Accurate and robust LiDAR 3D object detection is essential for comprehensive scene understanding in autonomous driving. Despite its importance, LiDAR detection performance is limited by inherent constraints of point cloud data, particularly under conditions of extended distances and occlusions. Recently, temporal aggregation has been proven to significantly enhance detection accuracy by fusing multi-frame viewpoint information and enriching the spatial representation of objects. In this work, we introduce a novel LiDAR 3D object detection framework, namely LiSTM, to facilitate spatial-temporal feature learning with cross-frame motion forecasting information. We aim to improve the spatial-temporal interpretation capabilities of the LiDAR detector by incorporating a dynamic prior, generated from a non-learnable motion estimation model. Specifically, Motion-Guided Feature Aggregation (MGFA) is proposed to utilize the object trajectory from previous and future motion states to model spatial-temporal correlations into gaussian heatmap over a driving sequence. This motion-based heatmap then guides the temporal feature fusion, enriching the proposed object features. Moreover, we design a Dual Correlation Weighting Module (DCWM) that effectively facilitates the interaction between past and prospective frames through scene- and channel-wise feature abstraction. In the end, a cascade cross-attention-based decoder is employed to refine the 3D prediction. We have conducted experiments on the Waymo and nuScenes datasets to demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior 3D detection performance with effective spatial-temporal feature learning.
Growing customer demand for smart solutions in robotics and augmented reality has attracted considerable attention to 3D object detection from point clouds. Yet, existing indoor datasets taken individually are too small and insufficiently diverse to train a powerful and general 3D object detection model. In the meantime, more general approaches utilizing foundation models are still inferior in quality to those based on supervised training for a specific task. In this work, we propose \ours{}, a simple yet effective 3D object detection model, which is trained on a mixture of indoor datasets and is capable of working in various indoor environments. By unifying different label spaces, \ours{} enables learning a strong representation across multiple datasets through a supervised joint training scheme. The proposed network architecture is built upon a vanilla transformer encoder, making it easy to run, customize and extend the prediction pipeline for practical use. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \ours{} obtains significant gains over existing 3D object detection methods in 6 indoor benchmarks: ScanNet (+1.1 mAP50), ARKitScenes (+19.4 mAP25), S3DIS (+9.1 mAP50), MultiScan (+9.3 mAP50), 3RScan (+3.2 mAP50), and ScanNet++ (+2.7 mAP50). Code is available at https://github.com/filapro/unidet3d .
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.
The detection of fa\c{c}ade elements on buildings, such as doors, windows, balconies, air conditioning units, billboards, and glass curtain walls, is a critical step in automating the creation of Building Information Modeling (BIM). Yet, this field faces significant challenges, including the uneven distribution of fa\c{c}ade elements, the presence of small objects, and substantial background noise, which hamper detection accuracy. To address these issues, we develop the BFA-YOLO model and the BFA-3D dataset in this study. The BFA-YOLO model is an advanced architecture designed specifically for analyzing multi-view images of fa\c{c}ade attachments. It integrates three novel components: the Feature Balanced Spindle Module (FBSM) that tackles the issue of uneven object distribution; the Target Dynamic Alignment Task Detection Head (TDATH) that enhances the detection of small objects; and the Position Memory Enhanced Self-Attention Mechanism (PMESA), aimed at reducing the impact of background noise. These elements collectively enable BFA-YOLO to effectively address each challenge, thereby improving model robustness and detection precision. The BFA-3D dataset, offers multi-view images with precise annotations across a wide range of fa\c{c}ade attachment categories. This dataset is developed to address the limitations present in existing fa\c{c}ade detection datasets, which often feature a single perspective and insufficient category coverage. Through comparative analysis, BFA-YOLO demonstrated improvements of 1.8\% and 2.9\% in mAP$_{50}$ on the BFA-3D dataset and the public Fa\c{c}ade-WHU dataset, respectively, when compared to the baseline YOLOv8 model. These results highlight the superior performance of BFA-YOLO in fa\c{c}ade element detection and the advancement of intelligent BIM technologies.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising substitute for Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their advantages of fast inference and low power consumption. However, the lack of efficient training algorithms has hindered their widespread adoption. Even efficient ANN-SNN conversion methods necessitate quantized training of ANNs to enhance the effectiveness of the conversion, incurring additional training costs. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient ANN-SNN conversion framework with only inference scale complexity. The conversion framework includes a local threshold balancing algorithm, which enables efficient calculation of the optimal thresholds and fine-grained adjustment of the threshold value by channel-wise scaling. We also introduce an effective delayed evaluation strategy to mitigate the influence of the spike propagation delays. We demonstrate the scalability of our framework in typical computer vision tasks: image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and video classification. Our algorithm outperforms existing methods, highlighting its practical applicability and efficiency. Moreover, we have evaluated the energy consumption of the converted SNNs, demonstrating their superior low-power advantage compared to conventional ANNs. This approach simplifies the deployment of SNNs by leveraging open-source pre-trained ANN models, enabling fast, low-power inference with negligible performance reduction. Code is available at https://github.com/putshua/Inference-scale-ANN-SNN.
