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Seung-Hwan Baek

Publications and source records attributed to Seung-Hwan Baek.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Taming VLAs under Robot Execution Errors: Self-Compensation and Stress Testing

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies often fail when a robot's executed motion deviates from their commanded action. Such execution errors arise from the robot's mechanics and operating conditions, such as wear and payload changes. We propose self-compensating VLA, a deployment-time adaptation method that enables a VLA policy to pre-compensate for the robot's execution errors when generating commands. Without task rewards or labels, it updates the policy online using the residual between the action commanded by a VLA and the motion executed by the robot. To stress-test VLA robustness across execution conditions that are impractical to cover with physical robots alone, we introduce RoboStress, a controlled simulation benchmark. It combines established joint-level models of friction, backlash, compliance, and gravity-compensation error into seven deployment scenarios whose execution errors depend on the robot's state and motion history. On RoboStress, self-compensating VLA achieves higher average task success than both the base policies and methods that build in robustness during training. On two physical robot arms with different usage histories, it raises the average task success rate by more than 30 percentage points on each arm, and the gains extend to objects not seen in the task demonstrations.

cs.RO↗

Depth-guided Multi-view Exposure Bracketing for HDR Robot Vision

Achieving reliable single-shot high dynamic range (HDR) imaging under extreme illumination conditions remains a long-standing challenge, yet no comprehensive benchmark exist for evaluating HDR perception in multi-sensor robotic systems. To fill this gap, we introduce a large-scale dataset collected via a custom robotic vision platform and an iPhone 13 Pro: 121 real-world scenes spanning modest and ultra-high dynamic range conditions, alongside 20 synthetic video sequences from the CARLA simulator. As a reference pipeline for this dataset, we propose Depth-guided Multi-view Exposure Bracketing (DMEB), a single-shot HDR method that distributes drastically different exposures across multi-view low-bit-depth cameras and fuses them via depth-guided confidence-aware fusion. Evaluations on our dataset show that DMEB establishes a strong reference point and highlight the promise of this sensor configuration for robust HDR perception in diverse multi-camera and depth sensor system.

cs.CV↗

Broadband Hyperspectral 3D Imaging using Dispersed Structured Light

Hyperspectral 3D imaging enables the capture of dense spectral information and scene geometry but has traditionally been confined to narrow spectral windows, typically the visible range. In this work, we introduce a broadband hyperspectral 3D imaging (BH3D) method to extend this capability across the full visible-near-infrared and short-wavelength infrared (SWIR) spectrum (450-1500 nm). This broad coverage is critical as it captures complementary physical cues: visible wavelengths reveal surface appearance, while SWIR bands provide insight into subsurface properties and material composition. However, realizing BH3D is challenging due to fundamental sensor constraints between visible-spectrum silicon and SWIR-spectrum InGaAs sensors, which necessitate complex multi-spectrograph designs. Here we propose a single-spectrograph BH3D system, using a stereo setup comprising visible and SWIR cameras, that reconstructs dense broadband hyperspectral reflectance together with accurate 3D geometry. Our key idea is to extend dispersed structured light to the broadband regime using a single spectrograph. We model the image formation of broadband dispersed structured light, and estimate hyperspectral reflectance and depth. We validate our approach on diverse real-world scenes, demonstrating accurate reconstruction with a mean spectral angle mapper of 0.13 rad, root mean square error of 0.03, and mean depth error of 4.5 mm. We further demonstrate identifying metameric materials, performing imaging through opaque layers, uncovering hidden features on banknotes, and revealing blood vessels.

