Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a fundamental component of perception systems for autonomous driving, and its robustness to unseen conditions is a requirement to avoid life-critical failures. Despite the urge of safety in driving systems, no solution to the MOT adaptation problem to domain shift in test-time conditions has ever been proposed. However, the nature of a MOT system is manifold - requiring object detection and instance association - and adapting all its components is non-trivial. In this paper, we analyze the effect of domain shift on appearance-based trackers, and introduce DARTH, a holistic test-time adaptation framework for MOT. We propose a detection consistency formulation to adapt object detection in a self-supervised fashion, while adapting the instance appearance representations via our novel patch contrastive loss. We evaluate our method on a variety of domain shifts - including sim-to-real, outdoor-to-indoor, indoor-to-outdoor - and substantially improve the source model performance on all metrics. Code: https://github.com/mattiasegu/darth.
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims to detect the objects beyond the set of classes observed during training. This work introduces a straightforward and efficient strategy that utilizes pre-trained vision-language models (VLM), like CLIP, to identify potential novel classes through zero-shot classification. Previous methods use a class-agnostic region proposal network to detect object proposals and consider the proposals that do not match the ground truth as background. Unlike these methods, our method will select a subset of proposals that will be considered as background during the training. Then, we treat them as novel classes during training. We refer to this approach as the self-training strategy, which enhances recall and accuracy for novel classes without requiring extra annotations, datasets, and re-training. Compared to previous pseudo methods, our approach does not require re-training and offline labeling processing, which is more efficient and effective in one-shot training. Empirical evaluations on three datasets, including LVIS, V3Det, and COCO, demonstrate significant improvements over the baseline performance without incurring additional parameters or computational costs during inference. In addition, we also apply our method to various baselines. In particular, compared with the previous method, F-VLM, our method achieves a 1.7% improvement on the LVIS dataset. Combined with the recent method CLIPSelf, our method also achieves 46.7 novel class AP on COCO without introducing extra data for pertaining. We also achieve over 6.5% improvement over the F-VLM baseline in the recent challenging V3Det dataset. We release our code and models at https://github.com/xushilin1/dst-det.
Reporting bias arises when people assume that some knowledge is universally understood and hence, do not necessitate explicit elaboration. In this paper, we focus on the wide existence of reporting bias in visual-language datasets, embodied as the object-attribute association, which can subsequentially degrade models trained on them. To mitigate this bias, we propose a bimodal augmentation (BiAug) approach through object-attribute decoupling to flexibly synthesize visual-language examples with a rich array of object-attribute pairing and construct cross-modal hard negatives. We employ large language models (LLMs) in conjunction with a grounding object detector to extract target objects. Subsequently, the LLM generates a detailed attribute description for each object and produces a corresponding hard negative counterpart. An inpainting model is then used to create images based on these detailed object descriptions. By doing so, the synthesized examples explicitly complement omitted objects and attributes to learn, and the hard negative pairs steer the model to distinguish object attributes. Our experiments demonstrated that BiAug is superior in object-attribute understanding. In addition, BiAug also improves the performance on zero-shot retrieval tasks on general benchmarks like MSCOCO and Flickr30K. BiAug refines the way of collecting text-image datasets. Mitigating the reporting bias helps models achieve a deeper understanding of visual-language phenomena, expanding beyond mere frequent patterns to encompass the richness and diversity of real-world scenarios.
To reduce the expensive labor cost for manual labeling autonomous driving datasets, an alternative is to automatically label the datasets using an offline perception system. However, objects might be temporally occluded. Such occlusion scenarios in the datasets are common yet underexplored in offline auto labeling. In this work, we propose an offline tracking model that focuses on occluded object tracks. It leverages the concept of object permanence which means objects continue to exist even if they are not observed anymore. The model contains three parts: a standard online tracker, a re-identification (Re-ID) module that associates tracklets before and after occlusion, and a track completion module that completes the fragmented tracks. The Re-ID module and the track completion module use the vectorized map as one of the inputs to refine the tracking results with occlusion. The model can effectively recover the occluded object trajectories. It achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D multi-object tracking by significantly improving the original online tracking result, showing its potential to be applied in offline auto labeling as a useful plugin to improve tracking by recovering occlusions.
LiDAR-based 3D object detectors have achieved unprecedented speed and accuracy in autonomous driving applications. However, similar to other neural networks, they are often biased toward high-confidence predictions or return detections where no real object is present. These types of detections can lead to a less reliable environment perception, severely affecting the functionality and safety of autonomous vehicles. We address this problem by proposing LS-VOS, a framework for identifying outliers in 3D object detections. Our approach builds on the idea of Virtual Outlier Synthesis (VOS), which incorporates outlier knowledge during training, enabling the model to learn more compact decision boundaries. In particular, we propose a new synthesis approach that relies on the latent space of an auto-encoder network to generate outlier features with a parametrizable degree of similarity to in-distribution features. In extensive experiments, we show that our approach improves the outlier detection capabilities of a state-of-the-art object detector while maintaining high 3D object detection performance.