Research in efficient vision backbones is evolving into models that are a mixture of convolutions and transformer blocks. A smart combination of both, architecture-wise and component-wise is mandatory to excel in the speedaccuracy trade-off. Most publications focus on maximizing accuracy and utilize MACs (multiply accumulate operations) as an efficiency metric. The latter however often do not measure accurately how fast a model actually is due to factors like memory access cost and degree of parallelism. We analyzed common modules and architectural design choices for backbones not in terms of MACs, but rather in actual throughput and latency, as the combination of the latter two is a better representation of the efficiency of models in real applications. We applied the conclusions taken from that analysis to create a recipe for increasing hardware-efficiency in macro design. Additionally we introduce a simple slimmed-down version of MultiHead Self-Attention, that aligns with our analysis. We combine both macro and micro design to create a new family of hardware-efficient backbone networks called LowFormer. LowFormer achieves a remarkable speedup in terms of throughput and latency, while achieving similar or better accuracy than current state-of-the-art efficient backbones. In order to prove the generalizability of our hardware-efficient design, we evaluate our method on GPU, mobile GPU and ARM CPU. We further show that the downstream tasks object detection and semantic segmentation profit from our hardware-efficient architecture. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ altair199797/LowFormer.
It is very important to detect traffic signs efficiently and accurately in autonomous driving systems. However, the farther the distance, the smaller the traffic signs. Existing object detection algorithms can hardly detect these small scaled signs.In addition, the performance of embedded devices on vehicles limits the scale of detection models.To address these challenges, a YOLO PPA based traffic sign detection algorithm is proposed in this paper.The experimental results on the GTSDB dataset show that compared to the original YOLO, the proposed method improves inference efficiency by 11.2%. The mAP 50 is also improved by 93.2%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed YOLO PPA.
We introduce Boundless, a photo-realistic synthetic data generation system for enabling highly accurate object detection in dense urban streetscapes. Boundless can replace massive real-world data collection and manual ground-truth object annotation (labeling) with an automated and configurable process. Boundless is based on the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) City Sample project with improvements enabling accurate collection of 3D bounding boxes across different lighting and scene variability conditions. We evaluate the performance of object detection models trained on the dataset generated by Boundless when used for inference on a real-world dataset acquired from medium-altitude cameras. We compare the performance of the Boundless-trained model against the CARLA-trained model and observe an improvement of 7.8 mAP. The results we achieved support the premise that synthetic data generation is a credible methodology for training/fine-tuning scalable object detection models for urban scenes.
Infrared and visible dual-modality tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection can achieve robust performance even in extreme scenes by fusing complementary information. Most current methods design task-specific frameworks, which are limited in generalization across multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a fusion-guided infrared and visible general framework, IVGF, which can be easily extended to many high-level vision tasks. Firstly, we adopt the SOTA infrared and visible foundation models to extract the general representations. Then, to enrich the semantics information of these general representations for high-level vision tasks, we design the feature enhancement module and token enhancement module for feature maps and tokens, respectively. Besides, the attention-guided fusion module is proposed for effectively fusing by exploring the complementary information of two modalities. Moreover, we also adopt the cutout&mix augmentation strategy to conduct the data augmentation, which further improves the ability of the model to mine the regional complementary between the two modalities. Extensive experiments show that the IVGF outperforms state-of-the-art dual-modality methods in the semantic segmentation and object detection tasks. The detailed ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each module, and another experiment explores the anti-missing modality ability of the proposed method in the dual-modality semantic segmentation task.
