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Aug 25

Sampling color and geometry point clouds from ShapeNet dataset

The popularisation of acquisition devices capable of capturing volumetric information such as LiDAR scans and depth cameras has lead to an increased interest in point clouds as an imaging modality. Due to the high amount of data needed for their representation, efficient compression solutions are needed to enable practical applications. Among the many techniques that have been proposed in the last years, learning-based methods are receiving large attention due to their high performance and potential for improvement. Such algorithms depend on large and diverse training sets to achieve good compression performance. ShapeNet is a large-scale dataset composed of CAD models with texture and constitute and effective option for training such compression methods. This dataset is entirely composed of meshes, which must go through a sampling process in order to obtain point clouds with geometry and texture information. Although many existing software libraries are able to sample geometry from meshes through simple functions, obtaining an output point cloud with geometry and color of the external faces of the mesh models is not a straightforward process for the ShapeNet dataset. The main difficulty associated with this dataset is that its models are often defined with duplicated faces sharing the same vertices, but with different color values. This document describes a script for sampling the meshes from ShapeNet that circumvent this issue by excluding the internal faces of the mesh models prior to the sampling. The script can be accessed from the following link: https://github.com/mmspg/mesh-sampling.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 17, 2022

Learning a More Continuous Zero Level Set in Unsigned Distance Fields through Level Set Projection

Latest methods represent shapes with open surfaces using unsigned distance functions (UDFs). They train neural networks to learn UDFs and reconstruct surfaces with the gradients around the zero level set of the UDF. However, the differential networks struggle from learning the zero level set where the UDF is not differentiable, which leads to large errors on unsigned distances and gradients around the zero level set, resulting in highly fragmented and discontinuous surfaces. To resolve this problem, we propose to learn a more continuous zero level set in UDFs with level set projections. Our insight is to guide the learning of zero level set using the rest non-zero level sets via a projection procedure. Our idea is inspired from the observations that the non-zero level sets are much smoother and more continuous than the zero level set. We pull the non-zero level sets onto the zero level set with gradient constraints which align gradients over different level sets and correct unsigned distance errors on the zero level set, leading to a smoother and more continuous unsigned distance field. We conduct comprehensive experiments in surface reconstruction for point clouds, real scans or depth maps, and further explore the performance in unsupervised point cloud upsampling and unsupervised point normal estimation with the learned UDF, which demonstrate our non-trivial improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/junshengzhou/LevelSetUDF .

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 22, 2023

ROOM: A Physics-Based Continuum Robot Simulator for Photorealistic Medical Datasets Generation

Continuum robots are advancing bronchoscopy procedures by accessing complex lung airways and enabling targeted interventions. However, their development is limited by the lack of realistic training and test environments: Real data is difficult to collect due to ethical constraints and patient safety concerns, and developing autonomy algorithms requires realistic imaging and physical feedback. We present ROOM (Realistic Optical Observation in Medicine), a comprehensive simulation framework designed for generating photorealistic bronchoscopy training data. By leveraging patient CT scans, our pipeline renders multi-modal sensor data including RGB images with realistic noise and light specularities, metric depth maps, surface normals, optical flow and point clouds at medically relevant scales. We validate the data generated by ROOM in two canonical tasks for medical robotics -- multi-view pose estimation and monocular depth estimation, demonstrating diverse challenges that state-of-the-art methods must overcome to transfer to these medical settings. Furthermore, we show that the data produced by ROOM can be used to fine-tune existing depth estimation models to overcome these challenges, also enabling other downstream applications such as navigation. We expect that ROOM will enable large-scale data generation across diverse patient anatomies and procedural scenarios that are challenging to capture in clinical settings. Code and data: https://github.com/iamsalvatore/room.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 16, 2025 2

ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data

Scene understanding is an active research area. Commercial depth sensors, such as Kinect, have enabled the release of several RGB-D datasets over the past few years which spawned novel methods in 3D scene understanding. More recently with the launch of the LiDAR sensor in Apple's iPads and iPhones, high quality RGB-D data is accessible to millions of people on a device they commonly use. This opens a whole new era in scene understanding for the Computer Vision community as well as app developers. The fundamental research in scene understanding together with the advances in machine learning can now impact people's everyday experiences. However, transforming these scene understanding methods to real-world experiences requires additional innovation and development. In this paper we introduce ARKitScenes. It is not only the first RGB-D dataset that is captured with a now widely available depth sensor, but to our best knowledge, it also is the largest indoor scene understanding data released. In addition to the raw and processed data from the mobile device, ARKitScenes includes high resolution depth maps captured using a stationary laser scanner, as well as manually labeled 3D oriented bounding boxes for a large taxonomy of furniture. We further analyze the usefulness of the data for two downstream tasks: 3D object detection and color-guided depth upsampling. We demonstrate that our dataset can help push the boundaries of existing state-of-the-art methods and it introduces new challenges that better represent real-world scenarios.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 16, 2021

Beyond a Single Light: A Large-Scale Aerial Dataset for Urban Scene Reconstruction Under Varying Illumination

Recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting have demonstrated strong potential for large-scale UAV-based 3D reconstruction tasks by fitting the appearance of images. However, real-world large-scale captures are often based on multi-temporal data capture, where illumination inconsistencies across different times of day can significantly lead to color artifacts, geometric inaccuracies, and inconsistent appearance. Due to the lack of UAV datasets that systematically capture the same areas under varying illumination conditions, this challenge remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduceSkyLume, a large-scale, real-world UAV dataset specifically designed for studying illumination robust 3D reconstruction in urban scene modeling: (1) We collect data from 10 urban regions data comprising more than 100k high resolution UAV images (four oblique views and nadir), where each region is captured at three periods of the day to systematically isolate illumination changes. (2) To support precise evaluation of geometry and appearance, we provide per-scene LiDAR scans and accurate 3D ground-truth for assessing depth, surface normals, and reconstruction quality under varying illumination. (3) For the inverse rendering task, we introduce the Temporal Consistency Coefficient (TCC), a metric that measuress cross-time albedo stability and directly evaluates the robustness of the disentanglement of light and material. We aim for this resource to serve as a foundation that advances research and real-world evaluation in large-scale inverse rendering, geometry reconstruction, and novel view synthesis.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 22

4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks

In many robotics and VR/AR applications, 3D-videos are readily-available sources of input (a continuous sequence of depth images, or LIDAR scans). However, those 3D-videos are processed frame-by-frame either through 2D convnets or 3D perception algorithms. In this work, we propose 4-dimensional convolutional neural networks for spatio-temporal perception that can directly process such 3D-videos using high-dimensional convolutions. For this, we adopt sparse tensors and propose the generalized sparse convolution that encompasses all discrete convolutions. To implement the generalized sparse convolution, we create an open-source auto-differentiation library for sparse tensors that provides extensive functions for high-dimensional convolutional neural networks. We create 4D spatio-temporal convolutional neural networks using the library and validate them on various 3D semantic segmentation benchmarks and proposed 4D datasets for 3D-video perception. To overcome challenges in the 4D space, we propose the hybrid kernel, a special case of the generalized sparse convolution, and the trilateral-stationary conditional random field that enforces spatio-temporal consistency in the 7D space-time-chroma space. Experimentally, we show that convolutional neural networks with only generalized 3D sparse convolutions can outperform 2D or 2D-3D hybrid methods by a large margin. Also, we show that on 3D-videos, 4D spatio-temporal convolutional neural networks are robust to noise, outperform 3D convolutional neural networks and are faster than the 3D counterpart in some cases.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 12, 2019

Geometry-Aware Sparse Depth Sampling for High-Fidelity RGB-D Depth Completion in Robotic Systems

Accurate three-dimensional perception is essential for modern industrial robotic systems that perform manipulation, inspection, and navigation tasks. RGB-D and stereo vision sensors are widely used for this purpose, but the depth maps they produce are often noisy, incomplete, or biased due to sensor limitations and environmental conditions. Depth completion methods aim to generate dense, reliable depth maps from RGB images and sparse depth input. However, a key limitation in current depth completion pipelines is the unrealistic generation of sparse depth: sparse pixels are typically selected uniformly at random from dense ground-truth depth, ignoring the fact that real sensors exhibit geometry-dependent and spatially nonuniform reliability. In this work, we propose a normal-guided sparse depth sampling strategy that leverages PCA-based surface normal estimation on the RGB-D point cloud to compute a per-pixel depth reliability measure. The sparse depth samples are then drawn according to this reliability distribution. We integrate this sampling method with the Marigold-DC diffusion-based depth completion model and evaluate it on NYU Depth v2 using the standard metrics. Experiments show that our geometry-aware sparse depth improves accuracy, reduces artifacts near edges and discontinuities, and produces more realistic training conditions that better reflect real sensor behavior.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 8, 2025

FastDepth: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation on Embedded Systems

Depth sensing is a critical function for robotic tasks such as localization, mapping and obstacle detection. There has been a significant and growing interest in depth estimation from a single RGB image, due to the relatively low cost and size of monocular cameras. However, state-of-the-art single-view depth estimation algorithms are based on fairly complex deep neural networks that are too slow for real-time inference on an embedded platform, for instance, mounted on a micro aerial vehicle. In this paper, we address the problem of fast depth estimation on embedded systems. We propose an efficient and lightweight encoder-decoder network architecture and apply network pruning to further reduce computational complexity and latency. In particular, we focus on the design of a low-latency decoder. Our methodology demonstrates that it is possible to achieve similar accuracy as prior work on depth estimation, but at inference speeds that are an order of magnitude faster. Our proposed network, FastDepth, runs at 178 fps on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 GPU and at 27 fps when using only the TX2 CPU, with active power consumption under 10 W. FastDepth achieves close to state-of-the-art accuracy on the NYU Depth v2 dataset. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper demonstrates real-time monocular depth estimation using a deep neural network with the lowest latency and highest throughput on an embedded platform that can be carried by a micro aerial vehicle.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 7, 2019

LidarScout: Direct Out-of-Core Rendering of Massive Point Clouds

Large-scale terrain scans are the basis for many important tasks, such as topographic mapping, forestry, agriculture, and infrastructure planning. The resulting point cloud data sets are so massive in size that even basic tasks like viewing take hours to days of pre-processing in order to create level-of-detail structures that allow inspecting the data set in their entirety in real time. In this paper, we propose a method that is capable of instantly visualizing massive country-sized scans with hundreds of billions of points. Upon opening the data set, we first load a sparse subsample of points and initialize an overview of the entire point cloud, immediately followed by a surface reconstruction process to generate higher-quality, hole-free heightmaps. As users start navigating towards a region of interest, we continue to prioritize the heightmap construction process to the user's viewpoint. Once a user zooms in closely, we load the full-resolution point cloud data for that region and update the corresponding height map textures with the full-resolution data. As users navigate elsewhere, full-resolution point data that is no longer needed is unloaded, but the updated heightmap textures are retained as a form of medium level of detail. Overall, our method constitutes a form of direct out-of-core rendering for massive point cloud data sets (terabytes, compressed) that requires no preprocessing and no additional disk space. Source code, executable, pre-trained model, and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cg-tuwien/lidarscout

