In this paper, we tackle the copy-paste image-to-image composition problem with a focus on object placement learning. Prior methods have leveraged generative models to reduce the reliance for dense supervision. However, this often limits their capacity to model complex data distributions. Alternatively, transformer networks with a sparse contrastive loss have been explored, but their over-relaxed regularization often leads to imprecise object placement. We introduce BOOTPLACE, a novel paradigm that formulates object placement as a placement-by-detection problem. Our approach begins by identifying suitable regions of interest for object placement. This is achieved by training a specialized detection transformer on object-subtracted backgrounds, enhanced with multi-object supervisions. It then semantically associates each target compositing object with detected regions based on their complementary characteristics. Through a boostrapped training approach applied to randomly object-subtracted images, our model enforces meaningful placements through extensive paired data augmentation. Experimental results on established benchmarks demonstrate BOOTPLACE's superior performance in object repositioning, markedly surpassing state-of-the-art baselines on Cityscapes and OPA datasets with notable improvements in IOU scores. Additional ablation studies further showcase the compositionality and generalizability of our approach, supported by user study evaluations.
Force estimation in human-object interactions is crucial for various fields like ergonomics, physical therapy, and sports science. Traditional methods depend on specialized equipment such as force plates and sensors, which makes accurate assessments both expensive and restricted to laboratory settings. In this paper, we introduce ForcePose, a novel deep learning framework that estimates applied forces by combining human pose estimation with object detection. Our approach leverages MediaPipe for skeletal tracking and SSD MobileNet for object recognition to create a unified representation of human-object interaction. We've developed a specialized neural network that processes both spatial and temporal features to predict force magnitude and direction without needing any physical sensors. After training on our dataset of 850 annotated videos with corresponding force measurements, our model achieves a mean absolute error of 5.83 N in force magnitude and 7.4 degrees in force direction. When compared to existing computer vision approaches, our method performs 27.5% better while still offering real-time performance on standard computing hardware. ForcePose opens up new possibilities for force analysis in diverse real-world scenarios where traditional measurement tools are impractical or intrusive. This paper discusses our methodology, the dataset creation process, evaluation metrics, and potential applications across rehabilitation, ergonomics assessment, and athletic performance analysis.
Predicting diverse object motions from a single static image remains challenging, as current video generation models often entangle object movement with camera motion and other scene changes. While recent methods can predict specific motions from motion arrow input, they rely on synthetic data and predefined motions, limiting their application to complex scenes. We introduce Motion Modes, a training-free approach that explores a pre-trained image-to-video generator's latent distribution to discover various distinct and plausible motions focused on selected objects in static images. We achieve this by employing a flow generator guided by energy functions designed to disentangle object and camera motion. Additionally, we use an energy inspired by particle guidance to diversify the generated motions, without requiring explicit training data. Experimental results demonstrate that Motion Modes generates realistic and varied object animations, surpassing previous methods and even human predictions regarding plausibility and diversity. Project Webpage: https://motionmodes.github.io/
Recently, 4D Radar has emerged as a crucial sensor for 3D object detection in autonomous vehicles, offering both stable perception in adverse weather and high-density point clouds for object shape recognition. However, processing such high-density data demands substantial computational resources and energy consumption. We propose SpikingRTNH, the first spiking neural network (SNN) for 3D object detection using 4D Radar data. By replacing conventional ReLU activation functions with leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) spiking neurons, SpikingRTNH achieves significant energy efficiency gains. Furthermore, inspired by human cognitive processes, we introduce biological top-down inference (BTI), which processes point clouds sequentially from higher to lower densities. This approach effectively utilizes points with lower noise and higher importance for detection. Experiments on K-Radar dataset demonstrate that SpikingRTNH with BTI significantly reduces energy consumption by 78% while achieving comparable detection performance to its ANN counterpart (51.1% AP 3D, 57.0% AP BEV). These results establish the viability of SNNs for energy-efficient 4D Radar-based object detection in autonomous driving systems. All codes are available at https://github.com/kaist-avelab/k-radar.
