Keypoint detection and description is fundamental yet important in many vision applications. Most existing methods use detect-then-describe or detect-and-describe strategy to learn local features without considering their context information. Consequently, it is challenging for these methods to learn robust local features. In this paper, we focus on the fusion of low-level textual information and high-level semantic context information to improve the discrimitiveness of local features. Specifically, we first estimate a score map to represent the distribution of potential keypoints according to the quality of descriptors of all pixels. Then, we extract and aggregate multi-scale high-level semantic features based by the guidance of the score map. Finally, the low-level local features and high-level semantic features are fused and refined using a residual module. Experiments on the challenging local feature benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the local feature challenge of the visual localization benchmark.
On the off-the-shelf navigational assistance devices, the localization precision is limited to the signal error of global navigation satellite system (GNSS). During travelling outdoors, the inaccurately localization perplexes visually impaired people, especially at key positions, such as gates, bus stations or intersections. The visual localization is a feasible approach to improving the positioning precision of assistive devices. Using multiple image descriptors, the paper proposes a robust and efficient visual localization algorithm, which takes advantage of priori GNSS signals and multi-mod…
This work introduces a simulator-based benchmark for visual localization in the autonomous navigation context. The dynamic benchmark enables investigation of how variables such as the time of day, weather, and camera perspective affect the navigation performance of autonomous agents that utilize visual localization for closed-loop control. The experimental part of the paper studies the effects of four such variables by evaluating state-of-the-art visual localization methods as part of the motion planning module of an autonomous navigation stack. The results show major variation in the suitabil…
In this paper, we propose a monocular visual localization pipeline leveraging semantic and depth cues. We apply semantic consistency evaluation to rank the image retrieval results and a practical clustering technique to reject estimation outliers. In addition, we demonstrate a substantial performance boost achieved with a combination of multiple feature extractors. Furthermore, by using depth prediction with a deep neural network, we show that a significant amount of falsely matched keypoints are identified and eliminated. The proposed pipeline outperforms most of the existing approaches at th…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学）
In this paper, we propose to go beyond the well-established approach to vision-based localization that relies on visual descriptor matching between a query image and a 3D point cloud. While matching keypoints via visual descriptors makes localization highly accurate, it has significant storage demands, raises privacy concerns and requires update to the descriptors in the long-term. To elegantly address those practical challenges for large-scale localization, we present GoMatch, an alternative to visual-based matching that solely relies on geometric information for matching image keypoints to m…
Jointly Optimized Global-Local Visual Localization of UAVs
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Aerospace Information Research Institute, CAS（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Visual localization plays an important role in many applications. However, due to the large appearance variations such as season and illumination changes, as well as weather and day-night variations, it's still a big challenge for robust long-term visual localization algorithms. In this paper, we present a novel visual localization method using hybrid handcrafted and learned features with dense semantic 3D map. Hybrid features help us to make full use of their strengths in different imaging conditions, and the dense semantic map provide us reliable and complete geometric and semantic informati…
Robust visual localization under a wide range of viewing conditions is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Handling the difficult cases of this problem is not only very challenging but also of high practical relevance, e.g., in the context of life-long localization for augmented reality or autonomous robots. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on a joint 3D geometric and semantic understanding of the world, enabling it to succeed under conditions where previous approaches failed. Our method leverages a novel generative model for descriptor learning, trained on semantic scene…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Accurate and robust visual localization under a wide range of viewing condition variations including season and illumination changes, as well as weather and day-night variations, is the key component for many computer vision and robotics applications. Under these conditions, most traditional methods would fail to locate the camera. In this paper we present a visual localization algorithm that combines structure-based method and image-based method with semantic information. Given semantic information about the query and database images, the retrieved images are scored according to the semantic …
