6D pose estimation aims at determining the object pose that best explains the camera observation. The unique solution for non-ambiguous objects can turn into a multi-modal pose distribution for symmetrical objects or when occlusions of symmetry-breaking elements happen, depending on the viewpoint. Currently, 6D pose estimation methods are benchmarked on datasets that consider, for their ground truth annotations, visual ambiguities as only related to global object symmetries, whereas they should be defined per-image to account for the camera viewpoint. We thus first propose an automatic method to re-annotate those datasets with a 6D pose distribution specific to each image, taking into account the object surface visibility in the image to correctly determine the visual ambiguities. Second, given this improved ground truth, we re-evaluate the state-of-the-art single pose methods and show that this greatly modifies the ranking of these methods. Third, as some recent works focus on estimating the complete set of solutions, we derive a precision/recall formulation to evaluate them against our image-wise distribution ground truth, making it the first benchmark for pose distribution methods on real images.
The tracking-by-detection paradigm is the mainstream in multi-object tracking, associating tracks to the predictions of an object detector. Although exhibiting uncertainty through a confidence score, these predictions do not capture the entire variability of the inference process. For safety and security critical applications like autonomous driving, surveillance, etc., knowing this predictive uncertainty is essential though. Therefore, we introduce, for the first time, a fast way to obtain the empirical predictive distribution during object detection and incorporate that knowledge in multi-object tracking. Our mechanism can easily be integrated into state-of-the-art trackers, enabling them to fully exploit the uncertainty in the detections. Additionally, novel association methods are introduced that leverage the proposed mechanism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our contribution on a variety of benchmarks, such as MOT17, MOT20, DanceTrack, and KITTI.
In recent years, 3D object perception has become a crucial component in the development of autonomous driving systems, providing essential environmental awareness. However, as perception tasks in autonomous driving evolve, their variants have increased, leading to diverse insights from industry and academia. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys that collect and summarize these perception tasks and their developments from a broader perspective. This review extensively summarizes traditional 3D object detection methods, focusing on camera-based, LiDAR-based, and fusion detection techniques. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and limitations of each approach, highlighting advancements in accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, we discuss future directions, including methods to improve accuracy such as temporal perception, occupancy grids, and end-to-end learning frameworks. We also explore cooperative perception methods that extend the perception range through collaborative communication. By providing a holistic view of the current state and future developments in 3D object perception, we aim to offer a more comprehensive understanding of perception tasks for autonomous driving. Additionally, we have established an active repository to provide continuous updates on the latest advancements in this field, accessible at: https://github.com/Fishsoup0/Autonomous-Driving-Perception.
Object detectors have shown outstanding performance on various public datasets. However, annotating a new dataset for a new task is usually unavoidable in real, since 1) a single existing dataset usually does not contain all object categories needed; 2) using multiple datasets usually suffers from annotation incompletion and heterogeneous features. We propose a novel problem as "Annotation-incomplete Multi-dataset Detection", and develop an end-to-end multi-task learning architecture which can accurately detect all the object categories with multiple partially annotated datasets. Specifically, we propose an attention feature extractor which helps to mine the relations among different datasets. Besides, a knowledge amalgamation training strategy is incorporated to accommodate heterogeneous features from different sources. Extensive experiments on different object detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods and an improvement of 2.17%, 2.10% in mAP can be achieved on COCO and VOC respectively.
Extracting robust feature representation is critical for object re-identification to accurately identify objects across non-overlapping cameras. Although having a strong representation ability, the Vision Transformer (ViT) tends to overfit on most distinct regions of training data, limiting its generalizability and attention to holistic object features. Meanwhile, due to the structural difference between CNN and ViT, fine-grained strategies that effectively address this issue in CNN do not continue to be successful in ViT. To address this issue, by observing the latent diverse representation hidden behind the multi-head attention, we present PartFormer, an innovative adaptation of ViT designed to overcome the granularity limitations in object Re-ID tasks. The PartFormer integrates a Head Disentangling Block (HDB) that awakens the diverse representation of multi-head self-attention without the typical loss of feature richness induced by concatenation and FFN layers post-attention. To avoid the homogenization of attention heads and promote robust part-based feature learning, two head diversity constraints are imposed: attention diversity constraint and correlation diversity constraint. These constraints enable the model to exploit diverse and discriminative feature representations from different attention heads. Comprehensive experiments on various object Re-ID benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the PartFormer. Specifically, our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art by 2.4\% mAP scores on the most challenging MSMT17 dataset.
