Object counting is a challenging task with broad application prospects in security surveillance, traffic management, and disease diagnosis. Existing object counting methods face a tri-fold challenge: achieving superior performance, maintaining high generalizability, and minimizing annotation costs. We develop a novel training-free class-agnostic object counter, TFCounter, which is prompt-context-aware via the cascade of the essential elements in large-scale foundation models. This approach employs an iterative counting framework with a dual prompt system to recognize a broader spectrum of objects varying in shape, appearance, and size. Besides, it introduces an innovative context-aware similarity module incorporating background context to enhance accuracy within messy scenes. To demonstrate cross-domain generalizability, we collect a novel counting dataset named BIKE-1000, including exclusive 1000 images of shared bicycles from Meituan. Extensive experiments on FSC-147, CARPK, and BIKE-1000 datasets demonstrate that TFCounter outperforms existing leading training-free methods and exhibits competitive results compared to trained counterparts.
Infrared pulse thermography non-destructive testing (NDT) method is developed based on the difference in the infrared radiation intensity emitted by defective and non-defective areas of an object. However, when the radiation intensity of the defective target is similar to that of the non-defective area of the object, the detection results are poor. To address this issue, this study investigated the polarization characteristics of the infrared radiation of different materials. Simulation results showed that the degree of infrared polarization of the object surface changed regularly with changes in thermal environment radiation. An infrared polarization imaging-based NDT method was proposed and demonstrated using specimens with four different simulated defective areas, which were designed and fabricated using four different materials. The experimental results were consistent with the simulation results, thereby proving the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the infrared-radiation-intensity-based NDT method, the proposed method improved the image detail presentation and detection accuracy.
The Panoptic Scene Graph generation (PSG) task aims to extract the triplets composed of subject, object, and relation based on panoptic segmentation. For one-stage methods, PSGTR predicts the subject, object, and relation by one query. However, the integrated query is too implicit to simultaneously ascertain pairs of instances and relations. In PSGFormer, it learns instances and relation queries separately and establishes matches between subject-relation and object-relation pairs by employing the relation as an index. Nevertheless, this method could potentially impede the accurate determination of the optimal match. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a new one-stage method, Contextual Associated Triplet Queries (CATQ), which employs three branches to decode subject, object, and relation features separately. Additionally, we leverage instance information to guide the relation decoding process. Furthermore, we introduce the triplet context fusion block to enable the extraction of more comprehensive instance pairs and triplet relations. Our proposed method achieves 34.8 Recall@20 and 20.9 mRecall@20 respectively and surpasses the state-of-the-art baseline method by 22.5\% and 26.0\% with half of the training session.
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment objects visually embedded in their surroundings, which is a very challenging task due to the high similarity between the objects and the background. To address it, most methods often incorporate additional information (e.g., boundary, texture, and frequency clues) to guide feature learning for better detecting camouflaged objects from the background. Although progress has been made, these methods are basically individually tailored to specific auxiliary cues, thus lacking adaptability and not consistently achieving high segmentation performance. To this end, this paper proposes an adaptive guidance learning network, dubbed \textit{AGLNet}, which is a unified end-to-end learnable model for exploring and adapting different additional cues in CNN models to guide accurate camouflaged feature learning. Specifically, we first design a straightforward additional information generation (AIG) module to learn additional camouflaged object cues, which can be adapted for the exploration of effective camouflaged features. Then we present a hierarchical feature combination (HFC) module to deeply integrate additional cues and image features to guide camouflaged feature learning in a multi-level fusion manner.Followed by a recalibration decoder (RD), different features are further aggregated and refined for accurate object prediction. Extensive experiments on three widely used COD benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant performance improvements under different additional cues, and outperforms the recent 20 state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our code will be made publicly available at: \textcolor{blue}{{https://github.com/ZNan-Chen/AGLNet}}.
3D object detectors for point clouds often rely on a pooling-based PointNet to encode sparse points into grid-like voxels or pillars. In this paper, we identify that the common PointNet design introduces an information bottleneck that limits 3D object detection accuracy and scalability. To address this limitation, we propose PVTransformer: a transformer-based point-to-voxel architecture for 3D detection. Our key idea is to replace the PointNet pooling operation with an attention module, leading to a better point-to-voxel aggregation function. Our design respects the permutation invariance of sparse 3D points while being more expressive than the pooling-based PointNet. Experimental results show our PVTransformer achieves much better performance compared to the latest 3D object detectors. On the widely used Waymo Open Dataset, our PVTransformer achieves state-of-the-art 76.5 mAPH L2, outperforming the prior art of SWFormer by +1.7 mAPH L2.