Image based localization is a classical computer vision challenge, with several well-known datasets. Generally, datasets consist of a visual 3D database that captures the modeled scenery, as well as query images whose 3D pose is to be discovered. Usually the query images have been acquired with a camera that differs from the imaging hardware used to collect the 3D database; consequently, it is hard to acquire accurate ground truth poses between query images and the 3D database. As the accuracy of visual localization algorithms constantly improves, precise ground truth becomes increasingly impo…
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Zenuity（Zenuity（泽努蒂））
Robust cross-seasonal localization is one of the major challenges in long-term visual navigation of autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we exploit recent advances in semantic segmentation of images, i.e., where each pixel is assigned a label related to the type of object it represents, to attack the problem of long-term visual localization. We show that semantically labeled 3-D point maps of the environment, together with semantically segmented images, can be efficiently used for vehicle localization without the need for detailed feature descriptors (SIFT, SURF, etc.). Thus, instead of dependi…
Feature matching is crucial in visual localization, where 2D-3D correspondence plays a major role in determining the accuracy of camera pose. A sufficient number of well-distributed 2D-3D correspondences is essential for accurate pose estimation due to noise. However, existing 2D-3D feature matching methods rely on finding nearest neighbors in the feature space and removing outliers using hand-crafted heuristics, which may lead to potential matches being missed or the correct matches being filtered out. In this work, we propose a novel method called Geometry-Aided Matching (GAM), which incorpo…
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；IRL 2958 GT-CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心GT联合研究实验室（IRL 2958））
We introduce Object-Guided Localization (OGuL) based on a novel method of local-feature matching. Direct matching of local features is sensitive to significant changes in illumination. In contrast, object detection often survives severe changes in lighting conditions. The proposed method first detects semantic objects and establishes correspondences of those objects between images. Object correspondences provide local coarse alignment of the images in the form of a planar homography. These homographies are consequently used to guide the matching of local features. Experiments on standard urban…
Izmir Institute of Technology（伊兹密尔理工学院）；Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A)（阿拉贡工程研究院（I3A））；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）
Any city-scale visual localization system has to overcome long-term appearance changes, such as varying illumination conditions or seasonal changes between query and database images. Since semantic content is more robust to such changes, we exploit semantic information to improve visual localization. In our scenario, the database consists of gnomonic views generated from panoramic images (e.g. Google Street View) and query images are collected with a standard field-of-view camera at a different time. To improve localization, we check the semantic similarity between query and database images, w…
Unsupervised approaches to learning in neural networks are of substantial interest for furthering artificial intelligence, both because they would enable the training of networks without the need for large numbers of expensive annotations, and because they would be better models of the kind of general-purpose learning deployed by humans. However, unsupervised networks have long lagged behind the performance of their supervised counterparts, especially in the domain of large-scale visual recognition. Recent developments in training deep convolutional embeddings to maximize non-parametric instan…
The Hague University of Applied Sciences（海牙应用科学大学）；Princeton Neuroscience Institute（普林斯顿神经科学研究所）；Erasmus University Medical Center（伊拉斯姆斯大学医学中心）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Distributed machine learning is becoming a popular model-training method due to privacy, computational scalability, and bandwidth capacities. In this work, we explore scalable distributed-training versions of two algorithms commonly used in object detection. A novel distributed training algorithm using Mean Weight Matrix Aggregation (MWMA) is proposed for Linear Support Vector Machine (L-SVM) object detection based in Histogram of Orientated Gradients (HOG). In addition, a novel Weighted Bin Aggregation (WBA) algorithm is proposed for distributed training of Ensemble of Regression Trees (ERT) …
Visual localization is the task of estimating camera pose in a known scene, which is an essential problem in robotics and computer vision. However, long-term visual localization is still a challenge due to the environmental appearance changes caused by lighting and seasons. While techniques exist to address appearance changes using neural networks, these methods typically require ground-truth pose information to generate accurate image correspondences or act as a supervisory signal during training. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised feature learning framework for metric visual l…
Associating image regions with text queries has been recently explored as a new way to bridge visual and linguistic representations. A few pioneering approaches have been proposed based on recurrent neural language models trained generatively (e.g., generating captions), but achieving somewhat limited localization accuracy. To better address natural-language-based visual entity localization, we propose a discriminative approach. We formulate a discriminative bimodal neural network (DBNet), which can be trained by a classifier with extensive use of negative samples. Our training objective encou…
