Automatic discovery of category-specific 3D keypoints from a collection of objects of some category is a challenging problem. One reason is that not all objects in a category necessarily have the same semantic parts. The level of difficulty adds up further when objects are represented by 3D point clouds, with variations in shape and unknown coordinate frames. We define keypoints to be category-specific, if they meaningfully represent objects' shape and their correspondences can be simply established order-wise across all objects. This paper aims at learning category-specific 3D keypoints, in an unsupervised manner, using a collection of misaligned 3D point clouds of objects from an unknown category. In order to do so, we model shapes defined by the keypoints, within a category, using the symmetric linear basis shapes without assuming the plane of symmetry to be known. The usage of symmetry prior leads us to learn stable keypoints suitable for higher misalignments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on learning such keypoints directly from 3D point clouds. Using categories from four benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the quality of our learned keypoints by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our experiments also show that the keypoints discovered by our method are geometrically and semantically consistent.
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Semantic 3D keypoints are category-level semantic consistent points on 3D objects. Detecting 3D semantic keypoints is a foundation for a number of 3D vision tasks but remains challenging, due to the ambiguity of semantic information, especially when the objects are represented by unordered 3D point clouds. Existing unsupervised methods tend to generate category-level keypoints in implicit manners, making it difficult to extract high-level information, such as semantic labels and topology. From a novel mutual reconstruction perspective, we present an unsupervised method to generate consistent s…
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）；Yamagata University, Faculty of Science（山形大学理学部）
This paper proposes to use keypoints as a self-supervision clue for learning depth map estimation from a collection of input images. As ground truth depth from real images is difficult to obtain, there are many unsupervised and self-supervised approaches to depth estimation that have been proposed. Most of these unsupervised approaches use depth map and ego-motion estimations to reproject the pixels from the current image into the adjacent image from the image collection. Depth and ego-motion estimations are evaluated based on pixel intensity differences between the correspondent original and …
Understanding point clouds is of great importance. Many previous methods focus on detecting salient keypoints to identity structures of point clouds. However, existing methods neglect the semantics of points selected, leading to poor performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose Keypoint Autoencoder, an unsupervised learning method for detecting keypoints. We encourage selecting sparse semantic keypoints by enforcing the reconstruction from keypoints to the original point cloud. To make sparse keypoint selection differentiable, Soft Keypoint Proposal is adopted by calculating weig…
MK-Pose: Category-Level Object Pose Estimation via Multimodal-Based Keypoint Learning
Institute of Robotics and Automatic Information System（机器人与自动信息系统研究所）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics（天津智能机器人重点实验室）；TBI center（TBI中心）；Nankai University（南开大学）
Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）；Sony Europe B.V.（索尼欧洲公司）
Establishing a sparse set of keypoint correspon dences between images is a fundamental task in many computer vision pipelines. Often, this translates into a computationally expensive nearest neighbor search, where every keypoint descriptor at one image must be compared with all the descriptors at the others. In order to lower the computational cost of the matching phase, we propose a deep feature extraction network capable of detecting a predefined number of complementary sets of keypoints at each image. Since only the descriptors within the same set need to be compared across the different im…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Point cloud completion aims at completing geometric and topological shapes from a partial observation. However, some topology of the original shape is missing, existing methods directly predict the location of complete points, without predicting structured and topological information of the complete shape, which leads to inferior performance. To better tackle the missing topology part, we propose LAKe-Net, a novel topology-aware point cloud completion model by localizing aligned keypoints, with a novel Keypoints-Skeleton-Shape prediction manner. Specifically, our method completes missing topol…
ComPose: A Unified Completion-Pose Framework for Robust Category-Level Object Pose Estimation
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；National Key Laboratory of Deep Space Exploration, Deep Space Exploration Laboratory（国家空间科学探测重点实验室，深空探测实验室）；Beijing Institute of Control Engineering（北京控制工程研究所）
We introduce ViewNeRF, a Neural Radiance Field-based viewpoint estimation method that learns to predict category-level viewpoints directly from images during training. While NeRF is usually trained with ground-truth camera poses, multiple extensions have been proposed to reduce the need for this expensive supervision. Nonetheless, most of these methods still struggle in complex settings with large camera movements, and are restricted to single scenes, i.e. they cannot be trained on a collection of scenes depicting the same object category. To address these issues, our method uses an analysis b…