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 24, 2025

MonoDETR: Depth-guided Transformer for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection has long been a challenging task in autonomous driving. Most existing methods follow conventional 2D detectors to first localize object centers, and then predict 3D attributes by neighboring features. However, only using local visual features is insufficient to understand the scene-level 3D spatial structures and ignores the long-range inter-object depth relations. In this paper, we introduce the first DETR framework for Monocular DEtection with a depth-guided TRansformer, named MonoDETR. We modify the vanilla transformer to be depth-aware and guide the whole detection process by contextual depth cues. Specifically, concurrent to the visual encoder that captures object appearances, we introduce to predict a foreground depth map, and specialize a depth encoder to extract non-local depth embeddings. Then, we formulate 3D object candidates as learnable queries and propose a depth-guided decoder to conduct object-scene depth interactions. In this way, each object query estimates its 3D attributes adaptively from the depth-guided regions on the image and is no longer constrained to local visual features. On KITTI benchmark with monocular images as input, MonoDETR achieves state-of-the-art performance and requires no extra dense depth annotations. Besides, our depth-guided modules can also be plug-and-play to enhance multi-view 3D object detectors on nuScenes dataset, demonstrating our superior generalization capacity. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/MonoDETR.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 24, 2022

Radar Meets Vision: Robustifying Monocular Metric Depth Prediction for Mobile Robotics

Mobile robots require accurate and robust depth measurements to understand and interact with the environment. While existing sensing modalities address this problem to some extent, recent research on monocular depth estimation has leveraged the information richness, yet low cost and simplicity of monocular cameras. These works have shown significant generalization capabilities, mainly in automotive and indoor settings. However, robots often operate in environments with limited scale cues, self-similar appearances, and low texture. In this work, we encode measurements from a low-cost mmWave radar into the input space of a state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation model. Despite the radar's extreme point cloud sparsity, our method demonstrates generalization and robustness across industrial and outdoor experiments. Our approach reduces the absolute relative error of depth predictions by 9-64% across a range of unseen, real-world validation datasets. Importantly, we maintain consistency of all performance metrics across all experiments and scene depths where current vision-only approaches fail. We further address the present deficit of training data in mobile robotics environments by introducing a novel methodology for synthesizing rendered, realistic learning datasets based on photogrammetric data that simulate the radar sensor observations for training. Our code, datasets, and pre-trained networks are made available at https://github.com/ethz-asl/radarmeetsvision.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024

Generalized Binary Search Network for Highly-Efficient Multi-View Stereo

Multi-view Stereo (MVS) with known camera parameters is essentially a 1D search problem within a valid depth range. Recent deep learning-based MVS methods typically densely sample depth hypotheses in the depth range, and then construct prohibitively memory-consuming 3D cost volumes for depth prediction. Although coarse-to-fine sampling strategies alleviate this overhead issue to a certain extent, the efficiency of MVS is still an open challenge. In this work, we propose a novel method for highly efficient MVS that remarkably decreases the memory footprint, meanwhile clearly advancing state-of-the-art depth prediction performance. We investigate what a search strategy can be reasonably optimal for MVS taking into account of both efficiency and effectiveness. We first formulate MVS as a binary search problem, and accordingly propose a generalized binary search network for MVS. Specifically, in each step, the depth range is split into 2 bins with extra 1 error tolerance bin on both sides. A classification is performed to identify which bin contains the true depth. We also design three mechanisms to respectively handle classification errors, deal with out-of-range samples and decrease the training memory. The new formulation makes our method only sample a very small number of depth hypotheses in each step, which is highly memory efficient, and also greatly facilitates quick training convergence. Experiments on competitive benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with much less memory. Particularly, our method obtains an overall score of 0.289 on DTU dataset and tops the first place on challenging Tanks and Temples advanced dataset among all the learning-based methods. The trained models and code will be released at https://github.com/MiZhenxing/GBi-Net.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 4, 2021

Reconstructing 4D Spatial Intelligence: A Survey

Reconstructing 4D spatial intelligence from visual observations has long been a central yet challenging task in computer vision, with broad real-world applications. These range from entertainment domains like movies, where the focus is often on reconstructing fundamental visual elements, to embodied AI, which emphasizes interaction modeling and physical realism. Fueled by rapid advances in 3D representations and deep learning architectures, the field has evolved quickly, outpacing the scope of previous surveys. Additionally, existing surveys rarely offer a comprehensive analysis of the hierarchical structure of 4D scene reconstruction. To address this gap, we present a new perspective that organizes existing methods into five progressive levels of 4D spatial intelligence: (1) Level 1 -- reconstruction of low-level 3D attributes (e.g., depth, pose, and point maps); (2) Level 2 -- reconstruction of 3D scene components (e.g., objects, humans, structures); (3) Level 3 -- reconstruction of 4D dynamic scenes; (4) Level 4 -- modeling of interactions among scene components; and (5) Level 5 -- incorporation of physical laws and constraints. We conclude the survey by discussing the key challenges at each level and highlighting promising directions for advancing toward even richer levels of 4D spatial intelligence. To track ongoing developments, we maintain an up-to-date project page: https://github.com/yukangcao/Awesome-4D-Spatial-Intelligence.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025 2

DEPTHOR: Depth Enhancement from a Practical Light-Weight dToF Sensor and RGB Image