Along with feature points for image matching, line features provide additional constraints to solve visual geometric problems in robotics and computer vision (CV). Although recent convolutional neural network (CNN)-based line descriptors are promising for viewpoint changes or dynamic environments, we claim that the CNN architecture has innate disadvantages to abstract variable line length into the fixed-dimensional descriptor. In this paper, we effectively introduce Line-Transformers dealing with variable lines. Inspired by natural language processing (NLP) tasks where sentences can be underst…
OPPO Research Institute（OPPO研究院）；Shanghai JiaoTong University（上海交通大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Visual localization is a fundamental task that regresses the 6 Degree Of Freedom (6DoF) poses with image features in order to serve the high precision localization requests in many robotics applications. Degenerate conditions like motion blur, illumination changes and environment variations place great challenges in this task. Fusion with additional information, such as sequential information and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) inputs, would greatly assist such problems. In this paper, we present an efficient client-server visual localization architecture that fuses global and local pose estim…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Microsoft（微软）
Adding fiducial markers to a scene is a well-known strategy for making visual localization algorithms more robust. Traditionally, these marker locations are selected by humans who are familiar with visual localization techniques. This paper explores the problem of automatic marker placement within a scene. Specifically, given a predetermined set of markers and a scene model, we compute optimized marker positions within the scene that can improve accuracy in visual localization. Our main contribution is a novel framework for modeling camera localizability that incorporates both natural scene fe…
We propose a novel learning-based formulation for visual localization of vehicles that can operate in real-time in city-scale environments. Visual localization algorithms determine the position and orientation from which an image has been captured, using a set of geo-referenced images or a 3D scene representation. Our new localization paradigm, named Implicit Pose Encoding (ImPosing), embeds images and camera poses into a common latent representation with 2 separate neural networks, such that we can compute a similarity score for each image-pose pair. By evaluating candidates through the laten…
RAM-LAB（RAM实验室）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Incorporating prior structure information into the visual state estimation could generally improve the localization performance. In this letter, we aim to address the paradox between accuracy and efficiency in coupling visual factors with structure constraints. To this end, we present a cross-modality method that tracks a camera in a prior map modelled by the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). With the pose estimated by the front-end initially, the local visual observations and map components are associated efficiently, and the visual structure from the triangulation is refined simultaneously. By i…
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；Univrses AB（Univrses公司）
Visual localization allows autonomous robots to relocalize when losing track of their pose by matching their current observation with past ones. However, ambiguous scenes pose a challenge for such systems, as repetitive structures can be viewed from many distinct, equally likely camera poses, which means it is not sufficient to produce a single best pose hypothesis. In this work, we propose a probabilistic framework that for a given image predicts the arbitrarily shaped posterior distribution of its camera pose. We do this via a novel formulation of camera pose regression using variational inf…
Google（谷歌）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Mapping and localization, preferably from a small number of observations, are fundamental tasks in robotics. We address these tasks by combining spatial structure (differentiable mapping) and end-to-end learning in a novel neural network architecture: the Differentiable Mapping Network (DMN). The DMN constructs a spatially structured view-embedding map and uses it for subsequent visual localization with a particle filter. Since the DMN architecture is end-to-end differentiable, we can jointly learn the map representation and localization using gradient descent. We apply the DMN to sparse visua…
Although several research works have been reported on audio-visual sound source localization in unconstrained videos, no datasets and metrics have been proposed in the literature to quantitatively evaluate its performance. Defining the ground truth for sound source localization is difficult, because the location where the sound is produced is not limited to the range of the source object, but the vibrations propagate and spread through the surrounding objects. Therefore we propose a new concept, Sounding Object, to reduce the ambiguity of the visual location of sound, making it possible to ann…
Center of Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；Zhejiang Lab（浙江实验室）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Key Laboratory of Machine Perception, MOE, School of EECS, Peking University（北京大学信息科学技术学院教育部机器感知重点实验室）
How do humans recognize an object in a piece of video? Due to the deteriorated quality of single frame, it may be hard for people to identify an occluded object in this frame by just utilizing information within one image. We argue that there are two important cues for humans to recognize objects in videos: the global semantic information and the local localization information. Recently, plenty of methods adopt the self-attention mechanisms to enhance the features in key frame with either global semantic information or local localization information. In this paper we introduce memory enhanced …
