Although LiDAR semantic segmentation advances rapidly, state-of-the-art methods often incorporate specifically designed inductive bias derived from benchmarks originating from mechanical spinning LiDAR. This can limit model generalizability to other kinds of LiDAR technologies and make hyperparameter tuning more complex. To tackle these issues, we propose a generalized framework to accommodate various types of LiDAR prevalent in the market by replacing window-attention with our sparse focal point modulation. Our SFPNet is capable of extracting multi-level contexts and dynamically aggregating them using a gate mechanism. By implementing a channel-wise information query, features that incorporate both local and global contexts are encoded. We also introduce a novel large-scale hybrid-solid LiDAR semantic segmentation dataset for robotic applications. SFPNet demonstrates competitive performance on conventional benchmarks derived from mechanical spinning LiDAR, while achieving state-of-the-art results on benchmark derived from solid-state LiDAR. Additionally, it outperforms existing methods on our novel dataset sourced from hybrid-solid LiDAR. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Cavendish518/SFPNet and https://www.semanticindustry.top.
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Estimating robot pose from RGB images is a crucial problem in computer vision and robotics. While previous methods have achieved promising performance, most of them presume full knowledge of robot internal states, \eg ground-truth robot joint angles. However, this assumption is not always valid in practical situations. In real-world applications such as multi-robot collaboration or human-robot interaction, the robot joint states might not be shared or could be unreliable. On the other hand, existing approaches that estimate robot pose without joint state priors suffer from heavy computation burdens and thus cannot support real-time applications. This work introduces an efficient framework for real-time robot pose estimation from RGB images without requiring known robot states. Our method estimates camera-to-robot rotation, robot state parameters, keypoint locations, and root depth, employing a neural network module for each task to facilitate learning and sim-to-real transfer. Notably, it achieves inference in a single feed-forward pass without iterative optimization. Our approach offers a 12$\times$ speed increase with state-of-the-art accuracy, enabling real-time holistic robot pose estimation for the first time.
WildRefer: 3D Object Localization in Large-scale Dynamic Scenes with Multi-modal Visual Data and Natural Language
PDF ↗We introduce the task of 3D visual grounding in large-scale dynamic scenes based on natural linguistic descriptions and online captured multi-modal visual data, including 2D images and 3D LiDAR point clouds. We present a novel method, dubbed WildRefer, for this task by fully utilizing the rich appearance information in images, the position and geometric clues in point cloud as well as the semantic knowledge of language descriptions. Besides, we propose two novel datasets, i.e., STRefer and LifeRefer, which focus on large-scale human-centric daily-life scenarios accompanied with abundant 3D object and natural language annotations. Our datasets are significant for the research of 3D visual grounding in the wild and has huge potential to boost the development of autonomous driving and service robots. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the proposed benchmarks. Code and dataset will be released when the paper is published.
We interact with the world with our hands and see it through our own (egocentric) perspective. A holistic 3D understanding of such interactions from egocentric views is important for tasks in robotics, AR/VR, action recognition and motion generation. Accurately reconstructing such interactions in 3D is challenging due to heavy occlusion, viewpoint bias, camera distortion, and motion blur from the head movement. To this end, we designed the HANDS23 challenge based on the AssemblyHands and ARCTIC datasets with carefully designed training and testing splits. Based on the results of the top submitted methods and more recent baselines on the leaderboards, we perform a thorough analysis on 3D hand(-object) reconstruction tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of addressing distortion specific to egocentric cameras, adopting high-capacity transformers to learn complex hand-object interactions, and fusing predictions from different views. Our study further reveals challenging scenarios intractable with state-of-the-art methods, such as fast hand motion, object reconstruction from narrow egocentric views, and close contact between two hands and objects. Our efforts will enrich the community's knowledge foundation and facilitate future hand studies on egocentric hand-object interactions.