LiDAR sensors are used in autonomous driving applications to accurately perceive the environment. However, they are affected by adverse weather conditions such as snow, fog, and rain. These everyday phenomena introduce unwanted noise into the measurements, severely degrading the performance of LiDAR-based perception systems. In this work, we propose a framework for improving the robustness of LiDAR-based 3D object detectors against road spray. Our approach uses a state-of-the-art adverse weather detection network to filter out spray from the LiDAR point cloud, which is then used as input for the object detector. In this way, the detected objects are less affected by the adverse weather in the scene, resulting in a more accurate perception of the environment. In addition to adverse weather filtering, we explore the use of radar targets to further filter false positive detections. Tests on real-world data show that our approach improves the robustness to road spray of several popular 3D object detectors.
This paper presents a novel approach to object completion, with the primary goal of reconstructing a complete object from its partially visible components. Our method, named MaskComp, delineates the completion process through iterative stages of generation and segmentation. In each iteration, the object mask is provided as an additional condition to boost image generation, and, in return, the generated images can lead to a more accurate mask by fusing the segmentation of images. We demonstrate that the combination of one generation and one segmentation stage effectively functions as a mask denoiser. Through alternation between the generation and segmentation stages, the partial object mask is progressively refined, providing precise shape guidance and yielding superior object completion results. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of MaskComp over existing approaches, e.g., ControlNet and Stable Diffusion, establishing it as an effective solution for object completion.
We present the HOH (Human-Object-Human) Handover Dataset, a large object count dataset with 136 objects, to accelerate data-driven research on handover studies, human-robot handover implementation, and artificial intelligence (AI) on handover parameter estimation from 2D and 3D data of person interactions. HOH contains multi-view RGB and depth data, skeletons, fused point clouds, grasp type and handedness labels, object, giver hand, and receiver hand 2D and 3D segmentations, giver and receiver comfort ratings, and paired object metadata and aligned 3D models for 2,720 handover interactions spanning 136 objects and 20 giver-receiver pairs-40 with role-reversal-organized from 40 participants. We also show experimental results of neural networks trained using HOH to perform grasp, orientation, and trajectory prediction. As the only fully markerless handover capture dataset, HOH represents natural human-human handover interactions, overcoming challenges with markered datasets that require specific suiting for body tracking, and lack high-resolution hand tracking. To date, HOH is the largest handover dataset in number of objects, participants, pairs with role reversal accounted for, and total interactions captured.
Scene graph generation (SGG) aims to automatically map an image into a semantic structural graph for better scene understanding. It has attracted significant attention for its ability to provide object and relation information, enabling graph reasoning for downstream tasks. However, it faces severe limitations in practice due to the biased data and training method. In this paper, we present a more rational and effective strategy based on causal inference for object relation prediction. To further evaluate the superiority of our strategy, we propose an object enhancement module to conduct ablation studies. Experimental results on the Visual Gnome 150 (VG-150) dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. These contributions can provide great potential for foundation models for decision-making.
We introduce Diff-DOPE, a 6-DoF pose refiner that takes as input an image, a 3D textured model of an object, and an initial pose of the object. The method uses differentiable rendering to update the object pose to minimize the visual error between the image and the projection of the model. We show that this simple, yet effective, idea is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on pose estimation datasets. Our approach is a departure from recent methods in which the pose refiner is a deep neural network trained on a large synthetic dataset to map inputs to refinement steps. Rather, our use of differentiable rendering allows us to avoid training altogether. Our approach performs multiple gradient descent optimizations in parallel with different random learning rates to avoid local minima from symmetric objects, similar appearances, or wrong step size. Various modalities can be used, e.g., RGB, depth, intensity edges, and object segmentation masks. We present experiments examining the effect of various choices, showing that the best results are found when the RGB image is accompanied by an object mask and depth image to guide the optimization process.
Obtaining annotations for complex computer vision tasks such as object detection is an expensive and time-intense endeavor involving a large number of human workers or expert opinions. Reducing the amount of annotations required while maintaining algorithm performance is, therefore, desirable for machine learning practitioners and has been successfully achieved by active learning algorithms. However, it is not merely the amount of annotations which influences model performance but also the annotation quality. In practice, the oracles that are queried for new annotations frequently contain significant amounts of noise. Therefore, cleansing procedures are oftentimes necessary to review and correct given labels. This process is subject to the same budget as the initial annotation itself since it requires human workers or even domain experts. Here, we propose a composite active learning framework including a label review module for deep object detection. We show that utilizing part of the annotation budget to correct the noisy annotations partially in the active dataset leads to early improvements in model performance, especially when coupled with uncertainty-based query strategies. The precision of the label error proposals has a significant influence on the measured effect of the label review. In our experiments we achieve improvements of up to 4.5 mAP points of object detection performance by incorporating label reviews at equal annotation budget.