Xi’an Research Institute of High-Tech（西安高技术研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Detecting 3D keypoints from point clouds is important for shape reconstruction, while this work investigates the dual question: can shape reconstruction benefit 3D keypoint detection? Existing methods either seek salient features according to statistics of different orders or learn to predict keypoints that are invariant to transformation. Nevertheless, the idea of incorporating shape reconstruction into 3D keypoint detection is under-explored. We argue that this is restricted by former problem formulations. To this end, a novel unsupervised paradigm named SNAKE is proposed, which is short for…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Qing Yuan Research Institute（清源研究院）
Detecting aligned 3D keypoints is essential under many scenarios such as object tracking, shape retrieval and robotics. However, it is generally hard to prepare a high-quality dataset for all types of objects due to the ambiguity of keypoint itself. Meanwhile, current unsupervised detectors are unable to generate aligned keypoints with good coverage. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised aligned keypoint detector, Skeleton Merger, which utilizes skeletons to reconstruct objects. It is based on an Autoencoder architecture. The encoder proposes keypoints and predicts activation strengths of …
Most learning-based approaches to category-level 6D pose estimation are design around normalized object coordinate space (NOCS). While being successful, NOCS-based methods become inaccurate and less robust when handling objects of a category containing significant intra-category shape variations. This is because the object coordinates induced by global and rigid alignment of objects are semantically incoherent, making the coordinate regression hard to learn and generalize. We propose Semantically-aware Object Coordinate Space (SOCS) built by warping-and-aligning the objects guided by a sparse …
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Keypoints of objects reflect their concise abstractions, while the corresponding connection links (CL) build the skeleton by detecting the intrinsic relations between keypoints. Existing approaches are typically computationally-intensive, inapplicable for instances belonging to multiple classes, and/or infeasible to simultaneously encode connection information. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an end-to-end category-implicit Keypoint and Link Prediction Network (KLPNet), which is the first approach for simultaneous semantic keypoint detection (for multi-class instances) and CL …
Correspondence search is an essential step in rigid point cloud registration algorithms. Most methods maintain a single correspondence at each step and gradually remove wrong correspondances. However, building one-to-one correspondence with hard assignments is extremely difficult, especially when matching two point clouds with many locally similar features. This paper proposes an optimization method that retains all possible correspondences for each keypoint when matching a partial point cloud to a complete point cloud. These uncertain correspondences are then gradually updated with the estima…
Unsupervised training of keypoint-agnostic descriptors for flexible retinal image registration
Grupo VARPA, Instituto de Investigacion Biomédica de A Coruña (INIBIC), Universidade da Coruña（VARPA组，阿维拉生物医学研究所（INIBIC），科鲁纳大学）；Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación y Tecnologías de la Información, Universidade da Coruña（计算机科学与信息技术部门，科鲁纳大学）
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
We present neural radiance fields (NeRF) with templates, dubbed Template-NeRF, for modeling appearance and geometry and generating dense shape correspondences simultaneously among objects of the same category from only multi-view posed images, without the need of either 3D supervision or ground-truth correspondence knowledge. The learned dense correspondences can be readily used for various image-based tasks such as keypoint detection, part segmentation, and texture transfer that previously require specific model designs. Our method can also accommodate annotation transfer in a one or few-shot…
Key-Grid: Unsupervised 3D Keypoints Detection using Grid Heatmap Features
Shanghai Qizhi Institute（上海智己研究所）；Peking University（北京大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）
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.…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
We introduce KeypointDeformer, a novel unsupervised method for shape control through automatically discovered 3D keypoints. We cast this as the problem of aligning a source 3D object to a target 3D object from the same object category. Our method analyzes the difference between the shapes of the two objects by comparing their latent representations. This latent representation is in the form of 3D keypoints that are learned in an unsupervised way. The difference between the 3D keypoints of the source and the target objects then informs the shape deformation algorithm that deforms the source obj…
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Existing unsupervised methods for keypoint learning rely heavily on the assumption that a specific keypoint type (e.g. elbow, digit, abstract geometric shape) appears only once in an image. This greatly limits their applicability, as each instance must be isolated before applying the method-an issue that is never discussed or evaluated. We thus propose a novel method to learn Task-agnostic, UnSupervised Keypoints (TUSK) which can deal with multiple instances. To achieve this, instead of the commonly-used strategy of detecting multiple heatmaps, each dedicated to a specific keypoint type, we us…
Unsupervised Keypoints from Pretrained Diffusion Models
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Vector Institute for AI（向量人工智能研究所）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Unsupervised Deep Learning-based Keypoint Localization Estimating Descriptor Matching Performance
Grupo VARPA（VARPA组）；Instituto de Investigacion Biomédica de A Coruña (INIBIC)（阿罗纳生物医学研究所（INIBIC））；Universidade da Coruña（科鲁纳大学）；Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación y Tecnologías de la Información（计算机科学与信息技术部门）
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Fuzhou University（福州大学）