cs.CV↗

Ambient-robust Inverse Rendering using Active RGB-NIR Imaging

Inverse rendering aims to reconstruct geometry and reflectance of objects from images. Despite recent progress, existing methods often produces inaccurate reconstructions that are sensitive to ambient illumination conditions. Here we introduce an ambient-robust inverse rendering method enabled by active RGB-NIR imaging. Our key insight is to leverage near-infrared (NIR) flash illumination-imperceptible to human observers-to obtain stable point-light shading that is largely invariant to ambient illumination. By using multi-view RGB images illuminated by ambient light and NIR images acquired with active NIR flash illumination, we reconstruct accurate geometry and reflectance by exploiting the complementary benefits of RGB and NIR images via a three-stage inverse rendering method. To enable dense multi-view acquisition, we develop an active imaging system equipped with a RGB-NIR camera and a NIR flash mounted on a mobile base. Using this system, we collect the first multi-view RGB-NIR inverse rendering dataset captured under multiple ambient illumination conditions. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms prior approaches, achieving accurate geometry and reflectance estimation across multiple ambient lighting scenarios.

cs.CV↗

Snapshot Polarimetric Display Inverse Rendering

Inverse rendering remains a core challenge in graphics and vision, especially in the snapshot configurations required for lightweight desktop workflows, where the per-frame information budget is highly constrained. Previous inverse rendering work explores various available dimensions for enriching the per-shot information, including temporal modulation, spectral encoding, and polarization. In this work, we introduce polarimetric display inverse rendering, using an LCD to project a linearly polarized RGB binary pattern and an RGB polarization camera augmented with a quarter-wave plate to acquire spectro-polarimetric measurements in a single shot. A feed-forward transformer maps these measurements to per-pixel normal, albedo, roughness, and metallicity. To overcome training data scarcity, we expand a limited set of measured polarimetric bidirectional reflectance distribution functions via a generative manifold. Evaluations on a real desktop setup demonstrate accurate inverse rendering across diverse scenes, outperforming existing approaches.

cs.GR↗

DynaVid: Learning to Generate Highly Dynamic Videos using Synthetic Motion Data

Despite recent progress, video diffusion models still struggle to synthesize realistic videos involving highly dynamic motions or requiring fine-grained motion controllability. A central limitation lies in the scarcity of such examples in commonly used training datasets. To address this, we introduce DynaVid, a video synthesis framework that leverages synthetic motion data in training, which is represented as optical flow and rendered using computer graphics pipelines. This approach offers two key advantages. First, synthetic motion offers diverse motion patterns and precise control signals that are difficult to obtain from real data. Second, unlike rendered videos with artificial appearances, rendered optical flow encodes only motion and is decoupled from appearance, thereby preventing models from reproducing the unnatural look of synthetic videos. Building on this idea, DynaVid adopts a two-stage generation framework: a motion generator first synthesizes motion, and then a motion-guided video generator produces video frames conditioned on that motion. This decoupled formulation enables the model to learn dynamic motion patterns from synthetic data while preserving visual realism from real-world videos. We validate our framework on two challenging scenarios, vigorous human motion generation and extreme camera motion control, where existing datasets are particularly limited. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DynaVid improves the realism and controllability in dynamic motion generation and camera motion control.

cs.CV↗

Complex-Valued Holographic Radiance Fields

Modeling wave properties of light is an important milestone for advancing physically-based rendering. In this paper, we propose complex-valued holographic radiance fields, a method that optimizes scenes without relying on intensity-based intermediaries. By leveraging multi-view images, our method directly optimizes a scene representation using complex-valued Gaussian primitives representing amplitude and phase values aligned with the scene geometry. Our approach eliminates the need for computationally expensive holographic rendering that typically utilizes a single view of a given scene. This accelerates holographic rendering speed by 30x-10,000x while achieving on-par image quality with state-of-the-art holography methods, representing a promising step towards bridging the representation gap between modeling wave properties of light and 3D geometry of scenes.

cs.GR↗

Learned split-spectrum metalens for obstruction-free broadband imaging in the visible

