Semantic keypoints provide concise abstractions for a variety of visual understanding tasks. Existing methods define semantic keypoints separately for each category with a fixed number of semantic labels in fixed indices. As a result, this keypoint representation is in-feasible when objects have a varying number of parts, e.g. chairs with varying number of legs. We propose a category-agnostic keypoint representation, which combines a multi-peak heatmap (StarMap) for all the keypoints and their corresponding features as 3D locations in the canonical viewpoint (CanViewFeature) defined for each instance. Our intuition is that the 3D locations of the keypoints in canonical object views contain rich semantic and compositional information. Using our flexible representation, we demonstrate competitive performance in keypoint detection and localization compared to category-specific state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we show that when augmented with an additional depth channel (DepthMap) to lift the 2D keypoints to 3D, our representation can achieve state-of-the-art results in viewpoint estimation. Finally, we show that our category-agnostic keypoint representation can be generalized to novel categories.
The estimation of viewpoints and keypoints effectively enhance object detection methods by extracting valuable traits of the object instances. While the output of both processes differ, i.e., angles vs. list of characteristic points, they indeed share the same focus on how the object is placed in the scene, inducing that there is a certain level of correlation between them. Therefore, we propose a convolutional neural network that jointly computes the viewpoint and keypoints for different object categories. By training both tasks together, each task improves the accuracy of the other. Since th…
We characterize the problem of pose estimation for rigid objects in terms of determining viewpoint to explain coarse pose and keypoint prediction to capture the finer details. We address both these tasks in two different settings - the constrained setting with known bounding boxes and the more challenging detection setting where the aim is to simultaneously detect and correctly estimate pose of objects. We present Convolutional Neural Network based architectures for these and demonstrate that leveraging viewpoint estimates can substantially improve local appearance based keypoint predictions. …
In this paper, we propose a method for keypoint discovery from a 2D image using image-level supervision. Recent works on unsupervised keypoint discovery reliably discover keypoints of aligned instances. However, when the target instances have high viewpoint or appearance variation, the discovered keypoints do not match the semantic correspondences over different images. Our work aims to discover keypoints even when the target instances have high viewpoint and appearance variation by using image-level supervision. Motivated by the weakly-supervised learning approach, our method exploits image-l…
We motivate and address a human-in-the-loop variant of the monocular viewpoint estimation task in which the location and class of one semantic object keypoint is available at test time. In order to leverage the keypoint information, we devise a Convolutional Neural Network called Click-Here CNN (CH-CNN) that integrates the keypoint information with activations from the layers that process the image. It transforms the keypoint information into a 2D map that can be used to weigh features from certain parts of the image more heavily. The weighted sum of these spatial features is combined with glo…
State-of-the-art approaches for 6D object pose estimation require large amounts of labeled data to train the deep networks. However, the acquisition of 6D object pose annotations is tedious and labor-intensive in large quantity. To alleviate this problem, we propose a weakly supervised 6D object pose estimation approach based on 2D keypoint detection. Our method trains only on image pairs with known relative transformations between their viewpoints. Specifically, we assign a set of arbitrarily chosen 3D keypoints to represent each unknown target 3D object and learn a network to detect their 2D…
We present a learning framework that learns to recover the 3D shape, pose and texture from a single image, trained on an image collection without any ground truth 3D shape, multi-view, camera viewpoints or keypoint supervision. We approach this highly under-constrained problem in a "analysis by synthesis" framework where the goal is to predict the likely shape, texture and camera viewpoint that could produce the image with various learned category-specific priors. Our particular contribution in this paper is a representation of the distribution over cameras, which we call "camera-multiplex". I…
Motion Matters: Compact Gaussian Streaming for Free-Viewpoint Video Reconstruction
College of Applied Technology, Shenzhen University（深圳大学应用技术学院）；College of Big Data and Internet, Shenzhen Technology University（深圳科技大学大数据与互联网学院）；College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学电子与信息工程学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）；Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen（深圳鹏城实验室）；School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University（北京大学电子与计算机工程学院）
Precise homography estimation between multiple images is a pre-requisite for many computer vision applications. One application that is particularly relevant in today's digital era is the alignment of scanned or camera-captured document images such as insurance claim forms for information extraction. Traditional learning based approaches perform poorly due to the absence of an appropriate gradient. Feature based keypoint extraction techniques for homography estimation in real scene images either detect an extremely large number of inconsistent keypoints due to sharp textual edges, or produce i…