The problem of cleaning a messy table using Deep Neural Networks is a very interesting problem in both social and industrial robotics. This project focuses on the social application of this technology. A neural network model that is capable of detecting and recognizing common tabletop objects, such as a mug, mouse, or stapler is developed. The model also predicts the angle at which these objects are placed on a table,with respect to some reference. Assuming each object has a fixed intended position and orientation on the tabletop, the orientation of a particular object predicted by the deep learning model can be used to compute the transformation matrix to move the object from its initial position to the intended position. This can be fed to a pick and place robot to carry out the transfer.This paper talks about the deep learning approaches used in this project for object detection and orientation estimation.
Studies on backdoor attacks in recent years suggest that an adversary can compromise the integrity of a deep neural network (DNN) by manipulating a small set of training samples. Our analysis shows that such manipulation can make the backdoor model converge to a bad local minima, i.e., sharper minima as compared to a benign model. Intuitively, the backdoor can be purified by re-optimizing the model to smoother minima. However, a na\"ive adoption of any optimization targeting smoother minima can lead to sub-optimal purification techniques hampering the clean test accuracy. Hence, to effectively obtain such re-optimization, inspired by our novel perspective establishing the connection between backdoor removal and loss smoothness, we propose Fisher Information guided Purification (FIP), a novel backdoor purification framework. Proposed FIP consists of a couple of novel regularizers that aid the model in suppressing the backdoor effects and retaining the acquired knowledge of clean data distribution throughout the backdoor removal procedure through exploiting the knowledge of Fisher Information Matrix (FIM). In addition, we introduce an efficient variant of FIP, dubbed as Fast FIP, which reduces the number of tunable parameters significantly and obtains an impressive runtime gain of almost $5\times$. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on a wide range of backdoor defense benchmarks: 5 different tasks -- Image Recognition, Object Detection, Video Action Recognition, 3D point Cloud, Language Generation; 11 different datasets including ImageNet, PASCAL VOC, UCF101; diverse model architectures spanning both CNN and vision transformer; 14 different backdoor attacks, e.g., Dynamic, WaNet, LIRA, ISSBA, etc.
Accurate classification of weather conditions in images is essential for enhancing the performance of object detection and classification models under varying weather conditions. This paper presents a comprehensive study on classifying weather conditions in images into four categories: rainy, low light, haze, and clear. The motivation for this work stems from the need to improve the reliability and efficiency of automated systems, such as autonomous vehicles and surveillance, which must operate under diverse weather conditions. Misclassification of weather conditions can lead to significant performance degradation in these systems, making robust weather classification crucial. Utilizing the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm, our approach leverages a robust set of features, including brightness, saturation, noise level, blur metric, edge strength, motion blur, Local Binary Patterns (LBP) mean and variance for radii 1, 2, and 3, edges mean and variance, and color histogram mean and variance for blue, green, and red channels. Our SVM-based method achieved a notable accuracy of 92.8%, surpassing typical benchmarks in the literature, which range from 80% to 90% for classical machine learning methods. While deep learning methods can achieve up to 94% accuracy, our approach offers a competitive advantage in terms of computational efficiency and real-time classification capabilities. Detailed analysis of each feature's contribution highlights the effectiveness of texture, color, and edge-related features in capturing the unique characteristics of different weather conditions. This research advances the state-of-the-art in weather image classification and provides insights into the critical features necessary for accurate weather condition differentiation, underscoring the potential of SVMs in practical applications where accuracy is paramount.
Inadequate bounding box modeling in regression tasks constrains the performance of one-stage 3D object detection. Our study reveals that the primary reason lies in two aspects: (1) The limited center-offset prediction seriously impairs the bounding box localization since many highest response positions significantly deviate from object centers. (2) The low-quality sample ignored in regression tasks significantly impacts the bounding box prediction since it produces unreliable quality (IoU) rectification. To tackle these problems, we propose Decoupled and Interactive Regression Modeling (DIRM) for one-stage detection. Specifically, Decoupled Attribute Regression (DAR) is implemented to facilitate long regression range modeling for the center attribute through an adaptive multi-sample assignment strategy that deeply decouples bounding box attributes. On the other hand, to enhance the reliability of IoU predictions for low-quality results, Interactive Quality Prediction (IQP) integrates the classification task, proficient in modeling negative samples, with quality prediction for joint optimization. Extensive experiments on Waymo and ONCE datasets demonstrate that DIRM significantly improves the performance of several state-of-the-art methods with minimal additional inference latency. Notably, DIRM achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on both the Waymo and ONCE datasets.
