptation framework that can accept text and/or image input. First, we pretrain a remote sensing image encoder to align with CLIP's visual encoder to output probability distributions of target presence used for visual search. Second, our framework dynamically refines CLIP's predictions during search using a test-time adaptation mechanism. Through a feedback loop inspired by Spatial Poisson Point Processes, gradient updates (weighted by uncertainty) are used to correct (potentially inaccurate) predictions and improve search performance. To validate Search-TTA's performance, we curate a visual search dataset based on internet-scale ecological data. We find that Search-TTA improves planner performance by up to 9.7%, particularly in cases with poor initial CLIP predictions. It also achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art VLMs. Finally, we deploy Search-TTA on a real UAV via hardware-in-the-loop testing, by simulating its operation within a large-scale simulation that provides onboard sensing.

  • 11 authors
·
May 16, 2025 1

BEV-CV: Birds-Eye-View Transform for Cross-View Geo-Localisation

Cross-view image matching for geo-localisation is a challenging problem due to the significant visual difference between aerial and ground-level viewpoints. The method provides localisation capabilities from geo-referenced images, eliminating the need for external devices or costly equipment. This enhances the capacity of agents to autonomously determine their position, navigate, and operate effectively in GNSS-denied environments. Current research employs a variety of techniques to reduce the domain gap such as applying polar transforms to aerial images or synthesising between perspectives. However, these approaches generally rely on having a 360{\deg} field of view, limiting real-world feasibility. We propose BEV-CV, an approach introducing two key novelties with a focus on improving the real-world viability of cross-view geo-localisation. Firstly bringing ground-level images into a semantic Birds-Eye-View before matching embeddings, allowing for direct comparison with aerial image representations. Secondly, we adapt datasets into application realistic format - limited Field-of-View images aligned to vehicle direction. BEV-CV achieves state-of-the-art recall accuracies, improving Top-1 rates of 70{\deg} crops of CVUSA and CVACT by 23% and 24% respectively. Also decreasing computational requirements by reducing floating point operations to below previous works, and decreasing embedding dimensionality by 33% - together allowing for faster localisation capabilities.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 23, 2023

Object Pose Estimation with Statistical Guarantees: Conformal Keypoint Detection and Geometric Uncertainty Propagation

The two-stage object pose estimation paradigm first detects semantic keypoints on the image and then estimates the 6D pose by minimizing reprojection errors. Despite performing well on standard benchmarks, existing techniques offer no provable guarantees on the quality and uncertainty of the estimation. In this paper, we inject two fundamental changes, namely conformal keypoint detection and geometric uncertainty propagation, into the two-stage paradigm and propose the first pose estimator that endows an estimation with provable and computable worst-case error bounds. On one hand, conformal keypoint detection applies the statistical machinery of inductive conformal prediction to convert heuristic keypoint detections into circular or elliptical prediction sets that cover the groundtruth keypoints with a user-specified marginal probability (e.g., 90%). Geometric uncertainty propagation, on the other, propagates the geometric constraints on the keypoints to the 6D object pose, leading to a Pose UnceRtainty SEt (PURSE) that guarantees coverage of the groundtruth pose with the same probability. The PURSE, however, is a nonconvex set that does not directly lead to estimated poses and uncertainties. Therefore, we develop RANdom SAmple averaGing (RANSAG) to compute an average pose and apply semidefinite relaxation to upper bound the worst-case errors between the average pose and the groundtruth. On the LineMOD Occlusion dataset we demonstrate: (i) the PURSE covers the groundtruth with valid probabilities; (ii) the worst-case error bounds provide correct uncertainty quantification; and (iii) the average pose achieves better or similar accuracy as representative methods based on sparse keypoints.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 21, 2023

Through the Haze: a Non-Convex Approach to Blind Gain Calibration for Linear Random Sensing Models

Computational sensing strategies often suffer from calibration errors in the physical implementation of their ideal sensing models. Such uncertainties are typically addressed by using multiple, accurately chosen training signals to recover the missing information on the sensing model, an approach that can be resource-consuming and cumbersome. Conversely, blind calibration does not employ any training signal, but corresponds to a bilinear inverse problem whose algorithmic solution is an open issue. We here address blind calibration as a non-convex problem for linear random sensing models, in which we aim to recover an unknown signal from its projections on sub-Gaussian random vectors, each subject to an unknown positive multiplicative factor (or gain). To solve this optimisation problem we resort to projected gradient descent starting from a suitable, carefully chosen initialisation point. An analysis of this algorithm allows us to show that it converges to the exact solution provided a sample complexity requirement is met, i.e., relating convergence to the amount of information collected during the sensing process. Interestingly, we show that this requirement grows linearly (up to log factors) in the number of unknowns of the problem. This sample complexity is found both in absence of prior information, as well as when subspace priors are available for both the signal and gains, allowing a further reduction of the number of observations required for our recovery guarantees to hold. Moreover, in the presence of noise we show how our descent algorithm yields a solution whose accuracy degrades gracefully with the amount of noise affecting the measurements. Finally, we present some numerical experiments in an imaging context, where our algorithm allows for a simple solution to blind calibration of the gains in a sensor array.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 27, 2016

Video2BEV: Transforming Drone Videos to BEVs for Video-based Geo-localization

Existing approaches to drone visual geo-localization predominantly adopt the image-based setting, where a single drone-view snapshot is matched with images from other platforms. Such task formulation, however, underutilizes the inherent video output of the drone and is sensitive to occlusions and viewpoint disparity. To address these limitations, we formulate a new video-based drone geo-localization task and propose the Video2BEV paradigm. This paradigm transforms the video into a Bird's Eye View (BEV), simplifying the subsequent inter-platform matching process. In particular, we employ Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct a 3D scene and obtain the BEV projection. Different from the existing transform methods, \eg, polar transform, our BEVs preserve more fine-grained details without significant distortion. To facilitate the discriminative intra-platform representation learning, our Video2BEV paradigm also incorporates a diffusion-based module for generating hard negative samples. To validate our approach, we introduce UniV, a new video-based geo-localization dataset that extends the image-based University-1652 dataset. UniV features flight paths at 30^circ and 45^circ elevation angles with increased frame rates of up to 10 frames per second (FPS). Extensive experiments on the UniV dataset show that our Video2BEV paradigm achieves competitive recall rates and outperforms conventional video-based methods. Compared to other competitive methods, our proposed approach exhibits robustness at lower elevations with more occlusions.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 19, 2024

Enhancing Worldwide Image Geolocation by Ensembling Satellite-Based Ground-Level Attribute Predictors

Geolocating images of a ground-level scene entails estimating the location on Earth where the picture was taken, in absence of GPS or other location metadata. Typically, methods are evaluated by measuring the Great Circle Distance (GCD) between a predicted location and ground truth. However, this measurement is limited because it only evaluates a single point, not estimates of regions or score heatmaps. This is especially important in applications to rural, wilderness and under-sampled areas, where finding the exact location may not be possible, and when used in aggregate systems that progressively narrow down locations. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric, Recall vs Area (RvA), which measures the accuracy of estimated distributions of locations. RvA treats image geolocation results similarly to document retrieval, measuring recall as a function of area: For a ranked list of (possibly non-contiguous) predicted regions, we measure the accumulated area required for the region to contain the ground truth coordinate. This produces a curve similar to a precision-recall curve, where "precision" is replaced by square kilometers area, allowing evaluation of performance for different downstream search area budgets. Following directly from this view of the problem, we then examine a simple ensembling approach to global-scale image geolocation, which incorporates information from multiple sources to help address domain shift, and can readily incorporate multiple models, attribute predictors, and data sources. We study its effectiveness by combining the geolocation models GeoEstimation and the current SOTA GeoCLIP, with attribute predictors based on ORNL LandScan and ESA-CCI Land Cover. We find significant improvements in image geolocation for areas that are under-represented in the training set, particularly non-urban areas, on both Im2GPS3k and Street View images.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024

PersPose: 3D Human Pose Estimation with Perspective Encoding and Perspective Rotation