Depth enhancement, which uses RGB images as guidance to convert raw signals from dToF into high-precision, dense depth maps, is a critical task in computer vision. Although existing super-resolution-based methods show promising results on public datasets, they often rely on idealized assumptions like accurate region correspondences and reliable dToF inputs, overlooking calibration errors that cause misalignment and anomaly signals inherent to dToF imaging, limiting real-world applicability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel completion-based method, named DEPTHOR, featuring advances in both the training strategy and model architecture. First, we propose a method to simulate real-world dToF data from the accurate ground truth in synthetic datasets to enable noise-robust training. Second, we design a novel network that incorporates monocular depth estimation (MDE), leveraging global depth relationships and contextual information to improve prediction in challenging regions. On the ZJU-L5 dataset, our training strategy significantly enhances depth completion models, achieving results comparable to depth super-resolution methods, while our model achieves state-of-the-art results, improving Rel and RMSE by 27% and 18%, respectively. On a more challenging set of dToF samples we collected, our method outperforms SOTA methods on preliminary stereo-based GT, improving Rel and RMSE by 23% and 22%, respectively. Our Code is available at https://github.com/ShadowBbBb/Depthor

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 2, 2025

Flying Triangulation - towards the 3D movie camera

Flying Triangulation sensors enable a free-hand and motion-robust 3D data acquisition of complex shaped objects. The measurement principle is based on a multi-line light-sectioning approach and uses sophisticated algorithms for real-time registration (S. Ettl et al., Appl. Opt. 51 (2012) 281-289). As "single-shot principle", light sectioning enables the option to get surface data from one single camera exposure. But there is a drawback: A pixel-dense measurement is not possible because of fundamental information-theoretical reasons. By "pixel-dense" we understand that each pixel displays individually measured distance information, neither interpolated from its neighbour pixels nor using lateral context information. Hence, for monomodal single-shot principles, the 3D data generated from one 2D raw image display a significantly lower space-bandwidth than the camera permits. This is the price one must pay for motion robustness. Currently, our sensors project about 10 lines (each with 1000 pixels), reaching an considerable lower data efficiency than theoretically possible for a single-shot sensor. Our aim is to push Flying Triangulation to its information-theoretical limits. Therefore, the line density as well as the measurement depth needs to be significantly increased. This causes serious indexing ambiguities. On the road to a single-shot 3D movie camera, we are working on solutions to overcome the problem of false line indexing by utilizing yet unexploited information. We will present several approaches and will discuss profound information-theoretical questions about the information efficiency of 3D sensors.

  • 4 authors
·
May 17, 2013

Calibrating Panoramic Depth Estimation for Practical Localization and Mapping

The absolute depth values of surrounding environments provide crucial cues for various assistive technologies, such as localization, navigation, and 3D structure estimation. We propose that accurate depth estimated from panoramic images can serve as a powerful and light-weight input for a wide range of downstream tasks requiring 3D information. While panoramic images can easily capture the surrounding context from commodity devices, the estimated depth shares the limitations of conventional image-based depth estimation; the performance deteriorates under large domain shifts and the absolute values are still ambiguous to infer from 2D observations. By taking advantage of the holistic view, we mitigate such effects in a self-supervised way and fine-tune the network with geometric consistency during the test phase. Specifically, we construct a 3D point cloud from the current depth prediction and project the point cloud at various viewpoints or apply stretches on the current input image to generate synthetic panoramas. Then we minimize the discrepancy of the 3D structure estimated from synthetic images without collecting additional data. We empirically evaluate our method in robot navigation and map-free localization where our method shows large performance enhancements. Our calibration method can therefore widen the applicability under various external conditions, serving as a key component for practical panorama-based machine vision systems.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 27, 2023

A Tutorial on MRI Reconstruction: From Modern Methods to Clinical Implications

MRI is an indispensable clinical tool, offering a rich variety of tissue contrasts to support broad diagnostic and research applications. Clinical exams routinely acquire multiple structural sequences that provide complementary information for differential diagnosis, while research protocols often incorporate advanced functional, diffusion, spectroscopic, and relaxometry sequences to capture multidimensional insights into tissue structure and composition. However, these capabilities come at the cost of prolonged scan times, which reduce patient throughput, increase susceptibility to motion artifacts, and may require trade-offs in image quality or diagnostic scope. Over the last two decades, advances in image reconstruction algorithms--alongside improvements in hardware and pulse sequence design--have made it possible to accelerate acquisitions while preserving diagnostic quality. Central to this progress is the ability to incorporate prior information to regularize the solutions to the reconstruction problem. In this tutorial, we overview the basics of MRI reconstruction and highlight state-of-the-art approaches, beginning with classical methods that rely on explicit hand-crafted priors, and then turning to deep learning methods that leverage a combination of learned and crafted priors to further push the performance envelope. We also explore the translational aspects and eventual clinical implications of these methods. We conclude by discussing future directions to address remaining challenges in MRI reconstruction. The tutorial is accompanied by a Python toolbox (https://github.com/tutorial-MRI-recon/tutorial) to demonstrate select methods discussed in the article.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025

SERV-CT: A disparity dataset from CT for validation of endoscopic 3D reconstruction

