arXiv subjects

Shohei Nobuhara

Publications and source records attributed to Shohei Nobuhara.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

BlindSpotNet: Seeing Where We Cannot See

We introduce 2D blind spot estimation as a critical visual task for road scene understanding. By automatically detecting road regions that are occluded from the vehicle's vantage point, we can proactively alert a manual driver or a self-driving system to potential causes of accidents (e.g., draw attention to a road region from which a child may spring out). Detecting blind spots in full 3D would be challenging, as 3D reasoning on the fly even if the car is equipped with LiDAR would be prohibitively expensive and error prone. We instead propose to learn to estimate blind spots in 2D, just from a monocular camera. We achieve this in two steps. We first introduce an automatic method for generating ``ground-truth'' blind spot training data for arbitrary driving videos by leveraging monocular depth estimation, semantic segmentation, and SLAM. The key idea is to reason in 3D but from 2D images by defining blind spots as those road regions that are currently invisible but become visible in the near future. We construct a large-scale dataset with this automatic offline blind spot estimation, which we refer to as Road Blind Spot (RBS) dataset. Next, we introduce BlindSpotNet (BSN), a simple network that fully leverages this dataset for fully automatic estimation of frame-wise blind spot probability maps for arbitrary driving videos. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the validity of our RBS Dataset and the effectiveness of our BSN.

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arXiv2021

Structure of Multiple Mirror System from Kaleidoscopic Projections of Single 3D Point

This paper proposes a novel algorithm of discovering the structure of a kaleidoscopic imaging system that consists of multiple planar mirrors and a camera. The kaleidoscopic imaging system can be recognized as the virtual multi-camera system and has strong advantages in that the virtual cameras are strictly synchronized and have the same intrinsic parameters. In this paper, we focus on the extrinsic calibration of the virtual multi-camera system. The problems to be solved in this paper are two-fold. The first problem is to identify to which mirror chamber each of the 2D projections of mirrored 3D points belongs. The second problem is to estimate all mirror parameters, i.e., normals, and distances of the mirrors. The key contribution of this paper is to propose novel algorithms for these problems using a single 3D point of unknown geometry by utilizing a kaleidoscopic projection constraint, which is an epipolar constraint on mirror reflections. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm of chamber assignment and estimation of mirror parameters with qualitative and quantitative evaluations using synthesized and real data.

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arXiv2020

Video Region Annotation with Sparse Bounding Boxes

Video analysis has been moving towards more detailed interpretation (e.g. segmentation) with encouraging progresses. These tasks, however, increasingly rely on densely annotated training data both in space and time. Since such annotation is labour-intensive, few densely annotated video data with detailed region boundaries exist. This work aims to resolve this dilemma by learning to automatically generate region boundaries for all frames of a video from sparsely annotated bounding boxes of target regions. We achieve this with a Volumetric Graph Convolutional Network (VGCN), which learns to iteratively find keypoints on the region boundaries using the spatio-temporal volume of surrounding appearance and motion. The global optimization of VGCN makes it significantly stronger and generalize better than existing solutions. Experimental results using two latest datasets (one real and one synthetic), including ablation studies, demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

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arXiv2020

3D-GMNet: Single-View 3D Shape Recovery as A Gaussian Mixture

In this paper, we introduce 3D-GMNet, a deep neural network for 3D object shape reconstruction from a single image. As the name suggests, 3D-GMNet recovers 3D shape as a Gaussian mixture. In contrast to voxels, point clouds, or meshes, a Gaussian mixture representation provides an analytical expression with a small memory footprint while accurately representing the target 3D shape. At the same time, it offers a number of additional advantages including instant pose estimation and controllable level-of-detail reconstruction, while also enabling interpretation as a point cloud, volume, and a mesh model. We train 3D-GMNet end-to-end with single input images and corresponding 3D models by introducing two novel loss functions, a 3D Gaussian mixture loss and a 2D multi-view loss, which collectively enable accurate shape reconstruction as kernel density estimation. We thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of 3D-GMNet with synthetic and real images of objects. The results show accurate reconstruction with a compact representation that also realizes novel applications of single-image 3D reconstruction.

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arXiv2020

Invertible Neural BRDF for Object Inverse Rendering

We introduce a novel neural network-based BRDF model and a Bayesian framework for object inverse rendering, i.e., joint estimation of reflectance and natural illumination from a single image of an object of known geometry. The BRDF is expressed with an invertible neural network, namely, normalizing flow, which provides the expressive power of a high-dimensional representation, computational simplicity of a compact analytical model, and physical plausibility of a real-world BRDF. We extract the latent space of real-world reflectance by conditioning this model, which directly results in a strong reflectance prior. We refer to this model as the invertible neural BRDF model (iBRDF). We also devise a deep illumination prior by leveraging the structural bias of deep neural networks. By integrating this novel BRDF model and reflectance and illumination priors in a MAP estimation formulation, we show that this joint estimation can be computed efficiently with stochastic gradient descent. We experimentally validate the accuracy of the invertible neural BRDF model on a large number of measured data and demonstrate its use in object inverse rendering on a number of synthetic and real images. The results show new ways in which deep neural networks can help solve challenging radiometric inverse problems.

