Real-time 2D keypoint detection plays an essential role in computer vision. Although CNN-based and Transformer-based methods have achieved breakthrough progress, they often fail to deliver superior performance and real-time speed. This paper introduces MamKPD, the first efficient yet effective mamba-based pose estimation framework for 2D keypoint detection. The conventional Mamba module exhibits limited information interaction between patches. To address this, we propose a lightweight contextual modeling module (CMM) that uses depth-wise convolutions to model inter-patch dependencies and linear layers to distill the pose cues within each patch. Subsequently, by combining Mamba for global modeling across all patches, MamKPD effectively extracts instances' pose information. We conduct extensive experiments on human and animal pose estimation datasets to validate the effectiveness of MamKPD. Our MamKPD-L achieves 77.3% AP on the COCO dataset with 1492 FPS on an NVIDIA GTX 4090 GPU. Moreover, MamKPD achieves state-of-the-art results on the MPII dataset and competitive results on the AP-10K dataset while saving 85% of the parameters compared to ViTPose. Our project page is available at https://mamkpd.github.io/.
Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE) localizes keypoints across diverse object categories with a single model, using one or a few annotated support images. Recent works have shown that using a pose graph (i.e., treating keypoints as nodes in a graph rather than isolated points) helps handle occlusions and break symmetry. However, these methods assume a static pose graph with equal-weight edges, leading to suboptimal results. We introduce EdgeCape, a novel framework that overcomes these limitations by predicting the graph's edge weights which optimizes localization. To further leverage structural priors, we propose integrating Markovian Structural Bias, which modulates the self-attention interaction between nodes based on the number of hops between them. We show that this improves the model's ability to capture global spatial dependencies. Evaluated on the MP-100 benchmark, which includes 100 categories and over 20K images, EdgeCape achieves state-of-the-art results in the 1-shot setting and leads among similar-sized methods in the 5-shot setting, significantly improving keypoint localization accuracy. Our code is publicly available.
Real-time object localization on edge devices is fundamental for numerous applications, ranging from surveillance to industrial automation. Traditional frameworks, such as object detection, segmentation, and keypoint detection, struggle in resource-constrained environments, often resulting in substantial target omissions. To address these challenges, we introduce OCDet, a lightweight Object Center Detection framework optimized for edge devices with NPUs. OCDet predicts heatmaps representing object center probabilities and extracts center points through peak identification. Unlike prior methods using fixed Gaussian distribution, we introduce Generalized Centerness (GC) to generate ground truth heatmaps from bounding box annotations, providing finer spatial details without additional manual labeling. Built on NPU-friendly Semantic FPN with MobileNetV4 backbones, OCDet models are trained by our Balanced Continuous Focal Loss (BCFL), which alleviates data imbalance and focuses training on hard negative examples for probability regression tasks. Leveraging the novel Center Alignment Score (CAS) with Hungarian matching, we demonstrate that OCDet consistently outperforms YOLO11 in object center detection, achieving up to 23% higher CAS while requiring 42% fewer parameters, 34% less computation, and 64% lower NPU latency. When compared to keypoint detection frameworks, OCDet achieves substantial CAS improvements up to 186% using identical models. By integrating GC, BCFL, and CAS, OCDet establishes a new paradigm for efficient and robust object center detection on edge devices with NPUs. The code is released at https://github.com/chen-xin-94/ocdet.
This study proposes the IoT-Enhanced Pose Optimization Network (IE-PONet) for high-precision 3D pose estimation and motion optimization of track and field athletes. IE-PONet integrates C3D for spatiotemporal feature extraction, OpenPose for real-time keypoint detection, and Bayesian optimization for hyperparameter tuning. Experimental results on NTURGB+D and FineGYM datasets demonstrate superior performance, with AP\(^p50\) scores of 90.5 and 91.0, and mAP scores of 74.3 and 74.0, respectively. Ablation studies confirm the essential roles of each module in enhancing model accuracy. IE-PONet provides a robust tool for athletic performance analysis and optimization, offering precise technical insights for training and injury prevention. Future work will focus on further model optimization, multimodal data integration, and developing real-time feedback mechanisms to enhance practical applications.
Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have greatly improved their abilities in image understanding. However, these models often struggle with grasping pixel-level semantic details, e.g., the keypoints of an object. To bridge this gap, we introduce the novel challenge of Semantic Keypoint Comprehension, which aims to comprehend keypoints across different task scenarios, including keypoint semantic understanding, visual prompt-based keypoint detection, and textual prompt-based keypoint detection. Moreover, we introduce KptLLM, a unified multimodal model that utilizes an identify-then-detect strategy to effectively address these challenges. KptLLM underscores the initial discernment of semantics in keypoints, followed by the precise determination of their positions through a chain-of-thought process. With several carefully designed modules, KptLLM adeptly handles various modality inputs, facilitating the interpretation of both semantic contents and keypoint locations. Our extensive experiments demonstrate KptLLM's superiority in various keypoint detection benchmarks and its unique semantic capabilities in interpreting keypoints.
Image Matching Challenge 2024 is a competition focused on building 3D maps from diverse image sets, requiring participants to solve fundamental computer vision challenges in image matching across varying angles, lighting, and seasonal changes. This project develops a Pipeline method that combines multiple advanced techniques: using pre-trained EfficientNet-B7 for initial feature extraction and cosine distance-based image pair filtering, employing both KeyNetAffNetHardNet and SuperPoint for keypoint feature extraction, utilizing AdaLAM and SuperGlue for keypoint matching, and finally applying Pycolmap for 3D spatial analysis. The methodology achieved an excellent score of 0.167 on the private leaderboard, with experimental results demonstrating that the combination of KeyNetAffNetHardNet and SuperPoint provides significant advantages in keypoint detection and matching, particularly when dealing with challenging variations in surface texture and environmental conditions that typically degrade traditional algorithm performance.
In precision agriculture, vision models often struggle with new, unseen fields where crops and weeds have been influenced by external factors, resulting in compositions and appearances that differ from the learned distribution. This paper aims to adapt to specific fields at low cost using Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). We explore a novel domain shift from a diverse, large pool of internet-sourced data to a small set of data collected by a robot at specific locations, minimizing the need for extensive on-field data collection. Additionally, we introduce a novel module -- the Multi-level Attention-based Adversarial Discriminator (MAAD) -- which can be integrated at the feature extractor level of any detection model. In this study, we incorporate MAAD with CenterNet to simultaneously detect leaf, stem, and vein instances. Our results show significant performance improvements in the unlabeled target domain compared to baseline models, with a 7.5% increase in object detection accuracy and a 5.1% improvement in keypoint detection.
Existing unsupervised keypoint detection methods apply artificial deformations to images such as masking a significant portion of images and using reconstruction of original image as a learning objective to detect keypoints. However, this approach lacks depth information in the image and often detects keypoints on the background. To address this, we propose Distill-DKP, a novel cross-modal knowledge distillation framework that leverages depth maps and RGB images for keypoint detection in a self-supervised setting. During training, Distill-DKP extracts embedding-level knowledge from a depth-based teacher model to guide an image-based student model with inference restricted to the student. Experiments show that Distill-DKP significantly outperforms previous unsupervised methods by reducing mean L2 error by 47.15% on Human3.6M, mean average error by 5.67% on Taichi, and improving keypoints accuracy by 1.3% on DeepFashion dataset. Detailed ablation studies demonstrate the sensitivity of knowledge distillation across different layers of the network. Project Page: https://23wm13.github.io/distill-dkp/
Chick sexing, the process of determining the gender of day-old chicks, is a critical task in the poultry industry due to the distinct roles that each gender plays in production. While effective traditional methods achieve high accuracy, color, and wing feather sexing is exclusive to specific breeds, and vent sexing is invasive and requires trained experts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach inspired by facial gender classification techniques in humans: facial chick sexing. This new method does not require expert knowledge and aims to reduce training time while enhancing animal welfare by minimizing chick manipulation. We develop a comprehensive system for training and inference that includes data collection, facial and keypoint detection, facial alignment, and classification. We evaluate our model on two sets of images: Cropped Full Face and Cropped Middle Face, both of which maintain essential facial features of the chick for further analysis. Our experiment demonstrates the promising viability, with a final accuracy of 81.89%, of this approach for future practices in chick sexing by making them more universally applicable.