Monocular 3D human pose estimation (HPE) methods estimate the 3D positions of joints from individual images. Existing 3D HPE approaches often use the cropped image alone as input for their models. However, the relative depths of joints cannot be accurately estimated from cropped images without the corresponding camera intrinsics, which determine the perspective relationship between 3D objects and the cropped images. In this work, we introduce Perspective Encoding (PE) to encode the camera intrinsics of the cropped images. Moreover, since the human subject can appear anywhere within the original image, the perspective relationship between the 3D scene and the cropped image differs significantly, which complicates model fitting. Additionally, the further the human subject deviates from the image center, the greater the perspective distortions in the cropped image. To address these issues, we propose Perspective Rotation (PR), a transformation applied to the original image that centers the human subject, thereby reducing perspective distortions and alleviating the difficulty of model fitting. By incorporating PE and PR, we propose a novel 3D HPE framework, PersPose. Experimental results demonstrate that PersPose achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, and Human3.6M datasets. For example, on the in-the-wild dataset 3DPW, PersPose achieves an MPJPE of 60.1 mm, 7.54% lower than the previous SOTA approach. Code is available at: https://github.com/KenAdamsJoseph/PersPose.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 24, 2025

Self-Supervised Learning of Depth and Camera Motion from 360° Videos

As 360{\deg} cameras become prevalent in many autonomous systems (e.g., self-driving cars and drones), efficient 360{\deg} perception becomes more and more important. We propose a novel self-supervised learning approach for predicting the omnidirectional depth and camera motion from a 360{\deg} video. In particular, starting from the SfMLearner, which is designed for cameras with normal field-of-view, we introduce three key features to process 360{\deg} images efficiently. Firstly, we convert each image from equirectangular projection to cubic projection in order to avoid image distortion. In each network layer, we use Cube Padding (CP), which pads intermediate features from adjacent faces, to avoid image boundaries. Secondly, we propose a novel "spherical" photometric consistency constraint on the whole viewing sphere. In this way, no pixel will be projected outside the image boundary which typically happens in images with normal field-of-view. Finally, rather than naively estimating six independent camera motions (i.e., naively applying SfM-Learner to each face on a cube), we propose a novel camera pose consistency loss to ensure the estimated camera motions reaching consensus. To train and evaluate our approach, we collect a new PanoSUNCG dataset containing a large amount of 360{\deg} videos with groundtruth depth and camera motion. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art depth prediction and camera motion estimation on PanoSUNCG with faster inference speed comparing to equirectangular. In real-world indoor videos, our approach can also achieve qualitatively reasonable depth prediction by acquiring model pre-trained on PanoSUNCG.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 13, 2018

Semantic-decoupled Spatial Partition Guided Point-supervised Oriented Object Detection

Recent remote sensing tech advancements drive imagery growth, making oriented object detection rapid development, yet hindered by labor-intensive annotation for high-density scenes. Oriented object detection with point supervision offers a cost-effective solution for densely packed scenes in remote sensing, yet existing methods suffer from inadequate sample assignment and instance confusion due to rigid rule-based designs. To address this, we propose SSP (Semantic-decoupled Spatial Partition), a unified framework that synergizes rule-driven prior injection and data-driven label purification. Specifically, SSP introduces two core innovations: 1) Pixel-level Spatial Partition-based Sample Assignment, which compactly estimates the upper and lower bounds of object scales and mines high-quality positive samples and hard negative samples through spatial partitioning of pixel maps. 2) Semantic Spatial Partition-based Box Extraction, which derives instances from spatial partitions modulated by semantic maps and reliably converts them into bounding boxes to form pseudo-labels for supervising the learning of downstream detectors. Experiments on DOTA-v1.0 and others demonstrate SSP\' s superiority: it achieves 45.78% mAP under point supervision, outperforming SOTA method PointOBB-v2 by 4.10%. Furthermore, when integrated with ORCNN and ReDet architectures, the SSP framework achieves mAP values of 47.86% and 48.50%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/antxinyuan/ssp.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

Machine learning-driven Anomaly Detection and Forecasting for Euclid Space Telescope Operations

State-of-the-art space science missions increasingly rely on automation due to spacecraft complexity and the costs of human oversight. The high volume of data, including scientific and telemetry data, makes manual inspection challenging. Machine learning offers significant potential to meet these demands. The Euclid space telescope, in its survey phase since February 2024, exemplifies this shift. Euclid's success depends on accurate monitoring and interpretation of housekeeping telemetry and science-derived data. Thousands of telemetry parameters, monitored as time series, may or may not impact the quality of scientific data. These parameters have complex interdependencies, often due to physical relationships (e.g., proximity of temperature sensors). Optimising science operations requires careful anomaly detection and identification of hidden parameter states. Moreover, understanding the interactions between known anomalies and physical quantities is crucial yet complex, as related parameters may display anomalies with varied timing and intensity. We address these challenges by analysing temperature anomalies in Euclid's telemetry from February to August 2024, focusing on eleven temperature parameters and 35 covariates. We use a predictive XGBoost model to forecast temperatures based on historical values, detecting anomalies as deviations from predictions. A second XGBoost model predicts anomalies from covariates, capturing their relationships to temperature anomalies. We identify the top three anomalies per parameter and analyse their interactions with covariates using SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations), enabling rapid, automated analysis of complex parameter relationships. Our method demonstrates how machine learning can enhance telemetry monitoring, offering scalable solutions for other missions with similar data challenges.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 8, 2024

Robust Frame-to-Frame Camera Rotation Estimation in Crowded Scenes

We present an approach to estimating camera rotation in crowded, real-world scenes from handheld monocular video. While camera rotation estimation is a well-studied problem, no previous methods exhibit both high accuracy and acceptable speed in this setting. Because the setting is not addressed well by other datasets, we provide a new dataset and benchmark, with high-accuracy, rigorously verified ground truth, on 17 video sequences. Methods developed for wide baseline stereo (e.g., 5-point methods) perform poorly on monocular video. On the other hand, methods used in autonomous driving (e.g., SLAM) leverage specific sensor setups, specific motion models, or local optimization strategies (lagging batch processing) and do not generalize well to handheld video. Finally, for dynamic scenes, commonly used robustification techniques like RANSAC require large numbers of iterations, and become prohibitively slow. We introduce a novel generalization of the Hough transform on SO(3) to efficiently and robustly find the camera rotation most compatible with optical flow. Among comparably fast methods, ours reduces error by almost 50\% over the next best, and is more accurate than any method, irrespective of speed. This represents a strong new performance point for crowded scenes, an important setting for computer vision. The code and the dataset are available at https://fabiendelattre.com/robust-rotation-estimation.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 15, 2023

AirShot: Efficient Few-Shot Detection for Autonomous Exploration

Few-shot object detection has drawn increasing attention in the field of robotic exploration, where robots are required to find unseen objects with a few online provided examples. Despite recent efforts have been made to yield online processing capabilities, slow inference speeds of low-powered robots fail to meet the demands of real-time detection-making them impractical for autonomous exploration. Existing methods still face performance and efficiency challenges, mainly due to unreliable features and exhaustive class loops. In this work, we propose a new paradigm AirShot, and discover that, by fully exploiting the valuable correlation map, AirShot can result in a more robust and faster few-shot object detection system, which is more applicable to robotics community. The core module Top Prediction Filter (TPF) can operate on multi-scale correlation maps in both the training and inference stages. During training, TPF supervises the generation of a more representative correlation map, while during inference, it reduces looping iterations by selecting top-ranked classes, thus cutting down on computational costs with better performance. Surprisingly, this dual functionality exhibits general effectiveness and efficiency on various off-the-shelf models. Exhaustive experiments on COCO2017, VOC2014, and SubT datasets demonstrate that TPF can significantly boost the efficacy and efficiency of most off-the-shelf models, achieving up to 36.4% precision improvements along with 56.3% faster inference speed. Code and Data are at: https://github.com/ImNotPrepared/AirShot.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 7, 2024

Overcome the Fear Of Missing Out: Active Sensing UAV Scanning for Precision Agriculture

This paper deals with the problem of informative path planning for a UAV deployed for precision agriculture applications. First, we observe that the ``fear of missing out'' data lead to uniform, conservative scanning policies over the whole agricultural field. Consequently, employing a non-uniform scanning approach can mitigate the expenditure of time in areas with minimal or negligible real value, while ensuring heightened precision in information-dense regions. Turning to the available informative path planning methodologies, we discern that certain methods entail intensive computational requirements, while others necessitate training on an ideal world simulator. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an active sensing coverage path planning approach, named OverFOMO, that regulates the speed of the UAV in accordance with both the relative quantity of the identified classes, i.e. crops and weeds, and the confidence level of such detections. To identify these instances, a robust Deep Learning segmentation model is deployed. The computational needs of the proposed algorithm are independent of the size of the agricultural field, rendering its applicability on modern UAVs quite straightforward. The proposed algorithm was evaluated with a simu-realistic pipeline, combining data from real UAV missions and the high-fidelity dynamics of AirSim simulator, showcasing its performance improvements over the established state of affairs for this type of missions. An open-source implementation of the algorithm and the evaluation pipeline is also available: https://github.com/emmarapt/OverFOMO.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 15, 2023

