arXiv subjects

Eddy Ilg

Publications and source records attributed to Eddy Ilg.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Neuroexplicit Diffusion Models for Inpainting of Optical Flow Fields

Deep learning has revolutionized the field of computer vision by introducing large scale neural networks with millions of parameters. Training these networks requires massive datasets and leads to intransparent models that can fail to generalize. At the other extreme, models designed from partial differential equations (PDEs) embed specialized domain knowledge into mathematical equations and usually rely on few manually chosen hyperparameters. This makes them transparent by construction and if designed and calibrated carefully, they can generalize well to unseen scenarios. In this paper, we show how to bring model- and data-driven approaches together by combining the explicit PDE-based approaches with convolutional neural networks to obtain the best of both worlds. We illustrate a joint architecture for the task of inpainting optical flow fields and show that the combination of model- and data-driven modeling leads to an effective architecture. Our model outperforms both fully explicit and fully data-driven baselines in terms of reconstruction quality, robustness and amount of required training data. Averaging the endpoint error across different mask densities, our method outperforms the explicit baselines by 11-27%, the GAN baseline by 47% and the Probabilisitic Diffusion baseline by 42%. With that, our method sets a new state of the art for inpainting of optical flow fields from random masks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Accurate Training Data for Occupancy Map Prediction in Automated Driving Using Evidence Theory

Automated driving fundamentally requires knowledge about the surrounding geometry of the scene. Modern approaches use only captured images to predict occupancy maps that represent the geometry. Training these approaches requires accurate data that may be acquired with the help of LiDAR scanners. We show that the techniques used for current benchmarks and training datasets to convert LiDAR scans into occupancy grid maps yield very low quality, and subsequently present a novel approach using evidence theory that yields more accurate reconstructions. We demonstrate that these are superior by a large margin, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and that we additionally obtain meaningful uncertainty estimates. When converting the occupancy maps back to depth estimates and comparing them with the raw LiDAR measurements, our method yields a MAE improvement of 30% to 52% on nuScenes and 53% on Waymo over other occupancy ground-truth data. Finally, we use the improved occupancy maps to train a state-of-the-art occupancy prediction method and demonstrate that it improves the MAE by 25% on nuScenes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes

Reconstructing models of the real world, including 3D geometry, appearance, and motion of real scenes, is essential for computer graphics and computer vision. It enables the synthesizing of photorealistic novel views, useful for the movie industry and AR/VR applications. It also facilitates the content creation necessary in computer games and AR/VR by avoiding laborious manual design processes. Further, such models are fundamental for intelligent computing systems that need to interpret real-world scenes and actions to act and interact safely with the human world. Notably, the world surrounding us is dynamic, and reconstructing models of dynamic, non-rigidly moving scenes is a severely underconstrained and challenging problem. This state-of-the-art report (STAR) offers the reader a comprehensive summary of state-of-the-art techniques with monocular and multi-view inputs such as data from RGB and RGB-D sensors, among others, conveying an understanding of different approaches, their potential applications, and promising further research directions. The report covers 3D reconstruction of general non-rigid scenes and further addresses the techniques for scene decomposition, editing and controlling, and generalizable and generative modeling. More specifically, we first review the common and fundamental concepts necessary to understand and navigate the field and then discuss the state-of-the-art techniques by reviewing recent approaches that use traditional and machine-learning-based neural representations, including a discussion on the newly enabled applications. The STAR is concluded with a discussion of the remaining limitations and open challenges.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Neural Parametric Gaussians for Monocular Non-Rigid Object Reconstruction

Reconstructing dynamic objects from monocular videos is a severely underconstrained and challenging problem, and recent work has approached it in various directions. However, owing to the ill-posed nature of this problem, there has been no solution that can provide consistent, high-quality novel views from camera positions that are significantly different from the training views. In this work, we introduce Neural Parametric Gaussians (NPGs) to take on this challenge by imposing a two-stage approach: first, we fit a low-rank neural deformation model, which then is used as regularization for non-rigid reconstruction in the second stage. The first stage learns the object's deformations such that it preserves consistency in novel views. The second stage obtains high reconstruction quality by optimizing 3D Gaussians that are driven by the coarse model. To this end, we introduce a local 3D Gaussian representation, where temporally shared Gaussians are anchored in and deformed by local oriented volumes. The resulting combined model can be rendered as radiance fields, resulting in high-quality photo-realistic reconstructions of the non-rigidly deforming objects. We demonstrate that NPGs achieve superior results compared to previous works, especially in challenging scenarios with few multi-view cues.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attention