Ensuring model explainability and robustness is essential for reliable deployment of deep vision systems. Current methods for evaluating robustness rely on collecting and annotating extensive test sets. While this is common practice, the process is labor-intensive and expensive with no guarantee of sufficient coverage across attributes of interest. Recently, model diagnosis frameworks have emerged leveraging user inputs (e.g., text) to assess the vulnerability of the model. However, such dependence on human can introduce bias and limitation given the domain knowledge of particular users. This paper proposes Unsupervised Model Diagnosis (UMO), that leverages generative models to produce semantic counterfactual explanations without any user guidance. Given a differentiable computer vision model (i.e., the target model), UMO optimizes for the most counterfactual directions in a generative latent space. Our approach identifies and visualizes changes in semantics, and then matches these changes to attributes from wide-ranging text sources, such as dictionaries or language models. We validate the framework on multiple vision tasks (e.g., classification, segmentation, keypoint detection). Extensive experiments show that our unsupervised discovery of semantic directions can correctly highlight spurious correlations and visualize the failure mode of target models without any human intervention.
Detecting 3D keypoints with semantic consistency is widely used in many scenarios such as pose estimation, shape registration and robotics. Currently, most unsupervised 3D keypoint detection methods focus on the rigid-body objects. However, when faced with deformable objects, the keypoints they identify do not preserve semantic consistency well. In this paper, we introduce an innovative unsupervised keypoint detector Key-Grid for both the rigid-body and deformable objects, which is an autoencoder framework. The encoder predicts keypoints and the decoder utilizes the generated keypoints to reconstruct the objects. Unlike previous work, we leverage the identified keypoint in formation to form a 3D grid feature heatmap called grid heatmap, which is used in the decoder section. Grid heatmap is a novel concept that represents the latent variables for grid points sampled uniformly in the 3D cubic space, where these variables are the shortest distance between the grid points and the skeleton connected by keypoint pairs. Meanwhile, we incorporate the information from each layer of the encoder into the decoder section. We conduct an extensive evaluation of Key-Grid on a list of benchmark datasets. Key-Grid achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the semantic consistency and position accuracy of keypoints. Moreover, we demonstrate the robustness of Key-Grid to noise and downsampling. In addition, we achieve SE-(3) invariance of keypoints though generalizing Key-Grid to a SE(3)-invariant backbone.
Exploiting the foundation models (e.g., CLIP) to build a versatile keypoint detector has gained increasing attention. Most existing models accept either the text prompt (e.g., ``the nose of a cat''), or the visual prompt (e.g., support image with keypoint annotations), to detect the corresponding keypoints in query image, thereby, exhibiting either zero-shot or few-shot detection ability. However, the research on taking multimodal prompt is still underexplored, and the prompt diversity in semantics and language is far from opened. For example, how to handle unseen text prompts for novel keypoint detection and the diverse text prompts like ``Can you detect the nose and ears of a cat?'' In this work, we open the prompt diversity from three aspects: modality, semantics (seen v.s. unseen), and language, to enable a more generalized zero- and few-shot keypoint detection (Z-FSKD). We propose a novel OpenKD model which leverages multimodal prototype set to support both visual and textual prompting. Further, to infer the keypoint location of unseen texts, we add the auxiliary keypoints and texts interpolated from visual and textual domains into training, which improves the spatial reasoning of our model and significantly enhances zero-shot novel keypoint detection. We also found large language model (LLM) is a good parser, which achieves over 96% accuracy to parse keypoints from texts. With LLM, OpenKD can handle diverse text prompts. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Z-FSKD and initiates new ways to deal with unseen text and diverse texts. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/AlanLuSun/OpenKD.