In computer vision, reference datasets have been highly successful in promoting algorithmic development in stereo reconstruction. Surgical scenes gives rise to specific problems, including the lack of clear corner features, highly specular surfaces and the presence of blood and smoke. Publicly available datasets have been produced using CT and either phantom images or biological tissue samples covering a relatively small region of the endoscope field-of-view. We present a stereo-endoscopic reconstruction validation dataset based on CT (SERV-CT). Two {\it ex vivo} small porcine full torso cadavers were placed within the view of the endoscope with both the endoscope and target anatomy visible in the CT scan. Orientation of the endoscope was manually aligned to the stereoscopic view. Reference disparities and occlusions were calculated for 8 stereo pairs from each sample. For the second sample an RGB surface was acquired to aid alignment of smooth, featureless surfaces. Repeated manual alignments showed an RMS disparity accuracy of ~2 pixels and a depth accuracy of ~2mm. The reference dataset includes endoscope image pairs with corresponding calibration, disparities, depths and occlusions covering the majority of the endoscopic image and a range of tissue types. Smooth specular surfaces and images with significant variation of depth are included. We assessed the performance of various stereo algorithms from online available repositories. There is a significant variation between algorithms, highlighting some of the challenges of surgical endoscopic images. The SERV-CT dataset provides an easy to use stereoscopic validation for surgical applications with smooth reference disparities and depths with coverage over the majority of the endoscopic images. This complements existing resources well and we hope will aid the development of surgical endoscopic anatomical reconstruction algorithms.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 21, 2020

Depth as Prior Knowledge for Object Detection

Detecting small and distant objects remains challenging for object detectors due to scale variation, low resolution, and background clutter. Safety-critical applications require reliable detection of these objects for safe planning. Depth information can improve detection, but existing approaches require complex, model-specific architectural modifications. We provide a theoretical analysis followed by an empirical investigation of the depth-detection relationship. Together, they explain how depth causes systematic performance degradation and why depth-informed supervision mitigates it. We introduce DepthPrior, a framework that uses depth as prior knowledge rather than as a fused feature, providing comparable benefits without modifying detector architectures. DepthPrior consists of Depth-Based Loss Weighting (DLW) and Depth-Based Loss Stratification (DLS) during training, and Depth-Aware Confidence Thresholding (DCT) during inference. The only overhead is the initial cost of depth estimation. Experiments across four benchmarks (KITTI, MS COCO, VisDrone, SUN RGB-D) and two detectors (YOLOv11, EfficientDet) demonstrate the effectiveness of DepthPrior, achieving up to +9% mAP_S and +7% mAR_S for small objects, with inference recovery rates as high as 95:1 (true vs. false detections). DepthPrior offers these benefits without additional sensors, architectural changes, or performance costs. Code is available at https://github.com/mos-ks/DepthPrior.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 5

Test-Time Adaptation for Height Completion via Self-Supervised ViT Features and Monocular Foundation Models

Accurate digital surface models (DSMs) are essential for many geospatial applications, including urban monitoring, environmental analyses, infrastructure management, and change detection. However, large-scale DSMs frequently contain incomplete or outdated regions due to acquisition limitations, reconstruction artifacts, or changes in the built environment. Traditional height completion approaches primarily rely on spatial interpolation or which assume spatial continuity and therefore fail when objects are missing. Recent learning-based approaches improve reconstruction quality but typically require supervised training on sensor-specific datasets, limiting their generalization across domains and sensing conditions. We propose Prior2DSM, a training-free framework for metric DSM completion that operates entirely at test time by leveraging foundation models. Unlike previous height completion approaches that require task-specific training, the proposed method combines self-supervised Vision Transformer (ViT) features from DINOv3 with monocular depth foundation models to propagate metric information from incomplete height priors through semantic feature-space correspondence. Test-time adaptation (TTA) is performed using parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA) together with a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP), which predicts spatially varying scale and shift parameters to convert relative depth estimates into metric heights. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over interpolation based methods, prior-based rescaling height approaches, and state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models. Prior2DSM reduces reconstruction error while preserving structural fidelity, achieving up to a 46% reduction in RMSE compared to linear fitting of MDE, and further enables DSM updating and coupled RGB-DSM generation.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 1

Manipulation as in Simulation: Enabling Accurate Geometry Perception in Robots

Modern robotic manipulation primarily relies on visual observations in a 2D color space for skill learning but suffers from poor generalization. In contrast, humans, living in a 3D world, depend more on physical properties-such as distance, size, and shape-than on texture when interacting with objects. Since such 3D geometric information can be acquired from widely available depth cameras, it appears feasible to endow robots with similar perceptual capabilities. Our pilot study found that using depth cameras for manipulation is challenging, primarily due to their limited accuracy and susceptibility to various types of noise. In this work, we propose Camera Depth Models (CDMs) as a simple plugin on daily-use depth cameras, which take RGB images and raw depth signals as input and output denoised, accurate metric depth. To achieve this, we develop a neural data engine that generates high-quality paired data from simulation by modeling a depth camera's noise pattern. Our results show that CDMs achieve nearly simulation-level accuracy in depth prediction, effectively bridging the sim-to-real gap for manipulation tasks. Notably, our experiments demonstrate, for the first time, that a policy trained on raw simulated depth, without the need for adding noise or real-world fine-tuning, generalizes seamlessly to real-world robots on two challenging long-horizon tasks involving articulated, reflective, and slender objects, with little to no performance degradation. We hope our findings will inspire future research in utilizing simulation data and 3D information in general robot policies.

