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1. Generalized Visual Odometry via Cross-Modal Self-Training

   Lai, Lei; Shangguan, Zhongkai; Zhang, Jimuyang; Ohn-Bar, Eshed (October 2023, International Conference on Computer Vision)

   We propose XVO, a semi-supervised learning method for training generalized monocular Visual Odometry (VO) models with robust off-the-self operation across diverse datasets and settings. In contrast to standard monocular VO approaches which often study a known calibration within a single dataset, XVO efficiently learns to recover relative pose with real-world scale from visual scene semantics, i.e., without relying on any known camera parameters. We optimize the motion estimation model via self-training from large amounts of unconstrained and heterogeneous dash camera videos available on YouTube. Our key contribution is twofold. First, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of semi-supervised training for learning a general-purpose direct VO regression network. Second, we demonstrate multi-modal supervision, including segmentation, flow, depth, and audio auxiliary prediction tasks, to facilitate generalized representations for the VO task. Specifically, we find audio prediction task to significantly enhance the semi-supervised learning process while alleviating noisy pseudo-labels, particularly in highly dynamic and out-of-domain video data. Our proposed teacher network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the commonly used KITTI benchmark despite no multi-frame optimization or knowledge of camera parameters. Combined with the proposed semi-supervised step, XVO demonstrates off-the-shelf knowledge transfer across diverse conditions on KITTI, nuScenes, and Argoverse without fine-tuning. 

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2. EV-FlowNet: Self-Supervised Optical Flow Estimation for Event-based Cameras

   Alex Zihao Zhu, Liangzhe Yuan (January 2018, Robotics: Science and Systems)

   Event-based cameras have shown great promise in a variety of situations where frame based cameras suffer, such as high speed motions and high dynamic range scenes. However, developing algorithms for event measurements requires a new class of hand crafted algorithms. Deep learning has shown great success in providing model free solutions to many problems in the vision community, but existing networks have been developed with frame based images in mind, and there does not exist the wealth of labeled data for events as there does for images for supervised training. To these points, we present EV-FlowNet, a novel self-supervised deep learning pipeline for optical flow estimation for event based cameras. In particular, we introduce an image based representation of a given event stream, which is fed into a self-supervised neural network as the sole input. The corresponding grayscale images captured from the same camera at the same time as the events are then used as a supervisory signal to provide a loss function at training time, given the estimated flow from the network. We show that the resulting network is able to accurately predict optical flow from events only in a variety of different scenes, with performance competitive to image based networks. This method not only allows for accurate estimation of dense optical flow, but also provides a framework for the transfer of other self-supervised methods to the event-based domain. 

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3. A correct-and-certify approach to self-supervise object pose estimators via ensemble self-training

   J. Shil; R. Talak; D. Maggio; L. Carlone (July 2023, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS))

   Real-world robotics applications demand object pose estimation methods that work reliably across a variety of scenarios. Modern learning-based approaches require large labeled datasets and tend to perform poorly outside the training domain. Our first contribution is to develop a robust corrector module that corrects pose estimates using depth information, thus enabling existing methods to better generalize to new test domains; the corrector operates on semantic keypoints (but is also applicable to other pose estimators) and is fully differentiable. Our second contribution is an ensemble self-training approach that simultaneously trains multiple pose estimators in a self-supervised manner. Our ensemble self-training architecture uses the robust corrector to refine the output of each pose estimator; then, it evaluates the quality of the outputs using observable correctness certificates; finally, it uses the observably correct outputs for further training, without requiring external supervision. As an additional contribution, we propose small improvements to a regression-based keypoint detection architecture, to enhance its robustness to outliers; these improvements include a robust pooling scheme and a robust centroid computation. Experiments on the YCBV and TLESS datasets show the proposed ensemble self-training outperforms fully supervised baselines while not requiring 3D annotations on real data. 

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4. An Unsupervised Approach for Simultaneous Visual Odometry and Single Image Depth Estimation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN55064.2022.9892294  

   Lu, Yawen; Lu, Guoyu (January 2022, IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Network (IJCNN))

   Visual odometry (VO) and single image depth estimation are critical for robot vision, 3D reconstruction, and camera pose estimation that can be applied to autonomous driving, map building, augmented reality and many other applications. Various supervised learning models have been proposed to train the VO or single image depth estimation framework for each targeted scene to improve the performance recently. However, little effort has been made to learn these separate tasks together without requiring the collection of a significant number of labels. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised learning approach to simultaneously perceive VO and single image depth estimation. In our framework, either of these tasks can benefit from each other through simultaneously learning these two tasks. We correlate these two tasks by enforcing depth consistency between VO and single image depth estimation. Based on the single image depth estimation, we can resolve the most common and challenging scaling issue of monocular VO. Meanwhile, through training from a sequence of images, VO can enhance the single image depth estimation accuracy. The effectiveness of our proposed method is demonstrated through extensive experiments compared with current state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark datasets. 

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5. Confidence Estimation Using Unlabeled Data

   Li, Chen; Hu, Xiaoling; Chen, Chao (May 2023, International Conference on Learning Representations)

   Overconfidence is a common issue for deep neural networks, limiting their deployment in real-world applications. To better estimate confidence, existing methods mostly focus on fully-supervised scenarios and rely on training labels. In this paper, we propose the first confidence estimation method for a semi-supervised setting, when most training labels are unavailable. We stipulate that even with limited training labels, we can still reasonably approximate the confidence of model on unlabeled samples by inspecting the prediction consistency through the training process. We use training consistency as a surrogate function and propose a consistency ranking loss for confidence estimation. On both image classification and segmentation tasks, our method achieves state-of-the-art performances in confidence estimation. Furthermore, we show the benefit of the proposed method through a downstream active learning task. 

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