A vast majority of conventional augmented reality devices are equipped with depth sensors. Depth images produced by such sensors contain complementary information for object detection when used with color images. Despite the benefits, it remains a complex task to simultaneously extract photometric and depth features in real time due to the immanent difference between depth and color images. Moreover, standard convolution operations are not sufficient to properly extract information directly from raw depth images leading to intermediate representations of depth which is inefficient. To address these issues, we propose a real-time and two stream RGBD object detection model. The proposed model consists of two new components: a depth guided hyper-involution that adapts dynamically based on the spatial interaction pattern in the raw depth map and an up-sampling based trainable fusion layer that combines the extracted depth and color image features without blocking the information transfer between them. We show that the proposed model outperforms other RGB-D based object detection models on NYU Depth v2 dataset and achieves comparable (second best) results on SUN RGB-D. Additionally, we introduce a new outdoor RGB-D object detection dataset where our proposed model outperforms other models. The performance evaluation on diverse synthetic data generated from CAD models and images shows the potential of the proposed model to be adapted to augmented reality based applications.
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), a fundamental computer vision task, which aims to segment out the object within only class-level labels. The traditional methods adopt the CNN-based network and utilize the class activation map (CAM) strategy to discover the object regions. However, such methods only focus on the most discriminative region of the object, resulting in incomplete segmentation. An alternative is to explore vision transformers (ViT) to encode the image to acquire the global semantic information. Yet, the lack of transductive bias to objects is a flaw of ViT. In this paper, we explore the dual-augmented transformer network with self-regularization constraints for WSSS. Specifically, we propose a dual network with both CNN-based and transformer networks for mutually complementary learning, where both networks augment the final output for enhancement. Massive systemic evaluations on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods.
Learning representations through self-supervision on unlabeled data has proven highly effective for understanding diverse images. However, remote sensing images often have complex and densely populated scenes with multiple land objects and no clear foreground objects. This intrinsic property generates high object density, resulting in false positive pairs or missing contextual information in self-supervised learning. To address these problems, we propose a context-enhanced masked image modeling method (CtxMIM), a simple yet efficient MIM-based self-supervised learning for remote sensing image understanding. CtxMIM formulates original image patches as a reconstructive template and employs a Siamese framework to operate on two sets of image patches. A context-enhanced generative branch is introduced to provide contextual information through context consistency constraints in the reconstruction. With the simple and elegant design, CtxMIM encourages the pre-training model to learn object-level or pixel-level features on a large-scale dataset without specific temporal or geographical constraints. Finally, extensive experiments show that features learned by CtxMIM outperform fully supervised and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods on various downstream tasks, including land cover classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. These results demonstrate that CtxMIM learns impressive remote sensing representations with high generalization and transferability. Code and data will be made public available.
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in understanding visual information with human languages. However, LVLMs still suffer from object hallucination, which is the problem of generating descriptions that include objects that do not actually exist in the images. This can negatively impact many vision-language tasks, such as visual summarization and reasoning. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet powerful algorithm, LVLM Hallucination Revisor (LURE), to post-hoc rectify object hallucination in LVLMs by reconstructing less hallucinatory descriptions. LURE is grounded in a rigorous statistical analysis of the key factors underlying object hallucination, including co-occurrence (the frequent appearance of certain objects alongside others in images), uncertainty (objects with higher uncertainty during LVLM decoding), and object position (hallucination often appears in the later part of the generated text). LURE can also be seamlessly integrated with any LVLMs. We evaluate LURE on six open-source LVLMs, achieving a 23% improvement in general object hallucination evaluation metrics over the previous best approach. In both GPT and human evaluations, LURE consistently ranks at the top. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/YiyangZhou/LURE.
We present a new open-vocabulary detection approach based on region-centric image-language pretraining to bridge the gap between image-level pretraining and open-vocabulary object detection. At the pretraining phase, we incorporate the detector architecture on top of the classification backbone, which better serves the region-level recognition needs of detection by enabling the detector heads to learn from large-scale image-text pairs. Using only standard contrastive loss and no pseudo-labeling, our approach is a simple yet effective extension of the contrastive learning method to learn emergent object-semantic cues. In addition, we propose a shifted-window learning approach upon window attention to make the backbone representation more robust, translation-invariant, and less biased by the window pattern. On the popular LVIS open-vocabulary detection benchmark, our approach sets a new state of the art of 37.6 mask APr using the common ViT-L backbone and public LAION dataset, and 40.5 mask APr using the DataComp-1B dataset, significantly outperforming the best existing approach by +3.7 mask APr at system level. On the COCO benchmark, we achieve very competitive 39.6 novel AP without pseudo labeling or weak supervision. In addition, we evaluate our approach on the transfer detection setup, where it demonstrates notable improvement over the baseline. Visualization reveals emerging object locality from the pretraining recipes compared to the baseline.
