By estimating 3D shape and instances from a single view, we can capture information about the environment quickly, without the need for comprehensive scanning and multi-view fusion. Solving this task for composite scenes (such as object stacks) is challenging: occluded areas are not only ambiguous in shape but also in instance segmentation; multiple decompositions could be valid. We observe that physics constrains decomposition as well as shape in occluded regions and hypothesise that a latent space learned from scenes built under physics simulation can serve as a prior to better predict shape and instances in occluded regions. To this end we propose SIMstack, a depth-conditioned Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE), trained on a dataset of objects stacked under physics simulation. We formulate instance segmentation as a center voting task which allows for class-agnostic detection and doesn't require setting the maximum number of objects in the scene. At test time, our model can generate 3D shape and instance segmentation from a single depth view, probabilistically sampling proposals for the occluded region from the learned latent space. We argue that this method has practical applications in providing robots some of the ability humans have to make rapid intuitive inferences of partially observed scenes. We demonstrate an application for precise (non-disruptive) object grasping of unknown objects from a single depth view.
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3D LiDAR (light detection and ranging) semantic segmentation is important in scene understanding for many applications, such as auto-driving and robotics. For example, for autonomous cars equipped with RGB cameras and LiDAR, it is crucial to fuse complementary information from different sensors for robust and accurate segmentation. Existing fusion-based methods, however, may not achieve promising performance due to the vast difference between the two modalities. In this work, we investigate a collaborative fusion scheme called perception-aware multi-sensor fusion (PMF) to exploit perceptual information from two modalities, namely, appearance information from RGB images and spatio-depth information from point clouds. To this end, we first project point clouds to the camera coordinates to provide spatio-depth information for RGB images. Then, we propose a two-stream network to extract features from the two modalities, separately, and fuse the features by effective residual-based fusion modules. Moreover, we propose additional perception-aware losses to measure the perceptual difference between the two modalities. Extensive experiments on two benchmark data sets show the superiority of our method. For example, on nuScenes, our PMF outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 0.8% in mIoU.
While predicting robot grasps with parallel jaw grippers have been well studied and widely applied in robot manipulation tasks, the study on natural human grasp generation with a multi-finger hand remains a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose to generate human grasps given a 3D object in the world. Our key observation is that it is crucial to model the consistency between the hand contact points and object contact regions. That is, we encourage the prior hand contact points to be close to the object surface and the object common contact regions to be touched by the hand at the same time. Based on the hand-object contact consistency, we design novel objectives in training the human grasp generation model and also a new self-supervised task which allows the grasp generation network to be adjusted even during test time. Our experiments show significant improvement in human grasp generation over state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin. More interestingly, by optimizing the model during test time with the self-supervised task, it helps achieve larger gain on unseen and out-of-domain objects. Project page: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/GraspTTA/.
Indoor visual localization is significant for various applications such as autonomous robots, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Recent advances in visual localization have demonstrated their feasibility in large-scale indoor spaces through coarse-to-fine methods that typically employ three steps: image retrieval, pose estimation, and pose selection. However, further research is needed to improve the accuracy of large-scale indoor visual localization. We demonstrate that the limitations in the previous methods can be attributed to the sparsity of image positions in the database, which causes view-differences between a query and a retrieved image from the database. In this paper, to address this problem, we propose a novel module, named pose correction, that enables re-estimation of the pose with local feature matching in a similar view by reorganizing the local features. This module enhances the accuracy of the initially estimated pose and assigns more reliable ranks. Furthermore, the proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of more than 90% within 1.0m in the challenging indoor benchmark dataset InLoc for the first time.
