arXiv subjects

Tai Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Tai Wang.

84 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Monocular 3D Object Detection with Depth from Motion

Perceiving 3D objects from monocular inputs is crucial for robotic systems, given its economy compared to multi-sensor settings. It is notably difficult as a single image can not provide any clues for predicting absolute depth values. Motivated by binocular methods for 3D object detection, we take advantage of the strong geometry structure provided by camera ego-motion for accurate object depth estimation and detection. We first make a theoretical analysis on this general two-view case and notice two challenges: 1) Cumulative errors from multiple estimations that make the direct prediction intractable; 2) Inherent dilemmas caused by static cameras and matching ambiguity. Accordingly, we establish the stereo correspondence with a geometry-aware cost volume as the alternative for depth estimation and further compensate it with monocular understanding to address the second problem. Our framework, named Depth from Motion (DfM), then uses the established geometry to lift 2D image features to the 3D space and detects 3D objects thereon. We also present a pose-free DfM to make it usable when the camera pose is unavailable. Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the KITTI benchmark. Detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses also validate our theoretical conclusions. The code will be released at https://github.com/Tai-Wang/Depth-from-Motion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

MV-FCOS3D++: Multi-View Camera-Only 4D Object Detection with Pretrained Monocular Backbones

In this technical report, we present our solution, dubbed MV-FCOS3D++, for the Camera-Only 3D Detection track in Waymo Open Dataset Challenge 2022. For multi-view camera-only 3D detection, methods based on bird-eye-view or 3D geometric representations can leverage the stereo cues from overlapped regions between adjacent views and directly perform 3D detection without hand-crafted post-processing. However, it lacks direct semantic supervision for 2D backbones, which can be complemented by pretraining simple monocular-based detectors. Our solution is a multi-view framework for 4D detection following this paradigm. It is built upon a simple monocular detector FCOS3D++, pretrained only with object annotations of Waymo, and converts multi-view features to a 3D grid space to detect 3D objects thereon. A dual-path neck for single-frame understanding and temporal stereo matching is devised to incorporate multi-frame information. Our method finally achieves 49.75% mAPL with a single model and wins 2nd place in the WOD challenge, without any LiDAR-based depth supervision during training. The code will be released at https://github.com/Tai-Wang/Depth-from-Motion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Probabilistic and Geometric Depth: Detecting Objects in Perspective

3D object detection is an important capability needed in various practical applications such as driver assistance systems. Monocular 3D detection, as a representative general setting among image-based approaches, provides a more economical solution than conventional settings relying on LiDARs but still yields unsatisfactory results. This paper first presents a systematic study on this problem. We observe that the current monocular 3D detection can be simplified as an instance depth estimation problem: The inaccurate instance depth blocks all the other 3D attribute predictions from improving the overall detection performance. Moreover, recent methods directly estimate the depth based on isolated instances or pixels while ignoring the geometric relations across different objects. To this end, we construct geometric relation graphs across predicted objects and use the graph to facilitate depth estimation. As the preliminary depth estimation of each instance is usually inaccurate in this ill-posed setting, we incorporate a probabilistic representation to capture the uncertainty. It provides an important indicator to identify confident predictions and further guide the depth propagation. Despite the simplicity of the basic idea, our method, PGD, obtains significant improvements on KITTI and nuScenes benchmarks, achieving 1st place out of all monocular vision-only methods while still maintaining real-time efficiency. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection3d.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Density-aware Chamfer Distance as a Comprehensive Metric for Point Cloud Completion

Chamfer Distance (CD) and Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) are two broadly adopted metrics for measuring the similarity between two point sets. However, CD is usually insensitive to mismatched local density, and EMD is usually dominated by global distribution while overlooks the fidelity of detailed structures. Besides, their unbounded value range induces a heavy influence from the outliers. These defects prevent them from providing a consistent evaluation. To tackle these problems, we propose a new similarity measure named Density-aware Chamfer Distance (DCD). It is derived from CD and benefits from several desirable properties: 1) it can detect disparity of density distributions and is thus a more intensive measure of similarity compared to CD; 2) it is stricter with detailed structures and significantly more computationally efficient than EMD; 3) the bounded value range encourages a more stable and reasonable evaluation over the whole test set. We adopt DCD to evaluate the point cloud completion task, where experimental results show that DCD pays attention to both the overall structure and local geometric details and provides a more reliable evaluation even when CD and EMD contradict each other. We can also use DCD as the training loss, which outperforms the same model trained with CD loss on all three metrics. In addition, we propose a novel point discriminator module that estimates the priority for another guided down-sampling step, and it achieves noticeable improvements under DCD together with competitive results for both CD and EMD. We hope our work could pave the way for a more comprehensive and practical point cloud similarity evaluation. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/wutong16/Density_aware_Chamfer_Distance .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

