In this paper, we present a joint end-to-end line segment detection algorithm using Transformers that is post-processing and heuristics-guided intermediate processing (edge/junction/region detection) free. Our method, named LinE segment TRansformers (LETR), takes advantages of having integrated tokenized queries, a self-attention mechanism, and an encoding-decoding strategy within Transformers by skipping standard heuristic designs for the edge element detection and perceptual grouping processes. We equip Transformers with a multi-scale encoder/decoder strategy to perform fine-grained line segment detection under a direct endpoint distance loss. This loss term is particularly suitable for detecting geometric structures such as line segments that are not conveniently represented by the standard bounding box representations. The Transformers learn to gradually refine line segments through layers of self-attention. In our experiments, we show state-of-the-art results on Wireframe and YorkUrban benchmarks.
Line segment detection is essential for high-level tasks in computer vision and robotics. Currently, most stateof-the-art (SOTA) methods are dedicated to detecting straight line segments in undistorted pinhole images, thus distortions on fisheye or spherical images may largely degenerate their performance. Targeting at the unified line segment detection (ULSD) for both distorted and undistorted images, we propose to represent line segments with the Bezier curve model. Then the line segment detection is tackled by the Bezier curve regression with an end-to-end network, which is model-free and without any undistortion preprocessing. Experimental results on the pinhole, fisheye, and spherical image datasets validate the superiority of the proposed ULSD to the SOTA methods both in accuracy and efficiency (40.6fps for pinhole images). The source code is available at https://github.com/lh9171338/Unified-LineSegment-Detection.
This paper proposes a novel deep convolutional model, Tri-Points Based Line Segment Detector (TP-LSD), to detect line segments in an image at real-time speed. The previous related methods typically use the two-step strategy, relying on either heuristic post-process or extra classifier. To realize one-step detection with a faster and more compact model, we introduce the tri-points representation, converting the line segment detection to the end-to-end prediction of a root-point and two endpoints for each line segment. TP-LSD has two branches: tri-points extraction branch and line segmentation branch. The former predicts the heat map of root-points and the two displacement maps of endpoints. The latter segments the pixels on straight lines out from background. Moreover, the line segmentation map is reused in the first branch as structural prior. We propose an additional novel evaluation metric and evaluate our method on Wireframe and YorkUrban datasets, demonstrating not only the competitive accuracy compared to the most recent methods, but also the real-time run speed up to 78 FPS with the $320\times 320$ input.
We present a novel real-time line segment detection scheme called Line Graph Neural Network (LGNN). Existing approaches require a computationally expensive verification or postprocessing step. Our LGNN employs a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for proposing line segment directly, with a graph neural network (GNN) module for reasoning their connectivities. Specifically, LGNN exploits a new quadruplet representation for each line segment where the GNN module takes the predicted candidates as vertexes and constructs a sparse graph to enforce structural context. Compared with the state-of-the-art, LGNN achieves near real-time performance without compromising accuracy. LGNN further enables time-sensitive 3D applications. When a 3D point cloud is accessible, we present a multi-modal line segment classification technique for extracting a 3D wireframe of the environment robustly and efficiently.
Classical work on line segment detection is knowledge-based; it uses carefully designed geometric priors using either image gradients, pixel groupings, or Hough transform variants. Instead, current deep learning methods do away with all prior knowledge and replace priors by training deep networks on large manually annotated datasets. Here, we reduce the dependency on labeled data by building on the classic knowledge-based priors while using deep networks to learn features. We add line priors through a trainable Hough transform block into a deep network. Hough transform provides the prior knowledge about global line parameterizations, while the convolutional layers can learn the local gradient-like line features. On the Wireframe (ShanghaiTech) and York Urban datasets we show that adding prior knowledge improves data efficiency as line priors no longer need to be learned from data. Keywords: Hough transform; global line prior, line segment detection.
In this paper, we propose a learning-based approach to the task of automatically extracting a "wireframe" representation for images of cluttered man-made environments. The wireframe (see Fig. 1) contains all salient straight lines and their junctions of the scene that encode efficiently and accurately large-scale geometry and object shapes. To this end, we have built a very large new dataset of over 5,000 images with wireframes thoroughly labelled by humans. We have proposed two convolutional neural networks that are suitable for extracting junctions and lines with large spatial support, respectively. The networks trained on our dataset have achieved significantly better performance than state-of-the-art methods for junction detection and line segment detection, respectively. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively the wireframes obtained by our method, and have convincingly shown that effectively and efficiently parsing wireframes for images of man-made environments is a feasible goal within reach. Such wireframes could benefit many important visual tasks such as feature correspondence, 3D reconstruction, vision-based mapping, localization, and navigation. The data and source code are available at https://github.com/huangkuns/wireframe.