Category-level articulated object pose estimation focuses on the pose estimation of unknown articulated objects within known categories. Despite its significance, this task remains challenging due to the varying shapes and poses of objects, expensive dataset annotation costs, and complex real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised approach that leverages a single-frame point cloud to solve this task. Our model consistently generates reconstruction with a canonical pose and joint state for the entire input object, and it estimates object-level poses that reduce overall pose variance and part-level poses that align each part of the input with its corresponding part of the reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous self-supervised methods and is comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised methods. To assess the performance of our model in real-world scenarios, we also introduce a new real-world articulated object benchmark dataset.
Video object segmentation (VOS) is a crucial task in computer vision, but current VOS methods struggle with complex scenes and prolonged object motions. To address these challenges, the MOSE dataset aims to enhance object recognition and differentiation in complex environments, while the LVOS dataset focuses on segmenting objects exhibiting long-term, intricate movements. This report introduces a discriminative spatial-temporal VOS model that utilizes discriminative object features as query representations. The semantic understanding of spatial-semantic modules enables it to recognize object parts, while salient features highlight more distinctive object characteristics. Our model, trained on extensive VOS datasets, achieved first place (\textbf{80.90\%} $\mathcal{J \& F}$) on the test set of the 6th LSVOS challenge in the VOS Track, demonstrating its effectiveness in tackling the aforementioned challenges. The code will be available at \href{https://github.com/yahooo-m/VOS-Solution}{code}.
Recently, LSS-based multi-view 3D object detection provides an economical and deployment-friendly solution for autonomous driving. However, all the existing LSS-based methods transform multi-view image features into a Cartesian Bird's-Eye-View(BEV) representation, which does not take into account the non-uniform image information distribution and hardly exploits the view symmetry. In this paper, in order to adapt the image information distribution and preserve the view symmetry by regular convolution, we propose to employ the polar BEV representation to substitute the Cartesian BEV representation. To achieve this, we elaborately tailor three modules: a polar view transformer to generate the polar BEV representation, a polar temporal fusion module for fusing historical polar BEV features and a polar detection head to predict the polar-parameterized representation of the object. In addition, we design a 2D auxiliary detection head and a spatial attention enhancement module to improve the quality of feature extraction in perspective view and BEV, respectively. Finally, we integrate the above improvements into a novel multi-view 3D object detector, PolarBEVDet. Experiments on nuScenes show that PolarBEVDet achieves the superior performance. The code is available at https://github.com/Yzichen/PolarBEVDet.git.(This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible)
In this paper, we propose an Audio-Language-Referenced SAM 2 (AL-Ref-SAM 2) pipeline to explore the training-free paradigm for audio and language-referenced video object segmentation, namely AVS and RVOS tasks. The intuitive solution leverages GroundingDINO to identify the target object from a single frame and SAM 2 to segment the identified object throughout the video, which is less robust to spatiotemporal variations due to a lack of video context exploration. Thus, in our AL-Ref-SAM 2 pipeline, we propose a novel GPT-assisted Pivot Selection (GPT-PS) module to instruct GPT-4 to perform two-step temporal-spatial reasoning for sequentially selecting pivot frames and pivot boxes, thereby providing SAM 2 with a high-quality initial object prompt. Within GPT-PS, two task-specific Chain-of-Thought prompts are designed to unleash GPT's temporal-spatial reasoning capacity by guiding GPT to make selections based on a comprehensive understanding of video and reference information. Furthermore, we propose a Language-Binded Reference Unification (LBRU) module to convert audio signals into language-formatted references, thereby unifying the formats of AVS and RVOS tasks in the same pipeline. Extensive experiments on both tasks show that our training-free AL-Ref-SAM 2 pipeline achieves performances comparable to or even better than fully-supervised fine-tuning methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/appletea233/AL-Ref-SAM2.
This study presents a detailed analysis of the YOLOv8 object detection model, focusing on its architecture, training techniques, and performance improvements over previous iterations like YOLOv5. Key innovations, including the CSPNet backbone for enhanced feature extraction, the FPN+PAN neck for superior multi-scale object detection, and the transition to an anchor-free approach, are thoroughly examined. The paper reviews YOLOv8's performance across benchmarks like Microsoft COCO and Roboflow 100, highlighting its high accuracy and real-time capabilities across diverse hardware platforms. Additionally, the study explores YOLOv8's developer-friendly enhancements, such as its unified Python package and CLI, which streamline model training and deployment. Overall, this research positions YOLOv8 as a state-of-the-art solution in the evolving object detection field.
