arXiv subjects

Xiaowei Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaowei Zhou.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Panoptic NeRF: 3D-to-2D Label Transfer for Panoptic Urban Scene Segmentation

Large-scale training data with high-quality annotations is critical for training semantic and instance segmentation models. Unfortunately, pixel-wise annotation is labor-intensive and costly, raising the demand for more efficient labeling strategies. In this work, we present a novel 3D-to-2D label transfer method, Panoptic NeRF, which aims for obtaining per-pixel 2D semantic and instance labels from easy-to-obtain coarse 3D bounding primitives. Our method utilizes NeRF as a differentiable tool to unify coarse 3D annotations and 2D semantic cues transferred from existing datasets. We demonstrate that this combination allows for improved geometry guided by semantic information, enabling rendering of accurate semantic maps across multiple views. Furthermore, this fusion process resolves label ambiguity of the coarse 3D annotations and filters noise in the 2D predictions. By inferring in 3D space and rendering to 2D labels, our 2D semantic and instance labels are multi-view consistent by design. Experimental results show that Panoptic NeRF outperforms existing label transfer methods in terms of accuracy and multi-view consistency on challenging urban scenes of the KITTI-360 dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

LADDER: Latent Boundary-guided Adversarial Training

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently achieved great success in many classification tasks. Unfortunately, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that generate adversarial examples with a small perturbation to fool DNN models, especially in model sharing scenarios. Adversarial training is proved to be the most effective strategy that injects adversarial examples into model training to improve the robustness of DNN models against adversarial attacks. However, adversarial training based on the existing adversarial examples fails to generalize well to standard, unperturbed test data. To achieve a better trade-off between standard accuracy and adversarial robustness, we propose a novel adversarial training framework called LAtent bounDary-guided aDvErsarial tRaining (LADDER) that adversarially trains DNN models on latent boundary-guided adversarial examples. As opposed to most of the existing methods that generate adversarial examples in the input space, LADDER generates a myriad of high-quality adversarial examples through adding perturbations to latent features. The perturbations are made along the normal of the decision boundary constructed by an SVM with an attention mechanism. We analyze the merits of our generated boundary-guided adversarial examples from a boundary field perspective and visualization view. Extensive experiments and detailed analysis on MNIST, SVHN, CelebA, and CIFAR-10 validate the effectiveness of LADDER in achieving a better trade-off between standard accuracy and adversarial robustness as compared with vanilla DNNs and competitive baselines.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

PlanarRecon: Real-time 3D Plane Detection and Reconstruction from Posed Monocular Videos

We present PlanarRecon -- a novel framework for globally coherent detection and reconstruction of 3D planes from a posed monocular video. Unlike previous works that detect planes in 2D from a single image, PlanarRecon incrementally detects planes in 3D for each video fragment, which consists of a set of key frames, from a volumetric representation of the scene using neural networks. A learning-based tracking and fusion module is designed to merge planes from previous fragments to form a coherent global plane reconstruction. Such design allows PlanarRecon to integrate observations from multiple views within each fragment and temporal information across different ones, resulting in an accurate and coherent reconstruction of the scene abstraction with low-polygonal geometry. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performances on the ScanNet dataset while being real-time.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Neural 3D Reconstruction in the Wild

We are witnessing an explosion of neural implicit representations in computer vision and graphics. Their applicability has recently expanded beyond tasks such as shape generation and image-based rendering to the fundamental problem of image-based 3D reconstruction. However, existing methods typically assume constrained 3D environments with constant illumination captured by a small set of roughly uniformly distributed cameras. We introduce a new method that enables efficient and accurate surface reconstruction from Internet photo collections in the presence of varying illumination. To achieve this, we propose a hybrid voxel- and surface-guided sampling technique that allows for more efficient ray sampling around surfaces and leads to significant improvements in reconstruction quality. Further, we present a new benchmark and protocol for evaluating reconstruction performance on such in-the-wild scenes. We perform extensive experiments, demonstrating that our approach surpasses both classical and neural reconstruction methods on a wide variety of metrics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