ByteDance-Seed ByteDance Seed
·
Sep 2, 2025 2

DepthMaster: Taming Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation

Monocular depth estimation within the diffusion-denoising paradigm demonstrates impressive generalization ability but suffers from low inference speed. Recent methods adopt a single-step deterministic paradigm to improve inference efficiency while maintaining comparable performance. However, they overlook the gap between generative and discriminative features, leading to suboptimal results. In this work, we propose DepthMaster, a single-step diffusion model designed to adapt generative features for the discriminative depth estimation task. First, to mitigate overfitting to texture details introduced by generative features, we propose a Feature Alignment module, which incorporates high-quality semantic features to enhance the denoising network's representation capability. Second, to address the lack of fine-grained details in the single-step deterministic framework, we propose a Fourier Enhancement module to adaptively balance low-frequency structure and high-frequency details. We adopt a two-stage training strategy to fully leverage the potential of the two modules. In the first stage, we focus on learning the global scene structure with the Feature Alignment module, while in the second stage, we exploit the Fourier Enhancement module to improve the visual quality. Through these efforts, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of generalization and detail preservation, outperforming other diffusion-based methods across various datasets. Our project page can be found at https://indu1ge.github.io/DepthMaster_page.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 5, 2025 4

SegNet4D: Efficient Instance-Aware 4D Semantic Segmentation for LiDAR Point Cloud

4D LiDAR semantic segmentation, also referred to as multi-scan semantic segmentation, plays a crucial role in enhancing the environmental understanding capabilities of autonomous vehicles or robots. It classifies the semantic category of each LiDAR measurement point and detects whether it is dynamic, a critical ability for tasks like obstacle avoidance and autonomous navigation. Existing approaches often rely on computationally heavy 4D convolutions or recursive networks, which result in poor real-time performance, making them unsuitable for online robotics and autonomous driving applications. In this paper, we introduce SegNet4D, a novel real-time 4D semantic segmentation network offering both efficiency and strong semantic understanding. SegNet4D addresses 4D segmentation as two tasks: single-scan semantic segmentation and moving object segmentation, each tackled by a separate network head. Both results are combined in a motion-semantic fusion module to achieve comprehensive 4D segmentation. Additionally, instance information is extracted from the current scan and exploited for instance-wise segmentation consistency. Our approach surpasses state-of-the-art in both multi-scan semantic segmentation and moving object segmentation while offering greater efficiency, enabling real-time operation. Besides, its effectiveness and efficiency have also been validated on a real-world unmanned ground platform. Our code will be released at https://github.com/nubot-nudt/SegNet4D.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 23, 2024

Pose-independent 3D Anthropometry from Sparse Data

3D digital anthropometry is the study of estimating human body measurements from 3D scans. Precise body measurements are important health indicators in the medical industry, and guiding factors in the fashion, ergonomic and entertainment industries. The measuring protocol consists of scanning the whole subject in the static A-pose, which is maintained without breathing or movement during the scanning process. However, the A-pose is not easy to maintain during the whole scanning process, which can last even up to a couple of minutes. This constraint affects the final quality of the scan, which in turn affects the accuracy of the estimated body measurements obtained from methods that rely on dense geometric data. Additionally, this constraint makes it impossible to develop a digital anthropometry method for subjects unable to assume the A-pose, such as those with injuries or disabilities. We propose a method that can obtain body measurements from sparse landmarks acquired in any pose. We make use of the sparse landmarks of the posed subject to create pose-independent features, and train a network to predict the body measurements as taken from the standard A-pose. We show that our method achieves comparable results to competing methods that use dense geometry in the standard A-pose, but has the capability of estimating the body measurements from any pose using sparse landmarks only. Finally, we address the lack of open-source 3D anthropometry methods by making our method available to the research community at https://github.com/DavidBoja/pose-independent-anthropometry.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 9, 2025

SingRef6D: Monocular Novel Object Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Reference

Recent 6D pose estimation methods demonstrate notable performance but still face some practical limitations. For instance, many of them rely heavily on sensor depth, which may fail with challenging surface conditions, such as transparent or highly reflective materials. In the meantime, RGB-based solutions provide less robust matching performance in low-light and texture-less scenes due to the lack of geometry information. Motivated by these, we propose SingRef6D, a lightweight pipeline requiring only a single RGB image as a reference, eliminating the need for costly depth sensors, multi-view image acquisition, or training view synthesis models and neural fields. This enables SingRef6D to remain robust and capable even under resource-limited settings where depth or dense templates are unavailable. Our framework incorporates two key innovations. First, we propose a token-scaler-based fine-tuning mechanism with a novel optimization loss on top of Depth-Anything v2 to enhance its ability to predict accurate depth, even for challenging surfaces. Our results show a 14.41% improvement (in δ_{1.05}) on REAL275 depth prediction compared to Depth-Anything v2 (with fine-tuned head). Second, benefiting from depth availability, we introduce a depth-aware matching process that effectively integrates spatial relationships within LoFTR, enabling our system to handle matching for challenging materials and lighting conditions. Evaluations of pose estimation on the REAL275, ClearPose, and Toyota-Light datasets show that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 6.1% improvement in average recall.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

Any to Full: Prompting Depth Anything for Depth Completion in One Stage

Accurate, dense depth estimation is crucial for robotic perception, but commodity sensors often yield sparse or incomplete measurements due to hardware limitations. Existing RGBD-fused depth completion methods learn priors jointly conditioned on training RGB distribution and specific depth patterns, limiting domain generalization and robustness to various depth patterns. Recent efforts leverage monocular depth estimation (MDE) models to introduce domain-general geometric priors, but current two-stage integration strategies relying on explicit relative-to-metric alignment incur additional computation and introduce structured distortions. To this end, we present Any2Full, a one-stage, domain-general, and pattern-agnostic framework that reformulates completion as a scale-prompting adaptation of a pretrained MDE model. To address varying depth sparsity levels and irregular spatial distributions, we design a Scale-Aware Prompt Encoder. It distills scale cues from sparse inputs into unified scale prompts, guiding the MDE model toward globally scale-consistent predictions while preserving its geometric priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Any2Full achieves superior robustness and efficiency. It outperforms OMNI-DC by 32.2\% in average AbsREL and delivers a 1.4times speedup over PriorDA with the same MDE backbone, establishing a new paradigm for universal depth completion. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/zhiyuandaily/Any2Full.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 5 2