We propose an unsupervised learning framework with the pretext task of finding dense correspondences between point cloud shapes from the same category based on the cycle-consistency formulation. In order to learn discriminative pointwise features from point cloud data, we incorporate in the formulation a regularization term based on Sinkhorn normalization to enhance the learned pointwise mappings to be as bijective as possible. Besides, a random rigid transform of the source shape is introduced to form a triplet cycle to improve the model's robustness against perturbations. Comprehensive exper…
Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学）
Keypoint detection and description play a central role in computer vision. Most existing methods are in the form of scene-level prediction, without returning the object classes of different keypoints. In this paper, we propose the object-centric formulation, which, beyond the conventional setting, requires further identifying which object each interest point belongs to. With such fine-grained information, our framework enables more downstream potentials, such as object-level matching and pose estimation in a clustered environment. To get around the difficulty of label collection in the real wo…
In this paper, we study the representation of the shape and pose of objects using their keypoints. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end method that simultaneously detects 2D keypoints from an image and lifts them to 3D. The proposed method learns both 2D detection and 3D lifting only from 2D keypoints annotations. In addition to being end-to-end from images to 3D keypoints, our method also handles objects from multiple categories using a single neural network. We use a Transformer-based architecture to detect the keypoints, as well as to summarize the visual context of the image. This visual co…
The task of unsupervised motion retargeting in videos has seen substantial advancements through the use of deep neural networks. While early works concentrated on specific object priors such as a human face or body, recent work considered the unsupervised case. When the source and target videos, however, are of different shapes, current methods fail. To alleviate this problem, we introduce JOKR - a JOint Keypoint Representation that captures the motion common to both the source and target videos, without requiring any object prior or data collection. By employing a domain confusion term, we en…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Existing works on 2D pose estimation mainly focus on a certain category, e.g. human, animal, and vehicle. However, there are lots of application scenarios that require detecting the poses/keypoints of the unseen class of objects. In this paper, we introduce the task of Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE), which aims to create a pose estimation model capable of detecting the pose of any class of object given only a few samples with keypoint definition. To achieve this goal, we formulate the pose estimation problem as a keypoint matching problem and design a novel CAPE framework, termed POs…
This paper introduces a new algorithm for unsupervised learning of keypoint detectors and descriptors, which demonstrates fast convergence and good performance across different datasets. The training procedure uses homographic transformation of images. The proposed model learns to detect points and generate descriptors on pairs of transformed images, which are easy for it to distinguish and repeatedly detect. The trained model follows SuperPoint architecture for ease of comparison, and demonstrates similar performance on natural images from HPatches dataset, and better performance on retina im…
Unsupervised Learning of Object Structure and Dynamics from Videos
Google Research（谷歌研究院）
在没有监督的情况下从视频中提取和预测对象结构和动态是机器学习的主要挑战。为了解决这一挑战，我们采用了基于关键点的图像表示，并学习关键点的随机动力学模型。从关键点和参考帧重建未来帧。通过在关键点坐标空间中建模动态，我们实现了稳定的学习并避免了像素空间中的错误复合。我们的方法改进后，非结构化表示像素级视频预测和下游任务需要对象级的运动动态的理解。我们在不同的数据集上评估我们的模型：多智能体运动数据集，Human3.6M数据集，以及基于DeepMind Control Suite连续控制任务的数据集。空间结构化表示在一系列与运动相关的任务（如对象跟踪、动作识别和奖励预测）上优于非结构化表示。
Can a robot manipulate intra-category unseen objects in arbitrary poses with the help of a mere demonstration of grasping pose on a single object instance? In this paper, we try to address this intriguing challenge by using USEEK, an unsupervised SE(3)-equivariant keypoints method that enjoys alignment across instances in a category, to perform generalizable manipulation. USEEK follows a teacher-student structure to decouple the unsupervised keypoint discovery and SE(3)-equivariant keypoint detection. With USEEK in hand, the robot can infer the category-level task-relevant object frames in an …
Entropy-driven Unsupervised Keypoint Representation Learning in Videos
Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior (CMBB), Uni. Marburg and JLU Giessen（马尔堡大学与吉森尤斯图斯·李比希大学心智、大脑与行为研究中心（CMBB））
The Swiss AI Lab IDSIA（瑞士人工智能实验室IDSIA）；USI（瑞士意大利语区大学）；SUPSI（瑞士南部应用科学大学）
We propose PermaKey, a novel approach to representation learning based on object keypoints. It leverages the predictability of local image regions from spatial neighborhoods to identify salient regions that correspond to object parts, which are then converted to keypoints. Unlike prior approaches, it utilizes predictability to discover object keypoints, an intrinsic property of objects. This ensures that it does not overly bias keypoints to focus on characteristics that are not unique to objects, such as movement, shape, colour etc. We demonstrate the efficacy of PermaKey on Atari where it lea…
Learning sensorimotor control policies from high-dimensional images crucially relies on the quality of the underlying visual representations. Prior works show that structured latent space such as visual keypoints often outperforms unstructured representations for robotic control. However, most of these representations, whether structured or unstructured are learned in a 2D space even though the control tasks are usually performed in a 3D environment. In this work, we propose a framework to learn such a 3D geometric structure directly from images in an end-to-end unsupervised manner. The input …