Video restoration aims at restoring multiple high-quality frames from multiple low-quality frames. Existing video restoration methods generally fall into two extreme cases, i.e., they either restore all frames in parallel or restore the video frame by frame in a recurrent way, which would result in different merits and drawbacks. Typically, the former has the advantage of temporal information fusion. However, it suffers from large model size and intensive memory consumption; the latter has a relatively small model size as it shares parameters across frames; however, it lacks long-range dependency modeling ability and parallelizability. In this paper, we attempt to integrate the advantages of the two cases by proposing a recurrent video restoration transformer, namely RVRT. RVRT processes local neighboring frames in parallel within a globally recurrent framework which can achieve a good trade-off between model size, effectiveness, and efficiency. Specifically, RVRT divides the video into multiple clips and uses the previously inferred clip feature to estimate the subsequent clip feature. Within each clip, different frame features are jointly updated with implicit feature aggregation. Across different clips, the guided deformable attention is designed for clip-to-clip alignment, which predicts multiple relevant locations from the whole inferred clip and aggregates their features by the attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on video super-resolution, deblurring, and denoising show that the proposed RVRT achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets with balanced model size, testing memory and runtime.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

NinjaDesc: Content-Concealing Visual Descriptors via Adversarial Learning

In the light of recent analyses on privacy-concerning scene revelation from visual descriptors, we develop descriptors that conceal the input image content. In particular, we propose an adversarial learning framework for training visual descriptors that prevent image reconstruction, while maintaining the matching accuracy. We let a feature encoding network and image reconstruction network compete with each other, such that the feature encoder tries to impede the image reconstruction with its generated descriptors, while the reconstructor tries to recover the input image from the descriptors. The experimental results demonstrate that the visual descriptors obtained with our method significantly deteriorate the image reconstruction quality with minimal impact on correspondence matching and camera localization performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

ERF: Explicit Radiance Field Reconstruction From Scratch

We propose a novel explicit dense 3D reconstruction approach that processes a set of images of a scene with sensor poses and calibrations and estimates a photo-real digital model. One of the key innovations is that the underlying volumetric representation is completely explicit in contrast to neural network-based (implicit) alternatives. We encode scenes explicitly using clear and understandable mappings of optimization variables to scene geometry and their outgoing surface radiance. We represent them using hierarchical volumetric fields stored in a sparse voxel octree. Robustly reconstructing such a volumetric scene model with millions of unknown variables from registered scene images only is a highly non-convex and complex optimization problem. To this end, we employ stochastic gradient descent (Adam) which is steered by an inverse differentiable renderer. We demonstrate that our method can reconstruct models of high quality that are comparable to state-of-the-art implicit methods. Importantly, we do not use a sequential reconstruction pipeline where individual steps suffer from incomplete or unreliable information from previous stages, but start our optimizations from uniformed initial solutions with scene geometry and radiance that is far off from the ground truth. We show that our method is general and practical. It does not require a highly controlled lab setup for capturing, but allows for reconstructing scenes with a vast variety of objects, including challenging ones, such as outdoor plants or furry toys. Finally, our reconstructed scene models are versatile thanks to their explicit design. They can be edited interactively which is computationally too costly for implicit alternatives.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Analysis and Mitigations of Reverse Engineering Attacks on Local Feature Descriptors

As autonomous driving and augmented reality evolve, a practical concern is data privacy. In particular, these applications rely on localization based on user images. The widely adopted technology uses local feature descriptors, which are derived from the images and it was long thought that they could not be reverted back. However, recent work has demonstrated that under certain conditions reverse engineering attacks are possible and allow an adversary to reconstruct RGB images. This poses a potential risk to user privacy. We take this a step further and model potential adversaries using a privacy threat model. Subsequently, we show under controlled conditions a reverse engineering attack on sparse feature maps and analyze the vulnerability of popular descriptors including FREAK, SIFT and SOSNet. Finally, we evaluate potential mitigation techniques that select a subset of descriptors to carefully balance privacy reconstruction risk while preserving image matching accuracy; our results show that similar accuracy can be obtained when revealing less information.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Deep Local Shapes: Learning Local SDF Priors for Detailed 3D Reconstruction

