Robot perception systems need to perform reliable image segmentation in real-time on noisy, raw perception data. State-of-the-art segmentation approaches use large CNN models and carefully constructed datasets; however, these models focus on accuracy at the cost of real-time inference. Furthermore, the standard semantic segmentation datasets are not large enough for training CNNs without augmentation and are not representative of noisy, uncurated robot perception data. We propose improving the performance of real-time segmentation frameworks on robot perception data by transferring features learned from synthetic segmentation data. We show that pretraining real-time segmentation architectures with synthetic segmentation data instead of ImageNet improves fine-tuning performance by reducing the bias learned in pretraining and closing the \textit{transfer gap} as a result. Our experiments show that our real-time robot perception models pretrained on synthetic data outperform those pretrained on ImageNet for every scale of fine-tuning data examined. Moreover, the degree to which synthetic pretraining outperforms ImageNet pretraining increases as the availability of robot data decreases, making our approach attractive for robotics domains where dataset collection is hard and/or expensive.
University of Picardie Jules Verne（儒勒·凡尔纳皮卡第大学）；University of Limoges（利摩日大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；XLim Institute（XLim研究所）
In this paper we present a novel approach for representing and evolving deformable active contours. The method combines piecewise regular B{é}zier models and curve evolution defined by local Free Form Deformation. The contour deformation is locally constrained which allows contour convergence with almost linear complexity while adapting to various shape settings and handling topology changes of the active contour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the new active contour scheme for visual free space perception and segmentation using omnidirectional images acquired by a robot exploring unknown…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Tongji University（同济大学）
Navigational perception for visually impaired people has been substantially promoted by both classic and deep learning based segmentation methods. In classic visual recognition methods, the segmentation models are mostly object-dependent, which means a specific algorithm has to be devised for the object of interest. In contrast, deep learning based models such as instance segmentation and semantic segmentation allow to individually recognize part of the entire scene, namely things or stuff, for blind individuals. However, both of them can not provide a holistic understanding of the surrounding…
More than Segmentation: Benchmarking SAM 3 for Segmentation, 3D Perception, and Reconstruction in Robotic Surgery
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科学与技术大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科学与技术大学（广州））；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）
Harman International（哈曼国际）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）
As the demand for enabling high-level autonomous driving has increased in recent years and visual perception is one of the critical features to enable fully autonomous driving, in this paper, we introduce an efficient approach for simultaneous object detection, depth estimation and pixel-level semantic segmentation using a shared convolutional architecture. The proposed network model, which we named Driving Scene Perception Network (DSPNet), uses multi-level feature maps and multi-task learning to improve the accuracy and efficiency of object detection, depth estimation and image segmentation …
LiDAR-based 3D object detection and panoptic segmentation are two crucial tasks in the perception systems of autonomous vehicles and robots. In this paper, we propose All-in-One Perception Network (AOP-Net), a LiDAR-based multi-task framework that combines 3D object detection and panoptic segmentation. In this method, a dual-task 3D backbone is developed to extract both panoptic- and detection-level features from the input LiDAR point cloud. Also, a new 2D backbone that intertwines Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and convolution layers is designed to further improve the detection task performance…
Technische Universität Braunschweig（布伦瑞克工业大学）；Institute for Communications Technology（通信技术研究所）
Amodal perception terms the ability of humans to imagine the entire shapes of occluded objects. This gives humans an advantage to keep track of everything that is going on, especially in crowded situations. Typical perception functions, however, lack amodal perception abilities and are therefore at a disadvantage in situations with occlusions. Complex urban driving scenarios often experience many different types of occlusions and, therefore, amodal perception for automated vehicles is an important task to investigate. In this paper, we consider the task of amodal semantic segmentation and prop…
Computer vision technology is widely used in biological and medical data analysis and understanding. However, there are still two major bottlenecks in the field of cell membrane segmentation, which seriously hinder further research: lack of sufficient high-quality data and lack of suitable evaluation criteria. In order to solve these two problems, this paper first proposes an Ultra-high Resolution Image Segmentation dataset for the Cell membrane, called U-RISC, the largest annotated Electron Microscopy (EM) dataset for the Cell membrane with multiple iterative annotations and uncompressed high…
Technische Universität Braunschweig（布伦瑞克工业大学）；Volkswagen Group Research – Automated Driving（大众集团研究部-自动驾驶）
The high amount of sensors required for autonomous driving poses enormous challenges on the capacity of automotive bus systems. There is a need to understand tradeoffs between bitrate and perception performance. In this paper, we compare the image compression standards JPEG, JPEG2000, and WebP to a modern encoder/decoder image compression approach based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). We evaluate both the pure compression performance using typical metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM) and others, but also the performance of a subsequent perc…
Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院人形机器人与智能系统研究所）；Hangzhou SurImage Technology Company Ltd.（杭州 SurImage 科技有限公司）；Hangzhou KrVision Technology Company Ltd.（杭州 KrVision 科技有限公司）