MSF: Motion-guided Sequential Fusion for Efficient 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences

Point cloud sequences are commonly used to accurately detect 3D objects in applications such as autonomous driving. Current top-performing multi-frame detectors mostly follow a Detect-and-Fuse framework, which extracts features from each frame of the sequence and fuses them to detect the objects in the current frame. However, this inevitably leads to redundant computation since adjacent frames are highly correlated. In this paper, we propose an efficient Motion-guided Sequential Fusion (MSF) method, which exploits the continuity of object motion to mine useful sequential contexts for object detection in the current frame. We first generate 3D proposals on the current frame and propagate them to preceding frames based on the estimated velocities. The points-of-interest are then pooled from the sequence and encoded as proposal features. A novel Bidirectional Feature Aggregation (BiFA) module is further proposed to facilitate the interactions of proposal features across frames. Besides, we optimize the point cloud pooling by a voxel-based sampling technique so that millions of points can be processed in several milliseconds. The proposed MSF method achieves not only better efficiency than other multi-frame detectors but also leading accuracy, with 83.12% and 78.30% mAP on the LEVEL1 and LEVEL2 test sets of Waymo Open Dataset, respectively. Codes can be found at https://github.com/skyhehe123/MSF.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 14, 2023

DeH4R: A Decoupled and Hybrid Method for Road Network Graph Extraction

The automated extraction of complete and precise road network graphs from remote sensing imagery remains a critical challenge in geospatial computer vision. Segmentation-based approaches, while effective in pixel-level recognition, struggle to maintain topology fidelity after vectorization postprocessing. Graph-growing methods build more topologically faithful graphs but suffer from computationally prohibitive iterative ROI cropping. Graph-generating methods first predict global static candidate road network vertices, and then infer possible edges between vertices. They achieve fast topology-aware inference, but limits the dynamic insertion of vertices. To address these challenges, we propose DeH4R, a novel hybrid model that combines graph-generating efficiency and graph-growing dynamics. This is achieved by decoupling the task into candidate vertex detection, adjacent vertex prediction, initial graph contruction, and graph expansion. This architectural innovation enables dynamic vertex (edge) insertions while retaining fast inference speed and enhancing both topology fidelity and spatial consistency. Comprehensive evaluations on CityScale and SpaceNet benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. DeH4R outperforms the prior SOTA graph-growing method RNGDet++ by 4.62 APLS and 10.18 IoU on CityScale, while being approximately 10 times faster. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/7777777FAN/DeH4R.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

Self-Calibration and Bilinear Inverse Problems via Linear Least Squares

Whenever we use devices to take measurements, calibration is indispensable. While the purpose of calibration is to reduce bias and uncertainty in the measurements, it can be quite difficult, expensive, and sometimes even impossible to implement. We study a challenging problem called self-calibration, i.e., the task of designing an algorithm for devices so that the algorithm is able to perform calibration automatically. More precisely, we consider the setup y = A(d) x + epsilon where only partial information about the sensing matrix A(d) is known and where A(d) linearly depends on d. The goal is to estimate the calibration parameter d (resolve the uncertainty in the sensing process) and the signal/object of interests x simultaneously. For three different models of practical relevance, we show how such a bilinear inverse problem, including blind deconvolution as an important example, can be solved via a simple linear least squares approach. As a consequence, the proposed algorithms are numerically extremely efficient, thus potentially allowing for real-time deployment. We also present a variation of the least squares approach, which leads to a~spectral method, where the solution to the bilinear inverse problem can be found by computing the singular vector associated with the smallest singular value of a certain matrix derived from the bilinear system. Explicit theoretical guarantees and stability theory are derived for both techniques; and the number of sampling complexity is nearly optimal (up to a poly-log factor). Applications in imaging sciences and signal processing are discussed and numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 13, 2016

Neural Global Shutter: Learn to Restore Video from a Rolling Shutter Camera with Global Reset Feature

Most computer vision systems assume distortion-free images as inputs. The widely used rolling-shutter (RS) image sensors, however, suffer from geometric distortion when the camera and object undergo motion during capture. Extensive researches have been conducted on correcting RS distortions. However, most of the existing work relies heavily on the prior assumptions of scenes or motions. Besides, the motion estimation steps are either oversimplified or computationally inefficient due to the heavy flow warping, limiting their applicability. In this paper, we investigate using rolling shutter with a global reset feature (RSGR) to restore clean global shutter (GS) videos. This feature enables us to turn the rectification problem into a deblur-like one, getting rid of inaccurate and costly explicit motion estimation. First, we build an optic system that captures paired RSGR/GS videos. Second, we develop a novel algorithm incorporating spatial and temporal designs to correct the spatial-varying RSGR distortion. Third, we demonstrate that existing image-to-image translation algorithms can recover clean GS videos from distorted RSGR inputs, yet our algorithm achieves the best performance with the specific designs. Our rendered results are not only visually appealing but also beneficial to downstream tasks. Compared to the state-of-the-art RS solution, our RSGR solution is superior in both effectiveness and efficiency. Considering it is easy to realize without changing the hardware, we believe our RSGR solution can potentially replace the RS solution in taking distortion-free videos with low noise and low budget.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 2, 2022

Enhanced Scale-aware Depth Estimation for Monocular Endoscopic Scenes with Geometric Modeling

Scale-aware monocular depth estimation poses a significant challenge in computer-aided endoscopic navigation. However, existing depth estimation methods that do not consider the geometric priors struggle to learn the absolute scale from training with monocular endoscopic sequences. Additionally, conventional methods face difficulties in accurately estimating details on tissue and instruments boundaries. In this paper, we tackle these problems by proposing a novel enhanced scale-aware framework that only uses monocular images with geometric modeling for depth estimation. Specifically, we first propose a multi-resolution depth fusion strategy to enhance the quality of monocular depth estimation. To recover the precise scale between relative depth and real-world values, we further calculate the 3D poses of instruments in the endoscopic scenes by algebraic geometry based on the image-only geometric primitives (i.e., boundaries and tip of instruments). Afterwards, the 3D poses of surgical instruments enable the scale recovery of relative depth maps. By coupling scale factors and relative depth estimation, the scale-aware depth of the monocular endoscopic scenes can be estimated. We evaluate the pipeline on in-house endoscopic surgery videos and simulated data. The results demonstrate that our method can learn the absolute scale with geometric modeling and accurately estimate scale-aware depth for monocular scenes.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024

Fat Polygonal Partitions with Applications to Visualization and Embeddings

Let T be a rooted and weighted tree, where the weight of any node is equal to the sum of the weights of its children. The popular Treemap algorithm visualizes such a tree as a hierarchical partition of a square into rectangles, where the area of the rectangle corresponding to any node in T is equal to the weight of that node. The aspect ratio of the rectangles in such a rectangular partition necessarily depends on the weights and can become arbitrarily high. We introduce a new hierarchical partition scheme, called a polygonal partition, which uses convex polygons rather than just rectangles. We present two methods for constructing polygonal partitions, both having guarantees on the worst-case aspect ratio of the constructed polygons; in particular, both methods guarantee a bound on the aspect ratio that is independent of the weights of the nodes. We also consider rectangular partitions with slack, where the areas of the rectangles may differ slightly from the weights of the corresponding nodes. We show that this makes it possible to obtain partitions with constant aspect ratio. This result generalizes to hyper-rectangular partitions in R^d. We use these partitions with slack for embedding ultrametrics into d-dimensional Euclidean space: we give a rm polylog(Delta)-approximation algorithm for embedding n-point ultrametrics into R^d with minimum distortion, where Delta denotes the spread of the metric, i.e., the ratio between the largest and the smallest distance between two points. The previously best-known approximation ratio for this problem was polynomial in n. This is the first algorithm for embedding a non-trivial family of weighted-graph metrics into a space of constant dimension that achieves polylogarithmic approximation ratio.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 9, 2010