Efficiently reconstructing complex and intricate surfaces at scale is a long-standing goal in machine perception. To address this problem we introduce Deep Local Shapes (DeepLS), a deep shape representation that enables encoding and reconstruction of high-quality 3D shapes without prohibitive memory requirements. DeepLS replaces the dense volumetric signed distance function (SDF) representation used in traditional surface reconstruction systems with a set of locally learned continuous SDFs defined by a neural network, inspired by recent work such as DeepSDF. Unlike DeepSDF, which represents an object-level SDF with a neural network and a single latent code, we store a grid of independent latent codes, each responsible for storing information about surfaces in a small local neighborhood. This decomposition of scenes into local shapes simplifies the prior distribution that the network must learn, and also enables efficient inference. We demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization power of DeepLS by showing object shape encoding and reconstructions of full scenes, where DeepLS delivers high compression, accuracy, and local shape completion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Domain Adaptation of Learned Features for Visual Localization

We tackle the problem of visual localization under changing conditions, such as time of day, weather, and seasons. Recent learned local features based on deep neural networks have shown superior performance over classical hand-crafted local features. However, in a real-world scenario, there often exists a large domain gap between training and target images, which can significantly degrade the localization accuracy. While existing methods utilize a large amount of data to tackle the problem, we present a novel and practical approach, where only a few examples are needed to reduce the domain gap. In particular, we propose a few-shot domain adaptation framework for learned local features that deals with varying conditions in visual localization. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance over baselines, while using a scarce number of training examples from the target domain.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

TLIO: Tight Learned Inertial Odometry

In this work we propose a tightly-coupled Extended Kalman Filter framework for IMU-only state estimation. Strap-down IMU measurements provide relative state estimates based on IMU kinematic motion model. However the integration of measurements is sensitive to sensor bias and noise, causing significant drift within seconds. Recent research by Yan et al. (RoNIN) and Chen et al. (IONet) showed the capability of using trained neural networks to obtain accurate 2D displacement estimates from segments of IMU data and obtained good position estimates from concatenating them. This paper demonstrates a network that regresses 3D displacement estimates and its uncertainty, giving us the ability to tightly fuse the relative state measurement into a stochastic cloning EKF to solve for pose, velocity and sensor biases. We show that our network, trained with pedestrian data from a headset, can produce statistically consistent measurement and uncertainty to be used as the update step in the filter, and the tightly-coupled system outperforms velocity integration approaches in position estimates, and AHRS attitude filter in orientation estimates.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2020

Overcoming Limitations of Mixture Density Networks: A Sampling and Fitting Framework for Multimodal Future Prediction

Future prediction is a fundamental principle of intelligence that helps plan actions and avoid possible dangers. As the future is uncertain to a large extent, modeling the uncertainty and multimodality of the future states is of great relevance. Existing approaches are rather limited in this regard and mostly yield a single hypothesis of the future or, at the best, strongly constrained mixture components that suffer from instabilities in training and mode collapse. In this work, we present an approach that involves the prediction of several samples of the future with a winner-takes-all loss and iterative grouping of samples to multiple modes. Moreover, we discuss how to evaluate predicted multimodal distributions, including the common real scenario, where only a single sample from the ground-truth distribution is available for evaluation. We show on synthetic and real data that the proposed approach triggers good estimates of multimodal distributions and avoids mode collapse. Source code is available at $\href{https://github.com/lmb-freiburg/Multimodal-Future-Prediction}{\text{this https URL.}}$

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Lucid Data Dreaming for Video Object Segmentation

Convolutional networks reach top quality in pixel-level video object segmentation but require a large amount of training data (1k~100k) to deliver such results. We propose a new training strategy which achieves state-of-the-art results across three evaluation datasets while using 20x~1000x less annotated data than competing methods. Our approach is suitable for both single and multiple object segmentation. Instead of using large training sets hoping to generalize across domains, we generate in-domain training data using the provided annotation on the first frame of each video to synthesize ("lucid dream") plausible future video frames. In-domain per-video training data allows us to train high quality appearance- and motion-based models, as well as tune the post-processing stage. This approach allows to reach competitive results even when training from only a single annotated frame, without ImageNet pre-training. Our results indicate that using a larger training set is not automatically better, and that for the video object segmentation task a smaller training set that is closer to the target domain is more effective. This changes the mindset regarding how many training samples and general "objectness" knowledge are required for the video object segmentation task.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Uncertainty Estimates and Multi-Hypotheses Networks for Optical Flow