Robo-ABC: Affordance Generalization Beyond Categories via Semantic Correspondence for Robot Manipulation
PDF ↗Enabling robotic manipulation that generalizes to out-of-distribution scenes is a crucial step toward open-world embodied intelligence. For human beings, this ability is rooted in the understanding of semantic correspondence among objects, which helps to naturally transfer the interaction experience of familiar objects to novel ones. Although robots lack such a reservoir of interaction experience, the vast availability of human videos on the Internet may serve as a resource, from which we extract an affordance memory of contact points. Inspired by the natural way humans think, We propose Robo-ABC: when confronted with unfamiliar objects that require generalization, the robot can acquire affordance by retrieving objects that share visual and semantic similarities from the memory, then mapping the contact points of the retrieved objects to the new object. While such correspondence may present formidable challenges at first glance, recent research finds it naturally arises from pre-trained diffusion models, enabling affordance mapping even across disparate categories. Through the Robo-ABC framework, robots can generalize to manipulate out-of-category objects in a zero-shot manner without any manual annotation, additional training, part segmentation, pre-coded knowledge, or viewpoint restrictions. Quantitatively, Robo-ABC significantly enhances the accuracy of visual affordance inference by a large margin of 28.7% compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) end-to-end affordance models. We also conduct real-world experiments of cross-category object-grasping tasks and achieve a success rate of 85.7%, proving Robo-ABC's capacity for real-world tasks.
Reconstructing a 3D scene from unordered images is pivotal in computer vision and robotics, with applications spanning crowd-sourced mapping and beyond. While global Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques are scalable and fast, they often compromise on accuracy. To address this, we introduce a principled approach that integrates gravity direction into the rotation averaging phase of global pipelines, enhancing camera orientation accuracy and reducing the degrees of freedom. This additional information is commonly available in recent consumer devices, such as smartphones, mixed-reality devices and drones, making the proposed method readily accessible. Rooted in circular regression, our algorithm has similar convergence guarantees as linear regression. It also supports scenarios where only a subset of cameras have known gravity. Additionally, we propose a mechanism to refine error-prone gravity. We achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on four large-scale datasets. Particularly, the proposed method improves upon the SfM baseline by 13 AUC@$1^\circ$ points, on average, while running eight times faster. It also outperforms the standard planar pose graph optimization technique by 23 AUC@$1^\circ$ points. The code will be made publicly available.
Simulated virtual environments have been widely used to learn robotic agents that perform daily household tasks. These environments encourage research progress by far, but often provide limited object interactability, visual appearance different from real-world environments, or relatively smaller environment sizes. This prevents the learned models in the virtual scenes from being readily deployable. To bridge the gap between these learning environments and deploying (i.e., real) environments, we propose the ReALFRED benchmark that employs real-world scenes, objects, and room layouts to learn agents to complete household tasks by understanding free-form language instructions and interacting with objects in large, multi-room and 3D-captured scenes. Specifically, we extend the ALFRED benchmark with updates for larger environmental spaces with smaller visual domain gaps. With ReALFRED, we analyze previously crafted methods for the ALFRED benchmark and observe that they consistently yield lower performance in all metrics, encouraging the community to develop methods in more realistic environments. Our code and data are publicly available.
Shape-guided Configuration-aware Learning for Endoscopic-image-based Pose Estimation of Flexible Robotic Instruments
PDF ↗Accurate estimation of both the external orientation and internal bending angle is crucial for understanding a soft robot state within its environment. However, existing sensor-based methods face limitations in cost, environmental constraints, and integration issues. Conventional image-based methods struggle with the shape complexity of soft robots. In this paper, we propose a novel shape-guided configuration-aware learning framework for image-based soft robot pose estimation. Inspired by the recent advances in 2D-3D joint representation learning, we leverage the 3D shape prior of the soft robot to enhance its image-based shape representation. Concretely, we first extract the part-level geometry representation of the 3D shape prior, then adapt this representation to the image by querying the image features corresponding to different robot parts. Furthermore, we present an effective mechanism to dynamically deform the shape prior. It aims to mitigate the shape difference between the adopted shape prior and the soft robot depicted in the image. This more expressive shape guidance further boosts the image-based robot representation and can be effectively used for soft robot pose refinement. Extensive experiments on surgical soft robots demonstrate the advantages of our method when compared with a series of keypoint-based, skeleton-based and direct regression-based methods.