Hand manipulating objects is an important interaction motion in our daily activities. We faithfully reconstruct this motion with a single RGBD camera by a novel deep reinforcement learning method to leverage physics. Firstly, we propose object compensation control which establishes direct object control to make the network training more stable. Meanwhile, by leveraging the compensation force and torque, we seamlessly upgrade the simple point contact model to a more physical-plausible surface contact model, further improving the reconstruction accuracy and physical correctness. Experiments indicate that without involving any heuristic physical rules, this work still successfully involves physics in the reconstruction of hand-object interactions which are complex motions hard to imitate with deep reinforcement learning. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/hu-hy17/HOIC.
In this competition we employed a model fusion approach to achieve object detection results close to those of real images. Our method is based on the CO-DETR model, which was trained on two sets of data: one containing images under dark conditions and another containing images enhanced with low-light conditions. We used various enhancement techniques on the test data to generate multiple sets of prediction results. Finally, we applied a clustering aggregation method guided by IoU thresholds to select the optimal results.
Modern image processing tools have made it easy for attackers to crop the region or object of interest in images and paste it into other images. The challenge this cropping-paste attack poses to the watermarking technology is that it breaks the synchronization of the image watermark, introducing multiple superimposed desynchronization distortions, such as rotation, scaling, and translation. However, current watermarking methods can only resist a single type of desynchronization and cannot be applied to protect the object's copyright under the cropping-paste attack. With the finding that the key to resisting the cropping-paste attack lies in robust features of the object to protect, this paper proposes a self-synchronizing object-aligned watermarking method, called SSyncOA. Specifically, we first constrain the watermarked region to be aligned with the protected object, and then synchronize the watermark's translation, rotation, and scaling distortions by normalizing the object invariant features, i.e., its centroid, principal orientation, and minimum bounding square, respectively. To make the watermark embedded in the protected object, we introduce the object-aligned watermarking model, which incorporates the real cropping-paste attack into the encoder-noise layer-decoder pipeline and is optimized end-to-end. Besides, we illustrate the effect of different desynchronization distortions on the watermark training, which confirms the necessity of the self-synchronization process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over other SOTAs.
Toward desirable saliency prediction, the types and numbers of inputs for a salient object detection (SOD) algorithm may dynamically change in many real-life applications. However, existing SOD algorithms are mainly designed or trained for one particular type of inputs, failing to be generalized to other types of inputs. Consequentially, more types of SOD algorithms need to be prepared in advance for handling different types of inputs, raising huge hardware and research costs. Differently, in this paper, we propose a new type of SOD task, termed Arbitrary Modality SOD (AM SOD). The most prominent characteristics of AM SOD are that the modality types and modality numbers will be arbitrary or dynamically changed. The former means that the inputs to the AM SOD algorithm may be arbitrary modalities such as RGB, depths, or even any combination of them. While, the latter indicates that the inputs may have arbitrary modality numbers as the input type is changed, e.g. single-modality RGB image, dual-modality RGB-Depth (RGB-D) images or triple-modality RGB-Depth-Thermal (RGB-D-T) images. Accordingly, a preliminary solution to the above challenges, \i.e. a modality switch network (MSN), is proposed in this paper. In particular, a modality switch feature extractor (MSFE) is first designed to extract discriminative features from each modality effectively by introducing some modality indicators, which will generate some weights for modality switching. Subsequently, a dynamic fusion module (DFM) is proposed to adaptively fuse features from a variable number of modalities based on a novel Transformer structure. Finally, a new dataset, named AM-XD, is constructed to facilitate research on AM SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AM SOD method can effectively cope with changes in the type and number of input modalities for robust salient object detection.
This paper delves into the task of arbitrary modality salient object detection (AM SOD), aiming to detect salient objects from arbitrary modalities, eg RGB images, RGB-D images, and RGB-D-T images. A novel modality-adaptive Transformer (MAT) will be proposed to investigate two fundamental challenges of AM SOD, ie more diverse modality discrepancies caused by varying modality types that need to be processed, and dynamic fusion design caused by an uncertain number of modalities present in the inputs of multimodal fusion strategy. Specifically, inspired by prompt learning's ability of aligning the distributions of pre-trained models to the characteristic of downstream tasks by learning some prompts, MAT will first present a modality-adaptive feature extractor (MAFE) to tackle the diverse modality discrepancies by introducing a modality prompt for each modality. In the training stage, a new modality translation contractive (MTC) loss will be further designed to assist MAFE in learning those modality-distinguishable modality prompts. Accordingly, in the testing stage, MAFE can employ those learned modality prompts to adaptively adjust its feature space according to the characteristics of the input modalities, thus being able to extract discriminative unimodal features. Then, MAFE will present a channel-wise and spatial-wise fusion hybrid (CSFH) strategy to meet the demand for dynamic fusion. For that, CSFH dedicates a channel-wise dynamic fusion module (CDFM) and a novel spatial-wise dynamic fusion module (SDFM) to fuse the unimodal features from varying numbers of modalities and meanwhile effectively capture cross-modal complementary semantic and detail information, respectively. Moreover, CSFH will carefully align CDFM and SDFM to different levels of unimodal features based on their characteristics for more effective complementary information exploitation.