FCOS3D: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection is an important task for autonomous driving considering its advantage of low cost. It is much more challenging than conventional 2D cases due to its inherent ill-posed property, which is mainly reflected in the lack of depth information. Recent progress on 2D detection offers opportunities to better solving this problem. However, it is non-trivial to make a general adapted 2D detector work in this 3D task. In this paper, we study this problem with a practice built on a fully convolutional single-stage detector and propose a general framework FCOS3D. Specifically, we first transform the commonly defined 7-DoF 3D targets to the image domain and decouple them as 2D and 3D attributes. Then the objects are distributed to different feature levels with consideration of their 2D scales and assigned only according to the projected 3D-center for the training procedure. Furthermore, the center-ness is redefined with a 2D Gaussian distribution based on the 3D-center to fit the 3D target formulation. All of these make this framework simple yet effective, getting rid of any 2D detection or 2D-3D correspondence priors. Our solution achieves 1st place out of all the vision-only methods in the nuScenes 3D detection challenge of NeurIPS 2020. Code and models are released at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection3d.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR-based Perception

State-of-the-art methods for driving-scene LiDAR-based perception (including point cloud semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation and 3D detection, \etc) often project the point clouds to 2D space and then process them via 2D convolution. Although this cooperation shows the competitiveness in the point cloud, it inevitably alters and abandons the 3D topology and geometric relations. A natural remedy is to utilize the 3D voxelization and 3D convolution network. However, we found that in the outdoor point cloud, the improvement obtained in this way is quite limited. An important reason is the property of the outdoor point cloud, namely sparsity and varying density. Motivated by this investigation, we propose a new framework for the outdoor LiDAR segmentation, where cylindrical partition and asymmetrical 3D convolution networks are designed to explore the 3D geometric pattern while maintaining these inherent properties. The proposed model acts as a backbone and the learned features from this model can be used for downstream tasks such as point cloud semantic and panoptic segmentation or 3D detection. In this paper, we benchmark our model on these three tasks. For semantic segmentation, we evaluate the proposed model on several large-scale datasets, \ie, SemanticKITTI, nuScenes and A2D2. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art on the leaderboard of SemanticKITTI (both single-scan and multi-scan challenge), and significantly outperforms existing methods on nuScenes and A2D2 dataset. Furthermore, the proposed 3D framework also shows strong performance and good generalization on LiDAR panoptic segmentation and LiDAR 3D detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

SIDE: Center-based Stereo 3D Detector with Structure-aware Instance Depth Estimation

3D detection plays an indispensable role in environment perception. Due to the high cost of commonly used LiDAR sensor, stereo vision based 3D detection, as an economical yet effective setting, attracts more attention recently. For these approaches based on 2D images, accurate depth information is the key to achieve 3D detection, and most existing methods resort to a preliminary stage for depth estimation. They mainly focus on the global depth and neglect the property of depth information in this specific task, namely, sparsity and locality, where exactly accurate depth is only needed for these 3D bounding boxes. Motivated by this finding, we propose a stereo-image based anchor-free 3D detection method, called structure-aware stereo 3D detector (termed as SIDE), where we explore the instance-level depth information via constructing the cost volume from RoIs of each object. Due to the information sparsity of local cost volume, we further introduce match reweighting and structure-aware attention, to make the depth information more concentrated. Experiments conducted on the KITTI dataset show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods without depth map supervision.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