From an early age, humans perceive the visual world as composed of coherent objects with distinctive properties such as shape, size, and color. There is great interest in building models that are able to learn similar structure, ideally in an unsupervised manner. Learning such structure from complex 3D scenes that include clutter, occlusions, interactions, and camera motion is still an open challenge. We present a model that is able to segment visual scenes from complex 3D environments into distinct objects, learn disentangled representations of individual objects, and form consistent and coherent predictions of future frames, in a fully unsupervised manner. Our model (named PARTS) builds on recent approaches that utilize iterative amortized inference and transition dynamics for deep generative models. We achieve dramatic improvements in performance by introducing several novel contributions. We introduce a recurrent slot-attention like encoder which allows for top-down influence during inference. Unlike prior work, we eschew using an auto-regressive prior when modeling image sequences, and demonstrate that a fixed frame-independent prior is superior for the purpose of scene segmentation and representation learning. We demonstrate our model's success on three different video datasets (the popular benchmark CLEVRER; a simulated 3D Playroom environment; and a real-world Robotics Arm dataset). Finally, we analyze the contributions of the various model components and the representations learned by the model.
Glass-like objects such as windows, bottles, and mirrors exist widely in the real world. Sensing these objects has many applications, including robot navigation and grasping. However, this task is very challenging due to the arbitrary scenes behind glass-like objects. This paper aims to solve the glass-like object segmentation problem via enhanced boundary learning. In particular, we first propose a novel refined differential module that outputs finer boundary cues. We then introduce an edge-aware point-based graph convolution network module to model the global shape along the boundary. We use these two modules to design a decoder that generates accurate and clean segmentation results, especially on the object contours. Both modules are lightweight and effective: they can be embedded into various segmentation models. In extensive experiments on three recent glass-like object segmentation datasets, including Trans10k, MSD, and GDD, our approach establishes new state-of-the-art results. We also illustrate the strong generalization properties of our method on three generic segmentation datasets, including Cityscapes, BDD, and COCO Stuff. Code and models will be available for further research.
The ability to find correspondences in visual data is the essence of most computer vision tasks. But what are the right correspondences? The task of visual correspondence is well defined for two different images of same object instance. In case of two images of objects belonging to same category, visual correspondence is reasonably well-defined in most cases. But what about correspondence between two objects of completely different category -- e.g., a shoe and a bottle? Does there exist any correspondence? Inspired by humans' ability to: (a) generalize beyond semantic categories and; (b) infer functional affordances, we introduce the problem of functional correspondences in this paper. Given images of two objects, we ask a simple question: what is the set of correspondences between these two images for a given task? For example, what are the correspondences between a bottle and shoe for the task of pounding or the task of pouring. We introduce a new dataset: FunKPoint that has ground truth correspondences for 10 tasks and 20 object categories. We also introduce a modular task-driven representation for attacking this problem and demonstrate that our learned representation is effective for this task. But most importantly, because our supervision signal is not bound by semantics, we show that our learned representation can generalize better on few-shot classification problem. We hope this paper will inspire our community to think beyond semantics and focus more on cross-category generalization and learning representations for robotics tasks.
Vision-Dialog Navigation (VDN) requires an agent to ask questions and navigate following the human responses to find target objects. Conventional approaches are only allowed to ask questions at predefined locations, which are built upon expensive dialogue annotations, and inconvenience the real-word human-robot communication and cooperation. In this paper, we propose a Self-Motivated Communication Agent (SCoA) that learns whether and what to communicate with human adaptively to acquire instructive information for realizing dialogue annotation-free navigation and enhancing the transferability in real-world unseen environment. Specifically, we introduce a whether-to-ask (WeTA) policy, together with uncertainty of which action to choose, to indicate whether the agent should ask a question. Then, a what-to-ask (WaTA) policy is proposed, in which, along with the oracle's answers, the agent learns to score question candidates so as to pick up the most informative one for navigation, and meanwhile mimic oracle's answering. Thus, the agent can navigate in a self-Q&A manner even in real-world environment where the human assistance is often unavailable. Through joint optimization of communication and navigation in a unified imitation learning and reinforcement learning framework, SCoA asks a question if necessary and obtains a hint for guiding the agent to move towards the target with less communication cost. Experiments on seen and unseen environments demonstrate that SCoA shows not only superior performance over existing baselines without dialog annotations, but also competing results compared with rich dialog annotations based counterparts.