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Meta Reality Labs Research（Meta现实实验室）
Humans naturally perceive surrounding scenes by unifying sound and sight in a first-person view. Likewise, machines are advanced to approach human intelligence by learning with multisensory inputs from an egocentric perspective. In this paper, we explore the challenging egocentric audio-visual object localization task and observe that 1) egomotion commonly exists in first-person recordings, even within a short duration; 2) The out-of-view sound components can be created while wearers shift their attention. To address the first problem, we propose a geometry-aware temporal aggregation module to…
A critical issue in pedestrian detection is to detect small-scale objects that will introduce feeble contrast and motion blur in images and videos, which in our opinion should partially resort to deep-rooted annotation bias. Motivated by this, we propose a novel method integrated with somatic topological line localization (TLL) and temporal feature aggregation for detecting multi-scale pedestrians, which works particularly well with small-scale pedestrians that are relatively far from the camera. Moreover, a post-processing scheme based on Markov Random Field (MRF) is introduced to eliminate a…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
In this work, we introduce a Denser Feature Network (DenserNet) for visual localization. Our work provides three principal contributions. First, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture which aggregates feature maps at different semantic levels for image representations. Using denser feature maps, our method can produce more keypoint features and increase image retrieval accuracy. Second, our model is trained end-to-end without pixel-level annotation other than positive and negative GPS-tagged image pairs. We use a weakly supervised triplet ranking loss to learn discriminat…
Peking University（北京大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；Cloud and Smart Industries Group, Tencent（腾讯云与智慧产业事业群）
Temporal action localization is a recently-emerging task, aiming to localize video segments from untrimmed videos that contain specific actions. Despite the remarkable recent progress, most two-stage action localization methods still suffer from imprecise temporal boundaries of action proposals. This work proposes a novel integrated temporal scale aggregation network (TSA-Net). Our main insight is that ensembling convolution filters with different dilation rates can effectively enlarge the receptive field with low computational cost, which inspires us to devise multi-dilation temporal convolut…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
This technical report presents an overview of our solution used in the submission to 2021 HACS Temporal Action Localization Challenge on both Supervised Learning Track and Weakly-Supervised Learning Track. Temporal Action Localization (TAL) requires to not only precisely locate the temporal boundaries of action instances, but also accurately classify the untrimmed videos into specific categories. However, Weakly-Supervised TAL indicates locating the action instances using only video-level class labels. In this paper, to train a supervised temporal action localizer, we adopt Temporal Context Ag…
In this paper, we introduce a novel problem of audio-visual event localization in unconstrained videos. We define an audio-visual event as an event that is both visible and audible in a video segment. We collect an Audio-Visual Event(AVE) dataset to systemically investigate three temporal localization tasks: supervised and weakly-supervised audio-visual event localization, and cross-modality localization. We develop an audio-guided visual attention mechanism to explore audio-visual correlations, propose a dual multimodal residual network (DMRN) to fuse information over the two modalities, and …
Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）；Italian Institute of Technology（意大利技术研究院）
Visual recognition systems are meant to work in the real world. For this to happen, they must work robustly in any visual domain, and not only on the data used during training. Within this context, a very realistic scenario deals with domain generalization, i.e. the ability to build visual recognition algorithms able to work robustly in several visual domains, without having access to any information about target data statistic. This paper contributes to this research thread, proposing a deep architecture that maintains separated the information about the available source domains data while at…
In this paper, we present a visual localization pipeline, namely MegLoc, for robust and accurate 6-DoF pose estimation under varying scenarios, including indoor and outdoor scenes, different time across a day, different seasons across a year, and even across years. MegLoc achieves state-of-the-art results on a range of challenging datasets, including winning the Outdoor and Indoor Visual Localization Challenge of ICCV 2021 Workshop on Long-term Visual Localization under Changing Conditions, as well as the Re-localization Challenge for Autonomous Driving of ICCV 2021 Workshop on Map-based Local…
We propose a novel cost aggregation network, called Cost Aggregation Transformers (CATs), to find dense correspondences between semantically similar images with additional challenges posed by large intra-class appearance and geometric variations. Cost aggregation is a highly important process in matching tasks, which the matching accuracy depends on the quality of its output. Compared to hand-crafted or CNN-based methods addressing the cost aggregation, in that either lacks robustness to severe deformations or inherit the limitation of CNNs that fail to discriminate incorrect matches due to li…