3D object detection is critical for autonomous driving, leveraging deep learning techniques to interpret LiDAR data. The PointPillars architecture is a prominent model in this field, distinguished by its efficient use of LiDAR data. This study provides an analysis of enhancing the performance of PointPillars model under various dropout rates to address overfitting and improve model generalization. Dropout, a regularization technique, involves randomly omitting neurons during training, compelling the network to learn robust and diverse features. We systematically compare the effects of different enhancement techniques on the model's regression performance during training and its accuracy, measured by Average Precision (AP) and Average Orientation Similarity (AOS). Our findings offer insights into the optimal enhancements, contributing to improved 3D object detection in autonomous driving applications.
Interacting with real-world cluttered scenes pose several challenges to robotic agents that need to understand complex spatial dependencies among the observed objects to determine optimal pick sequences or efficient object retrieval strategies. Existing solutions typically manage simplified scenarios and focus on predicting pairwise object relationships following an initial object detection phase, but often overlook the global context or struggle with handling redundant and missing object relations. In this work, we present a modern take on visual relational reasoning for grasp planning. We introduce D3GD, a novel testbed that includes bin picking scenes with up to 35 objects from 97 distinct categories. Additionally, we propose D3G, a new end-to-end transformer-based dependency graph generation model that simultaneously detects objects and produces an adjacency matrix representing their spatial relationships. Recognizing the limitations of standard metrics, we employ the Average Precision of Relationships for the first time to evaluate model performance, conducting an extensive experimental benchmark. The obtained results establish our approach as the new state-of-the-art for this task, laying the foundation for future research in robotic manipulation. We publicly release the code and dataset at https://paolotron.github.io/d3g.github.io.
Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has emerged as a mainstream paradigm for multi-view 3D object detection, demonstrating impressive perceptual capabilities. However, existing methods overlook the geometric quality of BEV representation, leaving it in a low-resolution state and failing to restore the authentic geometric information of the scene. In this paper, we identify the drawbacks of previous approaches that limit the geometric quality of BEV representation and propose Radial-Cartesian BEV Sampling (RC-Sampling), which outperforms other feature transformation methods in efficiently generating high-resolution dense BEV representation to restore fine-grained geometric information. Additionally, we design a novel In-Box Label to substitute the traditional depth label generated from the LiDAR points. This label reflects the actual geometric structure of objects rather than just their surfaces, injecting real-world geometric information into the BEV representation. In conjunction with the In-Box Label, Centroid-Aware Inner Loss (CAI Loss) is developed to capture the inner geometric structure of objects. Finally, we integrate the aforementioned modules into a novel multi-view 3D object detector, dubbed GeoBEV, which achieves a state-of-the-art result of 66.2\% NDS on the nuScenes test set. The code is available at https://github.com/mengtan00/GeoBEV.git.
Camouflaged object detection has attracted a lot of attention in computer vision. The main challenge lies in the high degree of similarity between camouflaged objects and their surroundings in the spatial domain, making identification difficult. Existing methods attempt to reduce the impact of pixel similarity by maximizing the distinguishing ability of spatial features with complicated design, but often ignore the sensitivity and locality of features in the spatial domain, leading to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose a new approach to address this issue by jointly exploring the representation in the frequency and spatial domains, introducing the Frequency-Spatial Entanglement Learning (FSEL) method. This method consists of a series of well-designed Entanglement Transformer Blocks (ETB) for representation learning, a Joint Domain Perception Module for semantic enhancement, and a Dual-domain Reverse Parser for feature integration in the frequency and spatial domains. Specifically, the ETB utilizes frequency self-attention to effectively characterize the relationship between different frequency bands, while the entanglement feed-forward network facilitates information interaction between features of different domains through entanglement learning. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our FSEL over 21 state-of-the-art methods, through comprehensive quantitative and qualitative comparisons in three widely-used datasets. The source code is available at: https://github.com/CSYSI/FSEL.