Animals perceive the world to plan their actions and interact with other agents to accomplish complex tasks, demonstrating capabilities that are still unmatched by AI systems. To advance our understanding and reduce the gap between the capabilities of animals and AI systems, we introduce a dataset of pet egomotion imagery with diverse examples of simultaneous egomotion and multi-agent interaction. Current video datasets separately contain egomotion and interaction examples, but rarely both at the same time. In addition, EgoPet offers a radically distinct perspective from existing egocentric datasets of humans or vehicles. We define two in-domain benchmark tasks that capture animal behavior, and a third benchmark to assess the utility of EgoPet as a pretraining resource to robotic quadruped locomotion, showing that models trained from EgoPet outperform those trained from prior datasets. This work provides evidence that today's pets could be a valuable resource for training future AI systems and robotic assistants.
Performing language-conditioned robotic manipulation tasks in unstructured environments is highly demanded for general intelligent robots. Conventional robotic manipulation methods usually learn semantic representation of the observation for action prediction, which ignores the scene-level spatiotemporal dynamics for human goal completion. In this paper, we propose a dynamic Gaussian Splatting method named ManiGaussian for multi-task robotic manipulation, which mines scene dynamics via future scene reconstruction. Specifically, we first formulate the dynamic Gaussian Splatting framework that infers the semantics propagation in the Gaussian embedding space, where the semantic representation is leveraged to predict the optimal robot action. Then, we build a Gaussian world model to parameterize the distribution in our dynamic Gaussian Splatting framework, which provides informative supervision in the interactive environment via future scene reconstruction. We evaluate our ManiGaussian on 10 RLBench tasks with 166 variations, and the results demonstrate our framework can outperform the state-of-the-art methods by 13.1\% in average success rate.
Although time-of-flight (ToF) cameras are becoming the sensor-of-choice for numerous 3D imaging applications in robotics, augmented reality (AR) and human-computer interfaces (HCI), they do not explicitly consider scene or camera motion. Consequently, current ToF cameras do not provide 3D motion information, and the estimated depth and intensity often suffers from significant motion artifacts in dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel ToF imaging method for dynamic scenes, with the goal of simultaneously estimating 3D geometry, intensity, and 3D motion using a single indirect ToF (I-ToF) camera. Our key observation is that we can estimate 3D motion, as well as motion artifact-free depth and intensity by designing optical-flow-like algorithms that operate on coded correlation images captured by an I-ToF camera. Through the integration of a multi-frequency I-ToF approach with burst imaging, we demonstrate high-quality all-in-one (3D geometry, intensity, 3D motion) imaging even in challenging low signal-to-noise ratio scenarios. We show the effectiveness of our approach through thorough simulations and real experiments conducted across a wide range of motion and imaging scenarios, including indoor and outdoor dynamic scenes.
Monocular depth estimation in endoscopy videos can enable assistive and robotic surgery to obtain better coverage of the organ and detection of various health issues. Despite promising progress on mainstream, natural image depth estimation, techniques perform poorly on endoscopy images due to a lack of strong geometric features and challenging illumination effects. In this paper, we utilize the photometric cues, i.e., the light emitted from an endoscope and reflected by the surface, to improve monocular depth estimation. We first create two novel loss functions with supervised and self-supervised variants that utilize a per-pixel shading representation. We then propose a novel depth refinement network that leverages the same per-pixel shading representation. Finally, we introduce teacher-student transfer learning to produce better depth maps from both synthetic data with supervision and clinical data with self-supervision. We achieve state-of-the-art results on the C3VD dataset while estimating high-quality depth maps from clinical data.