As the scene information, including objectness and scene type, are important for people with visual impairment, in this work we present a multi-task efficient perception system for the scene parsing and recognition tasks. Building on the compact ResNet backbone, our designed network architecture has two paths with shared parameters. In the structure, the semantic segmentation path integrates fast attention, with the aim of harvesting long-range contextual information in an efficient manner. Simultaneously, the scene recognition path attains the scene type inference by passing the semantic feat…
UFO: A Unified Approach to Fine-grained Visual Perception via Open-ended Language Interface
Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；CASIA；Center for Machine Learning Research, Peking University（北京大学机器学习研究中心）；State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Peking University（北京大学通用人工智能国家重点实验室）
GP-NeRF: Generalized Perception NeRF for Context-Aware 3D Scene Understanding
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Baidu, Inc.（百度公司）
Enhancing Shape Perception and Segmentation Consistency for Industrial Image Inspection
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（人工智能学院，北京邮电大学）；Ricoh Software Research Center (Beijing) Co., Ltd（Ricoh软件研究中心（北京）有限公司）
In this paper, we present ViP-DeepLab, a unified model attempting to tackle the long-standing and challenging inverse projection problem in vision, which we model as restoring the point clouds from perspective image sequences while providing each point with instance-level semantic interpretations. Solving this problem requires the vision models to predict the spatial location, semantic class, and temporally consistent instance label for each 3D point. ViP-DeepLab approaches it by jointly performing monocular depth estimation and video panoptic segmentation. We name this joint task as Depth-awa…
Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院人机与机器人研究所）；Sino-German School, Tongji University（同济大学中德学院）；Hangzhou SurImage Technology Company Ltd.（杭州 SurImage 科技有限公司）；Hangzhou KrVision Technology Company Ltd.（杭州 KrVision 科技有限公司）
Classic computer vision algorithms, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation can not provide a holistic understanding of the surroundings for the visually impaired. In this paper, we utilize panoptic segmentation to assist the navigation of visually impaired people by offering both things and stuff awareness in the proximity of the visually impaired efficiently. To this end, we propose an efficient Attention module -- Lintention which can model long-range interactions in linear time using linear space. Based on Lintention, we then devise a novel panoptic segmentation model which we ter…
SSF-PAN: Semantic Scene Flow-Based Perception for Autonomous Navigation in Traffic Scenarios
Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学可信自主系统研究院）；Shenzhen Deeproute.ai Co.,Ltd（深圳元戎启行科技有限公司）
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Few-shot segmentation of point cloud remains a challenging task, as there is no effective way to convert local point cloud information to global representation, which hinders the generalization ability of point features. In this study, we propose a bidirectional feature globalization (BFG) approach, which leverages the similarity measurement between point features and prototype vectors to embed global perception to local point features in a bidirectional fashion. With point-to-prototype globalization (Po2PrG), BFG aggregates local point features to prototypes according to similarity weights fr…
Unveiling the Potential of Segment Anything Model 2 for RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation with Language Guidance
School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University（人工智能与机器人学院，湖南大学）；National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University（机器人视觉感知与控制技术国家工程研究中心，湖南大学）；AI Thrust, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港理工大学（广州）人工智能方向）
Region-Aware CAM: High-Resolution Weakly-Supervised Defect Segmentation via Salient Region Perception
School of Instrumentation Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology（仪器科学与工程学院，哈尔滨工业大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology Suzhou Research Institute（哈尔滨工业大学苏州研究所）
Image segmentation has been a very active research topic in image analysis area. Currently, most of the image segmentation algorithms are designed based on the idea that images are partitioned into a set of regions preserving homogeneous intra-regions and inhomogeneous inter-regions. However, human visual intuition does not always follow this pattern. A new image segmentation method named Visual-Hint Boundary to Segment (VHBS) is introduced, which is more consistent with human perceptions. VHBS abides by two visual hint rules based on human perceptions: (i) the global scale boundaries tend to …
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Intuitive Surgical Inc.（直观外科公司）
Purpose: We describe a 3D multi-view perception system for the da Vinci surgical system to enable Operating room (OR) scene understanding and context awareness. Methods: Our proposed system is comprised of four Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras rigidly attached to strategic locations on the daVinci Xi patient side cart (PSC). The cameras are registered to the robot's kinematic chain by performing a one-time calibration routine and therefore, information from all cameras can be fused and represented in one common coordinate frame. Based on this architecture, a multi-view 3D scene semantic segmentati…
Radar-Camera Fusion for Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；Institute of Deep Perception Technology, JITRI（江苏省产业技术研究院深度感知技术研究所）；XJTLU-JITRI Academy of Industrial Technology（西交利物浦大学-江苏省产业技术研究院工业技术学院）
Achelous++: Power-Oriented Water-Surface Panoptic Perception Framework on Edge Devices based on Vision-Radar Fusion and Pruning of Heterogeneous Modalities
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；JITRI（江苏省产业技术研究院）；Nantong University（南通大学）
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）；La Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）