Both indoor and outdoor scene perceptions are essential for embodied intelligence. However, current sparse supervised 3D object detection methods focus solely on outdoor scenes without considering indoor settings. To this end, we propose a unified sparse supervised 3D object detection method for both indoor and outdoor scenes through learning class prototypes to effectively utilize unlabeled objects. Specifically, we first propose a prototype-based object mining module that converts the unlabeled object mining into a matching problem between class prototypes and unlabeled features. By using optimal transport matching results, we assign prototype labels to high-confidence features, thereby achieving the mining of unlabeled objects. We then present a multi-label cooperative refinement module to effectively recover missed detections through pseudo label quality control and prototype label cooperation. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under the one object per scene sparse supervised setting across indoor and outdoor datasets. With only one labeled object per scene, our method achieves about 78%, 90%, and 96% performance compared to the fully supervised detector on ScanNet V2, SUN RGB-D, and KITTI, respectively, highlighting the scalability of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/zyrant/CPDet3D.
This paper proposes a novel scene understanding task called Visual Jenga. Drawing inspiration from the game Jenga, the proposed task involves progressively removing objects from a single image until only the background remains. Just as Jenga players must understand structural dependencies to maintain tower stability, our task reveals the intrinsic relationships between scene elements by systematically exploring which objects can be removed while preserving scene coherence in both physical and geometric sense. As a starting point for tackling the Visual Jenga task, we propose a simple, data-driven, training-free approach that is surprisingly effective on a range of real-world images. The principle behind our approach is to utilize the asymmetry in the pairwise relationships between objects within a scene and employ a large inpainting model to generate a set of counterfactuals to quantify the asymmetry.
Object-centric representation learning aims to decompose visual scenes into fixed-size vectors called "slots" or "object files", where each slot captures a distinct object. Current state-of-the-art object-centric models have shown remarkable success in object discovery in diverse domains, including complex real-world scenes. However, these models suffer from a key limitation: they lack controllability. Specifically, current object-centric models learn representations based on their preconceived understanding of objects, without allowing user input to guide which objects are represented. Introducing controllability into object-centric models could unlock a range of useful capabilities, such as the ability to extract instance-specific representations from a scene. In this work, we propose a novel approach for user-directed control over slot representations by conditioning slots on language descriptions. The proposed ConTRoLlable Object-centric representation learning approach, which we term CTRL-O, achieves targeted object-language binding in complex real-world scenes without requiring mask supervision. Next, we apply these controllable slot representations on two downstream vision language tasks: text-to-image generation and visual question answering. The proposed approach enables instance-specific text-to-image generation and also achieves strong performance on visual question answering.
In the realm of object pose estimation, scenarios involving both dynamic objects and moving cameras are prevalent. However, the scarcity of corresponding real-world datasets significantly hinders the development and evaluation of robust pose estimation models. This is largely attributed to the inherent challenges in accurately annotating object poses in dynamic scenes captured by moving cameras. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a novel dataset DynOPETs and a dedicated data acquisition and annotation pipeline tailored for object pose estimation and tracking in such unconstrained environments. Our efficient annotation method innovatively integrates pose estimation and pose tracking techniques to generate pseudo-labels, which are subsequently refined through pose graph optimization. The resulting dataset offers accurate pose annotations for dynamic objects observed from moving cameras. To validate the effectiveness and value of our dataset, we perform comprehensive evaluations using 18 state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its potential to accelerate research in this challenging domain. The dataset will be made publicly available to facilitate further exploration and advancement in the field.
The task of LiDAR-based 3D Open-Vocabulary Detection (3D OVD) requires the detector to learn to detect novel objects from point clouds without off-the-shelf training labels. Previous methods focus on the learning of object-level representations and ignore the scene-level information, thus it is hard to distinguish objects with similar classes. In this work, we propose a Global-Local Collaborative Reason and Debate with PSL (GLRD) framework for the 3D OVD task, considering both local object-level information and global scene-level information. Specifically, LLM is utilized to perform common sense reasoning based on object-level and scene-level information, where the detection result is refined accordingly. To further boost the LLM's ability of precise decisions, we also design a probabilistic soft logic solver (OV-PSL) to search for the optimal solution, and a debate scheme to confirm the class of confusable objects. In addition, to alleviate the uneven distribution of classes, a static balance scheme (SBC) and a dynamic balance scheme (DBC) are designed. In addition, to reduce the influence of noise in data and training, we further propose Reflected Pseudo Labels Generation (RPLG) and Background-Aware Object Localization (BAOL). Extensive experiments conducted on ScanNet and SUN RGB-D demonstrate the superiority of GLRD, where absolute improvements in mean average precision are $+2.82\%$ on SUN RGB-D and $+3.72\%$ on ScanNet in the partial open-vocabulary setting. In the full open-vocabulary setting, the absolute improvements in mean average precision are $+4.03\%$ on ScanNet and $+14.11\%$ on SUN RGB-D.