Automating garment manipulation poses a significant challenge for assistive robotics due to the diverse and deformable nature of garments. Traditional approaches typically require separate models for each garment type, which limits scalability and adaptability. In contrast, this paper presents a unified approach using vision-language models (VLMs) to improve keypoint prediction across various garment categories. By interpreting both visual and semantic information, our model enables robots to manage different garment states with a single model. We created a large-scale synthetic dataset using advanced simulation techniques, allowing scalable training without extensive real-world data. Experimental results indicate that the VLM-based method significantly enhances keypoint detection accuracy and task success rates, providing a more flexible and general solution for robotic garment manipulation. In addition, this research also underscores the potential of VLMs to unify various garment manipulation tasks within a single framework, paving the way for broader applications in home automation and assistive robotics for future.
Although various visual localization approaches exist, such as scene coordinate regression and camera pose regression, these methods often struggle with optimization complexity or limited accuracy. To address these challenges, we explore the use of novel view synthesis techniques, particularly 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), which enables the compact encoding of both 3D geometry and scene appearance. We propose a two-stage procedure that integrates dense and robust keypoint descriptors from the lightweight XFeat feature extractor into 3DGS, enhancing performance in both indoor and outdoor environments. The coarse pose estimates are directly obtained via 2D-3D correspondences between the 3DGS representation and query image descriptors. In the second stage, the initial pose estimate is refined by minimizing the rendering-based photometric warp loss. Benchmarking on widely used indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrates improvements over recent neural rendering-based localization methods, such as NeRFMatch and PNeRFLoc.
Traditional fish farming practices often lead to inefficient feeding, resulting in environmental issues and reduced productivity. We developed an innovative system combining computer vision and IoT technologies for precise Tilapia feeding. Our solution uses real-time IoT sensors to monitor water quality parameters and computer vision algorithms to analyze fish size and count, determining optimal feed amounts. A mobile app enables remote monitoring and control. We utilized YOLOv8 for keypoint detection to measure Tilapia weight from length, achieving \textbf{94\%} precision on 3,500 annotated images. Pixel-based measurements were converted to centimeters using depth estimation for accurate feeding calculations. Our method, with data collection mirroring inference conditions, significantly improved results. Preliminary estimates suggest this approach could increase production up to 58 times compared to traditional farms. Our models, code, and dataset are open-source~\footnote{The code, dataset, and models are available upon reasonable request.
In an agricultural field, plant phenotyping using object detection models is gaining attention. However, collecting the training data necessary to create generic and high-precision models is extremely challenging due to the difficulty of annotation and the diversity of domains. Furthermore, it is difficult to transfer training data across different crops, and although machine learning models effective for specific environments, conditions, or crops have been developed, they cannot be widely applied in actual fields. In this study, we propose a generative data augmentation method (D4) for vineyard shoot detection. D4 uses a pre-trained text-guided diffusion model based on a large number of original images culled from video data collected by unmanned ground vehicles or other means, and a small number of annotated datasets. The proposed method generates new annotated images with background information adapted to the target domain while retaining annotation information necessary for object detection. In addition, D4 overcomes the lack of training data in agriculture, including the difficulty of annotation and diversity of domains. We confirmed that this generative data augmentation method improved the mean average precision by up to 28.65% for the BBox detection task and the average precision by up to 13.73% for the keypoint detection task for vineyard shoot detection. Our generative data augmentation method D4 is expected to simultaneously solve the cost and domain diversity issues of training data generation in agriculture and improve the generalization performance of detection models.