Kineo: Calibration-Free Metric Motion Capture From Sparse RGB Cameras

Markerless multiview motion capture is often constrained by the need for precise camera calibration, limiting accessibility for non-experts and in-the-wild captures. Existing calibration-free approaches mitigate this requirement but suffer from high computational cost and reduced reconstruction accuracy. We present Kineo, a fully automatic, calibration-free pipeline for markerless motion capture from videos captured by unsynchronized, uncalibrated, consumer-grade RGB cameras. Kineo leverages 2D keypoints from off-the-shelf detectors to simultaneously calibrate cameras, including Brown-Conrady distortion coefficients, and reconstruct 3D keypoints and dense scene point maps at metric scale. A confidence-driven spatio-temporal keypoint sampling strategy, combined with graph-based global optimization, ensures robust calibration at a fixed computational cost independent of sequence length. We further introduce a pairwise reprojection consensus score to quantify 3D reconstruction reliability for downstream tasks. Evaluations on EgoHumans and Human3.6M demonstrate substantial improvements over prior calibration-free methods. Compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches, Kineo reduces camera translation error by approximately 83-85%, camera angular error by 86-92%, and world mean-per-joint error (W-MPJPE) by 83-91%. Kineo is also efficient in real-world scenarios, processing multi-view sequences faster than their duration in specific configuration (e.g., 36min to process 1h20min of footage). The full pipeline and evaluation code are openly released to promote reproducibility and practical adoption at https://liris-xr.github.io/kineo/.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

FullCircle: Effortless 3D Reconstruction from Casual 360^circ Captures

Radiance fields have emerged as powerful tools for 3D scene reconstruction. However, casual capture remains challenging due to the narrow field of view of perspective cameras, which limits viewpoint coverage and feature correspondences necessary for reliable camera calibration and reconstruction. While commercially available 360^circ cameras offer significantly broader coverage than perspective cameras for the same capture effort, existing 360^circ reconstruction methods require special capture protocols and pre-processing steps that undermine the promise of radiance fields: effortless workflows to capture and reconstruct 3D scenes. We propose a practical pipeline for reconstructing 3D scenes directly from raw 360^circ camera captures. We require no special capture protocols or pre-processing, and exhibit robustness to a prevalent source of reconstruction errors: the human operator that is visible in all 360^circ imagery. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce a multi-tiered dataset of scenes captured as raw dual-fisheye images, establishing a benchmark for robust casual 360^circ reconstruction. Our method significantly outperforms not only vanilla 3DGS for 360^circ cameras but also robust perspective baselines when perspective cameras are simulated from the same capture, demonstrating the advantages of 360^circ capture for casual reconstruction. Additional results are available at: https://theialab.github.io/fullcircle

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 23

HoloBeam: Learning Optimal Beamforming in Far-Field Holographic Metasurface Transceivers

Holographic Metasurface Transceivers (HMTs) are emerging as cost-effective substitutes to large antenna arrays for beamforming in Millimeter and TeraHertz wave communication. However, to achieve desired channel gains through beamforming in HMT, phase-shifts of a large number of elements need to be appropriately set, which is challenging. Also, these optimal phase-shifts depend on the location of the receivers, which could be unknown. In this work, we develop a learning algorithm using a {\it fixed-budget multi-armed bandit framework} to beamform and maximize received signal strength at the receiver for far-field regions. Our algorithm, named \Algo exploits the parametric form of channel gains of the beams, which can be expressed in terms of two {\it phase-shifting parameters}. Even after parameterization, the problem is still challenging as phase-shifting parameters take continuous values. To overcome this, {\it\HB} works with the discrete values of phase-shifting parameters and exploits their unimodal relations with channel gains to learn the optimal values faster. We upper bound the probability of {\it\HB} incorrectly identifying the (discrete) optimal phase-shift parameters in terms of the number of pilots used in learning. We show that this probability decays exponentially with the number of pilot signals. We demonstrate that {\it\HB} outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms through extensive simulations.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 29, 2023

Sat3DGen: Comprehensive Street-Level 3D Scene Generation from Single Satellite Image

Generating a street-level 3D scene from a single satellite image is a crucial yet challenging task. Current methods present a stark trade-off: geometry-colorization models achieve high geometric fidelity but are typically building-focused and lack semantic diversity. In contrast, proxy-based models use feed-forward image-to-3D frameworks to generate holistic scenes by jointly learning geometry and texture, a process that yields rich content but coarse and unstable geometry. We attribute these geometric failures to the extreme viewpoint gap and sparse, inconsistent supervision inherent in satellite-to-street data. We introduce Sat3DGen to address these fundamental challenges, which embodies a geometry-first methodology. This methodology enhances the feed-forward paradigm by integrating novel geometric constraints with a perspective-view training strategy, explicitly countering the primary sources of geometric error. This geometry-centric strategy yields a dramatic leap in both 3D accuracy and photorealism. For validation, we first constructed a new benchmark by pairing the VIGOR-OOD test set with high-resolution DSM data. On this benchmark, our method improves geometric RMSE from 6.76m to 5.20m. Crucially, this geometric leap also boosts photorealism, reducing the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) from sim40 to 19 against the leading method, Sat2Density++, despite using no extra tailored image-quality modules. We demonstrate the versatility of our high-quality 3D assets through diverse downstream applications, including semantic-map-to-3D synthesis, multi-camera video generation, large-scale meshing, and unsupervised single-image Digital Surface Model (DSM) estimation. The code has been released on https://github.com/qianmingduowan/Sat3DGen.

Euclid: Supercharging Multimodal LLMs with Synthetic High-Fidelity Visual Descriptions

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in recent years, yet continue to struggle with low-level visual perception (LLVP) -- particularly the ability to accurately describe the geometric details of an image. This capability is crucial for applications in areas such as robotics, medical image analysis, and manufacturing. In this paper, we first introduce Geoperception, a benchmark designed to evaluate an MLLM's ability to accurately transcribe 2D geometric information from an image. Using this benchmark, we demonstrate the limitations of leading MLLMs, and then conduct a comprehensive empirical study to explore strategies for improving their performance on geometric tasks. Our findings highlight the benefits of certain model architectures, training techniques, and data strategies, including the use of high-fidelity synthetic data and multi-stage training with a data curriculum. Notably, we find that a data curriculum enables models to learn challenging geometry understanding tasks which they fail to learn from scratch. Leveraging these insights, we develop Euclid, a family of models specifically optimized for strong low-level geometric perception. Although purely trained on synthetic multimodal data, Euclid shows strong generalization ability to novel geometry shapes. For instance, Euclid outperforms the best closed-source model, Gemini-1.5-Pro, by up to 58.56% on certain Geoperception benchmark tasks and 10.65% on average across all tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024 2

TSPulse: Dual Space Tiny Pre-Trained Models for Rapid Time-Series Analysis

The rise of time-series pre-trained models has advanced temporal representation learning, but current state-of-the-art models are often large-scale, requiring substantial compute. We introduce TSPulse, ultra-compact time-series pre-trained models with only 1M parameters, specialized to perform strongly across classification, anomaly detection, imputation, and retrieval tasks. TSPulse introduces innovations at both the architecture and task levels. At the architecture level, it employs a dual-space masked reconstruction, learning from both time and frequency domains to capture complementary signals. This is further enhanced by a dual-embedding disentanglement, generating both detailed embeddings for fine-grained analysis and high-level semantic embeddings for broader task understanding. Notably, TSPulse's semantic embeddings are robust to shifts in time, magnitude, and noise, which is important for robust retrieval. At the task level, TSPulse incorporates TSLens, a fine-tuning component enabling task-specific feature attention. It also introduces a multi-head triangulation technique that correlates deviations from multiple prediction heads, enhancing anomaly detection by fusing complementary model outputs. Additionally, a hybrid mask pretraining is proposed to improves zero-shot imputation by reducing pre-training bias. These architecture and task innovations collectively contribute to TSPulse's significant performance gains: 5-16% on the UEA classification benchmarks, +20% on the TSB-AD anomaly detection leaderboard, +50% in zero-shot imputation, and +25% in time-series retrieval. Remarkably, these results are achieved with just 1M parameters, making TSPulse 10-100X smaller than existing pre-trained models. Its efficiency enables GPU-free inference and rapid pre-training, setting a new standard for efficient time-series pre-trained models. Models will be open-sourced soon.