Adversarial patches in computer vision can be used, to fool deep neural networks and manipulate their decision-making process. One of the most prominent examples of adversarial patches are evasion attacks for object detectors. By covering parts of objects of interest, these patches suppress the detections and thus make the target object 'invisible' to the object detector. Since these patches are usually optimized on a specific network with a specific train dataset, the transferability across multiple networks and datasets is not given. This paper addresses these issues and investigates the transferability across numerous object detector architectures. Our extensive evaluation across various models on two distinct datasets indicates that patches optimized with larger models provide better network transferability than patches that are optimized with smaller models.
Multimodal fusion, leveraging data like vision and language, is rapidly gaining traction. This enriched data representation improves performance across various tasks. Existing methods for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, a critical area where AI models encounter unseen data in real-world scenarios, rely heavily on whole-image features. These image-level features can include irrelevant information that hinders the detection of OOD samples, ultimately limiting overall performance. In this paper, we propose \textbf{TagOOD}, a novel approach for OOD detection that leverages vision-language representations to achieve label-free object feature decoupling from whole images. This decomposition enables a more focused analysis of object semantics, enhancing OOD detection performance. Subsequently, TagOOD trains a lightweight network on the extracted object features to learn representative class centers. These centers capture the central tendencies of IND object classes, minimizing the influence of irrelevant image features during OOD detection. Finally, our approach efficiently detects OOD samples by calculating distance-based metrics as OOD scores between learned centers and test samples. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate TagOOD on several benchmark datasets and demonstrate its superior performance compared to existing OOD detection methods. This work presents a novel perspective for further exploration of multimodal information utilization in OOD detection, with potential applications across various tasks.
This work-in-progress paper presents results on the feasibility of single-shot object detection on microcontrollers using YOLO. Single-shot object detectors like YOLO are widely used, however due to their complexity mainly on larger GPU-based platforms. We present microYOLO, which can be used on Cortex-M based microcontrollers, such as the OpenMV H7 R2, achieving about 3.5 FPS when classifying 128x128 RGB images while using less than 800 KB Flash and less than 350 KB RAM. Furthermore, we share experimental results for three different object detection tasks, analyzing the accuracy of microYOLO on them.
The use of intelligent automation is growing significantly in the automotive industry, as it assists drivers and fleet management companies, thus increasing their productivity. Dash cams are now been used for this purpose which enables the instant identification and understanding of multiple objects and occurrences in the surroundings. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for object detection in dashcams using transformers. Our system is based on the state-of-the-art DEtection TRansformer (DETR), which has demonstrated strong performance in a variety of conditions, including different weather and illumination scenarios. The use of transformers allows for the consideration of contextual information in decisionmaking, improving the accuracy of object detection. To validate our approach, we have trained our DETR model on a dataset that represents real-world conditions. Our results show that the use of intelligent automation through transformers can significantly enhance the capabilities of dashcam systems. The model achieves an mAP of 0.95 on detection.
We propose a diffusion-based approach for Text-to-Image (T2I) generation with interactive 3D layout control. Layout control has been widely studied to alleviate the shortcomings of T2I diffusion models in understanding objects' placement and relationships from text descriptions. Nevertheless, existing approaches for layout control are limited to 2D layouts, require the user to provide a static layout beforehand, and fail to preserve generated images under layout changes. This makes these approaches unsuitable for applications that require 3D object-wise control and iterative refinements, e.g., interior design and complex scene generation. To this end, we leverage the recent advancements in depth-conditioned T2I models and propose a novel approach for interactive 3D layout control. We replace the traditional 2D boxes used in layout control with 3D boxes. Furthermore, we revamp the T2I task as a multi-stage generation process, where at each stage, the user can insert, change, and move an object in 3D while preserving objects from earlier stages. We achieve this through our proposed Dynamic Self-Attention (DSA) module and the consistent 3D object translation strategy. Experiments show that our approach can generate complicated scenes based on 3D layouts, boosting the object generation success rate over the standard depth-conditioned T2I methods by 2x. Moreover, it outperforms other methods in comparison in preserving objects under layout changes. Project Page: \url{https://abdo-eldesokey.github.io/build-a-scene/}
The integration of point and voxel representations is becoming more common in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. However, this combination often struggles with capturing semantic information effectively. Moreover, relying solely on point features within regions of interest can lead to information loss and limitations in local feature representation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage 3D object detector, called Point-Voxel Attention Fusion Network (PVAFN). PVAFN leverages an attention mechanism to improve multi-modal feature fusion during the feature extraction phase. In the refinement stage, it utilizes a multi-pooling strategy to integrate both multi-scale and region-specific information effectively. The point-voxel attention mechanism adaptively combines point cloud and voxel-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features, resulting in richer object representations that help to reduce false detections. Additionally, a multi-pooling enhancement module is introduced to boost the model's perception capabilities. This module employs cluster pooling and pyramid pooling techniques to efficiently capture key geometric details and fine-grained shape structures, thereby enhancing the integration of local and global features. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate that the proposed PVAFN achieves competitive performance. The code and models will be available.