This paper presents a fast and parsimonious parsing method to accurately and robustly detect a vectorized wireframe in an input image with a single forward pass. The proposed method is end-to-end trainable, consisting of three components: (i) line segment and junction proposal generation, (ii) line segment and junction matching, and (iii) line segment and junction verification. For computing line segment proposals, a novel exact dual representation is proposed which exploits a parsimonious geometric reparameterization for line segments and forms a holistic 4-dimensional attraction field map for an input image. Junctions can be treated as the "basins" in the attraction field. The proposed method is thus called Holistically-Attracted Wireframe Parser (HAWP). In experiments, the proposed method is tested on two benchmarks, the Wireframe dataset, and the YorkUrban dataset. On both benchmarks, it obtains state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency. For example, on the Wireframe dataset, compared to the previous state-of-the-art method L-CNN, it improves the challenging mean structural average precision (msAP) by a large margin ($2.8\%$ absolute improvements) and achieves 29.5 FPS on single GPU ($89\%$ relative improvement). A systematic ablation study is performed to further justify the proposed method.
Line segment detection is an essential task in computer vision and image analysis, as it is the critical foundation for advanced tasks such as shape modeling and road lane line detection for autonomous driving. We present a robust topological graph guided approach for line segment detection in low quality binary images (hence, we call it TGGLines). Due to the graph-guided approach, TGGLines not only detects line segments, but also organizes the segments with a line segment connectivity graph, which means the topological relationships (e.g., intersection, an isolated line segment) of the detected line segments are captured and stored; whereas other line detectors only retain a collection of loose line segments. Our empirical results show that the TGGLines detector visually and quantitatively outperforms state-of-the-art line segment detection methods. In addition, our TGGLines approach has the following two competitive advantages: (1) our method only requires one parameter and it is adaptive, whereas almost all other line segment detection methods require multiple (non-adaptive) parameters, and (2) the line segments detected by TGGLines are organized by a line segment connectivity graph.
Traditional approaches to line segment detection typically involve perceptual grouping in the image domain and/or global accumulation in the Hough domain. Here we propose a probabilistic algorithm that merges the advantages of both approaches. In a first stage lines are detected using a global probabilistic Hough approach. In the second stage each detected line is analyzed in the image domain to localize the line segments that generated the peak in the Hough map. By limiting search to a line, the distribution of segments over the sequence of points on the line can be modeled as a Markov chain, and a probabilistically optimal labelling can be computed exactly using a standard dynamic programming algorithm, in linear time. The Markov assumption also leads to an intuitive ranking method that uses the local marginal posterior probabilities to estimate the expected number of correctly labelled points on a segment. To assess the resulting Markov Chain Marginal Line Segment Detector (MCMLSD) we develop and apply a novel quantitative evaluation methodology that controls for under- and over-segmentation. Evaluation on the YorkUrbanDB and Wireframe datasets shows that the proposed MCMLSD method outperforms prior traditional approaches, as well as more recent deep learning methods.
This paper presents regional attraction of line segment maps, and hereby poses the problem of line segment detection (LSD) as a problem of region coloring. Given a line segment map, the proposed regional attraction first establishes the relationship between line segments and regions in the image lattice. Based on this, the line segment map is equivalently transformed to an attraction field map (AFM), which can be remapped to a set of line segments without loss of information. Accordingly, we develop an end-to-end framework to learn attraction field maps for raw input images, followed by a squeeze module to detect line segments. Apart from existing works, the proposed detector properly handles the local ambiguity and does not rely on the accurate identification of edge pixels. Comprehensive experiments on the Wireframe dataset and the YorkUrban dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method. In particular, we achieve an F-measure of 0.831 on the Wireframe dataset, advancing the state-of-the-art performance by 10.3 percent.