In this paper, we introduce a new method for the task of interaction transfer. Given an example interaction between a source object and an agent, our method can automatically infer both surface and spatial relationships for the agent and target objects within the same category, yielding more accurate and valid transfers. Specifically, our method characterizes the example interaction using a combined spatial and surface representation. We correspond the agent points and object points related to the representation to the target object space using a learned spatial and surface correspondence field, which represents objects as deformed and rotated signed distance fields. With the corresponded points, an optimization is performed under the constraints of our spatial and surface interaction representation and additional regularization. Experiments conducted on human-chair and hand-mug interaction transfer tasks show that our approach can handle larger geometry and topology variations between source and target shapes, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Electric scooters (e-scooters) have rapidly emerged as a popular mode of transportation in urban areas, yet they pose significant safety challenges. In the United States, the rise of e-scooters has been marked by a concerning increase in related injuries and fatalities. Recently, while deep-learning object detection holds paramount significance in autonomous vehicles to avoid potential collisions, its application in the context of e-scooters remains relatively unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of cutting-edge object detectors designed for e-scooters. To achieve this, the first comprehensive benchmark involving 22 state-of-the-art YOLO object detectors, including five versions (YOLOv3, YOLOv5, YOLOv6, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8), has been established for real-time traffic object detection using a self-collected dataset featuring e-scooters. The detection accuracy, measured in terms of [email omitted], ranges from 27.4% (YOLOv7-E6E) to 86.8% (YOLOv5s). All YOLO models, particularly YOLOv3-tiny, have displayed promising potential for real-time object detection in the context of e-scooters. Both the traffic scene dataset (https://zenodo.org/records/10578641) and software program codes (https://github.com/DongChen06/ScooterDet) for model benchmarking in this study are publicly available, which will not only improve e-scooter safety with advanced object detection but also lay the groundwork for tailored solutions, promising a safer and more sustainable urban micromobility landscape.
We propose a hybrid framework for consistently producing high-quality object tracks by combining an automated object tracker with little human input. The key idea is to tailor a module for each dataset to intelligently decide when an object tracker is failing and so humans should be brought in to re-localize an object for continued tracking. Our approach leverages self-supervised learning on unlabeled videos to learn a tailored representation for a target object that is then used to actively monitor its tracked region and decide when the tracker fails. Since labeled data is not needed, our approach can be applied to novel object categories. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate our method outperforms existing approaches, especially for small, fast moving, or occluded objects.
Traditional unsupervised optical flow methods are vulnerable to occlusions and motion boundaries due to lack of object-level information. Therefore, we propose UnSAMFlow, an unsupervised flow network that also leverages object information from the latest foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM). We first include a self-supervised semantic augmentation module tailored to SAM masks. We also analyze the poor gradient landscapes of traditional smoothness losses and propose a new smoothness definition based on homography instead. A simple yet effective mask feature module has also been added to further aggregate features on the object level. With all these adaptations, our method produces clear optical flow estimation with sharp boundaries around objects, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both KITTI and Sintel datasets. Our method also generalizes well across domains and runs very efficiently.
View-predictive generative models provide strong priors for lifting object-centric images and videos into 3D and 4D through rendering and score distillation objectives. A question then remains: what about lifting complete multi-object dynamic scenes? There are two challenges in this direction: First, rendering error gradients are often insufficient to recover fast object motion, and second, view predictive generative models work much better for objects than whole scenes, so, score distillation objectives cannot currently be applied at the scene level directly. We present DreamScene4D, the first approach to generate 3D dynamic scenes of multiple objects from monocular videos via 360-degree novel view synthesis. Our key insight is a "decompose-recompose" approach that factorizes the video scene into the background and object tracks, while also factorizing object motion into 3 components: object-centric deformation, object-to-world-frame transformation, and camera motion. Such decomposition permits rendering error gradients and object view-predictive models to recover object 3D completions and deformations while bounding box tracks guide the large object movements in the scene. We show extensive results on challenging DAVIS, Kubric, and self-captured videos with quantitative comparisons and a user preference study. Besides 4D scene generation, DreamScene4D obtains accurate 2D persistent point track by projecting the inferred 3D trajectories to 2D. We will release our code and hope our work will stimulate more research on fine-grained 4D understanding from videos.