Generating realistic human grasps is a crucial yet challenging task for applications involving object manipulation in computer graphics and robotics. Existing methods often struggle with generating fine-grained realistic human grasps that ensure all fingers effectively interact with objects, as they focus on encoding hand with the whole representation and then estimating both hand posture and position in a single step. In this paper, we propose a novel Decomposed Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoder (DVQ-VAE) to address this limitation by decomposing hand into several distinct parts and encoding them separately. This part-aware decomposed architecture facilitates more precise management of the interaction between each component of hand and object, enhancing the overall reality of generated human grasps. Furthermore, we design a newly dual-stage decoding strategy, by first determining the type of grasping under skeletal physical constraints, and then identifying the location of the grasp, which can greatly improve the verisimilitude as well as adaptability of the model to unseen hand-object interaction. In experiments, our model achieved about 14.1% relative improvement in the quality index compared to the state-of-the-art methods in four widely-adopted benchmarks. We will release the code and model.
Alignist: CAD-Informed Orientation Distribution Estimation by Fusing Shape and Correspondences
PDF ↗Object pose distribution estimation is crucial in robotics for better path planning and handling of symmetric objects. Recent distribution estimation approaches employ contrastive learning-based approaches by maximizing the likelihood of a single pose estimate in the absence of a CAD model. We propose a pose distribution estimation method leveraging symmetry respecting correspondence distributions and shape information obtained using a CAD model. Contrastive learning-based approaches require an exhaustive amount of training images from different viewpoints to learn the distribution properly, which is not possible in realistic scenarios. Instead, we propose a pipeline that can leverage correspondence distributions and shape information from the CAD model, which are later used to learn pose distributions. Besides, having access to pose distribution based on correspondences before learning pose distributions conditioned on images, can help formulate the loss between distributions. The prior knowledge of distribution also helps the network to focus on getting sharper modes instead. With the CAD prior, our approach converges much faster and learns distribution better by focusing on learning sharper distribution near all the valid modes, unlike contrastive approaches, which focus on a single mode at a time. We achieve benchmark results on SYMSOL-I and T-Less datasets.
Robotic grasping in clutters is a fundamental task in robotic manipulation. In this work, we propose an economic framework for 6-DoF grasp detection, aiming to economize the resource cost in training and meanwhile maintain effective grasp performance. To begin with, we discover that the dense supervision is the bottleneck that severely encumbers the entire training overload, meanwhile making the training difficult to converge. To solve the above problem, we first propose an economic supervision paradigm for efficient and effective grasping. This paradigm includes a well-designed supervision selection strategy, selecting key labels basically without ambiguity, and an economic pipeline to enable the training after selection. Furthermore, benefit from the economic supervision, we can focus on a specific grasp, and thus we devise a focal representation module, which comprises an interactive grasp head and a composite score estimation to generate the specific grasp more accurately. Combining all together, the EconomicGrasp framework is proposed. Our extensive experiments show that EconomicGrasp surpasses the SOTA grasp method by about 3AP on average, and with extremely low resource cost, for about 1/4 training time cost, 1/8 memory cost and 1/30 storage cost. Our code will be published.
Category-level pose estimation is a challenging task with many potential applications in computer vision and robotics. Recently, deep-learning-based approaches have made great progress, but are typically hindered by the need for large datasets of either pose-labelled real images or carefully tuned photorealistic simulators. This can be avoided by using only geometry inputs such as depth images to reduce the domain-gap but these approaches suffer from a lack of semantic information, which can be vital in the pose estimation problem. To resolve this conflict, we propose to utilize both geometric and semantic features obtained from a pre-trained foundation model. Our approach projects 2D semantic features into object models as 3D semantic point clouds. Based on the novel 3D representation, we further propose a self-supervision pipeline, and match the fused semantic point clouds against their synthetic rendered partial observations from synthetic object models. The learned knowledge from synthetic data generalizes to observations of unseen objects in the real scenes, without any fine-tuning. We demonstrate this with a rich evaluation on the NOCS, Wild6D and SUN RGB-D benchmarks, showing superior performance over geometric-only and semantic-only baselines with significantly fewer training objects.