In this paper, we introduces a new type of line-shaped image representation, named semantic line segment (Sem-LS) and focus on solving its detection problem. Sem-LS contains high-level semantics and is a compact scene representation where only visually salient line segments with stable semantics are preserved. Combined with high-level semantics, Sem-LS is more robust under cluttered environment compared with existing line-shaped representations. The compactness of Sem-LS facilitates its use in large-scale applications, such as city-scale SLAM (simultaneously localization and mapping) and LCD (loop closure detection). Sem-LS detection is a challenging task due to its significantly different appearance from existing learning-based image representations such as wireframes and objects. For further investigation, we first label Sem-LS on two well-known datasets, KITTI and KAIST URBAN, as new benchmarks. Then, we propose a learning-based Sem-LS detector (Sem-LSD) and devise new module as well as metrics to address unique challenges in Sem-LS detection. Experimental results have shown both the efficacy and efficiency of Sem-LSD. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed Sem-LS is supported by two experiments on detector repeatability and a city-scale LCD problem. Labeled datasets and code will be released shortly.
In this paper, we present a novel framework to detect line segments in man-made environments. Specifically, we propose to describe junctions, line segments and relationships between them with a simple graph, which is more structured and informative than end-point representation used in existing line segment detection methods. In order to extract a line segment graph from an image, we further introduce the PPGNet, a convolutional neural network that directly infers a graph from an image. We evaluate our method on published benchmarks including York Urban and Wireframe datasets. The results demonstrate that our method achieves satisfactory performance and generalizes well on all the benchmarks. The source code of our work is available at \url{https://github.com/svip-lab/PPGNet}.
We present a conceptually simple yet effective algorithm to detect wireframes in a given image. Compared to the previous methods which first predict an intermediate heat map and then extract straight lines with heuristic algorithms, our method is end-to-end trainable and can directly output a vectorized wireframe that contains semantically meaningful and geometrically salient junctions and lines. To better understand the quality of the outputs, we propose a new metric for wireframe evaluation that penalizes overlapped line segments and incorrect line connectivities. We conduct extensive experiments and show that our method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art wireframe and line extraction algorithms. We hope our simple approach can be served as a baseline for future wireframe parsing studies. Code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/zhou13/lcnn.
This paper presents a very simple but efficient algorithm for 3D line segment detection from large scale unorganized point cloud. Unlike traditional methods which usually extract 3D edge points first and then link them to fit for 3D line segments, we propose a very simple 3D line segment detection algorithm based on point cloud segmentation and 2D line detection. Given the input unorganized point cloud, three steps are performed to detect 3D line segments. Firstly, the point cloud is segmented into 3D planes via region growing and region merging. Secondly, for each 3D plane, all the points belonging to it are projected onto the plane itself to form a 2D image, which is followed by 2D contour extraction and Least Square Fitting to get the 2D line segments. Those 2D line segments are then re-projected onto the 3D plane to get the corresponding 3D line segments. Finally, a post-processing procedure is proposed to eliminate outliers and merge adjacent 3D line segments. Experiments on several public datasets demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our method. More results and the C++ source code of the proposed algorithm are publicly available at https://github.com/xiaohulugo/3DLineDetection.
This paper presents a region-partition based attraction field dual representation for line segment maps, and thus poses the problem of line segment detection (LSD) as the region coloring problem. The latter is then addressed by learning deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) for accuracy, robustness and efficiency. For a 2D line segment map, our dual representation consists of three components: (i) A region-partition map in which every pixel is assigned to one and only one line segment; (ii) An attraction field map in which every pixel in a partition region is encoded by its 2D projection vector w.r.t. the associated line segment; and (iii) A squeeze module which squashes the attraction field to a line segment map that almost perfectly recovers the input one. By leveraging the duality, we learn ConvNets to compute the attraction field maps for raw in-put images, followed by the squeeze module for LSD, in an end-to-end manner. Our method rigorously addresses several challenges in LSD such as local ambiguity and class imbalance. Our method also harnesses the best practices developed in ConvNets based semantic segmentation methods such as the encoder-decoder architecture and the a-trous convolution. In experiments, our method is tested on the WireFrame dataset and the YorkUrban dataset with state-of-the-art performance obtained. Especially, we advance the performance by 4.5 percents on the WireFrame dataset. Our method is also fast with 6.6~10.4 FPS, outperforming most of existing line segment detectors.