Obstructions such as raindrops, fences, or dust degrade captured images, especially when mechanical cleaning is infeasible. Conventional solutions to obstructions rely on a bulky compound optics array or computational inpainting, which compromise compactness or fidelity. Metalenses composed of subwavelength meta-atoms promise compact imaging, but simultaneous achievement of broadband and obstruction-free imaging remains a challenge, since a metalens that images distant scenes across a broadband spectrum cannot properly defocus near-depth occlusions. Here, we introduce a learned split-spectrum metalens that enables broadband obstruction-free imaging. Our approach divides the spectrum of each RGB channel into pass and stop bands with multi-band spectral filtering and learns the metalens to focus light from far objects through pass bands, while filtering focused near-depth light through stop bands. This optical signal is further enhanced using a neural network. Our learned split-spectrum metalens achieves broadband and obstruction-free imaging with relative PSNR gains of 32.29% and improves object detection and semantic segmentation accuracies with absolute gains of +13.54% mAP, +48.45% IoU, and +20.35% mIoU over a conventional hyperbolic design. This promises robust obstruction-free sensing and vision for space-constrained systems, such as mobile robots, drones, and endoscopes.

physics.optics↗

Differential Locally Injective Grid Deformation and Optimization

Grids are a general representation for capturing regularly-spaced information, but since they are uniform in space, they cannot dynamically allocate resolution to regions with varying levels of detail. There has been some exploration of indirect grid adaptivity by replacing uniform grids with tetrahedral meshes or locally subdivided grids, as inversion-free deformation of grids is difficult. This work develops an inversion-free grid deformation method that optimizes differential weight to adaptively compress space. The method is the first to optimize grid vertices as differential elements using vertex-colorings, decomposing a dense input linear system into many independent sets of vertices which can be optimized concurrently. This method is then also extended to optimize UV meshes with convex boundaries. Experimentally, this differential representation leads to a smoother optimization manifold than updating extrinsic vertex coordinates. By optimizing each sets of vertices in a coloring separately, local injectivity checks are straightforward since the valid region for each vertex is fixed. This enables the use of optimizers such as Adam, as each vertex can be optimized independently of other vertices. We demonstrate the generality and efficacy of this approach through applications in isosurface extraction for inverse rendering, image compaction, and mesh parameterization.

cs.GR↗

Limitations of Data-Driven Spectral Reconstruction -- An Optics-Aware Analysis

Hyperspectral imaging empowers machine vision systems with the distinct capability of identifying materials through recording their spectral signatures. Recent efforts in data-driven spectral reconstruction aim at extracting spectral information from RGB images captured by cost-effective RGB cameras, instead of dedicated hardware. Published work reports exceedingly high numerical scores for this reconstruction task, yet real-world performance lags substantially behind. We systematically analyze the performance of such methods. First, we evaluate the overfitting limitations with respect to current datasets by training the networks with less data, validating the trained models with unseen yet slightly modified data and cross-dataset validation. Second, we reveal fundamental limitations in the ability of RGB to spectral methods to deal with metameric or near-metameric conditions, which have so far gone largely unnoticed due to the insufficiencies of existing datasets. We validate the trained models with metamer data generated by metameric black theory and re-training the networks with various forms of metamers. This methodology can also be used for data augmentation as a partial mitigation of the dataset issues, although the RGB to spectral inverse problem remains fundamentally ill-posed. Finally, we analyze the potential for modifying the problem setting to achieve better performance by exploiting optical encoding provided by either optical aberrations or deliberate optical design. Our experiments show such approaches provide improved results under certain circumstances, but their overall performance is limited by the same dataset issues. We conclude that future progress on snapshot spectral imaging will heavily depend on the generation of improved datasets which can then be used to design effective optical encoding strategies. Code: https://github.com/vccimaging/OpticsAwareHSI-Analysis.

