arXiv subjects

Jinqiang Cui

Publications and source records attributed to Jinqiang Cui.

27 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

UrbanVideo-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Embodied Intelligence with Video Data in Urban Spaces

Large multimodal models exhibit remarkable intelligence, yet their embodied cognitive abilities during motion in open-ended urban 3D space remain to be explored. We introduce a benchmark to evaluate whether video-large language models (Video-LLMs) can naturally process continuous first-person visual observations like humans, enabling recall, perception, reasoning, and navigation. We have manually control drones to collect 3D embodied motion video data from real-world cities and simulated environments, resulting in 1.5k video clips. Then we design a pipeline to generate 5.2k multiple-choice questions. Evaluations of 17 widely-used Video-LLMs reveal current limitations in urban embodied cognition. Correlation analysis provides insight into the relationships between different tasks, showing that causal reasoning has a strong correlation with recall, perception, and navigation, while the abilities for counterfactual and associative reasoning exhibit lower correlation with other tasks. We also validate the potential for Sim-to-Real transfer in urban embodiment through fine-tuning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

EmbodiedCity: A Benchmark Platform for Embodied Agent in Real-world City Environment

Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

A Real-Time Framework for Domain-Adaptive Underwater Object Detection with Image Enhancement

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, its practical utility for high-level vision tasks, such as underwater object detection (UOD) in Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), remains relatively unexplored. It may be attributed to several factors: (1) Existing methods typically employ UIE as a pre-processing step, which inevitably introduces considerable computational overhead and latency. (2) The process of enhancing images prior to training object detectors may not necessarily yield performance improvements. (3) The complex underwater environments can induce significant domain shifts across different scenarios, seriously deteriorating the UOD performance. To address these challenges, we introduce EnYOLO, an integrated real-time framework designed for simultaneous UIE and UOD with domain-adaptation capability. Specifically, both the UIE and UOD task heads share the same network backbone and utilize a lightweight design. Furthermore, to ensure balanced training for both tasks, we present a multi-stage training strategy aimed at consistently enhancing their performance. Additionally, we propose a novel domain-adaptation strategy to align feature embeddings originating from diverse underwater environments. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework not only achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both UIE and UOD tasks, but also shows superior adaptability when applied to different underwater scenarios. Our efficiency analysis further highlights the substantial potential of our framework for onboard deployment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

NocPlace: Nocturnal Visual Place Recognition via Generative and Inherited Knowledge Transfer

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is crucial in computer vision, aiming to retrieve database images similar to a query image from an extensive collection of known images. However, like many vision tasks, VPR always degrades at night due to the scarcity of nighttime images. Moreover, VPR needs to address the cross-domain problem of night-to-day rather than just the issue of a single nighttime domain. In response to these issues, we present NocPlace, which leverages generative and inherited knowledge transfer to embed resilience against dazzling lights and extreme darkness in the global descriptor. First, we establish a day-night urban scene dataset called NightCities, capturing diverse lighting variations and dark scenarios across 60 cities globally. Then, an image generation network is trained on this dataset and processes a large-scale VPR dataset, obtaining its nighttime version. Finally, VPR models are fine-tuned using descriptors inherited from themselves and night-style images, which builds explicit cross-domain contrastive relationships. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate our contributions and the superiority of NocPlace. Without adding any real-time computing resources, NocPlace improves the performance of Eigenplaces by 7.6% on Tokyo 24/7 Night and 16.8% on SVOX Night.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

A Convolutional-Transformer Network for Crack Segmentation with Boundary Awareness

Cracks play a crucial role in assessing the safety and durability of manufactured buildings. However, the long and sharp topological features and complex background of cracks make the task of crack segmentation extremely challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional-transformer network based on encoder-decoder architecture to solve this challenge. Particularly, we designed a Dilated Residual Block (DRB) and a Boundary Awareness Module (BAM). The DRB pays attention to the local detail of cracks and adjusts the feature dimension for other blocks as needed. And the BAM learns the boundary features from the dilated crack label. Furthermore, the DRB is combined with a lightweight transformer that captures global information to serve as an effective encoder. Experimental results show that the proposed network performs better than state-of-the-art algorithms on two typical datasets. Datasets, code, and trained models are available for research at https://github.com/HqiTao/CT-crackseg.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

