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1. A High-Resolution Dataset for Instance Detection with Multi-View Instance Capture

   Shen, Qianqian; Zhao, Yunhan; Kwon, Nahyun; Kim, Jeeeun; Li, Yanan; Kong, Shu (May 2024, Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, Inc. (NeurIPS))

   Instance detection (InsDet) is a long-lasting problem in robotics and computer vision, aiming to detect object instances (predefined by some visual examples) in a cluttered scene. Despite its practical significance, its advancement is overshadowed by Object Detection, which aims to detect objects belonging to some predefined classes. One major reason is that current InsDet datasets are too small in scale by today's standards. For example, the popular InsDet dataset GMU (published in 2016) has only 23 instances, far less than COCO (80 classes), a well-known object detection dataset published in 2014. We are motivated to introduce a new InsDet dataset and protocol. First, we define a realistic setup for InsDet: training data consists of multi-view instance captures, along with diverse scene images allowing synthesizing training images by pasting instance images on them with free box annotations. Second, we release a real-world database, which contains multi-view capture of 100 object instances, and high-resolution (6k\texttimes{} 8k) testing images. Third, we extensively study baseline methods for InsDet on our dataset, analyze their performance and suggest future work. Somewhat surprisingly, using the off-the-shelf class-agnostic segmentation model (Segment Anything Model, SAM) and the self-supervised feature representation DINOv2 performs the best, achieving >10 AP better than end-to-end trained InsDet models that repurpose object detectors (e.g., FasterRCNN and RetinaNet). 

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2. Recognizing Objects from Any View with Object and Viewer-Centered Representations

   Liu, Sainan; Nguyen, Vincent; Rehg, Isaac; Tu, Zhuowen (June 2020, IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition)

   In this paper, we tackle an important task in computer vision: any view object recognition. In both training and testing, for each object instance, we are only given its 2D image viewed from an unknown angle. We propose a computational framework by designing object and viewer-centered neural networks (OVCNet) to recognize an object instance viewed from an arbitrary unknown angle. OVCNet consists of three branches that respectively implement object-centered, 3D viewer-centered, and in-plane viewer-centered recognition. We evaluate our proposed OVCNet using two metrics with unseen views from both seen and novel object instances. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of OVCNet over classic 2D-image-based CNN classi fiers, 3D-object (inferred from 2D image) classifiers, and competing multi-view based approaches. It gives rise to a viable and practical computing framework that combines both viewpoint-dependent and viewpoint-independent features for object recognition from any view. 

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3. Scene-level Pose Estimation for Multiple Instances of Densely Packed Objects

   Mitash, Chaitanya; Boularias, Abdeslam; Bekris, Kostas (July 2019, Conference on Robot Learning)

   This paper introduces key machine learning operations that allow the realization of robust, joint 6D pose estimation of multiple instances of objects either densely packed or in unstructured piles from RGB-D data. The first objective is to learn semantic and instance-boundary detectors without manual labeling. An adversarial training framework in conjunction with physics-based simulation is used to achieve detectors that behave similarly in synthetic and real data. Given the stochastic output of such detectors, candidates for object poses are sampled. The second objective is to automatically learn a single score for each pose candidate that represents its quality in terms of explaining the entire scene via a gradient boosted tree. The proposed method uses features derived from surface and boundary alignment between the observed scene and the object model placed at hypothesized poses. Scene-level, multi-instance pose estimation is then achieved by an integer linear programming process that selects hypotheses that maximize the sum of the learned individual scores, while respecting constraints, such as avoiding collisions. To evaluate this method, a dataset of densely packed objects with challenging setups for state-of-the-art approaches is collected. Experiments on this dataset and a public one show that the method significantly outperforms alternatives in terms of 6D pose accuracy while trained only with synthetic datasets. 

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4. Multiview Aerial Visual Recognition (MAVREC): Can Multi-View Improve Aerial Visual Perception?

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52733.2024.02140  

   Dutta, Aritra; Das, Srijan; Nielsen, Jacob; Chakraborty, Rajatsubhra; Shah, Mubarak (June 2024, IEEE)

   Despite the commercial abundance of UAVs, aerial data acquisition remains challenging, and the existing Asia and North America-centric open-source UAV datasets are small- scale or low-resolution and lack diversity in scene contextuality. Additionally, the color content of the scenes, solar zenith angle, and population density of different geographies influence the data diversity. These factors conjointly render suboptimal aerial-visual perception of the deep neural net- work (DNN) models trained primarily on the ground view data, including the open-world foundational models. To pave the way for a transformative era of aerial detection, we present Multiview Aerial Visual RECognition or MAVREC, a video dataset where we record synchronized scenes from different perspectives — ground camera and drone-mounted camera. MAVREC consists of around 2.5 hours of industry-standard 2.7K resolution video sequences, more than 0.5 million frames, and 1.1 million annotated bounding boxes. This makes MAVREC the largest ground and aerial view dataset, and the fourth largest among all drone-based datasets across all modalities and tasks. Through our extensive benchmarking on MAVREC, we recognize that augmenting object detectors with ground view images from the corresponding geographical location is a superior pre-training strategy for aerial detection. Building on this strategy, we benchmark MAVREC with a curriculum- based semi-supervised object detection approach that lever- ages labeled (ground and aerial) and unlabeled (only aerial) images to enhance aerial detection. 

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5. Neural Groundplans: Persistent Neural Scene Representations from a Single Image

   Sharma, Prafull; Tewari, Ayush; Du, Yilun; Zakharov, Sergey; Ambrus, Rares Andrei; Gaidon, Adrien; Freeman, William T.; Durand, Fredo; Tenenbaum, Joshua B.; Sitzmann, Vincent (February 2023, International Conference on Learning Representations)

   We present a method to map 2D image observations of a scene to a persistent 3D scene representation, enabling novel view synthesis and disentangled representation of the movable and immovable components of the scene. Motivated by the bird’s-eye-view (BEV) representation commonly used in vision and robotics, we propose conditional neural groundplans, ground-aligned 2D feature grids, as persistent and memory-efficient scene representations. Our method is trained self-supervised from unlabeled multi-view observations using differentiable rendering, and learns to complete geometry and appearance of occluded regions. In addition, we show that we can leverage multi-view videos at training time to learn to separately reconstruct static and movable components of the scene from a single image at test time. The ability to separately reconstruct movable objects enables a variety of downstream tasks using simple heuristics, such as extraction of object-centric 3D representations, novel view synthesis, instance-level segmentation, 3D bounding box prediction, and scene editing. This highlights the value of neural groundplans as a backbone for efficient 3D scene understanding models. 

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