The visible-light camera, which is capable of environment perception and navigation assistance, has emerged as an essential imaging sensor for marine surface vessels in intelligent waterborne transportation systems (IWTS). However, the visual imaging quality inevitably suffers from several kinds of degradations (e.g., limited visibility, low contrast, color distortion, etc.) under complex weather conditions (e.g., haze, rain, and low-lightness). The degraded visual information will accordingly result in inaccurate environment perception and delayed operations for navigational risk. To promote the navigational safety of vessels, many computational methods have been presented to perform visual quality enhancement under poor weather conditions. However, most of these methods are essentially specific-purpose implementation strategies, only available for one specific weather type. To overcome this limitation, we propose to develop a general-purpose multi-scene visibility enhancement method, i.e., edge reparameterization- and attention-guided neural network (ERANet), to adaptively restore the degraded images captured under different weather conditions. In particular, our ERANet simultaneously exploits the channel attention, spatial attention, and reparameterization technology to enhance the visual quality while maintaining low computational cost. Extensive experiments conducted on standard and IWTS-related datasets have demonstrated that our ERANet could outperform several representative visibility enhancement methods in terms of both imaging quality and computational efficiency. The superior performance of IWTS-related object detection and scene segmentation could also be steadily obtained after ERANet-based visibility enhancement under complex weather conditions.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based Road Damage Detection (RDD) is important for daily maintenance and safety in cities, especially in terms of significantly reducing labor costs. However, current UAV-based RDD research is still faces many challenges. For example, the damage with irregular size and direction, the masking of damage by the background, and the difficulty of distinguishing damage from the background significantly affect the ability of UAV to detect road damage in daily inspection. To solve these problems and improve the performance of UAV in real-time road damage detection, we design and propose three corresponding modules: a feature extraction module that flexibly adapts to shape and background; a module that fuses multiscale perception and adapts to shape and background ; an efficient downsampling module. Based on these modules, we designed a multi-scale, adaptive road damage detection model with the ability to automatically remove background interference, called Dynamic Scale-Aware Fusion Detection Model (RT-DSAFDet). Experimental results on the UAV-PDD2023 public dataset show that our model RT-DSAFDet achieves a mAP50 of 54.2%, which is 11.1% higher than that of YOLOv10-m, an efficient variant of the latest real-time object detection model YOLOv10, while the amount of parameters is reduced to 1.8M and FLOPs to 4.6G, with a decreased by 88% and 93%, respectively. Furthermore, on the large generalized object detection public dataset MS COCO2017 also shows the superiority of our model with mAP50-95 is the same as YOLOv9-t, but with 0.5% higher mAP50, 10% less parameters volume, and 40% less FLOPs.
While Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has made substantial advancements, it is limited by heavy reliance on prior knowledge and limited to predefined categories. In contrast, Generic Multiple Object Tracking (GMOT), tracking multiple objects with similar appearance, requires less prior information about the targets but faces challenges with variants like viewpoint, lighting, occlusion, and resolution. Our contributions commence with the introduction of the \textbf{\text{Refer-GMOT dataset}} a collection of videos, each accompanied by fine-grained textual descriptions of their attributes. Subsequently, we introduce a novel text prompt-based open-vocabulary GMOT framework, called \textbf{\text{TP-GMOT}}, which can track never-seen object categories with zero training examples. Within \text{TP-GMOT} framework, we introduce two novel components: (i) {\textbf{\text{TP-OD}}, an object detection by a textual prompt}, for accurately detecting unseen objects with specific characteristics. (ii) Motion-Appearance Cost SORT \textbf{\text{MAC-SORT}}, a novel object association approach that adeptly integrates motion and appearance-based matching strategies to tackle the complex task of tracking multiple generic objects with high similarity. Our contributions are benchmarked on the \text{Refer-GMOT} dataset for GMOT task. Additionally, to assess the generalizability of the proposed \text{TP-GMOT} framework and the effectiveness of \text{MAC-SORT} tracker, we conduct ablation studies on the DanceTrack and MOT20 datasets for the MOT task. Our dataset, code, and models will be publicly available at: https://fsoft-aic.github.io/TP-GMOT