A long-standing goal in computer vision is to capture, model, and realistically synthesize human behavior. Specifically, by learning from data, our goal is to enable virtual humans to navigate within cluttered indoor scenes and naturally interact with objects. Such embodied behavior has applications in virtual reality, computer games, and robotics, while synthesized behavior can be used as a source of training data. This is challenging because real human motion is diverse and adapts to the scene. For example, a person can sit or lie on a sofa in many places and with varying styles. It is necessary to model this diversity when synthesizing virtual humans that realistically perform human-scene interactions. We present a novel data-driven, stochastic motion synthesis method that models different styles of performing a given action with a target object. Our method, called SAMP, for Scene-Aware Motion Prediction, generalizes to target objects of various geometries while enabling the character to navigate in cluttered scenes. To train our method, we collected MoCap data covering various sitting, lying down, walking, and running styles. We demonstrate our method on complex indoor scenes and achieve superior performance compared to existing solutions. Our code and data are available for research at https://samp.is.tue.mpg.de.
Trajectory forecasting is a crucial step for autonomous vehicles and mobile robots in order to navigate and interact safely. In order to handle the spatial interactions between objects, graph-based approaches have been proposed. These methods, however, model motion on a frame-to-frame basis and do not provide a strong temporal model. To overcome this limitation, we propose a compact model called Spatial-Temporal Consistency Network (STC-Net). In STC-Net, dilated temporal convolutions are introduced to model long-range dependencies along each trajectory for better temporal modeling while graph convolutions are employed to model the spatial interaction among different trajectories. Furthermore, we propose a feature-wise convolution to generate the predicted trajectories in one pass and refine the forecast trajectories together with the reconstructed observed trajectories. We demonstrate that STC-Net generates spatially and temporally consistent trajectories and outperforms other graph-based methods. Since STC-Net requires only 0.7k parameters and forecasts the future with a latency of only 1.3ms, it advances the state-of-the-art and satisfies the requirements for realistic applications.
RGBD (RGB plus depth) object tracking is gaining momentum as RGBD sensors have become popular in many application fields such as robotics. However, the best RGBD trackers are extensions of the state-of-the-art deep RGB trackers. They are trained with RGB data and the depth channel is used as a sidekick for subtleties such as occlusion detection. This can be explained by the fact that there are no sufficiently large RGBD datasets to 1) train "deep depth trackers" and to 2) challenge RGB trackers with sequences for which the depth cue is essential. This work introduces a new RGBD tracking dataset - DepthTrack - that has twice as many sequences (200) and scene types (40) than in the largest existing dataset, and three times more objects (90). In addition, the average length of the sequences (1473), the number of deformable objects (16) and the number of annotated tracking attributes (15) have been increased. Furthermore, by running the SotA RGB and RGBD trackers on DepthTrack, we propose a new RGBD tracking baseline, namely DeT, which reveals that deep RGBD tracking indeed benefits from genuine training data. The code and dataset is available at https://github.com/xiaozai/DeT.
Tracking non-rigidly deforming scenes using range sensors has numerous applications including computer vision, AR/VR, and robotics. However, due to occlusions and physical limitations of range sensors, existing methods only handle the visible surface, thus causing discontinuities and incompleteness in the motion field. To this end, we introduce 4DComplete, a novel data-driven approach that estimates the non-rigid motion for the unobserved geometry. 4DComplete takes as input a partial shape and motion observation, extracts 4D time-space embedding, and jointly infers the missing geometry and motion field using a sparse fully-convolutional network. For network training, we constructed a large-scale synthetic dataset called DeformingThings4D, which consists of 1,972 animation sequences spanning 31 different animals or humanoid categories with dense 4D annotation. Experiments show that 4DComplete 1) reconstructs high-resolution volumetric shape and motion field from a partial observation, 2) learns an entangled 4D feature representation that benefits both shape and motion estimation, 3) yields more accurate and natural deformation than classic non-rigid priors such as As-RigidAs-Possible (ARAP) deformation, and 4) generalizes well to unseen objects in real-world sequences.