FLAVA: Find, Localize, Adjust and Verify to Annotate LiDAR-Based Point Clouds

Recent years have witnessed the rapid progress of perception algorithms on top of LiDAR, a widely adopted sensor for autonomous driving systems. These LiDAR-based solutions are typically data hungry, requiring a large amount of data to be labeled for training and evaluation. However, annotating this kind of data is very challenging due to the sparsity and irregularity of point clouds and more complex interaction involved in this procedure. To tackle this problem, we propose FLAVA, a systematic approach to minimizing human interaction in the annotation process. Specifically, we divide the annotation pipeline into four parts: find, localize, adjust and verify. In addition, we carefully design the UI for different stages of the annotation procedure, thus keeping the annotators to focus on the aspects that are most important to each stage. Furthermore, our system also greatly reduces the amount of interaction by introducing a light-weight yet effective mechanism to propagate the annotation results. Experimental results show that our method can remarkably accelerate the procedure and improve the annotation quality.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2020

Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation

State-of-the-art methods for large-scale driving-scene LiDAR segmentation often project the point clouds to 2D space and then process them via 2D convolution. Although this corporation shows the competitiveness in the point cloud, it inevitably alters and abandons the 3D topology and geometric relations. A natural remedy is to utilize the3D voxelization and 3D convolution network. However, we found that in the outdoor point cloud, the improvement obtained in this way is quite limited. An important reason is the property of the outdoor point cloud, namely sparsity and varying density. Motivated by this investigation, we propose a new framework for the outdoor LiDAR segmentation, where cylindrical partition and asymmetrical 3D convolution networks are designed to explore the 3D geometric pat-tern while maintaining these inherent properties. Moreover, a point-wise refinement module is introduced to alleviate the interference of lossy voxel-based label encoding. We evaluate the proposed model on two large-scale datasets, i.e., SemanticKITTI and nuScenes. Our method achieves the 1st place in the leaderboard of SemanticKITTI and outperforms existing methods on nuScenes with a noticeable margin, about 4%. Furthermore, the proposed 3D framework also generalizes well to LiDAR panoptic segmentation and LiDAR 3D detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Reconfigurable Voxels: A New Representation for LiDAR-Based Point Clouds

LiDAR is an important method for autonomous driving systems to sense the environment. The point clouds obtained by LiDAR typically exhibit sparse and irregular distribution, thus posing great challenges to the detection of 3D objects, especially those that are small and distant. To tackle this difficulty, we propose Reconfigurable Voxels, a new approach to constructing representations from 3D point clouds. Specifically, we devise a biased random walk scheme, which adaptively covers each neighborhood with a fixed number of voxels based on the local spatial distribution and produces a representation by integrating the points in the chosen neighbors. We found empirically that this approach effectively improves the stability of voxel features, especially for sparse regions. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks, including nuScenes, Lyft, and KITTI, show that this new representation can remarkably improve the detection performance for small and distant objects, without incurring noticeable overhead costs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

SSN: Shape Signature Networks for Multi-class Object Detection from Point Clouds

Multi-class 3D object detection aims to localize and classify objects of multiple categories from point clouds. Due to the nature of point clouds, i.e. unstructured, sparse and noisy, some features benefit-ting multi-class discrimination are underexploited, such as shape information. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D shape signature to explore the shape information from point clouds. By incorporating operations of symmetry, convex hull and chebyshev fitting, the proposed shape sig-nature is not only compact and effective but also robust to the noise, which serves as a soft constraint to improve the feature capability of multi-class discrimination. Based on the proposed shape signature, we develop the shape signature networks (SSN) for 3D object detection, which consist of pyramid feature encoding part, shape-aware grouping heads and explicit shape encoding objective. Experiments show that the proposed method performs remarkably better than existing methods on two large-scale datasets. Furthermore, our shape signature can act as a plug-and-play component and ablation study shows its effectiveness and good scalability

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

An Empirical Study on Academic Commentary and Its Implications on Reading and Writing

The relationship between reading and writing (RRW) is one of the major themes in learning science. One of its obstacles is that it is difficult to define or measure the latent background knowledge of the individual. However, in an academic research setting, scholars are required to explicitly list their background knowledge in the citation sections of their manuscripts. This unique opportunity was taken advantage of to observe RRW, especially in the published academic commentary scenario. RRW was visualized under a proposed topic process model by using a state of the art version of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). The empirical study showed that the academic commentary is modulated both by its target paper and the author's background knowledge. Although this conclusion was obtained in a unique environment, we suggest its implications can also shed light on other similar interesting areas, such as dialog and conversation, group discussion, and social media.

cs.CY↗