Recognizing the states of objects in a video is crucial in understanding the scene beyond actions and objects. For instance, an egg can be raw, cracked, and whisked while cooking an omelet, and these states can coexist simultaneously (an egg can be both raw and whisked). However, most existing research assumes a single object state change (e.g., uncracked -> cracked), overlooking the coexisting nature of multiple object states and the influence of past states on the current state. We formulate object state recognition as a multi-label classification task that explicitly handles multiple states. We then propose to learn multiple object states from narrated videos by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to generate pseudo-labels from the transcribed narrations, capturing the influence of past states. The challenge is that narrations mostly describe human actions in the video but rarely explain object states. Therefore, we use the LLMs knowledge of the relationship between actions and states to derive the missing object states. We further accumulate the derived object states to consider past state contexts to infer current object state pseudo-labels. We newly collect a dataset called the Multiple Object States Transition (MOST) dataset, which includes manual multi-label annotation for evaluation purposes, covering 60 object states across six object categories. Experimental results show that our model trained on LLM-generated pseudo-labels significantly outperforms strong vision-language models, demonstrating the effectiveness of our pseudo-labeling framework that considers past context via LLMs.
Recent works in hand-object reconstruction mainly focus on the single-view and dense multi-view settings. On the one hand, single-view methods can leverage learned shape priors to generalise to unseen objects but are prone to inaccuracies due to occlusions. On the other hand, dense multi-view methods are very accurate but cannot easily adapt to unseen objects without further data collection. In contrast, sparse multi-view methods can take advantage of the additional views to tackle occlusion, while keeping the computational cost low compared to dense multi-view methods. In this paper, we consider the problem of hand-object reconstruction with unseen objects in the sparse multi-view setting. Given multiple RGB images of the hand and object captured at the same time, our model SVHO combines the predictions from each view into a unified reconstruction without optimisation across views. We train our model on a synthetic hand-object dataset and evaluate directly on a real world recorded hand-object dataset with unseen objects. We show that while reconstruction of unseen hands and objects from RGB is challenging, additional views can help improve the reconstruction quality.
As human-machine interaction continues to evolve, the capacity for environmental perception is becoming increasingly crucial. Integrating the two most common types of sensory data, images, and point clouds, can enhance detection accuracy. Currently, there is no existing model capable of detecting an object's position in both point clouds and images while also determining their corresponding relationship. This information is invaluable for human-machine interactions, offering new possibilities for their enhancement. In light of this, this paper introduces an end-to-end Consistency Object Detection (COD) algorithm framework that requires only a single forward inference to simultaneously obtain an object's position in both point clouds and images and establish their correlation. Furthermore, to assess the accuracy of the object correlation between point clouds and images, this paper proposes a new evaluation metric, Consistency Precision (CP). To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, an extensive set of experiments has been conducted on the KITTI and DAIR-V2X datasets. The study also explored how the proposed consistency detection method performs on images when the calibration parameters between images and point clouds are disturbed, compared to existing post-processing methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits excellent detection performance and robustness, achieving end-to-end consistency detection. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/xifen523/COD.
Humans seemingly incorporate potential touch signals in their perception. Our goal is to equip robots with a similar capability, which we term Imagine2touch. Imagine2touch aims to predict the expected touch signal based on a visual patch representing the area to be touched. We use ReSkin, an inexpensive and compact touch sensor to collect the required dataset through random touching of five basic geometric shapes, and one tool. We train Imagine2touch on two out of those shapes and validate it on the ood. tool. We demonstrate the efficacy of Imagine2touch through its application to the downstream task of object recognition. In this task, we evaluate Imagine2touch performance in two experiments, together comprising 5 out of training distribution objects. Imagine2touch achieves an object recognition accuracy of 58% after ten touches per object, surpassing a proprioception baseline.
In this paper, we present Sim-Grasp, a robust 6-DOF two-finger grasping system that integrates advanced language models for enhanced object manipulation in cluttered environments. We introduce the Sim-Grasp-Dataset, which includes 1,550 objects across 500 scenarios with 7.9 million annotated labels, and develop Sim-GraspNet to generate grasp poses from point clouds. The Sim-Grasp-Polices achieve grasping success rates of 97.14% for single objects and 87.43% and 83.33% for mixed clutter scenarios of Levels 1-2 and Levels 3-4 objects, respectively. By incorporating language models for target identification through text and box prompts, Sim-Grasp enables both object-agnostic and target picking, pushing the boundaries of intelligent robotic systems.