The generation of indoor furniture layouts has significant applications in augmented reality, smart homes, and architectural design. Successful furniture arrangement requires proper physical relationships (e.g., collision avoidance) and spacing relationships between furniture and their functional zones to be respected. However, manually defined relationships are almost always incomplete and can produce unrealistic layouts. This work instead extracts spacing relationships automatically based on a hierarchical analysis and adopts the Delaunay Triangulation to produce important triple relationships. Compared to pairwise relationship modeling, triple relationships account for interactions and space utilization among multiple objects. To this end, we introduce RelTriple, a novel approach that enhances furniture distribution by learning spacing relationships between objects and regions. We formulate triple relationships as object-to-object (O2O) losses and object-to-region (O2R) losses and integrate them directly into the training process of generative diffusion. Our approach consistently improves over existing state-of-the-art methods in visual results evaluation metrics on unconditional layout generation, floorplan-conditioned layout generation, and scene rearrangement, achieving at least 12% on the introduced spatial relationship metric and superior spatial coherence and practical usability.
We present a method for learning 3D spatial relationships between object pairs, referred to as object-object spatial relationships (OOR), by leveraging synthetically generated 3D samples from pre-trained 2D diffusion models. We hypothesize that images synthesized by 2D diffusion models inherently capture plausible and realistic OOR cues, enabling efficient ways to collect a 3D dataset to learn OOR for various unbounded object categories. Our approach begins by synthesizing diverse images that capture plausible OOR cues, which we then uplift into 3D samples. Leveraging our diverse collection of plausible 3D samples for the object pairs, we train a score-based OOR diffusion model to learn the distribution of their relative spatial relationships. Additionally, we extend our pairwise OOR to multi-object OOR by enforcing consistency across pairwise relations and preventing object collisions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness of our method across various object-object spatial relationships, along with its applicability to real-world 3D scene arrangement tasks using the OOR diffusion model.
Video camouflaged object segmentation (VCOS), aiming at segmenting camouflaged objects that seamlessly blend into their environment, is a fundamental vision task with various real-world applications. With the release of SAM2, video segmentation has witnessed significant progress. However, SAM2's capability of segmenting camouflaged videos is suboptimal, especially when given simple prompts such as point and box. To address the problem, we propose Camouflaged SAM2 (CamSAM2), which enhances SAM2's ability to handle camouflaged scenes without modifying SAM2's parameters. Specifically, we introduce a decamouflaged token to provide the flexibility of feature adjustment for VCOS. To make full use of fine-grained and high-resolution features from the current frame and previous frames, we propose implicit object-aware fusion (IOF) and explicit object-aware fusion (EOF) modules, respectively. Object prototype generation (OPG) is introduced to abstract and memorize object prototypes with informative details using high-quality features from previous frames. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach. While CamSAM2 only adds negligible learnable parameters to SAM2, it substantially outperforms SAM2 on three VCOS datasets, especially achieving 12.2 mDice gains with click prompt on MoCA-Mask and 19.6 mDice gains with mask prompt on SUN-SEG-Hard, with Hiera-T as the backbone. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhoustan/CamSAM2.