MHS-VM: Multi-Head Scanning in Parallel Subspaces for Vision Mamba

Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), with Mamba as a prime example, have shown great promise for long-range dependency modeling with linear complexity. Then, Vision Mamba and the subsequent architectures are presented successively, and they perform well on visual tasks. The crucial step of applying Mamba to visual tasks is to construct 2D visual features in sequential manners. To effectively organize and construct visual features within the 2D image space through 1D selective scan, we propose a novel Multi-Head Scan (MHS) module. The embeddings extracted from the preceding layer are projected into multiple lower-dimensional subspaces. Subsequently, within each subspace, the selective scan is performed along distinct scan routes. The resulting sub-embeddings, obtained from the multi-head scan process, are then integrated and ultimately projected back into the high-dimensional space. Moreover, we incorporate a Scan Route Attention (SRA) mechanism to enhance the module's capability to discern complex structures. To validate the efficacy of our module, we exclusively substitute the 2D-Selective-Scan (SS2D) block in VM-UNet with our proposed module, and we train our models from scratch without using any pre-trained weights. The results indicate a significant improvement in performance while reducing the parameters of the original VM-UNet. The code for this study is publicly available at https://github.com/PixDeep/MHS-VM.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 9, 2024

MM-LINS: a Multi-Map LiDAR-Inertial System for Over-Degenerate Environments

SLAM plays a crucial role in automation tasks, such as warehouse logistics, healthcare robotics, and restaurant delivery. These scenes come with various challenges, including navigating around crowds of people, dealing with flying plastic bags that can temporarily blind sensors, and addressing reduced LiDAR density caused by cooking smoke. Such scenarios can result in over-degeneracy, causing the map to drift. To address this issue, this paper presents a multi-map LiDAR-inertial system (MM-LINS) for the first time. The front-end employs an iterated error state Kalman filter for state estimation and introduces a reliable evaluation strategy for degeneracy detection. If over-degeneracy is detected, the active map will be stored into sleeping maps. Subsequently, the system continuously attempts to construct new maps using a dynamic initialization method to ensure successful initialization upon leaving the over-degeneracy. Regarding the back-end, the Scan Context descriptor is utilized to detect inter-map similarity. Upon successful recognition of a sleeping map that shares a common region with the active map, the overlapping trajectory region is utilized to constrain the positional transformation near the edge of the prior map. In response to this, a constraint-enhanced map fusion strategy is proposed to achieve high-precision positional and mapping results. Experiments have been conducted separately on both public datasets that exhibited over-degenerate conditions and in real-world environments. These tests demonstrated the effectiveness of MM-LINS in over-degeneracy environment. Our codes are open-sourced on Github.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 25, 2025

SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) significantly degrades when only a limited number of views are available. To complement the lack of 3D information, depth-based models, such as DSNeRF and MonoSDF, explicitly assume the availability of accurate depth maps of multiple views. They linearly scale the accurate depth maps as supervision to guide the predicted depth of few-shot NeRFs. However, accurate depth maps are difficult and expensive to capture due to wide-range depth distances in the wild. In this work, we present a new Sparse-view NeRF (SparseNeRF) framework that exploits depth priors from real-world inaccurate observations. The inaccurate depth observations are either from pre-trained depth models or coarse depth maps of consumer-level depth sensors. Since coarse depth maps are not strictly scaled to the ground-truth depth maps, we propose a simple yet effective constraint, a local depth ranking method, on NeRFs such that the expected depth ranking of the NeRF is consistent with that of the coarse depth maps in local patches. To preserve the spatial continuity of the estimated depth of NeRF, we further propose a spatial continuity constraint to encourage the consistency of the expected depth continuity of NeRF with coarse depth maps. Surprisingly, with simple depth ranking constraints, SparseNeRF outperforms all state-of-the-art few-shot NeRF methods (including depth-based models) on standard LLFF and DTU datasets. Moreover, we collect a new dataset NVS-RGBD that contains real-world depth maps from Azure Kinect, ZED 2, and iPhone 13 Pro. Extensive experiments on NVS-RGBD dataset also validate the superiority and generalizability of SparseNeRF. Code and dataset are available at https://sparsenerf.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 28, 2023

MonoDGP: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Decoupled-Query and Geometry-Error Priors

Perspective projection has been extensively utilized in monocular 3D object detection methods. It introduces geometric priors from 2D bounding boxes and 3D object dimensions to reduce the uncertainty of depth estimation. However, due to depth errors originating from the object's visual surface, the height of the bounding box often fails to represent the actual projected central height, which undermines the effectiveness of geometric depth. Direct prediction for the projected height unavoidably results in a loss of 2D priors, while multi-depth prediction with complex branches does not fully leverage geometric depth. This paper presents a Transformer-based monocular 3D object detection method called MonoDGP, which adopts perspective-invariant geometry errors to modify the projection formula. We also try to systematically discuss and explain the mechanisms and efficacy behind geometry errors, which serve as a simple but effective alternative to multi-depth prediction. Additionally, MonoDGP decouples the depth-guided decoder and constructs a 2D decoder only dependent on visual features, providing 2D priors and initializing object queries without the disturbance of 3D detection. To further optimize and fine-tune input tokens of the transformer decoder, we also introduce a Region Segment Head (RSH) that generates enhanced features and segment embeddings. Our monocular method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark without extra data. Code is available at https://github.com/PuFanqi23/MonoDGP.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 25, 2024