OnePose: One-Shot Object Pose Estimation without CAD Models

We propose a new method named OnePose for object pose estimation. Unlike existing instance-level or category-level methods, OnePose does not rely on CAD models and can handle objects in arbitrary categories without instance- or category-specific network training. OnePose draws the idea from visual localization and only requires a simple RGB video scan of the object to build a sparse SfM model of the object. Then, this model is registered to new query images with a generic feature matching network. To mitigate the slow runtime of existing visual localization methods, we propose a new graph attention network that directly matches 2D interest points in the query image with the 3D points in the SfM model, resulting in efficient and robust pose estimation. Combined with a feature-based pose tracker, OnePose is able to stably detect and track 6D poses of everyday household objects in real-time. We also collected a large-scale dataset that consists of 450 sequences of 150 objects.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Neural 3D Scene Reconstruction with the Manhattan-world Assumption

This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing 3D indoor scenes from multi-view images. Many previous works have shown impressive reconstruction results on textured objects, but they still have difficulty in handling low-textured planar regions, which are common in indoor scenes. An approach to solving this issue is to incorporate planer constraints into the depth map estimation in multi-view stereo-based methods, but the per-view plane estimation and depth optimization lack both efficiency and multi-view consistency. In this work, we show that the planar constraints can be conveniently integrated into the recent implicit neural representation-based reconstruction methods. Specifically, we use an MLP network to represent the signed distance function as the scene geometry. Based on the Manhattan-world assumption, planar constraints are employed to regularize the geometry in floor and wall regions predicted by a 2D semantic segmentation network. To resolve the inaccurate segmentation, we encode the semantics of 3D points with another MLP and design a novel loss that jointly optimizes the scene geometry and semantics in 3D space. Experiments on ScanNet and 7-Scenes datasets show that the proposed method outperforms previous methods by a large margin on 3D reconstruction quality. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/manhattan_sdf.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Wave emission of non-thermal electron beams generated by magnetic reconnection

Magnetic reconnection in solar flares can efficiently generate non-thermal electron beams. The energetic electrons can, in turn, cause radio waves through microscopic plasma instabilities as they propagate through the ambient plasma along the magnetic field lines. We aim at investigating the wave emission caused by fast moving electron beams (FEBs) with characteristic non-thermal electron velocity distribution functions (EVDFs) generated by kinetic magnetic reconnection: two-streaming EVDFs along the separatrices and in the diffusion region, and perpendicular crescent-shaped EVDFs closer to the diffusion region. For this purpose, we utilized 2.5D fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code simulations in this study. We found that:(1) the two-streaming EVDFs plus the background ions are unstable to electron/ion (streaming) instabilities which cause ion acoustic waves and Langmuir waves due to the net current. This can lead to multiple harmonic plasma emission in the diffusion region and the separatrices of reconnection. (2) The perpendicular crescent-shaped EVDFs can cause multiple harmonic electromagnetic electron cyclotron waves through the electron cyclotron maser instabilities in the diffusion region of reconnection. Our results are applicable to diagnose the plasma parameters which control magnetic reconnection in solar flares by means of radio waves observations.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2022

Ray Priors through Reprojection: Improving Neural Radiance Fields for Novel View Extrapolation

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a potent paradigm for representing scenes and synthesizing photo-realistic images. A main limitation of conventional NeRFs is that they often fail to produce high-quality renderings under novel viewpoints that are significantly different from the training viewpoints. In this paper, instead of exploiting few-shot image synthesis, we study the novel view extrapolation setting that (1) the training images can well describe an object, and (2) there is a notable discrepancy between the training and test viewpoints' distributions. We present RapNeRF (RAy Priors) as a solution. Our insight is that the inherent appearances of a 3D surface's arbitrary visible projections should be consistent. We thus propose a random ray casting policy that allows training unseen views using seen views. Furthermore, we show that a ray atlas pre-computed from the observed rays' viewing directions could further enhance the rendering quality for extrapolated views. A main limitation is that RapNeRF would remove the strong view-dependent effects because it leverages the multi-view consistency property.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Modeling Indirect Illumination for Inverse Rendering

Recent advances in implicit neural representations and differentiable rendering make it possible to simultaneously recover the geometry and materials of an object from multi-view RGB images captured under unknown static illumination. Despite the promising results achieved, indirect illumination is rarely modeled in previous methods, as it requires expensive recursive path tracing which makes the inverse rendering computationally intractable. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to efficiently recovering spatially-varying indirect illumination. The key insight is that indirect illumination can be conveniently derived from the neural radiance field learned from input images instead of being estimated jointly with direct illumination and materials. By properly modeling the indirect illumination and visibility of direct illumination, interreflection- and shadow-free albedo can be recovered. The experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to previous work and its capability to synthesize realistic renderings under novel viewpoints and illumination. Our code and data are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/invrender/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Semantic keypoint-based pose estimation from single RGB frames