  • 8 authors
·
May 19, 2025

Clustering based Point Cloud Representation Learning for 3D Analysis

Point cloud analysis (such as 3D segmentation and detection) is a challenging task, because of not only the irregular geometries of many millions of unordered points, but also the great variations caused by depth, viewpoint, occlusion, etc. Current studies put much focus on the adaption of neural networks to the complex geometries of point clouds, but are blind to a fundamental question: how to learn an appropriate point embedding space that is aware of both discriminative semantics and challenging variations? As a response, we propose a clustering based supervised learning scheme for point cloud analysis. Unlike current de-facto, scene-wise training paradigm, our algorithm conducts within-class clustering on the point embedding space for automatically discovering subclass patterns which are latent yet representative across scenes. The mined patterns are, in turn, used to repaint the embedding space, so as to respect the underlying distribution of the entire training dataset and improve the robustness to the variations. Our algorithm is principled and readily pluggable to modern point cloud segmentation networks during training, without extra overhead during testing. With various 3D network architectures (i.e., voxel-based, point-based, Transformer-based, automatically searched), our algorithm shows notable improvements on famous point cloud segmentation datasets (i.e.,2.0-2.6% on single-scan and 2.0-2.2% multi-scan of SemanticKITTI, 1.8-1.9% on S3DIS, in terms of mIoU). Our algorithm also demonstrates utility in 3D detection, showing 2.0-3.4% mAP gains on KITTI.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 26, 2023

EAGLE-360: Embodied Active Global-to-Local Exploration in 360^circ

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in standard visual understanding, adapting them for active visual search in 360^circ panoramic environments exposes fundamental limitations. Specifically, standard MLLMs struggle to effectively model inherent panoramic properties, such as severe polar distortion and continuous cylindrical topologies, which significantly degrades target detection accuracy. Consequently, existing panoramic search methods attempt to compensate by relying heavily on fragmented local viewpoints. Burdened by rigid initialization and a lack of global panoramic priors, these approaches suffer from myopic, inefficient exploration and struggle with robust error recovery when targets are out of view. To overcome these challenges, we propose EAGLE-360, a novel Embodied Active Global-to-Local Exploration framework. Rather than performing exhaustive local searches, EAGLE-360 leverages global priors to establish an initial holistic perspective, iteratively reasoning and progressively narrowing the search space. Architecturally, we adapt RoPE Rolling, a coordinate-shifting positional encoding mechanism, to seamlessly model the continuous topologies of panoramas. To facilitate this paradigm, we construct the large-scale EAGLE-360 dataset, comprising 14,000+ 4K panoramas and 70,000+ rounds of high-quality VQA dialogues. By employing a training pipeline that integrates Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), we effectively elicit complex spatial reasoning and tool-calling capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EAGLE-360 establishes a new state-of-the-art for 360^circ visual search, achieving nearly an 8-fold increase in accuracy over the base model while significantly enhancing exploration efficiency.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 1

Long-Term Photometric Consistent Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models

Novel view synthesis from a single input image is a challenging task, where the goal is to generate a new view of a scene from a desired camera pose that may be separated by a large motion. The highly uncertain nature of this synthesis task due to unobserved elements within the scene (i.e. occlusion) and outside the field-of-view makes the use of generative models appealing to capture the variety of possible outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model capable of producing a sequence of photorealistic images consistent with a specified camera trajectory, and a single starting image. Our approach is centred on an autoregressive conditional diffusion-based model capable of interpolating visible scene elements, and extrapolating unobserved regions in a view, in a geometrically consistent manner. Conditioning is limited to an image capturing a single camera view and the (relative) pose of the new camera view. To measure the consistency over a sequence of generated views, we introduce a new metric, the thresholded symmetric epipolar distance (TSED), to measure the number of consistent frame pairs in a sequence. While previous methods have been shown to produce high quality images and consistent semantics across pairs of views, we show empirically with our metric that they are often inconsistent with the desired camera poses. In contrast, we demonstrate that our method produces both photorealistic and view-consistent imagery.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 20, 2023

Automated Search for Conjectures on Mathematical Constants using Analysis of Integer Sequences

Formulas involving fundamental mathematical constants had a great impact on various fields of science and mathematics, for example aiding in proofs of irrationality of constants. However, the discovery of such formulas has historically remained scarce, often perceived as an act of mathematical genius by great mathematicians such as Ramanujan, Euler, and Gauss. Recent efforts to automate the discovery of formulas for mathematical constants, such as the Ramanujan Machine project, relied on exhaustive search. Despite several successful discoveries, exhaustive search remains limited by the space of options that can be covered and by the need for vast amounts of computational resources. Here we propose a fundamentally different method to search for conjectures on mathematical constants: through analysis of integer sequences. We introduce the Enumerated Signed-continued-fraction Massey Approve (ESMA) algorithm, which builds on the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm to identify patterns in integer sequences that represent mathematical constants. The ESMA algorithm found various known formulas for e, e^2, tan(1), and ratios of values of Bessel functions. The algorithm further discovered a large number of new conjectures for these constants, some providing simpler representations and some providing faster numerical convergence than the corresponding simple continued fractions. Along with the algorithm, we present mathematical tools for manipulating continued fractions. These connections enable us to characterize what space of constants can be found by ESMA and quantify its algorithmic advantage in certain scenarios. Altogether, this work continues in the development of augmenting mathematical intuition by computer algorithms, to help reveal mathematical structures and accelerate mathematical research.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 13, 2022

MonoDGP: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Decoupled-Query and Geometry-Error Priors

Perspective projection has been extensively utilized in monocular 3D object detection methods. It introduces geometric priors from 2D bounding boxes and 3D object dimensions to reduce the uncertainty of depth estimation. However, due to depth errors originating from the object's visual surface, the height of the bounding box often fails to represent the actual projected central height, which undermines the effectiveness of geometric depth. Direct prediction for the projected height unavoidably results in a loss of 2D priors, while multi-depth prediction with complex branches does not fully leverage geometric depth. This paper presents a Transformer-based monocular 3D object detection method called MonoDGP, which adopts perspective-invariant geometry errors to modify the projection formula. We also try to systematically discuss and explain the mechanisms and efficacy behind geometry errors, which serve as a simple but effective alternative to multi-depth prediction. Additionally, MonoDGP decouples the depth-guided decoder and constructs a 2D decoder only dependent on visual features, providing 2D priors and initializing object queries without the disturbance of 3D detection. To further optimize and fine-tune input tokens of the transformer decoder, we also introduce a Region Segment Head (RSH) that generates enhanced features and segment embeddings. Our monocular method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark without extra data. Code is available at https://github.com/PuFanqi23/MonoDGP.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 25, 2024

Bilateral Guided Radiance Field Processing

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieves unprecedented performance in synthesizing novel view synthesis, utilizing multi-view consistency. When capturing multiple inputs, image signal processing (ISP) in modern cameras will independently enhance them, including exposure adjustment, color correction, local tone mapping, etc. While these processings greatly improve image quality, they often break the multi-view consistency assumption, leading to "floaters" in the reconstructed radiance fields. To address this concern without compromising visual aesthetics, we aim to first disentangle the enhancement by ISP at the NeRF training stage and re-apply user-desired enhancements to the reconstructed radiance fields at the finishing stage. Furthermore, to make the re-applied enhancements consistent between novel views, we need to perform imaging signal processing in 3D space (i.e. "3D ISP"). For this goal, we adopt the bilateral grid, a locally-affine model, as a generalized representation of ISP processing. Specifically, we optimize per-view 3D bilateral grids with radiance fields to approximate the effects of camera pipelines for each input view. To achieve user-adjustable 3D finishing, we propose to learn a low-rank 4D bilateral grid from a given single view edit, lifting photo enhancements to the whole 3D scene. We demonstrate our approach can boost the visual quality of novel view synthesis by effectively removing floaters and performing enhancements from user retouching. The source code and our data are available at: https://bilarfpro.github.io.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 1, 2024

SITS-DECO: A Generative Decoder Is All You Need For Multitask Satellite Image Time Series Modelling

Earth Observation (EO) Foundation Modelling (FM) holds great promise for simplifying and improving the use of EO data for diverse real-world tasks. However, most existing models require additional adaptation before they can be used and are structured rigidly around particular data sources or training approaches. To address this, we take inspiration from large language models, where diverse tasks, both pre-training and downstream, are implicitly captured through next-token prediction over unified token sequences, leveraging the structure and diversity of the training data. We introduce SITS-DECO (Satellite Image Time Series-DECoder Only), a proof-of-concept generative model that applies this unified-sequence framing to EO data. Using a simple GPT-style decoder-only architecture, and demonstrate its ability to perform useful EO tasks (pixel-wise, multi-temporal, multi-modal crop-type classification) in a purely generative framework. Through symbolic prompting, we show that the model can perform multiple supervised and self-supervised tasks within a single unified architecture, without task- or modality-specific adaptation. Despite its simplicity and lack of spatial context, SITS-DECO outperforms much larger EO foundation models on crop-type classification (PASTIS-R) demonstrating that dense temporal sequence modelling is a critical missing ingredient in the current paradigm. This work exemplifies a data-centric modelling paradigm in which capability arises from the diversity and structure of the training data rather than from architectural complexity. SITS-DECO provides a lightweight, practical route to multi-modal, multi-task EO modelling, and a conceptual bridge toward future generative EO foundation models.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 21, 2025