DermDepth: Toward Monocular Metric Scale 3D Reconstruction Models for Dermatology

Dermatological practice routinely involves measuring and tracking lesion size, morphology and texture, as critical components of wound or skin cancer screening, monitoring and diagnosis. To accomplish this task, practitioners often image the skin surface with commonly available off-the-shelf camera sensors. This has led to an overwhelming research focus on 2D methods while these objectives naturally benefit from 3D information. In this paper, we demonstrate that dense monocular 3D reconstructions, metric scale measurements and rich surface normal texture estimates are achievable for both dermoscopic and macroscopic cases without the need for additional hardware or multiple captures. We present DermDepth, the first single-view metric scale 3D model for the dermatological domain and D-Synth, the first synthetic dermoscopic dataset with pixel-perfect 3D information. Our experiments show training DermDepth on D-Synth corrects metric scale error from over 16x to under 1.1x for real dermoscopic data, while preserving geometric quality and increasing texture richness. Fine-tuning on a small amount of real clinical samples generalizes our method across three real-world benchmarks spanning the few mm to hundred cm range, diverse skin-tones, chronic wound cases and produces measurements broadly consistent with disease size reported in medical literature. All code, data and models are available at https://github.com/hectorcarrion/dermdepth.

  • 2 authors
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Jul 13

Are We Hungry for 3D LiDAR Data for Semantic Segmentation? A Survey and Experimental Study

3D semantic segmentation is a fundamental task for robotic and autonomous driving applications. Recent works have been focused on using deep learning techniques, whereas developing fine-annotated 3D LiDAR datasets is extremely labor intensive and requires professional skills. The performance limitation caused by insufficient datasets is called data hunger problem. This research provides a comprehensive survey and experimental study on the question: are we hungry for 3D LiDAR data for semantic segmentation? The studies are conducted at three levels. First, a broad review to the main 3D LiDAR datasets is conducted, followed by a statistical analysis on three representative datasets to gain an in-depth view on the datasets' size and diversity, which are the critical factors in learning deep models. Second, a systematic review to the state-of-the-art 3D semantic segmentation is conducted, followed by experiments and cross examinations of three representative deep learning methods to find out how the size and diversity of the datasets affect deep models' performance. Finally, a systematic survey to the existing efforts to solve the data hunger problem is conducted on both methodological and dataset's viewpoints, followed by an insightful discussion of remaining problems and open questions To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to analyze the data hunger problem for 3D semantic segmentation using deep learning techniques that are addressed in the literature review, statistical analysis, and cross-dataset and cross-algorithm experiments. We share findings and discussions, which may lead to potential topics in future works.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 7, 2020

Patch-Depth Fusion: Dichotomous Image Segmentation via Fine-Grained Patch Strategy and Depth Integrity-Prior

Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) is a high-precision object segmentation task for high-resolution natural images. The current mainstream methods focus on the optimization of local details but overlook the fundamental challenge of modeling the integrity of objects. We have found that the depth integrity-prior implicit in the the pseudo-depth maps generated by Depth Anything Model v2 and the local detail features of image patches can jointly address the above dilemmas. Based on the above findings, we have designed a novel Patch-Depth Fusion Network (PDFNet) for high-precision dichotomous image segmentation. The core of PDFNet consists of three aspects. Firstly, the object perception is enhanced through multi-modal input fusion. By utilizing the patch fine-grained strategy, coupled with patch selection and enhancement, the sensitivity to details is improved. Secondly, by leveraging the depth integrity-prior distributed in the depth maps, we propose an integrity-prior loss to enhance the uniformity of the segmentation results in the depth maps. Finally, we utilize the features of the shared encoder and, through a simple depth refinement decoder, improve the ability of the shared encoder to capture subtle depth-related information in the images. Experiments on the DIS-5K dataset show that PDFNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art non-diffusion methods. Due to the incorporation of the depth integrity-prior, PDFNet achieves or even surpassing the performance of the latest diffusion-based methods while using less than 11% of the parameters of diffusion-based methods. The source code at https://github.com/Tennine2077/PDFNet.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 8, 2025

You Only Scan Once: Efficient Multi-dimension Sequential Modeling with LightNet

Linear attention mechanisms have gained prominence in causal language models due to their linear computational complexity and enhanced speed. However, the inherent decay mechanism in linear attention presents challenges when applied to multi-dimensional sequence modeling tasks, such as image processing and multi-modal learning. In these scenarios, the utilization of sequential scanning to establish a global receptive field necessitates multiple scans for multi-dimensional data, thereby leading to inefficiencies. This paper identifies the inefficiency caused by a multiplicative linear recurrence and proposes an efficient alternative additive linear recurrence to avoid the issue, as it can handle multi-dimensional data within a single scan. We further develop an efficient multi-dimensional sequential modeling framework called LightNet based on the new recurrence. Moreover, we present two new multi-dimensional linear relative positional encoding methods, MD-TPE and MD-LRPE to enhance the model's ability to discern positional information in multi-dimensional scenarios. Our empirical evaluations across various tasks, including image classification, image generation, bidirectional language modeling, and autoregressive language modeling, demonstrate the efficacy of LightNet, showcasing its potential as a versatile and efficient solution for multi-dimensional sequential modeling.

  • 7 authors
·
May 31, 2024