cs.CV↗

Hyperspectral Polarimetric BRDFs of Real-world Materials

Acquiring bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) is essential for simulating light transport and analytically modeling material properties. Over the past two decades, numerous intensity-only BRDF datasets in the visible spectrum have been introduced, primarily for RGB image rendering applications. However, in scientific and engineering domains, there remains an unmet need to model light transport with polarization--a fundamental wave property of light--across hyperspectral bands. To address this gap, we present the first hyperspectral-polarimetric BRDF (hpBRDF) dataset of real-world materials, spanning wavelengths from 414 to 950\,nm and densely sampled at 68 spectral bands. This dataset covers both the visible and near-infrared (NIR) spectra, enabling detailed material analysis and light reflection simulations that incorporate polarization at each narrow spectral band. We develop an efficient hpBRDF acquisition system that captures high-dimensional hpBRDFs within a feasible acquisition time. Using this system, we demonstrate hyperspectral-polarimetric rendering using the acquired hpBRDFs. To provide insights on hpBRDF, we analyze the hpBRDFs with respect to their dependencies on wavelength, polarization state, material type, and illumination/viewing geometry. Also, we propose compact representations through principal component analysis and implicit neural hpBRDF modeling.

cs.GR↗

A Real-world Display Inverse Rendering Dataset

Inverse rendering aims to reconstruct geometry and reflectance from captured images. Display-camera imaging systems offer unique advantages for this task: each pixel can easily function as a programmable point light source, and the polarized light emitted by LCD displays facilitates diffuse-specular separation. Despite these benefits, there is currently no public real-world dataset captured using display-camera systems, unlike other setups such as light stages. This absence hinders the development and evaluation of display-based inverse rendering methods. In this paper, we introduce the first real-world dataset for display-based inverse rendering. To achieve this, we construct and calibrate an imaging system comprising an LCD display and stereo polarization cameras. We then capture a diverse set of objects with diverse geometry and reflectance under one-light-at-a-time (OLAT) display patterns. We also provide high-quality ground-truth geometry. Our dataset enables the synthesis of captured images under arbitrary display patterns and different noise levels. Using this dataset, we evaluate the performance of existing photometric stereo and inverse rendering methods, and provide a simple, yet effective baseline for display inverse rendering, outperforming state-of-the-art inverse rendering methods. Code and dataset are available on our project page at https://michaelcsj.github.io/DIR/

cs.GR↗

Event Ellipsometer: Event-based Mueller-Matrix Video Imaging

Light-matter interactions modify both the intensity and polarization state of light. Changes in polarization, represented by a Mueller matrix, encode detailed scene information. Existing optical ellipsometers capture Mueller-matrix images; however, they are often limited to capturing static scenes due to long acquisition times. Here, we introduce Event Ellipsometer, a method for acquiring a Mueller-matrix video for dynamic scenes. Our imaging system employs fast-rotating quarter-wave plates (QWPs) in front of a light source and an event camera that asynchronously captures intensity changes induced by the rotating QWPs. We develop an ellipsometric-event image formation model, a calibration method, and an ellipsometric-event reconstruction method. We experimentally demonstrate that Event Ellipsometer enables Mueller-matrix video imaging at 30fps, extending ellipsometry to dynamic scenes.

cs.CV↗

Gyro-based Neural Single Image Deblurring

In this paper, we present GyroDeblurNet, a novel single-image deblurring method that utilizes a gyro sensor to resolve the ill-posedness of image deblurring. The gyro sensor provides valuable information about camera motion that can improve deblurring quality. However, exploiting real-world gyro data is challenging due to errors from various sources. To handle these errors, GyroDeblurNet is equipped with two novel neural network blocks: a gyro refinement block and a gyro deblurring block. The gyro refinement block refines the erroneous gyro data using the blur information from the input image. The gyro deblurring block removes blur from the input image using the refined gyro data and further compensates for gyro error by leveraging the blur information from the input image. For training a neural network with erroneous gyro data, we propose a training strategy based on the curriculum learning. We also introduce a novel gyro data embedding scheme to represent real-world intricate camera shakes. Finally, we present both synthetic and real-world datasets for training and evaluating gyro-based single image deblurring. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art deblurring quality by effectively utilizing erroneous gyro data.