Monocular object detection and tracking have improved drastically in recent years, but rely on a key assumption: that objects are visible to the camera. Many offline tracking approaches reason about occluded objects post-hoc, by linking together tracklets after the object re-appears, making use of reidentification (ReID). However, online tracking in embodied robotic agents (such as a self-driving vehicle) fundamentally requires object permanence, which is the ability to reason about occluded objects before they re-appear. In this work, we re-purpose tracking benchmarks and propose new metrics for the task of detecting invisible objects, focusing on the illustrative case of people. We demonstrate that current detection and tracking systems perform dramatically worse on this task. We introduce two key innovations to recover much of this performance drop. We treat occluded object detection in temporal sequences as a short-term forecasting challenge, bringing to bear tools from dynamic sequence prediction. Second, we build dynamic models that explicitly reason in 3D from monocular videos without calibration, using observations produced by monocular depth estimators. To our knowledge, ours is the first work to demonstrate the effectiveness of monocular depth estimation for the task of tracking and detecting occluded objects. Our approach strongly improves by 11.4% over the baseline in ablations and by 5.0% over the state-of-the-art in F1 score.
Efficient and robust grasp pose detection is vital for robotic manipulation. For general 6 DoF grasping, conventional methods treat all points in a scene equally and usually adopt uniform sampling to select grasp candidates. However, we discover that ignoring where to grasp greatly harms the speed and accuracy of current grasp pose detection methods. In this paper, we propose "graspness", a quality based on geometry cues that distinguishes graspable area in cluttered scenes. A look-ahead searching method is proposed for measuring the graspness and statistical results justify the rationality of our method. To quickly detect graspness in practice, we develop a neural network named graspness model to approximate the searching process. Extensive experiments verify the stability, generality and effectiveness of our graspness model, allowing it to be used as a plug-and-play module for different methods. A large improvement in accuracy is witnessed for various previous methods after equipping our graspness model. Moreover, we develop GSNet, an end-to-end network that incorporates our graspness model for early filtering of low-quality predictions. Experiments on a large-scale benchmark, GraspNet-1Billion, show that our method outperforms previous arts by a large margin (30+ AP) and achieves a high inference speed. Our code and model will be made publicly available.
In recent years, many dexterous robotic hands have been designed to assist or replace human hands in executing various tasks. But how to teach them to perform dexterous operations like human hands is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a grasp synthesis framework to make robots grasp and manipulate objects like human beings. We first build a dataset by accurately segmenting the functional areas of the object and annotating semantic touch code for each functional area to guide the dexterous hand to complete the functional grasp and post-grasp manipulation. This dataset contains 18 categories of 129 objects selected from four datasets, and 15 people participated in data annotation. Then we carefully design four loss functions to constrain the network, which successfully generates the functional grasp of dexterous hand under the guidance of semantic touch code. The thorough experiments in synthetic data show our model can robustly generate functional grasp, even for objects that the model has not see before.
Most existing Siamese-based tracking methods execute the classification and regression of the target object based on the similarity maps. However, they either employ a single map from the last convolutional layer which degrades the localization accuracy in complex scenarios or separately use multiple maps for decision making, introducing intractable computations for aerial mobile platforms. Thus, in this work, we propose an efficient and effective hierarchical feature transformer (HiFT) for aerial tracking. Hierarchical similarity maps generated by multi-level convolutional layers are fed into the feature transformer to achieve the interactive fusion of spatial (shallow layers) and semantics cues (deep layers). Consequently, not only the global contextual information can be raised, facilitating the target search, but also our end-to-end architecture with the transformer can efficiently learn the interdependencies among multi-level features, thereby discovering a tracking-tailored feature space with strong discriminability. Comprehensive evaluations on four aerial benchmarks have proven the effectiveness of HiFT. Real-world tests on the aerial platform have strongly validated its practicability with a real-time speed. Our code is available at https://github.com/vision4robotics/HiFT.