Optical flow estimation can be formulated as an end-to-end supervised learning problem, which yields estimates with a superior accuracy-runtime tradeoff compared to alternative methodology. In this paper, we make such networks estimate their local uncertainty about the correctness of their prediction, which is vital information when building decisions on top of the estimations. For the first time we compare several strategies and techniques to estimate uncertainty in a large-scale computer vision task like optical flow estimation. Moreover, we introduce a new network architecture utilizing the Winner-Takes-All loss and show that this can provide complementary hypotheses and uncertainty estimates efficiently with a single forward pass and without the need for sampling or ensembles. Finally, we demonstrate the quality of the different uncertainty estimates, which is clearly above previous confidence measures on optical flow and allows for interactive frame rates.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

FusionNet and AugmentedFlowNet: Selective Proxy Ground Truth for Training on Unlabeled Images

Recent work has shown that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used to estimate optical flow with high quality and fast runtime. This makes them preferable for real-world applications. However, such networks require very large training datasets. Engineering the training data is difficult and/or laborious. This paper shows how to augment a network trained on an existing synthetic dataset with large amounts of additional unlabelled data. In particular, we introduce a selection mechanism to assemble from multiple estimates a joint optical flow field, which outperforms that of all input methods. The latter can be used as proxy-ground-truth to train a network on real-world data and to adapt it to specific domains of interest. Our experimental results show that the performance of networks improves considerably, both, in cross-domain and in domain-specific scenarios. As a consequence, we obtain state-of-the-art results on the KITTI benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Occlusions, Motion and Depth Boundaries with a Generic Network for Disparity, Optical Flow or Scene Flow Estimation

Occlusions play an important role in disparity and optical flow estimation, since matching costs are not available in occluded areas and occlusions indicate depth or motion boundaries. Moreover, occlusions are relevant for motion segmentation and scene flow estimation. In this paper, we present an efficient learning-based approach to estimate occlusion areas jointly with disparities or optical flow. The estimated occlusions and motion boundaries clearly improve over the state-of-the-art. Moreover, we present networks with state-of-the-art performance on the popular KITTI benchmark and good generic performance. Making use of the estimated occlusions, we also show improved results on motion segmentation and scene flow estimation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

What Makes Good Synthetic Training Data for Learning Disparity and Optical Flow Estimation?

The finding that very large networks can be trained efficiently and reliably has led to a paradigm shift in computer vision from engineered solutions to learning formulations. As a result, the research challenge shifts from devising algorithms to creating suitable and abundant training data for supervised learning. How to efficiently create such training data? The dominant data acquisition method in visual recognition is based on web data and manual annotation. Yet, for many computer vision problems, such as stereo or optical flow estimation, this approach is not feasible because humans cannot manually enter a pixel-accurate flow field. In this paper, we promote the use of synthetically generated data for the purpose of training deep networks on such tasks.We suggest multiple ways to generate such data and evaluate the influence of dataset properties on the performance and generalization properties of the resulting networks. We also demonstrate the benefit of learning schedules that use different types of data at selected stages of the training process.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

End-to-End Learning of Video Super-Resolution with Motion Compensation

Learning approaches have shown great success in the task of super-resolving an image given a low resolution input. Video super-resolution aims for exploiting additionally the information from multiple images. Typically, the images are related via optical flow and consecutive image warping. In this paper, we provide an end-to-end video super-resolution network that, in contrast to previous works, includes the estimation of optical flow in the overall network architecture. We analyze the usage of optical flow for video super-resolution and find that common off-the-shelf image warping does not allow video super-resolution to benefit much from optical flow. We rather propose an operation for motion compensation that performs warping from low to high resolution directly. We show that with this network configuration, video super-resolution can benefit from optical flow and we obtain state-of-the-art results on the popular test sets. We also show that the processing of whole images rather than independent patches is responsible for a large increase in accuracy.

cs.CV↗