Object grasping is a fundamental challenge in robotics and computer vision, critical for advancing robotic manipulation capabilities. Deformable objects, like fabrics and cloths, pose additional challenges due to their non-rigid nature. In this work, we introduce CeDiRNet-3DoF, a deep-learning model for grasp point detection, with a particular focus on cloth objects. CeDiRNet-3DoF employs center direction regression alongside a localization network, attaining first place in the perception task of ICRA 2023's Cloth Manipulation Challenge. Recognizing the lack of standardized benchmarks in the literature that hinder effective method comparison, we present the ViCoS Towel Dataset. This extensive benchmark dataset comprises 8,000 real and 12,000 synthetic images, serving as a robust resource for training and evaluating contemporary data-driven deep-learning approaches. Extensive evaluation revealed CeDiRNet-3DoF's robustness in real-world performance, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, including the latest transformer-based models. Our work bridges a crucial gap, offering a robust solution and benchmark for cloth grasping in computer vision and robotics. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/vicoslab/CeDiRNet-3DoF
We present Sapiens, a family of models for four fundamental human-centric vision tasks -- 2D pose estimation, body-part segmentation, depth estimation, and surface normal prediction. Our models natively support 1K high-resolution inference and are extremely easy to adapt for individual tasks by simply fine-tuning models pretrained on over 300 million in-the-wild human images. We observe that, given the same computational budget, self-supervised pretraining on a curated dataset of human images significantly boosts the performance for a diverse set of human-centric tasks. The resulting models exhibit remarkable generalization to in-the-wild data, even when labeled data is scarce or entirely synthetic. Our simple model design also brings scalability -- model performance across tasks improves as we scale the number of parameters from 0.3 to 2 billion. Sapiens consistently surpasses existing baselines across various human-centric benchmarks. We achieve significant improvements over the prior state-of-the-art on Humans-5K (pose) by 7.6 mAP, Humans-2K (part-seg) by 17.1 mIoU, Hi4D (depth) by 22.4% relative RMSE, and THuman2 (normal) by 53.5% relative angular error. Project page: https://about.meta.com/realitylabs/codecavatars/sapiens.
This work addresses the certification of the local robustness of vision-based two-stage 6D object pose estimation. The two-stage method for object pose estimation achieves superior accuracy by first employing deep neural network-driven keypoint regression and then applying a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) technique. Despite advancements, the certification of these methods' robustness remains scarce. This research aims to fill this gap with a focus on their local robustness on the system level--the capacity to maintain robust estimations amidst semantic input perturbations. The core idea is to transform the certification of local robustness into neural network verification for classification tasks. The challenge is to develop model, input, and output specifications that align with off-the-shelf verification tools. To facilitate verification, we modify the keypoint detection model by substituting nonlinear operations with those more amenable to the verification processes. Instead of injecting random noise into images, as is common, we employ a convex hull representation of images as input specifications to more accurately depict semantic perturbations. Furthermore, by conducting a sensitivity analysis, we propagate the robustness criteria from pose to keypoint accuracy, and then formulating an optimal error threshold allocation problem that allows for the setting of a maximally permissible keypoint deviation thresholds. Viewing each pixel as an individual class, these thresholds result in linear, classification-akin output specifications. Under certain conditions, we demonstrate that the main components of our certification framework are both sound and complete, and validate its effects through extensive evaluations on realistic perturbations. To our knowledge, this is the first study to certify the robustness of large-scale, keypoint-based pose estimation given images in real-world scenarios.
Canonical surface mapping generalizes keypoint detection by assigning each pixel of an object to a corresponding point in a 3D template. Popularised by DensePose for the analysis of humans, authors have since attempted to apply the concept to more categories, but with limited success due to the high cost of manual supervision. In this work, we introduce SHIC, a method to learn canonical maps without manual supervision which achieves better results than supervised methods for most categories. Our idea is to leverage foundation computer vision models such as DINO and Stable Diffusion that are open-ended and thus possess excellent priors over natural categories. SHIC reduces the problem of estimating image-to-template correspondences to predicting image-to-image correspondences using features from the foundation models. The reduction works by matching images of the object to non-photorealistic renders of the template, which emulates the process of collecting manual annotations for this task. These correspondences are then used to supervise high-quality canonical maps for any object of interest. We also show that image generators can further improve the realism of the template views, which provide an additional source of supervision for the model.