Tracking and modeling unknown rigid objects in the environment play a crucial role in autonomous unmanned systems and virtual-real interactive applications. However, many existing Simultaneous Localization, Mapping and Moving Object Tracking (SLAMMOT) methods focus solely on estimating specific object poses and lack estimation of object scales and are unable to effectively track unknown objects. In this paper, we propose a novel SLAM backend that unifies ego-motion tracking, rigid object motion tracking, and modeling within a joint optimization framework. In the perception part, we designed a pixel-level asynchronous object tracker (AOT) based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and DeAOT, enabling the tracker to effectively track target unknown objects guided by various predefined tasks and prompts. In the modeling part, we present a novel object-centric quadric parameterization to unify both static and dynamic object initialization and optimization. Subsequently, in the part of object state estimation, we propose a tightly coupled optimization model for object pose and scale estimation, incorporating hybrids constraints into a novel dual sliding window optimization framework for joint estimation. To our knowledge, we are the first to tightly couple object pose tracking with light-weight modeling of dynamic and static objects using quadric. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments on simulation datasets and real-world datasets, demonstrating the state-of-the-art robustness and accuracy in motion estimation and modeling. Our system showcases the potential application of object perception in complex dynamic scenes.
In comparison to conventional RGB cameras, the superior temporal resolution of event cameras allows them to capture rich information between frames, making them prime candidates for object tracking. Yet in practice, despite their theoretical advantages, the body of work on event-based multi-object tracking (MOT) remains in its infancy, especially in real-world settings where events from complex background and camera motion can easily obscure the true target motion. In this work, an event-based multi-object tracker, called SpikeMOT, is presented to address these challenges. SpikeMOT leverages spiking neural networks to extract sparse spatiotemporal features from event streams associated with objects. The resulting spike train representations are used to track the object movement at high frequency, while a simultaneous object detector provides updated spatial information of these objects at an equivalent frame rate. To evaluate the effectiveness of SpikeMOT, we introduce DSEC-MOT, the first large-scale event-based MOT benchmark incorporating fine-grained annotations for objects experiencing severe occlusions, frequent trajectory intersections, and long-term re-identification in real-world contexts. Extensive experiments employing DSEC-MOT and another event-based dataset, named FE240hz, demonstrate SpikeMOT's capability to achieve high tracking accuracy amidst challenging real-world scenarios, advancing the state-of-the-art in event-based multi-object tracking.
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation is a challenging task that has been deeply studied in recent years. Most of the common solutions exploit class activation map (CAM) to locate object regions. However, such response maps generated by the classification network usually focus on discriminative object parts. In this paper, we propose a novel Co-Occurrent Matching Network (COMNet), which can promote the quality of the CAMs and enforce the network to pay attention to the entire parts of objects. Specifically, we perform inter-matching on paired images that contain common classes to enhance the corresponded areas, and construct intra-matching on a single image to propagate the semantic features across the object regions. The experiments on the Pascal VOC 2012 and MS-COCO datasets show that our network can effectively boost the performance of the baseline model and achieve new state-of-the-art performance.
Current successful methods of 3D scene perception rely on the large-scale annotated point cloud, which is tedious and expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose Model2Scene, a novel paradigm that learns free 3D scene representation from Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models and languages. The main challenges are the domain gaps between the CAD models and the real scene's objects, including model-to-scene (from a single model to the scene) and synthetic-to-real (from synthetic model to real scene's object). To handle the above challenges, Model2Scene first simulates a crowded scene by mixing data-augmented CAD models. Next, we propose a novel feature regularization operation, termed Deep Convex-hull Regularization (DCR), to project point features into a unified convex hull space, reducing the domain gap. Ultimately, we impose contrastive loss on language embedding and the point features of CAD models to pre-train the 3D network. Extensive experiments verify the learned 3D scene representation is beneficial for various downstream tasks, including label-free 3D object salient detection, label-efficient 3D scene perception and zero-shot 3D semantic segmentation. Notably, Model2Scene yields impressive label-free 3D object salient detection with an average mAP of 46.08\% and 55.49\% on the ScanNet and S3DIS datasets, respectively. The code will be publicly available.