China Unicom（中国联通）；AI Innovation and Application Center（人工智能创新应用中心）
We propose a novel visual localization network when outside environment has changed such as different illumination, weather and season. The visual localization network is composed of a feature extraction network and pose regression network. The feature extraction network is made up of an encoder network based on the Generative Adversarial Network CycleGAN, which can capture intrinsic appearance-invariant feature maps from unpaired samples of different weathers and seasons. With such an invariant feature, we use a 6-DoF pose regression network to tackle long-term visual localization in the pres…
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Kwangwoon University（光云大学）
Multi-person pose estimation from a 2D image is challenging because it requires not only keypoint localization but also human detection. In state-of-the-art top-down methods, multi-scale information is a crucial factor for the accurate pose estimation because it contains both of local information around the keypoints and global information of the entire person. Although multi-scale information allows these methods to achieve the state-of-the-art performance, the top-down methods still require a huge amount of computation because they need to use an additional human detector to feed the cropped…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心）
In content-based image retrieval, the first-round retrieval result by simple visual feature comparison may be unsatisfactory, which can be refined by visual re-ranking techniques. In image retrieval, it is observed that the contextual similarity among the top-ranked images is an important clue to distinguish the semantic relevance. Inspired by this observation, in this paper, we propose a visual re-ranking method by contextual similarity aggregation with self-attention. In our approach, for each image in the top-K ranking list, we represent it into an affinity feature vector by comparing it wi…
For many computer vision applications, such as image description and human identification, recognizing the visual attributes of humans is an essential yet challenging problem. Its challenges originate from its multi-label nature, the large underlying class imbalance and the lack of spatial annotations. Existing methods follow either a computer vision approach while failing to account for class imbalance, or explore machine learning solutions, which disregard the spatial and semantic relations that exist in the images. With that in mind, we propose an effective method that extracts and aggregat…
A major focus of current research on place recognition is visual localization for autonomous driving. In this scenario, as cameras will be operating continuously, it is realistic to expect videos as an input to visual localization algorithms, as opposed to the single-image querying approach used in other visual localization works. In this paper, we show that exploiting temporal continuity in the testing sequence significantly improves visual localization - qualitatively and quantitatively. Although intuitive, this idea has not been fully explored in recent works. To this end, we propose two fi…
Computer vision has flourished in recent years thanks to Deep Learning advancements, fast and scalable hardware solutions and large availability of structured image data. Convolutional Neural Networks trained on supervised tasks with backpropagation learn to extract meaningful representations from raw pixels automatically, and surpass shallow methods in image understanding. Though convenient, data-driven feature learning is prone to dataset bias: a network learns its parameters from training signals alone, and will usually perform poorly if train and test distribution differ. To alleviate this…
National Institutes of Health Clinical Center（美国国立卫生研究院临床中心）
Accurate and automatic organ segmentation from 3D radiological scans is an important yet challenging problem for medical image analysis. Specifically, the pancreas demonstrates very high inter-patient anatomical variability in both its shape and volume. In this paper, we present an automated system using 3D computed tomography (CT) volumes via a two-stage cascaded approach: pancreas localization and segmentation. For the first step, we localize the pancreas from the entire 3D CT scan, providing a reliable bounding box for the more refined segmentation step. We introduce a fully deep-learning a…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Visual place recognition is challenging in the urban environment and is usually viewed as a large scale image retrieval task. The intrinsic challenges in place recognition exist that the confusing objects such as cars and trees frequently occur in the complex urban scene, and buildings with repetitive structures may cause over-counting and the burstiness problem degrading the image representations. To address these problems, we present an Attention-based Pyramid Aggregation Network (APANet), which is trained in an end-to-end manner for place recognition. One main component of APANet, the spati…
LAVA: Layered Audio-Visual Anti-tampering Watermarking for Robust Deepfake Detection and Localization
School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；UNSW Sydney（新南威尔士大学悉尼分校）；School of Information and Communication Technology（信息与通信技术学院）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）
SuperPlace: The Renaissance of Classical Feature Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition in the Era of Foundation Models
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Cambridge University（剑桥大学）