MUSt3R: Multi-view Network for Stereo 3D Reconstruction

DUSt3R introduced a novel paradigm in geometric computer vision by proposing a model that can provide dense and unconstrained Stereo 3D Reconstruction of arbitrary image collections with no prior information about camera calibration nor viewpoint poses. Under the hood, however, DUSt3R processes image pairs, regressing local 3D reconstructions that need to be aligned in a global coordinate system. The number of pairs, growing quadratically, is an inherent limitation that becomes especially concerning for robust and fast optimization in the case of large image collections. In this paper, we propose an extension of DUSt3R from pairs to multiple views, that addresses all aforementioned concerns. Indeed, we propose a Multi-view Network for Stereo 3D Reconstruction, or MUSt3R, that modifies the DUSt3R architecture by making it symmetric and extending it to directly predict 3D structure for all views in a common coordinate frame. Second, we entail the model with a multi-layer memory mechanism which allows to reduce the computational complexity and to scale the reconstruction to large collections, inferring thousands of 3D pointmaps at high frame-rates with limited added complexity. The framework is designed to perform 3D reconstruction both offline and online, and hence can be seamlessly applied to SfM and visual SLAM scenarios showing state-of-the-art performance on various 3D downstream tasks, including uncalibrated Visual Odometry, relative camera pose, scale and focal estimation, 3D reconstruction and multi-view depth estimation.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 3, 2025

Flying Triangulation - towards the 3D movie camera

Flying Triangulation sensors enable a free-hand and motion-robust 3D data acquisition of complex shaped objects. The measurement principle is based on a multi-line light-sectioning approach and uses sophisticated algorithms for real-time registration (S. Ettl et al., Appl. Opt. 51 (2012) 281-289). As "single-shot principle", light sectioning enables the option to get surface data from one single camera exposure. But there is a drawback: A pixel-dense measurement is not possible because of fundamental information-theoretical reasons. By "pixel-dense" we understand that each pixel displays individually measured distance information, neither interpolated from its neighbour pixels nor using lateral context information. Hence, for monomodal single-shot principles, the 3D data generated from one 2D raw image display a significantly lower space-bandwidth than the camera permits. This is the price one must pay for motion robustness. Currently, our sensors project about 10 lines (each with 1000 pixels), reaching an considerable lower data efficiency than theoretically possible for a single-shot sensor. Our aim is to push Flying Triangulation to its information-theoretical limits. Therefore, the line density as well as the measurement depth needs to be significantly increased. This causes serious indexing ambiguities. On the road to a single-shot 3D movie camera, we are working on solutions to overcome the problem of false line indexing by utilizing yet unexploited information. We will present several approaches and will discuss profound information-theoretical questions about the information efficiency of 3D sensors.

  • 4 authors
·
May 17, 2013

Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image

Reconstructing accurate 3D scenes from images is a long-standing vision task. Due to the ill-posedness of the single-image reconstruction problem, most well-established methods are built upon multi-view geometry. State-of-the-art (SOTA) monocular metric depth estimation methods can only handle a single camera model and are unable to perform mixed-data training due to the metric ambiguity. Meanwhile, SOTA monocular methods trained on large mixed datasets achieve zero-shot generalization by learning affine-invariant depths, which cannot recover real-world metrics. In this work, we show that the key to a zero-shot single-view metric depth model lies in the combination of large-scale data training and resolving the metric ambiguity from various camera models. We propose a canonical camera space transformation module, which explicitly addresses the ambiguity problems and can be effortlessly plugged into existing monocular models. Equipped with our module, monocular models can be stably trained with over 8 million images with thousands of camera models, resulting in zero-shot generalization to in-the-wild images with unseen camera settings. Experiments demonstrate SOTA performance of our method on 7 zero-shot benchmarks. Notably, our method won the championship in the 2nd Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge. Our method enables the accurate recovery of metric 3D structures on randomly collected internet images, paving the way for plausible single-image metrology. The potential benefits extend to downstream tasks, which can be significantly improved by simply plugging in our model. For example, our model relieves the scale drift issues of monocular-SLAM (Fig. 1), leading to high-quality metric scale dense mapping. The code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/Metric3D.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

The Role of Vertex Consistency in Sampling-based Algorithms for Optimal Motion Planning

Motion planning problems have been studied by both the robotics and the controls research communities for a long time, and many algorithms have been developed for their solution. Among them, incremental sampling-based motion planning algorithms, such as the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs), and the Probabilistic Road Maps (PRMs) have become very popular recently, owing to their implementation simplicity and their advantages in handling high-dimensional problems. Although these algorithms work very well in practice, the quality of the computed solution is often not good, i.e., the solution can be far from the optimal one. A recent variation of RRT, namely the RRT* algorithm, bypasses this drawback of the traditional RRT algorithm, by ensuring asymptotic optimality as the number of samples tends to infinity. Nonetheless, the convergence rate to the optimal solution may still be slow. This paper presents a new incremental sampling-based motion planning algorithm based on Rapidly-exploring Random Graphs (RRG), denoted RRT# (RRT "sharp") which also guarantees asymptotic optimality but, in addition, it also ensures that the constructed spanning tree of the geometric graph is consistent after each iteration. In consistent trees, the vertices which have the potential to be part of the optimal solution have the minimum cost-come-value. This implies that the best possible solution is readily computed if there are some vertices in the current graph that are already in the goal region. Numerical results compare with the RRT* algorithm.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 28, 2012

Unsupervised Stereo via Multi-Baseline Geometry-Consistent Self-Training

Photometric loss and pseudo-label-based self-training are two widely used methods for training stereo networks on unlabeled data. However, they both struggle to provide accurate supervision in occluded regions. The former lacks valid correspondences, while the latter's pseudo labels are often unreliable. To overcome these limitations, we present S^3, a simple yet effective framework based on multi-baseline geometry consistency. Unlike conventional self-training where teacher and student share identical stereo pairs, S^3 assigns them different target images, introducing natural visibility asymmetry. Regions occluded in the student's view often remain visible and matchable to the teacher, enabling reliable pseudo labels even in regions where photometric supervision fails. The teacher's disparities are rescaled to align with the student's baseline and used to guide student learning. An occlusion-aware weighting strategy is further proposed to mitigate unreliable supervision in teacher-occluded regions and to encourage the student to learn robust occlusion completion. To support training, we construct MBS20K, a multi-baseline stereo dataset synthesized using the CARLA simulator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S^3 provides effective supervision in both occluded and non-occluded regions, achieves strong generalization performance, and surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods on the KITTI 2015 and 2012 benchmarks.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

The Lift Spectrum: How Measurement-to-Space Adaptivity Shapes Robustness in Image-Free Single-Pixel Sensing

Single-pixel sensing encodes a scene as a short sequence of coded measurements, and image-free methods infer the task directly from that sequence. Removing reconstruction does not remove the difficulty: it relocates it to the lift, the map from 1D measurements to a 2D representation, which prior work treats as a trivial reshape. We recast the lift as the central design axis of image-free sensing and order methods by how strongly it adapts to its input: a fixed-physics inverse (reconstruct-then-segment), a learned static projection, or a content-adaptive retrieval; position on this lift spectrum predicts behavior as acquisition degrades. The spatiotemporal soft-fusion (STSF) network pairs a probe-selected recurrent encoder with a cross-attention lift chosen by a parameter-matched ablation, ahead of its U-Net++ decoder, and trains under task-prioritized loss scheduling (TPLS), a scheduled reconstruction prior. In simulation, STSF+TPLS surpasses the prior image-free baseline on three datasets at 3.13% sampling (+3.2 to +9.9 pp foreground mIoU) and plateaus down to 0.39%. The strongest clean-trained reconstruct-then-segment baseline wins the noiseless limit, but under calibrated measurement noise image-free inference overtakes it, for a measured reason: the reconstruction pipeline amplifies the identical measurement noise before its segmenter reads it. Each region fails in its own signature: collapse, imprinting, or coarsening. STSF+TPLS transfers without fine-tuning to a real single-pixel bench as a proof of concept, at about 14 ms per mask. Charting the lift turns a scattered design space into a map of which lift to deploy at each operating point. Code and pretrained weights: https://github.com/Hanyuyuan6/STSF-TPLS