This paper presents an approach to estimating the continuous 6-DoF pose of an object from a single RGB image. The approach combines semantic keypoints predicted by a convolutional network (convnet) with a deformable shape model. Unlike prior investigators, we are agnostic to whether the object is textured or textureless, as the convnet learns the optimal representation from the available training-image data. Furthermore, the approach can be applied to instance- and class-based pose recovery. Additionally, we accompany our main pipeline with a technique for semi-automatic data generation from unlabeled videos. This procedure allows us to train the learnable components of our method with minimal manual intervention in the labeling process. Empirically, we show that our approach can accurately recover the 6-DoF object pose for both instance- and class-based scenarios even against a cluttered background. We apply our approach both to several, existing, large-scale datasets - including PASCAL3D+, LineMOD-Occluded, YCB-Video, and TUD-Light - and, using our labeling pipeline, to a new dataset with novel object classes that we introduce here. Extensive empirical evaluations show that our approach is able to provide pose estimation results comparable to the state of the art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Neural Rays for Occlusion-aware Image-based Rendering

We present a new neural representation, called Neural Ray (NeuRay), for the novel view synthesis task. Recent works construct radiance fields from image features of input views to render novel view images, which enables the generalization to new scenes. However, due to occlusions, a 3D point may be invisible to some input views. On such a 3D point, these generalization methods will include inconsistent image features from invisible views, which interfere with the radiance field construction. To solve this problem, we predict the visibility of 3D points to input views within our NeuRay representation. This visibility enables the radiance field construction to focus on visible image features, which significantly improves its rendering quality. Meanwhile, a novel consistency loss is proposed to refine the visibility in NeuRay when finetuning on a specific scene. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the novel view synthesis task when generalizing to unseen scenes and outperforms per-scene optimization methods after finetuning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Learning Hierarchical Cross-Modal Association for Co-Speech Gesture Generation

Generating speech-consistent body and gesture movements is a long-standing problem in virtual avatar creation. Previous studies often synthesize pose movement in a holistic manner, where poses of all joints are generated simultaneously. Such a straightforward pipeline fails to generate fine-grained co-speech gestures. One observation is that the hierarchical semantics in speech and the hierarchical structures of human gestures can be naturally described into multiple granularities and associated together. To fully utilize the rich connections between speech audio and human gestures, we propose a novel framework named Hierarchical Audio-to-Gesture (HA2G) for co-speech gesture generation. In HA2G, a Hierarchical Audio Learner extracts audio representations across semantic granularities. A Hierarchical Pose Inferer subsequently renders the entire human pose gradually in a hierarchical manner. To enhance the quality of synthesized gestures, we develop a contrastive learning strategy based on audio-text alignment for better audio representations. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that the proposed method renders realistic co-speech gestures and outperforms previous methods in a clear margin. Project page: https://alvinliu0.github.io/projects/HA2G

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Visual Sound Localization in the Wild by Cross-Modal Interference Erasing

The task of audio-visual sound source localization has been well studied under constrained scenes, where the audio recordings are clean. However, in real-world scenarios, audios are usually contaminated by off-screen sound and background noise. They will interfere with the procedure of identifying desired sources and building visual-sound connections, making previous studies non-applicable. In this work, we propose the Interference Eraser (IEr) framework, which tackles the problem of audio-visual sound source localization in the wild. The key idea is to eliminate the interference by redefining and carving discriminative audio representations. Specifically, we observe that the previous practice of learning only a single audio representation is insufficient due to the additive nature of audio signals. We thus extend the audio representation with our Audio-Instance-Identifier module, which clearly distinguishes sounding instances when audio signals of different volumes are unevenly mixed. Then we erase the influence of the audible but off-screen sounds and the silent but visible objects by a Cross-modal Referrer module with cross-modality distillation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves superior results on sound localization tasks, especially under real-world scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/alvinliu0/Visual-Sound-Localization-in-the-Wild.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies

This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing an animatable human model from a multi-view video. Some recent works have proposed to decompose a non-rigidly deforming scene into a canonical neural radiance field and a set of deformation fields that map observation-space points to the canonical space, thereby enabling them to learn the dynamic scene from images. However, they represent the deformation field as translational vector field or SE(3) field, which makes the optimization highly under-constrained. Moreover, these representations cannot be explicitly controlled by input motions. Instead, we introduce neural blend weight fields to produce the deformation fields. Based on the skeleton-driven deformation, blend weight fields are used with 3D human skeletons to generate observation-to-canonical and canonical-to-observation correspondences. Since 3D human skeletons are more observable, they can regularize the learning of deformation fields. Moreover, the learned blend weight fields can be combined with input skeletal motions to generate new deformation fields to animate the human model. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms recent human synthesis methods. The code and supplementary materials are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/animatable_nerf/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Edge but not Least: Cross-View Graph Pooling

Graph neural networks have emerged as a powerful model for graph representation learning to undertake graph-level prediction tasks. Various graph pooling methods have been developed to coarsen an input graph into a succinct graph-level representation through aggregating node embeddings obtained via graph convolution. However, most graph pooling methods are heavily node-centric and are unable to fully leverage the crucial information contained in global graph structure. This paper presents a cross-view graph pooling (Co-Pooling) method to better exploit crucial graph structure information. The proposed Co-Pooling fuses pooled representations learnt from both node view and edge view. Through cross-view interaction, edge-view pooling and node-view pooling seamlessly reinforce each other to learn more informative graph-level representations. Co-Pooling has the advantage of handling various graphs with different types of node attributes. Extensive experiments on a total of 15 graph benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, demonstrating its superior performance over state-of-the-art pooling methods on both graph classification and graph regression tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

VS-Net: Voting with Segmentation for Visual Localization

Visual localization is of great importance in robotics and computer vision. Recently, scene coordinate regression based methods have shown good performance in visual localization in small static scenes. However, it still estimates camera poses from many inferior scene coordinates. To address this problem, we propose a novel visual localization framework that establishes 2D-to-3D correspondences between the query image and the 3D map with a series of learnable scene-specific landmarks. In the landmark generation stage, the 3D surfaces of the target scene are over-segmented into mosaic patches whose centers are regarded as the scene-specific landmarks. To robustly and accurately recover the scene-specific landmarks, we propose the Voting with Segmentation Network (VS-Net) to segment the pixels into different landmark patches with a segmentation branch and estimate the landmark locations within each patch with a landmark location voting branch. Since the number of landmarks in a scene may reach up to 5000, training a segmentation network with such a large number of classes is both computation and memory costly for the commonly used cross-entropy loss. We propose a novel prototype-based triplet loss with hard negative mining, which is able to train semantic segmentation networks with a large number of labels efficiently. Our proposed VS-Net is extensively tested on multiple public benchmarks and can outperform state-of-the-art visual localization methods. Code and models are available at \href{https://github.com/zju3dv/VS-Net}{https://github.com/zju3dv/VS-Net}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Reconstructing 3D Human Pose by Watching Humans in the Mirror

In this paper, we introduce the new task of reconstructing 3D human pose from a single image in which we can see the person and the person's image through a mirror. Compared to general scenarios of 3D pose estimation from a single view, the mirror reflection provides an additional view for resolving the depth ambiguity. We develop an optimization-based approach that exploits mirror symmetry constraints for accurate 3D pose reconstruction. We also provide a method to estimate the surface normal of the mirror from vanishing points in the single image. To validate the proposed approach, we collect a large-scale dataset named Mirrored-Human, which covers a large variety of human subjects, poses and backgrounds. The experiments demonstrate that, when trained on Mirrored-Human with our reconstructed 3D poses as pseudo ground-truth, the accuracy and generalizability of existing single-view 3D pose estimators can be largely improved.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers

We present a novel method for local image feature matching. Instead of performing image feature detection, description, and matching sequentially, we propose to first establish pixel-wise dense matches at a coarse level and later refine the good matches at a fine level. In contrast to dense methods that use a cost volume to search correspondences, we use self and cross attention layers in Transformer to obtain feature descriptors that are conditioned on both images. The global receptive field provided by Transformer enables our method to produce dense matches in low-texture areas, where feature detectors usually struggle to produce repeatable interest points. The experiments on indoor and outdoor datasets show that LoFTR outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. LoFTR also ranks first on two public benchmarks of visual localization among the published methods.

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