cs.CV↗

FloVD: Optical Flow Meets Video Diffusion Model for Enhanced Camera-Controlled Video Synthesis

We present FloVD, a novel video diffusion model for camera-controllable video generation. FloVD leverages optical flow to represent the motions of the camera and moving objects. This approach offers two key benefits. Since optical flow can be directly estimated from videos, our approach allows for the use of arbitrary training videos without ground-truth camera parameters. Moreover, as background optical flow encodes 3D correlation across different viewpoints, our method enables detailed camera control by leveraging the background motion. To synthesize natural object motion while supporting detailed camera control, our framework adopts a two-stage video synthesis pipeline consisting of optical flow generation and flow-conditioned video synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous approaches in terms of accurate camera control and natural object motion synthesis.

cs.CV↗

Differentiable Mobile Display Photometric Stereo

Display photometric stereo uses a display as a programmable light source to illuminate a scene with diverse illumination conditions. Recently, differentiable display photometric stereo (DDPS) demonstrated improved normal reconstruction accuracy by using learned display patterns. However, DDPS faced limitations in practicality, requiring a fixed desktop imaging setup using a polarization camera and a desktop-scale monitor. In this paper, we propose a more practical physics-based photometric stereo, differentiable mobile display photometric stereo (DMDPS), that leverages a mobile phone consisting of a display and a camera. We overcome the limitations of using a mobile device by developing a mobile app and method that simultaneously displays patterns and captures high-quality HDR images. Using this technique, we capture real-world 3D-printed objects and learn display patterns via a differentiable learning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DMDPS on both a 3D printed dataset and a first dataset of fallen leaves. The leaf dataset contains reconstructed surface normals and albedos of fallen leaves that may enable future research beyond computer graphics and vision. We believe that DMDPS takes a step forward for practical physics-based photometric stereo.

cs.CV↗

Polarimetric BSSRDF Acquisition of Dynamic Faces

Acquisition and modeling of polarized light reflection and scattering help reveal the shape, structure, and physical characteristics of an object, which is increasingly important in computer graphics. However, current polarimetric acquisition systems are limited to static and opaque objects. Human faces, on the other hand, present a particularly difficult challenge, given their complex structure and reflectance properties, the strong presence of spatially-varying subsurface scattering, and their dynamic nature. We present a new polarimetric acquisition method for dynamic human faces, which focuses on capturing spatially varying appearance and precise geometry, across a wide spectrum of skin tones and facial expressions. It includes both single and heterogeneous subsurface scattering, index of refraction, and specular roughness and intensity, among other parameters, while revealing biophysically-based components such as inner- and outer-layer hemoglobin, eumelanin and pheomelanin. Our method leverages such components' unique multispectral absorption profiles to quantify their concentrations, which in turn inform our model about the complex interactions occurring within the skin layers. To our knowledge, our work is the first to simultaneously acquire polarimetric and spectral reflectance information alongside biophysically-based skin parameters and geometry of dynamic human faces. Moreover, our polarimetric skin model integrates seamlessly into various rendering pipelines.

cs.CV↗

Dual Exposure Stereo for Extended Dynamic Range 3D Imaging

Achieving robust stereo 3D imaging under diverse illumination conditions is an important however challenging task, due to the limited dynamic ranges (DRs) of cameras, which are significantly smaller than real world DR. As a result, the accuracy of existing stereo depth estimation methods is often compromised by under- or over-exposed images. Here, we introduce dual-exposure stereo for extended dynamic range 3D imaging. We develop automatic dual-exposure control method that adjusts the dual exposures, diverging them when the scene DR exceeds the camera DR, thereby providing information about broader DR. From the captured dual-exposure stereo images, we estimate depth using motion-aware dual-exposure stereo network. To validate our method, we develop a robot-vision system, collect stereo video datasets, and generate a synthetic dataset. Our method outperforms other exposure control methods.

cs.CV↗