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 23

LiDAR-PTQ: Post-Training Quantization for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection

Due to highly constrained computing power and memory, deploying 3D lidar-based detectors on edge devices equipped in autonomous vehicles and robots poses a crucial challenge. Being a convenient and straightforward model compression approach, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has been widely adopted in 2D vision tasks. However, applying it directly to 3D lidar-based tasks inevitably leads to performance degradation. As a remedy, we propose an effective PTQ method called LiDAR-PTQ, which is particularly curated for 3D lidar detection (both SPConv-based and SPConv-free). Our LiDAR-PTQ features three main components, (1) a sparsity-based calibration method to determine the initialization of quantization parameters, (2) a Task-guided Global Positive Loss (TGPL) to reduce the disparity between the final predictions before and after quantization, (3) an adaptive rounding-to-nearest operation to minimize the layerwise reconstruction error. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LiDAR-PTQ can achieve state-of-the-art quantization performance when applied to CenterPoint (both Pillar-based and Voxel-based). To our knowledge, for the very first time in lidar-based 3D detection tasks, the PTQ INT8 model's accuracy is almost the same as the FP32 model while enjoying 3times inference speedup. Moreover, our LiDAR-PTQ is cost-effective being 30times faster than the quantization-aware training method. Code will be released at https://github.com/StiphyJay/LiDAR-PTQ.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 28, 2024

AerialMetric: Benchmarking and Adapting UAV Monocular Metric Depth Estimation in the Real World

This paper addresses the problem of monocular metric depth estimation in aerial UAV imagery. Although recent data-driven methods have achieved remarkable progress in ground-level scenarios, models trained primarily on street-view and indoor datasets exhibit significant domain gaps when applied to aerial viewpoints. To tackle these challenges, we introduce AerialMetric, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate and facilitate the adaptation of monocular metric depth estimation under UAV aerial viewpoints. The dataset consists of four complementary subsets collected from different sources, jointly covering real-world photogrammetry data, controlled aerial acquisition settings, photorealistic synthetic scenes, and in-the-wild Internet imagery. Totally, AerialMetric provides 52K real-world and 16K synthetic image-depth pairs with reliable metric ground truth. Based on this dataset, we conduct systematic evaluations of existing state-of-the-art models under aerial settings and investigate the impact of viewpoint, altitude, and camera parameters on metric depth prediction. In addition, by fine-tuning representative metric depth model on our dataset, we establish a comprehensive aerial benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance across diverse aerial imagery. Our dataset, code, and model weight are publicly available at https://kuieless.github.io/AerialMetric-ECCV2026-page/.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 28

Verified Uncertainty Calibration

Applications such as weather forecasting and personalized medicine demand models that output calibrated probability estimates---those representative of the true likelihood of a prediction. Most models are not calibrated out of the box but are recalibrated by post-processing model outputs. We find in this work that popular recalibration methods like Platt scaling and temperature scaling are (i) less calibrated than reported, and (ii) current techniques cannot estimate how miscalibrated they are. An alternative method, histogram binning, has measurable calibration error but is sample inefficient---it requires O(B/ε^2) samples, compared to O(1/ε^2) for scaling methods, where B is the number of distinct probabilities the model can output. To get the best of both worlds, we introduce the scaling-binning calibrator, which first fits a parametric function to reduce variance and then bins the function values to actually ensure calibration. This requires only O(1/ε^2 + B) samples. Next, we show that we can estimate a model's calibration error more accurately using an estimator from the meteorological community---or equivalently measure its calibration error with fewer samples (O(B) instead of O(B)). We validate our approach with multiclass calibration experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, where we obtain a 35% lower calibration error than histogram binning and, unlike scaling methods, guarantees on true calibration. In these experiments, we also estimate the calibration error and ECE more accurately than the commonly used plugin estimators. We implement all these methods in a Python library: https://pypi.org/project/uncertainty-calibration

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 23, 2019

Stereophotoclinometry Revisited

Image-based surface reconstruction and characterization is crucial for missions to small celestial bodies, as it informs mission planning, navigation, and scientific analysis. However, current state-of-the-practice methods, such as stereophotoclinometry (SPC), rely heavily on human-in-the-loop verification and high-fidelity a priori information. This paper proposes Photoclinometry-from-Motion (PhoMo), a novel framework that incorporates photoclinometry techniques into a keypoint-based structure-from-motion (SfM) system to estimate the surface normal and albedo at detected landmarks to improve autonomous surface and shape characterization of small celestial bodies from in-situ imagery. In contrast to SPC, we forego the expensive maplet estimation step and instead use dense keypoint measurements and correspondences from an autonomous keypoint detection and matching method based on deep learning. Moreover, we develop a factor graph-based approach allowing for simultaneous optimization of the spacecraft's pose, landmark positions, Sun-relative direction, and surface normals and albedos via fusion of Sun vector measurements and image keypoint measurements. The proposed framework is validated on real imagery taken by the Dawn mission to the asteroid 4 Vesta and the minor planet 1 Ceres and compared against an SPC reconstruction, where we demonstrate superior rendering performance compared to an SPC solution and precise alignment to a stereophotogrammetry (SPG) solution without relying on any a priori camera pose and topography information or humans-in-the-loop.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 11, 2025

Object Detection as an Optional Basis: A Graph Matching Network for Cross-View UAV Localization

With the rapid growth of the low-altitude economy, UAVs have become crucial for measurement and tracking in patrol systems. However, in GNSS-denied areas, satellite-based localization methods are prone to failure. This paper presents a cross-view UAV localization framework that performs map matching via object detection, aimed at effectively addressing cross-temporal, cross-view, heterogeneous aerial image matching. In typical pipelines, UAV visual localization is formulated as an image-retrieval problem: features are extracted to build a localization map, and the pose of a query image is estimated by matching it to a reference database with known poses. Because publicly available UAV localization datasets are limited, many approaches recast localization as a classification task and rely on scene labels in these datasets to ensure accuracy. Other methods seek to reduce cross-domain differences using polar-coordinate reprojection, perspective transformations, or generative adversarial networks; however, they can suffer from misalignment, content loss, and limited realism. In contrast, we leverage modern object detection to accurately extract salient instances from UAV and satellite images, and integrate a graph neural network to reason about inter-image and intra-image node relationships. Using a fine-grained, graph-based node-similarity metric, our method achieves strong retrieval and localization performance. Extensive experiments on public and real-world datasets show that our approach handles heterogeneous appearance differences effectively and generalizes well, making it applicable to scenarios with larger modality gaps, such as infrared-visible image matching. Our dataset will be publicly available at the following URL: https://github.com/liutao23/ODGNNLoc.git.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025

Can Single-View Mesh Reconstruction Generalize to Robot Camera Rotation?

Single-view mesh reconstruction predicts object meshes and spatial layouts from a single observation, making it attractive for fast robot spatial reasoning and real-to-sim digital twins. However, robot-mounted cameras naturally rotate during manipulation and navigation, while learned single-view reconstruction models often rely on view-dependent priors and may generalize poorly to out-of-distribution camera rotations. Such rotations can introduce 3D inconsistencies, incorrect layouts, and violations of physical constraints, but this failure mode remains under-evaluated. We introduce an evaluation protocol with controlled axis-wise roll, pitch, and yaw sweeps to trace errors in monocular depth estimation (MDE), canonical object meshes, camera-space layout, and physical plausibility within a representative SAM3D-style pipeline. On the Aria Digital Twin dataset and a real Franka wrist-camera sequence, camera rotations induce MDE distortion, layout drift, and collision penetration, while canonical mesh predictions remain relatively stable. A two-stage SAM3D+FoundationPose pipeline is more robust than one-stage feed-forward layout prediction, and our Gravity-Aware Refinement reduces one-stage pairwise ICP-based layout-orientation error by 47.1%. Our evaluation reveals that current single-view mesh reconstruction methods generalize poorly to robot camera rotation, and suggests that explicit gravity cues are important for reliable robotic single-view mesh reconstruction.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 21

PanoWorld: Towards Spatial Supersensing in 360^circ Panorama World

Multimodal large laboratory models (MLLMs) still struggle with spatial understanding under the dominant perspective-image paradigm, which inherits the narrow field of view of human-like perception. For navigation, robotic search, and 3D scene understanding, 360-degree panoramic sensing offers a form of supersensing by capturing the entire surrounding environment at once. However, existing MLLM pipelines typically decompose panoramas into multiple perspective views, leaving the spherical structure of equirectangular projection (ERP) largely implicit. In this paper, we study pano-native understanding, which requires an MLLM to reason over an ERP panorama as a continuous, observer-centered space. To this end, we first define the key abilities for pano-native understanding, including semantic anchoring, spherical localization, reference-frame transformation, and depth-aware 3D spatial reasoning. We then build a large-scale metadata construction pipeline that converts mixed-source ERP panoramas into geometry-aware, language-grounded, and depth-aware supervision, and instantiate these signals as capability-aligned instruction tuning data. On the model side, we introduce PanoWorld with Spherical Spatial Cross-Attention, which injects spherical geometry into the visual stream. We further construct PanoSpace-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating ERP-native spatial reasoning. Experiments show that PanoWorld substantially outperforms both proprietary and open-source baselines on PanoSpace-Bench, H* Bench, and R2R-CE Val-Unseen benchmarks. These results demonstrate that robust panoramic reasoning requires dedicated pano-native supervision and geometry-aware model adaptation. All source code and proposed data will be publicly released.