Learning deformable 3D objects from 2D images is often an ill-posed problem. Existing methods rely on explicit supervision to establish multi-view correspondences, such as template shape models and keypoint annotations, which restricts their applicability on objects "in the wild". A more natural way of establishing correspondences is by watching videos of objects moving around. In this paper, we present DOVE, a method that learns textured 3D models of deformable object categories from monocular videos available online, without keypoint, viewpoint or template shape supervision. By resolving sym…
University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；Samsung AI Center Cambridge（三星剑桥人工智能中心）；Hartpury University（哈特伯瑞大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
This paper proposes a novel paradigm for the unsupervised learning of object landmark detectors. Contrary to existing methods that build on auxiliary tasks such as image generation or equivariance, we propose a self-training approach where, departing from generic keypoints, a landmark detector and descriptor is trained to improve itself, tuning the keypoints into distinctive landmarks. To this end, we propose an iterative algorithm that alternates between producing new pseudo-labels through feature clustering and learning distinctive features for each pseudo-class through contrastive learning.…
Learnable keypoint detectors and descriptors are beginning to outperform classical hand-crafted feature extraction methods. Recent studies on self-supervised learning of visual representations have driven the increasing performance of learnable models based on deep networks. By leveraging traditional data augmentations and homography transformations, these networks learn to detect corners under adverse conditions such as extreme illumination changes. However, their generalization capabilities are limited to corner-like features detected a priori by classical methods or synthetically generated …
Understanding the geometry and pose of objects in 2D images is a fundamental necessity for a wide range of real world applications. Driven by deep neural networks, recent methods have brought significant improvements to object pose estimation. However, they suffer due to scarcity of keypoint/pose-annotated real images and hence can not exploit the object's 3D structural information effectively. In this work, we propose a data-efficient method which utilizes the geometric regularity of intraclass objects for pose estimation. First, we learn pose-invariant local descriptors of object parts from …
Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Detecting and matching robust viewpoint-invariant keypoints is critical for visual SLAM and Structure-from-Motion. State-of-the-art learning-based methods generate training samples via homography adaptation to create 2D synthetic views with known keypoint matches from a single image. This approach, however, does not generalize to non-planar 3D scenes with illumination variations commonly seen in real-world videos. In this work, we propose self-supervised learning of depth-aware keypoints directly from unlabeled videos. We jointly learn keypoint and depth estimation networks by combining appear…
University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Viewpoint estimation for known categories of objects has been improved significantly thanks to deep networks and large datasets, but generalization to unknown categories is still very challenging. With an aim towards improving performance on unknown categories, we introduce the problem of category-level few-shot viewpoint estimation. We design a novel framework to successfully train viewpoint networks for new categories with few examples (10 or less). We formulate the problem as one of learning to estimate category-specific 3D canonical shapes, their associated depth estimates, and semantic 2D…
Humans have an unparalleled visual intelligence and can overcome visual ambiguities that machines currently cannot. Recent works have shown that incorporating guidance from humans during inference for monocular viewpoint-estimation can help overcome difficult cases in which the computer-alone would have otherwise failed. These hybrid intelligence approaches are hence gaining traction. However, deciding what question to ask the human at inference time remains an unknown for these problems. We address this question by formulating it as an Adviser Problem: can we learn a mapping from the input to…
Sapienza University（罗马第一大学）；University of Udine（乌迪内大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
Estimating the 3D pose of a hand from a 2D image is a well-studied problem and a requirement for several real-life applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and hand gesture recognition. Currently, reasonable estimations can be computed from single RGB images, especially when a multi-task learning approach is used to force the system to consider the shape of the hand when its pose is determined. However, depending on the method used to represent the hand, the performance can drop considerably in real-life tasks, suggesting that stable descriptions are required to achieve satisfa…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Mila-University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学米拉研究院）；Polytechnique Montreal（蒙特利尔综合理工大学）；Element AI（元素人工智能公司）