Accurate object detection in LiDAR point clouds is a key prerequisite of robust and safe autonomous driving and robotics applications. Training the 3D object detectors currently involves the need to manually annotate vasts amounts of training data, which is very time-consuming and costly. As a result, the amount of annotated training data readily available is limited, and moreover these annotated datasets likely do not contain edge-case or otherwise rare instances, simply because the probability of them occurring in such a small dataset is low. In this paper, we propose a method to train 3D object detector without any need for manual annotations, by exploiting existing off-the-shelf vision components and by using the consistency of the world around us. The method can therefore be used to train a 3D detector by only collecting sensor recordings in the real world, which is extremely cheap and allows training using orders of magnitude more data than traditional fully-supervised methods. The method is evaluated on the both KITTI validation and test datasets, where it outperforms all previous weakly-supervised methods and where it narrows the gap when compared to methods using human 3D labels.
3D single object tracking (SOT) is an essential task in autonomous driving and robotics. However, learning robust 3D SOT trackers remains challenging due to the limited category-specific point cloud data and the inherent sparsity and incompleteness of LiDAR scans. To tackle these issues, we propose a unified 3D SOT framework that leverages 3D generative pre-training and learns robust 3D matching abilities from 2D pre-trained foundation trackers. Our framework features a consistent target-matching architecture with the widely used 2D trackers, facilitating the transfer of 2D matching knowledge. Specifically, we first propose a lightweight Target-Aware Projection (TAP) module, allowing the pre-trained 2D tracker to work well on the projected point clouds without further fine-tuning. We then propose a novel IoU-guided matching-distillation framework that utilizes the powerful 2D pre-trained trackers to guide 3D matching learning in the 3D tracker, i.e., the 3D template-to-search matching should be consistent with its corresponding 2D template-to-search matching obtained from 2D pre-trained trackers. Our designs are applied to two mainstream 3D SOT frameworks: memory-less Siamese and contextual memory-based approaches, which are respectively named SiamDisst and MemDisst. Extensive experiments show that SiamDisst and MemDisst achieve state-of-the-art performance on KITTI, Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes benchmarks, while running at the above real-time speed of 25 and 90 FPS on a single RTX3090 GPU. The code will be made publicly available.
Accurate reconstruction of complex dynamic scenes from just a single viewpoint continues to be a challenging task in computer vision. Current dynamic novel view synthesis methods typically require videos from many different camera viewpoints, necessitating careful recording setups, and significantly restricting their utility in the wild as well as in terms of embodied AI applications. In this paper, we propose GCD, a controllable monocular dynamic view synthesis pipeline that leverages large-scale diffusion priors to, given a video of any scene, generate a synchronous video from any other chosen perspective, conditioned on a set of relative camera pose parameters. Our model does not require depth as input, and does not explicitly model 3D scene geometry, instead performing end-to-end video-to-video translation in order to achieve its goal efficiently. Despite being trained on synthetic multi-view video data only, zero-shot real-world generalization experiments show promising results in multiple domains, including robotics, object permanence, and driving environments. We believe our framework can potentially unlock powerful applications in rich dynamic scene understanding, perception for robotics, and interactive 3D video viewing experiences for virtual reality. Project webpage: https://gcd.cs.columbia.edu/
Hand motion prediction from both first- and third-person perspectives is vital for enhancing user experience in AR/VR and ensuring safe remote robotic arm control. Previous works typically focus on predicting hand motion trajectories or human body motion, with direct hand motion prediction remaining largely unexplored - despite the additional challenges posed by compact skeleton size. To address this, we propose a prompt-based Future Driven Diffusion Model (PromptFDDM) for predicting hand motion with guidance and prompts. Specifically, we develop a Spatial-Temporal Extractor Network (STEN) to predict hand motion with guidance, a Ground Truth Extractor Network (GTEN), and a Reference Data Generator Network (RDGN), which extract ground truth and substitute future data with generated reference data, respectively, to guide STEN. Additionally, interactive prompts generated from observed motions further enhance model performance. Experimental results on the FPHA and HO3D datasets demonstrate that the proposed PromptFDDM achieves state-of-the-art performance in both first- and third-person perspectives.