SATMapTR: Satellite Image Enhanced Online HD Map Construction

High-definition (HD) maps are evolving from pre-annotated to real-time construction to better support autonomous driving in diverse scenarios. However, this process is hindered by low-quality input data caused by onboard sensors limited capability and frequent occlusions, leading to incomplete, noisy, or missing data, and thus reduced mapping accuracy and robustness. Recent efforts have introduced satellite images as auxiliary input, offering a stable, wide-area view to complement the limited ego perspective. However, satellite images in Bird's Eye View are often degraded by shadows and occlusions from vegetation and buildings. Prior methods using basic feature extraction and fusion remain ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose SATMapTR, a novel online map construction model that effectively fuses satellite image through two key components: (1) a gated feature refinement module that adaptively filters satellite image features by integrating high-level semantics with low-level structural cues to extract high signal-to-noise ratio map-relevant representations; and (2) a geometry-aware fusion module that consistently fuse satellite and BEV features at a grid-to-grid level, minimizing interference from irrelevant regions and low-quality inputs. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset show that SATMapTR achieves the highest mean average precision (mAP) of 73.8, outperforming state-of-the-art satellite-enhanced models by up to 14.2 mAP. It also shows lower mAP degradation under adverse weather and sensor failures, and achieves nearly 3 times higher mAP at extended perception ranges.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 11, 2025

LDL: Line Distance Functions for Panoramic Localization

We introduce LDL, a fast and robust algorithm that localizes a panorama to a 3D map using line segments. LDL focuses on the sparse structural information of lines in the scene, which is robust to illumination changes and can potentially enable efficient computation. While previous line-based localization approaches tend to sacrifice accuracy or computation time, our method effectively observes the holistic distribution of lines within panoramic images and 3D maps. Specifically, LDL matches the distribution of lines with 2D and 3D line distance functions, which are further decomposed along principal directions of lines to increase the expressiveness. The distance functions provide coarse pose estimates by comparing the distributional information, where the poses are further optimized using conventional local feature matching. As our pipeline solely leverages line geometry and local features, it does not require costly additional training of line-specific features or correspondence matching. Nevertheless, our method demonstrates robust performance on challenging scenarios including object layout changes, illumination shifts, and large-scale scenes, while exhibiting fast pose search terminating within a matter of milliseconds. We thus expect our method to serve as a practical solution for line-based localization, and complement the well-established point-based paradigm. The code for LDL is available through the following link: https://github.com/82magnolia/panoramic-localization.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 26, 2023

Non-convex optimization for self-calibration of direction-dependent effects in radio interferometric imaging

Radio interferometric imaging aims to estimate an unknown sky intensity image from degraded observations, acquired through an antenna array. In the theoretical case of a perfectly calibrated array, it has been shown that solving the corresponding imaging problem by iterative algorithms based on convex optimization and compressive sensing theory can be competitive with classical algorithms such as CLEAN. However, in practice, antenna-based gains are unknown and have to be calibrated. Future radio telescopes, such as the SKA, aim at improving imaging resolution and sensitivity by orders of magnitude. At this precision level, the direction-dependency of the gains must be accounted for, and radio interferometric imaging can be understood as a blind deconvolution problem. In this context, the underlying minimization problem is non-convex, and adapted techniques have to be designed. In this work, leveraging recent developments in non-convex optimization, we propose the first joint calibration and imaging method in radio interferometry, with proven convergence guarantees. Our approach, based on a block-coordinate forward-backward algorithm, jointly accounts for visibilities and suitable priors on both the image and the direction-dependent effects (DDEs). As demonstrated in recent works, sparsity remains the prior of choice for the image, while DDEs are modelled as smooth functions of the sky, i.e. spatially band-limited. Finally, we show through simulations the efficiency of our method, for the reconstruction of both images of point sources and complex extended sources. MATLAB code is available on GitHub.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 13, 2017

Game4Loc: A UAV Geo-Localization Benchmark from Game Data

The vision-based geo-localization technology for UAV, serving as a secondary source of GPS information in addition to the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), can still operate independently in the GPS-denied environment. Recent deep learning based methods attribute this as the task of image matching and retrieval. By retrieving drone-view images in geo-tagged satellite image database, approximate localization information can be obtained. However, due to high costs and privacy concerns, it is usually difficult to obtain large quantities of drone-view images from a continuous area. Existing drone-view datasets are mostly composed of small-scale aerial photography with a strong assumption that there exists a perfect one-to-one aligned reference image for any query, leaving a significant gap from the practical localization scenario. In this work, we construct a large-range contiguous area UAV geo-localization dataset named GTA-UAV, featuring multiple flight altitudes, attitudes, scenes, and targets using modern computer games. Based on this dataset, we introduce a more practical UAV geo-localization task including partial matches of cross-view paired data, and expand the image-level retrieval to the actual localization in terms of distance (meters). For the construction of drone-view and satellite-view pairs, we adopt a weight-based contrastive learning approach, which allows for effective learning while avoiding additional post-processing matching steps. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our data and training method for UAV geo-localization, as well as the generalization capabilities to real-world scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25, 2024 2

360-GS: Layout-guided Panoramic Gaussian Splatting For Indoor Roaming

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has recently attracted great attention with real-time and photo-realistic renderings. This technique typically takes perspective images as input and optimizes a set of 3D elliptical Gaussians by splatting them onto the image planes, resulting in 2D Gaussians. However, applying 3D-GS to panoramic inputs presents challenges in effectively modeling the projection onto the spherical surface of {360^circ} images using 2D Gaussians. In practical applications, input panoramas are often sparse, leading to unreliable initialization of 3D Gaussians and subsequent degradation of 3D-GS quality. In addition, due to the under-constrained geometry of texture-less planes (e.g., walls and floors), 3D-GS struggles to model these flat regions with elliptical Gaussians, resulting in significant floaters in novel views. To address these issues, we propose 360-GS, a novel 360^{circ} Gaussian splatting for a limited set of panoramic inputs. Instead of splatting 3D Gaussians directly onto the spherical surface, 360-GS projects them onto the tangent plane of the unit sphere and then maps them to the spherical projections. This adaptation enables the representation of the projection using Gaussians. We guide the optimization of 360-GS by exploiting layout priors within panoramas, which are simple to obtain and contain strong structural information about the indoor scene. Our experimental results demonstrate that 360-GS allows panoramic rendering and outperforms state-of-the-art methods with fewer artifacts in novel view synthesis, thus providing immersive roaming in indoor scenarios.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 1, 2024

Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D

The goal of perception for autonomous vehicles is to extract semantic representations from multiple sensors and fuse these representations into a single "bird's-eye-view" coordinate frame for consumption by motion planning. We propose a new end-to-end architecture that directly extracts a bird's-eye-view representation of a scene given image data from an arbitrary number of cameras. The core idea behind our approach is to "lift" each image individually into a frustum of features for each camera, then "splat" all frustums into a rasterized bird's-eye-view grid. By training on the entire camera rig, we provide evidence that our model is able to learn not only how to represent images but how to fuse predictions from all cameras into a single cohesive representation of the scene while being robust to calibration error. On standard bird's-eye-view tasks such as object segmentation and map segmentation, our model outperforms all baselines and prior work. In pursuit of the goal of learning dense representations for motion planning, we show that the representations inferred by our model enable interpretable end-to-end motion planning by "shooting" template trajectories into a bird's-eye-view cost map output by our network. We benchmark our approach against models that use oracle depth from lidar. Project page with code: https://nv-tlabs.github.io/lift-splat-shoot .

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 13, 2020