We introduce the active audio-visual source separation problem, where an agent must move intelligently in order to better isolate the sounds coming from an object of interest in its environment. The agent hears multiple audio sources simultaneously (e.g., a person speaking down the hall in a noisy household) and it must use its eyes and ears to automatically separate out the sounds originating from a target object within a limited time budget. Towards this goal, we introduce a reinforcement learning approach that trains movement policies controlling the agent's camera and microphone placement over time, guided by the improvement in predicted audio separation quality. We demonstrate our approach in scenarios motivated by both augmented reality (system is already co-located with the target object) and mobile robotics (agent begins arbitrarily far from the target object). Using state-of-the-art realistic audio-visual simulations in 3D environments, we demonstrate our model's ability to find minimal movement sequences with maximal payoff for audio source separation. Project: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/move2hear
Developing deep neural networks to generate 3D scenes is a fundamental problem in neural synthesis with immediate applications in architectural CAD, computer graphics, as well as in generating virtual robot training environments. This task is challenging because 3D scenes exhibit diverse patterns, ranging from continuous ones, such as object sizes and the relative poses between pairs of shapes, to discrete patterns, such as occurrence and co-occurrence of objects with symmetrical relationships. This paper introduces a novel neural scene synthesis approach that can capture diverse feature patterns of 3D scenes. Our method combines the strength of both neural network-based and conventional scene synthesis approaches. We use the parametric prior distributions learned from training data, which provide uncertainties of object attributes and relative attributes, to regularize the outputs of feed-forward neural models. Moreover, instead of merely predicting a scene layout, our approach predicts an over-complete set of attributes. This methodology allows us to utilize the underlying consistency constraints among the predicted attributes to prune infeasible predictions. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing methods considerably. The generated 3D scenes interpolate the training data faithfully while preserving both continuous and discrete feature patterns.
Human motion synthesis is an important problem for applications in graphics and gaming, and even in simulation environments for robotics. Existing methods require accurate motion capture data for training, which is costly to obtain. Instead, we propose a framework for training generative models of physically plausible human motion directly from monocular RGB videos, which are much more widely available. At the core of our method is a novel optimization formulation that aims to correct imperfect image-based pose estimations by enforcing physics constraints and reasons about contacts in a differentiable way. This optimization yields corrected 3D poses and motions, as well as their corresponding contact forces. Results show that our physically-correct motions significantly outperform prior work on pose estimation. We then train a generative model to synthesize both future motion and contact forces. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively significantly improved motion synthesis quality and physical plausibility achieved by our method on the large scale Human3.6m dataset as compared to prior learning-based kinematic and physics-based methods. By learning directly from video, our method paves the way for large-scale, realistic and diverse motion synthesis not previously possible.
Object handover is a common human collaboration behavior that attracts attention from researchers in Robotics and Cognitive Science. Though visual perception plays an important role in the object handover task, the whole handover process has been specifically explored. In this work, we propose a novel rich-annotated dataset, H2O, for visual analysis of human-human object handovers. The H2O, which contains 18K video clips involving 15 people who hand over 30 objects to each other, is a multi-purpose benchmark. It can support several vision-based tasks, from which, we specifically provide a baseline method, RGPNet, for a less-explored task named Receiver Grasp Prediction. Extensive experiments show that the RGPNet can produce plausible grasps based on the giver's hand-object states in the pre-handover phase. Besides, we also report the hand and object pose errors with existing baselines and show that the dataset can serve as the video demonstrations for robot imitation learning on the handover task.