Accurate object segmentation is crucial for high-quality scene understanding in the 3D vision domain. However, 3D segmentation based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) struggles with accurately delineating object boundaries, as Gaussian primitives often span across object edges due to their inherent volume and the lack of semantic guidance during training. In order to tackle these challenges, we introduce Clear Object Boundaries for 3DGS Segmentation (COB-GS), which aims to improve segmentation accuracy by clearly delineating blurry boundaries of interwoven Gaussian primitives within the scene. Unlike existing approaches that remove ambiguous Gaussians and sacrifice visual quality, COB-GS, as a 3DGS refinement method, jointly optimizes semantic and visual information, allowing the two different levels to cooperate with each other effectively. Specifically, for the semantic guidance, we introduce a boundary-adaptive Gaussian splitting technique that leverages semantic gradient statistics to identify and split ambiguous Gaussians, aligning them closely with object boundaries. For the visual optimization, we rectify the degraded suboptimal texture of the 3DGS scene, particularly along the refined boundary structures. Experimental results show that COB-GS substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness against inaccurate masks from pre-trained model, yielding clear boundaries while preserving high visual quality. Code is available at https://github.com/ZestfulJX/COB-GS.
Recent text-to-image generative models, e.g., Stable Diffusion V3 and Flux, have achieved notable progress. However, these models are strongly restricted to their limited knowledge, a.k.a., their own fixed parameters, that are trained with closed datasets. This leads to significant hallucinations or distortions when facing fine-grained and unseen novel real-world objects, e.g., the appearance of the Tesla Cybertruck. To this end, we present the first real-object-based retrieval-augmented generation framework (RealRAG), which augments fine-grained and unseen novel object generation by learning and retrieving real-world images to overcome the knowledge gaps of generative models. Specifically, to integrate missing memory for unseen novel object generation, we train a reflective retriever by self-reflective contrastive learning, which injects the generator's knowledge into the sef-reflective negatives, ensuring that the retrieved augmented images compensate for the model's missing knowledge. Furthermore, the real-object-based framework integrates fine-grained visual knowledge for the generative models, tackling the distortion problem and improving the realism for fine-grained object generation. Our Real-RAG is superior in its modular application to all types of state-of-the-art text-to-image generative models and also delivers remarkable performance boosts with all of them, such as a gain of 16.18% FID score with the auto-regressive model on the Stanford Car benchmark.
Existing progress in object keypoint estimation primarily benefits from the conventional supervised learning paradigm based on numerous data labeled with pre-defined keypoints. However, these well-trained models can hardly detect the undefined new keypoints in test time, which largely hinders their feasibility for diverse downstream tasks. To handle this, various solutions are explored but still suffer from either limited generalizability or transferability. Therefore, in this paper, we explore a novel keypoint learning paradigm in that we only annotate new keypoints in the new data and incrementally train the model, without retaining any old data, called Incremental object Keypoint Learning (IKL). A two-stage learning scheme as a novel baseline tailored to IKL is developed. In the first Knowledge Association stage, given the data labeled with only new keypoints, an auxiliary KA-Net is trained to automatically associate the old keypoints to these new ones based on their spatial and intrinsic anatomical relations. In the second Mutual Promotion stage, based on a keypoint-oriented spatial distillation loss, we jointly leverage the auxiliary KA-Net and the old model for knowledge consolidation to mutually promote the estimation of all old and new keypoints. Owing to the investigation of the correlations between new and old keypoints, our proposed method can not just effectively mitigate the catastrophic forgetting of old keypoints, but may even further improve the estimation of the old ones and achieve a positive transfer beyond anti-forgetting. Such an observation has been solidly verified by extensive experiments on different keypoint datasets, where our method exhibits superiority in alleviating the forgetting issue and boosting performance while enjoying labeling efficiency even under the low-shot data regime.
Human-object interaction (HOI) synthesis is crucial for creating immersive and realistic experiences for applications such as virtual reality. Existing methods often rely on simplified object representations, such as the object's centroid or the nearest point to a human, to achieve physically plausible motions. However, these approaches may overlook geometric complexity, resulting in suboptimal interaction fidelity. To address this limitation, we introduce ROG, a novel diffusion-based framework that models the spatiotemporal relationships inherent in HOIs with rich geometric detail. For efficient object representation, we select boundary-focused and fine-detail key points from the object mesh, ensuring a comprehensive depiction of the object's geometry. This representation is used to construct an interactive distance field (IDF), capturing the robust HOI dynamics. Furthermore, we develop a diffusion-based relation model that integrates spatial and temporal attention mechanisms, enabling a better understanding of intricate HOI relationships. This relation model refines the generated motion's IDF, guiding the motion generation process to produce relation-aware and semantically aligned movements. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ROG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the realism and semantic accuracy of synthesized HOIs.