Agricultural robots have the prospect to enable more efficient and sustainable agricultural production of food, feed, and fiber. Perception of crops and weeds is a central component of agricultural robots that aim to monitor fields and assess the plants as well as their growth stage in an automatic manner. Semantic perception mostly relies on deep learning using supervised approaches, which require time and qualified workers to label fairly large amounts of data. In this paper, we look into the problem of reducing the amount of labels without compromising the final segmentation performance. Fo…
We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and universal visual perception head for variant visual tasks, e.g., classification, object detection, instance segmentation and pose estimation, and different frameworks, such as one-stage or two-stage pipelines. Our approach effectively identifies an object in an image while simultaneously generating a high-quality bounding box or contour-based segmentation mask or set of keypoints. The method, called UniHead, views different visual perception tasks as the dispersible points learning via the transformer encoder architecture. Given a fixed spatial c…
Depth perception is fundamental for robots to understand the surrounding environment. As the view of cognitive neuroscience, visual depth perception methods are divided into three categories, namely binocular, active, and pictorial. The first two categories have been studied for decades in detail. However, research for the exploration of the third category is still in its infancy and has got momentum by the advent of deep learning methods in recent years. In cognitive neuroscience, it is known that pictorial depth perception mechanisms are dependent on the perception of seen objects. Inspired …
LiDAR-based 3D object detection, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation are usually implemented in specialized networks with distinctive architectures that are difficult to adapt to each other. This paper presents LidarMultiNet, a LiDAR-based multi-task network that unifies these three major LiDAR perception tasks. Among its many benefits, a multi-task network can reduce the overall cost by sharing weights and computation among multiple tasks. However, it typically underperforms compared to independently combined single-task models. The proposed LidarMultiNet aims to bridge the perfo…
Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）
State-of-the-art methods for driving-scene LiDAR-based perception (including point cloud semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation and 3D detection, \etc) often project the point clouds to 2D space and then process them via 2D convolution. Although this cooperation shows the competitiveness in the point cloud, it inevitably alters and abandons the 3D topology and geometric relations. A natural remedy is to utilize the 3D voxelization and 3D convolution network. However, we found that in the outdoor point cloud, the improvement obtained in this way is quite limited. An important reason is th…
Canonical Space Representation for 4D Panoptic Segmentation of Articulated Objects
IEETA - LASI, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Aveiro（阿维罗大学机械工程系IEETA-LASI）；Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）
Adapting SAM to Nuclei Instance Segmentation and Classification via Cooperative Fine-Grained Refinement
organization= College of Computer；Data Science , addressline= Fuzhou University , city= Fuzhou , country= China；organization= School of Mechanical Engineering；Automation , addressline= Fuzhou University , city= Fuzhou , country= China；organization= College of Physics；Information Engineering , addressline= Fuzhou University , city= Fuzhou , country= China
LiDAR Based Semantic Perception for Forklifts in Outdoor Environments
Faculty of Engineering and Informatics, University of Applied Sciences Aschaffenburg（应用科学阿施芬堡大学工程与信息学院）；Linde Material Handling GmbH, Kion Group（林德物料搬运有限公司，Kion集团）
TuSimple（图森未来）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
This technical report presents the 1st place winning solution for the Waymo Open Dataset 3D semantic segmentation challenge 2022. Our network, termed LidarMultiNet, unifies the major LiDAR perception tasks such as 3D semantic segmentation, object detection, and panoptic segmentation in a single framework. At the core of LidarMultiNet is a strong 3D voxel-based encoder-decoder network with a novel Global Context Pooling (GCP) module extracting global contextual features from a LiDAR frame to complement its local features. An optional second stage is proposed to refine the first-stage segmentati…
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）
The research advancements have made the neural network algorithms deployed in the autonomous vehicle to perceive the surrounding. The standard exteroceptive sensors that are utilized for the perception of the environment are cameras and Lidar. Therefore, the neural network algorithms developed using these exteroceptive sensors have provided the necessary solution for the autonomous vehicle's perception. One major drawback of these exteroceptive sensors is their operability in adverse weather conditions, for instance, low illumination and night conditions. The useability and affordability of th…
Mila - Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）
In this work, we consider the problem of learning a perception model for monocular robot navigation using few annotated images. Using a Vision Transformer (ViT) pretrained with a label-free self-supervised method, we successfully train a coarse image segmentation model for the Duckietown environment using 70 training images. Our model performs coarse image segmentation at the 8x8 patch level, and the inference resolution can be adjusted to balance prediction granularity and real-time perception constraints. We study how best to adapt a ViT to our task and environment, and find that some lightw…
For the self-driving and automatic parking, perception is the basic and critical technique, moreover, the detection of lane markings and parking slots is an important part of visual perception. In this paper, we use the semantic segmentation method to segment the area and classify the class of lane makings and parking slots on panoramic surround view (PSV) dataset. We propose the DFNet and make two main contributions, one is dynamic loss weights, and the other is residual fusion block (RFB). Dynamic loss weights are varying from classes, calculated according to the pixel number of each class i…