We present an unsupervised approach for learning to estimate three dimensional (3D) facial structure from a single image while also predicting 3D viewpoint transformations that match a desired pose and facial geometry. We achieve this by inferring the depth of facial keypoints of an input image in an unsupervised manner, without using any form of ground-truth depth information. We show how it is possible to use these depths as intermediate computations within a new backpropable loss to predict the parameters of a 3D affine transformation matrix that maps inferred 3D keypoints of an input face …
Understanding and extracting 3D information of objects from monocular 2D images is a fundamental problem in computer vision. In the task of 3D object pose estimation, recent data driven deep neural network based approaches suffer from scarcity of real images with 3D keypoint and pose annotations. Drawing inspiration from human cognition, where the annotators use a 3D CAD model as structural reference to acquire ground-truth viewpoints for real images; we propose an iterative Semantic Pose Alignment Network, called iSPA-Net. Our approach focuses on exploiting semantic 3D structural regularity t…
Deep learning methods have typically been trained on large datasets in which many training examples are available. However, many real-world product datasets have only a small number of images available for each product. We explore the use of deep learning methods for recognizing object instances when we have only a single training example per class. We show that feedforward neural networks outperform state-of-the-art methods for recognizing objects from novel viewpoints even when trained from just a single image per object. To further improve our performance on this task, we propose to take ad…
Human visual scene understanding is so remarkable that we are able to recognize a revisited place when entering it from the opposite direction it was first visited, even in the presence of extreme variations in appearance. This capability is especially apparent during driving: a human driver can recognize where they are when travelling in the reverse direction along a route for the first time, without having to turn back and look. The difficulty of this problem exceeds any addressed in past appearance- and viewpoint-invariant visual place recognition (VPR) research, in part because large parts…
GSAlign: Geometric and Semantic Alignment Network for Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification
Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing, Ministry of Education, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University（航天信息安全部与可信计算重点实验室，教育部，武汉大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
SOCO: Benchmarking Semantic Object Correspondence in Vision Foundation Models
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克研究所信息学研究所）；Saarland Informatics Campus（萨尔州信息学校园）；CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security（信息安全霍夫曼中心）；University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）
Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Recent studies have shown remarkable advances in 3D human pose estimation from monocular images, with the help of large-scale in-door 3D datasets and sophisticated network architectures. However, the generalizability to different environments remains an elusive goal. In this work, we propose a geometry-aware 3D representation for the human pose to address this limitation by using multiple views in a simple auto-encoder model at the training stage and only 2D keypoint information as supervision. A view synthesis framework is proposed to learn the shared 3D representation between viewpoints with…
Object encoding and identification are vital for robotic tasks such as autonomous exploration, semantic scene understanding, and re-localization. Previous approaches have attempted to either track objects or generate descriptors for object identification. However, such systems are limited to a "fixed" partial object representation from a single viewpoint. In a robot exploration setup, there is a requirement for a temporally "evolving" global object representation built as the robot observes the object from multiple viewpoints. Furthermore, given the vast distribution of unknown novel objects i…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
The performance of point cloud 3D object detection hinges on effectively representing raw points, grid-based voxels or pillars. Recent two-stage 3D detectors typically take the point-voxel-based R-CNN paradigm, i.e., the first stage resorts to the 3D voxel-based backbone for 3D proposal generation on bird-eye-view (BEV) representation and the second stage refines them via the intermediate point representation. Their primary mechanisms involve the utilization of intermediary keypoints to restore the substantial 3D structure context from the converted BEV representation. The skilled point-voxel …
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Siemens Corporate Technology（西门子企业技术研究院）
We consider the problem of 3D object pose estimation. While much recent work has focused on the RGB domain, the reliance on accurately annotated images limits their generalizability and scalability. On the other hand, the easily available CAD models of objects are rich sources of data, providing a large number of synthetically rendered images. In this paper, we solve this key problem of existing methods requiring expensive 3D pose annotations by proposing a new method that matches RGB images to CAD models for object pose estimation. Our key innovations compared to existing work include removin…