Object detection aims to obtain the location and the category of specific objects in a given image, which includes two tasks: classification and location. In recent years, researchers tend to apply object detection to underwater robots equipped with vision systems to complete tasks including seafood fishing, fish farming, biodiversity monitoring and so on. However, the diversity and complexity of underwater environments bring new challenges to object detection. First, aquatic organisms tend to live together, which leads to severe occlusion. Second, theaquatic organisms are good at hiding themselves, which have a similar color to the background. Third, the various water quality and changeable and extreme lighting conditions lead to the distorted, low contrast, blue or green images obtained by the underwater camera, resulting in domain shift. And the deep model is generally vulnerable to facing domain shift. Fourth, the movement of the underwater robot leads to the blur of the captured image and makes the water muddy, which results in low visibility of the water. This paper investigates the problems brought by the underwater environment mentioned above, and aims to design a high-performance and robust underwater object detector.
Accurate 3D pose estimation of grasped objects is an important prerequisite for robots to perform assembly or in-hand manipulation tasks, but object occlusion by the robot's own hand greatly increases the difficulty of this perceptual task. Here, we propose that combining visual information and proprioception with binary, low-resolution tactile contact measurements from across the interior surface of an articulated robotic hand can mitigate this issue. The visuo-tactile object-pose-estimation problem is formulated probabilistically in a factor graph. The pose of the object is optimized to align with the three kinds of measurements using a robust cost function to reduce the influence of visual or tactile outlier readings. The advantages of the proposed approach are first demonstrated in simulation: a custom 15-DoF robot hand with one binary tactile sensor per link grasps 17 YCB objects while observed by an RGB-D camera. This low-resolution in-hand tactile sensing significantly improves object-pose estimates under high occlusion and also high visual noise. We also show these benefits through grasping tests with a preliminary real version of our tactile hand, obtaining reasonable visuo-tactile estimates of object pose at approximately 13.3 Hz on average.
Human-object interaction (HOI) synthesis is important for various applications, ranging from virtual reality to robotics. However, acquiring 3D HOI data is challenging due to its complexity and high cost, limiting existing methods to the narrow diversity of object types and interaction patterns in training datasets. This paper proposes a novel zero-shot HOI synthesis framework without relying on end-to-end training on currently limited 3D HOI datasets. The core idea of our method lies in leveraging extensive HOI knowledge from pre-trained Multimodal Models. Given a text description, our system first obtains temporally consistent 2D HOI image sequences using image or video generation models, which are then uplifted to 3D HOI milestones of human and object poses. We employ pre-trained human pose estimation models to extract human poses and introduce a generalizable category-level 6-DoF estimation method to obtain the object poses from 2D HOI images. Our estimation method is adaptive to various object templates obtained from text-to-3D models or online retrieval. A physics-based tracking of the 3D HOI kinematic milestone is further applied to refine both body motions and object poses, yielding more physically plausible HOI generation results. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is capable of generating open-vocabulary HOIs with physical realism and semantic diversity.
Referring expression comprehension (REC) aims at achieving object localization based on natural language descriptions. However, existing REC approaches are constrained by object category descriptions and single-attribute intention descriptions, hindering their application in real-world scenarios. In natural human-robot interactions, users often express their desires through individual states and intentions, accompanied by guiding gestures, rather than detailed object descriptions. To address this challenge, we propose Multi-ref EC, a novel task framework that integrates state descriptions, derived intentions, and embodied gestures to locate target objects. We introduce the State-Intention-Gesture Attributes Reference (SIGAR) dataset, which combines state and intention expressions with embodied references. Through extensive experiments with various baseline models on SIGAR, we demonstrate that properly ordered multi-attribute references contribute to improved localization performance, revealing that single-attribute reference is insufficient for natural human-robot interaction scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of multi-attribute reference expressions in advancing visual-language understanding.