Despite the success of vision-based dynamics prediction models, which predict object states by utilizing RGB images and simple object descriptions, they were challenged by environment misalignments. Although the literature has demonstrated that unifying visual domains with both environment context and object abstract, such as semantic segmentation and bounding boxes, can effectively mitigate the visual domain misalignment challenge, discussions were focused on the abstract of environment context, and the insight of using bounding box as the object abstract is under-explored. Furthermore, we notice that, as empirical results shown in the literature, even when the visual appearance of objects is removed, object bounding boxes alone, instead of being directly fed into the network, can indirectly provide sufficient position information via the Region of Interest Pooling operation for dynamics prediction. However, previous literature overlooked discussions regarding how such position information is implicitly encoded in the dynamics prediction model. Thus, in this paper, we provide detailed studies to investigate the process and necessary conditions for encoding position information via using the bounding box as the object abstract into output features. Furthermore, we study the limitation of solely using object abstracts, such that the dynamics prediction performance will be jeopardized when the environment context varies.
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) refers to the task of identifying and segmenting objects that blend seamlessly into their surroundings, posing a significant challenge for computer vision systems. In recent years, COD has garnered widespread attention due to its potential applications in surveillance, wildlife conservation, autonomous systems, and more. While several surveys on COD exist, they often have limitations in terms of the number and scope of papers covered, particularly regarding the rapid advancements made in the field since mid-2023. To address this void, we present the most comprehensive review of COD to date, encompassing both theoretical frameworks and practical contributions to the field. This paper explores various COD methods across four domains, including both image-level and video-level solutions, from the perspectives of traditional and deep learning approaches. We thoroughly investigate the correlations between COD and other camouflaged scenario methods, thereby laying the theoretical foundation for subsequent analyses. Beyond object-level detection, we also summarize extended methods for instance-level tasks, including camouflaged instance segmentation, counting, and ranking. Additionally, we provide an overview of commonly used benchmarks and evaluation metrics in COD tasks, conducting a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning-based techniques in both image and video domains, considering both qualitative and quantitative performance. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current COD models and propose 9 promising directions for future research, focusing on addressing inherent challenges and exploring novel, meaningful technologies. For those interested, a curated list of COD-related techniques, datasets, and additional resources can be found at https://github.com/ChunmingHe/awesome-concealed-object-segmentation
This paper tackles the challenge of multi-sensor multi-object tracking by proposing various decentralised Variational Inference (VI) schemes that match the tracking performance of centralised sensor fusion with only local message exchanges among neighboring sensors. We first establish a centralised VI sensor fusion scheme as a benchmark and analyse the limitations of its decentralised counterpart, which requires sensors to await consensus at each VI iteration. Therefore, we propose a decentralised gradient-based VI framework that optimises the Locally Maximised Evidence Lower Bound (LM-ELBO) instead of the standard ELBO, which reduces the parameter search space and enables faster convergence, making it particularly beneficial for decentralised tracking. This proposed framework is inherently self-evolving, improving with advancements in decentralised optimisation techniques for convergence guarantees and efficiency. Further, we enhance the convergence speed of proposed decentralised schemes using natural gradients and gradient tracking strategies. Results verify that our decentralised VI schemes are empirically equivalent to centralised fusion in tracking performance. Notably, the decentralised natural gradient VI method is the most communication-efficient, with communication costs comparable to suboptimal decentralised strategies while delivering notably higher tracking accuracy.
Video object segmentation is a challenging task that serves as the cornerstone of numerous downstream applications, including video editing and autonomous driving. In this technical report, we briefly introduce the solution of our team "yuanjie" for video object segmentation in the 6-th LSVOS Challenge VOS Track at ECCV 2024. We believe that our proposed CSS-Segment will perform better in videos of complex object motion and long-term presentation. In this report, we successfully validated the effectiveness of the CSS-Segment in video object segmentation. Finally, our method achieved a J\&F score of 80.84 in and test phases, and ultimately ranked 2nd in the 6-th LSVOS Challenge VOS Track at ECCV 2024.