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arXiv2020

SOIC: Semantic Online Initialization and Calibration for LiDAR and Camera

This paper presents a novel semantic-based online extrinsic calibration approach, SOIC (so, I see), for Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and camera sensors. Previous online calibration methods usually need prior knowledge of rough initial values for optimization. The proposed approach removes this limitation by converting the initialization problem to a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem with the introduction of semantic centroids (SCs). The closed-form solution of this PnP problem has been well researched and can be found with existing PnP methods. Since the semantic centroid of the point cloud usually does not accurately match with that of the corresponding image, the accuracy of parameters are not improved even after a nonlinear refinement process. Thus, a cost function based on the constraint of the correspondence between semantic elements from both point cloud and image data is formulated. Subsequently, optimal extrinsic parameters are estimated by minimizing the cost function. We evaluate the proposed method either with GT or predicted semantics on KITTI dataset. Experimental results and comparisons with the baseline method verify the feasibility of the initialization strategy and the accuracy of the calibration approach. In addition, we release the source code at https://github.com/--/SOIC.

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arXiv2020

Appearance and Shape from Water Reflection

This paper introduces single-image geometric and appearance reconstruction from water reflection photography, i.e., images capturing direct and water-reflected real-world scenes. Water reflection offers an additional viewpoint to the direct sight, collectively forming a stereo pair. The water-reflected scene, however, includes internally scattered and reflected environmental illumination in addition to the scene radiance, which precludes direct stereo matching. We derive a principled iterative method that disentangles this scene radiometry and geometry for reconstructing 3D scene structure as well as its high-dynamic range appearance. In the presence of waves, we simultaneously recover the wave geometry as surface normal perturbations of the water surface. Most important, we show that the water reflection enables calibration of the camera. In other words, for the first time, we show that capturing a direct and water-reflected scene in a single exposure forms a self-calibrating HDR catadioptric stereo camera. We demonstrate our method on a number of images taken in the wild. The results demonstrate a new means for leveraging this accidental catadioptric camera.

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arXiv2018

Deep Photovoltaic Nowcasting

Predicting the short-term power output of a photovoltaic panel is an important task for the efficient management of smart grids. Short-term forecasting at the minute scale, also known as nowcasting, can benefit from sky images captured by regular cameras and installed close to the solar panel. However, estimating the weather conditions from these images---sun intensity, cloud appearance and movement, etc.---is a very challenging task that the community has yet to solve with traditional computer vision techniques. In this work, we propose to learn the relationship between sky appearance and the future photovoltaic power output using deep learning. We train several variants of convolutional neural networks which take historical photovoltaic power values and sky images as input and estimate photovoltaic power in a very short term future. In particular, we compare three different architectures based on: a multi-layer perceptron (MLP), a convolutional neural network (CNN), and a long short term memory (LSTM) module. We evaluate our approach quantitatively on a dataset of photovoltaic power values and corresponding images gathered in Kyoto, Japan. Our experiments reveal that the MLP network, already used similarly in previous work, achieves an RMSE skill score of 7% over the commonly-used persistence baseline on the 1-minute future photovoltaic power prediction task. Our CNN-based network improves upon this with a 12% skill score. In contrast, our LSTM-based model, which can learn the temporal dependencies in the data, achieves a 21% RMSE skill score, thus outperforming all other approaches.

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arXiv2017

A Linear Extrinsic Calibration of Kaleidoscopic Imaging System from Single 3D Point

This paper proposes a new extrinsic calibration of kaleidoscopic imaging system by estimating normals and distances of the mirrors. The problem to be solved in this paper is a simultaneous estimation of all mirror parameters consistent throughout multiple reflections. Unlike conventional methods utilizing a pair of direct and mirrored images of a reference 3D object to estimate the parameters on a per-mirror basis, our method renders the simultaneous estimation problem into solving a linear set of equations. The key contribution of this paper is to introduce a linear estimation of multiple mirror parameters from kaleidoscopic 2D projections of a single 3D point of unknown geometry. Evaluations with synthesized and real images demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison with conventional methods.

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arXiv2016

Panoptic Studio: A Massively Multiview System for Social Interaction Capture

We present an approach to capture the 3D motion of a group of people engaged in a social interaction. The core challenges in capturing social interactions are: (1) occlusion is functional and frequent; (2) subtle motion needs to be measured over a space large enough to host a social group; (3) human appearance and configuration variation is immense; and (4) attaching markers to the body may prime the nature of interactions. The Panoptic Studio is a system organized around the thesis that social interactions should be measured through the integration of perceptual analyses over a large variety of view points. We present a modularized system designed around this principle, consisting of integrated structural, hardware, and software innovations. The system takes, as input, 480 synchronized video streams of multiple people engaged in social activities, and produces, as output, the labeled time-varying 3D structure of anatomical landmarks on individuals in the space. Our algorithm is designed to fuse the "weak" perceptual processes in the large number of views by progressively generating skeletal proposals from low-level appearance cues, and a framework for temporal refinement is also presented by associating body parts to reconstructed dense 3D trajectory stream. Our system and method are the first in reconstructing full body motion of more than five people engaged in social interactions without using markers. We also empirically demonstrate the impact of the number of views in achieving this goal.

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