SyreaNet: A Physically Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Framework Integrating Synthetic and Real Images

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is vital for high-level vision-related underwater tasks. Although learning-based UIE methods have made remarkable achievements in recent years, it's still challenging for them to consistently deal with various underwater conditions, which could be caused by: 1) the use of the simplified atmospheric image formation model in UIE may result in severe errors; 2) the network trained solely with synthetic images might have difficulty in generalizing well to real underwater images. In this work, we, for the first time, propose a framework \textit{SyreaNet} for UIE that integrates both synthetic and real data under the guidance of the revised underwater image formation model and novel domain adaptation (DA) strategies. First, an underwater image synthesis module based on the revised model is proposed. Then, a physically guided disentangled network is designed to predict the clear images by combining both synthetic and real underwater images. The intra- and inter-domain gaps are abridged by fully exchanging the domain knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework over other state-of-the-art (SOTA) learning-based UIE methods qualitatively and quantitatively. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/RockWenJJ/SyreaNet.git.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

NPR: Nocturnal Place Recognition in Streets

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is the task of retrieving database images similar to a query photo by comparing it to a large database of known images. In real-world applications, extreme illumination changes caused by query images taken at night pose a significant obstacle that VPR needs to overcome. However, a training set with day-night correspondence for city-scale, street-level VPR does not exist. To address this challenge, we propose a novel pipeline that divides VPR and conquers Nocturnal Place Recognition (NPR). Specifically, we first established a street-level day-night dataset, NightStreet, and used it to train an unpaired image-to-image translation model. Then we used this model to process existing large-scale VPR datasets to generate the VPR-Night datasets and demonstrated how to combine them with two popular VPR pipelines. Finally, we proposed a divide-and-conquer VPR framework and provided explanations at the theoretical, experimental, and application levels. Under our framework, previous methods can significantly improve performance on two public datasets, including the top-ranked method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

TJ-FlyingFish: Design and Implementation of an Aerial-Aquatic Quadrotor with Tiltable Propulsion Units

Aerial-aquatic vehicles are capable to move in the two most dominant fluids, making them more promising for a wide range of applications. We propose a prototype with special designs for propulsion and thruster configuration to cope with the vast differences in the fluid properties of water and air. For propulsion, the operating range is switched for the different mediums by the dual-speed propulsion unit, providing sufficient thrust and also ensuring output efficiency. For thruster configuration, thrust vectoring is realized by the rotation of the propulsion unit around the mount arm, thus enhancing the underwater maneuverability. This paper presents a quadrotor prototype of this concept and the design details and realization in practice.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

LGC-Net: A Lightweight Gyroscope Calibration Network for Efficient Attitude Estimation

This paper presents a lightweight, efficient calibration neural network model for denoising low-cost microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gyroscope and estimating the attitude of a robot in real-time. The key idea is extracting local and global features from the time window of inertial measurement units (IMU) measurements to regress the output compensation components for the gyroscope dynamically. Following a carefully deduced mathematical calibration model, LGC-Net leverages the depthwise separable convolution to capture the sectional features and reduce the network model parameters. The Large kernel attention is designed to learn the long-range dependencies and feature representation better. The proposed algorithm is evaluated in the EuRoC and TUM-VI datasets and achieves state-of-the-art on the (unseen) test sequences with a more lightweight model structure. The estimated orientation with our LGC-Net is comparable with the top-ranked visual-inertial odometry systems, although it does not adopt vision sensors. We make our method open-source at: https://github.com/huazai665/LGC-Net

cs.RO↗