3D Object Class Detection in the Wild

Object class detection has been a synonym for 2D bounding box localization for the longest time, fueled by the success of powerful statistical learning techniques, combined with robust image representations. Only recently, there has been a growing interest in revisiting the promise of computer vision from the early days: to precisely delineate the contents of a visual scene, object by object, in 3D. In this paper, we draw from recent advances in object detection and 2D-3D object lifting in order to design an object class detector that is particularly tailored towards 3D object class detection. Our 3D object class detection method consists of several stages gradually enriching the object detection output with object viewpoint, keypoints and 3D shape estimates. Following careful design, in each stage it constantly improves the performance and achieves state-ofthe-art performance in simultaneous 2D bounding box and viewpoint estimation on the challenging Pascal3D+ dataset

Multi-View Priors for Learning Detectors from Sparse Viewpoint Data

While the majority of today's object class models provide only 2D bounding boxes, far richer output hypotheses are desirable including viewpoint, fine-grained category, and 3D geometry estimate. However, models trained to provide richer output require larger amounts of training data, preferably well covering the relevant aspects such as viewpoint and fine-grained categories. In this paper, we address this issue from the perspective of transfer learning, and design an object class model that explicitly leverages correlations between visual features. Specifically, our model represents prior distributions over permissible multi-view detectors in a parametric way -- the priors are learned once from training data of a source object class, and can later be used to facilitate the learning of a detector for a target class. As we show in our experiments, this transfer is not only beneficial for detectors based on basic-level category representations, but also enables the robust learning of detectors that represent classes at finer levels of granularity, where training data is typically even scarcer and more unbalanced. As a result, we report largely improved performance in simultaneous 2D object localization and viewpoint estimation on a recent dataset of challenging street scenes.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables, International Conference on Learning Representations 201

3D scanning of cultural heritage with consumer depth cameras

Three dimensional reconstruction of cultural heritage objects is an expensive and time-consuming process. Recent consumer real-time depth acquisition devices, like Microsoft Kinect, allow very fast and simple acquisition of 3D views. However 3D scanning with such devices is a challenging task due to the limited accuracy and reliability of the acquired data. This paper introduces a 3D reconstruction pipeline suited to use consumer depth cameras as hand-held scanners for cultural heritage objects. Several new contributions have been made to achieve this result. They include an ad-hoc filtering scheme that exploits the model of the error on the acquired data and a novel algorithm for the extraction of salient points exploiting both depth and color data. Then the salient points are used within a modified version of the ICP algorithm that exploits both geometry and color distances to precisely align the views even when geometry information is not sufficient to constrain the registration. The proposed method, although applicable to generic scenes, has been tuned to the acquisition of sculptures and in this connection its performance is rather interesting as the experimental results indicate

Proposal Flow: Semantic Correspondences from Object Proposals

Finding image correspondences remains a challenging problem in the presence of intra-class variations and large changes in scene layout. Semantic flow methods are designed to handle images depicting different instances of the same object or scene category. We introduce a novel approach to semantic flow, dubbed proposal flow, that establishes reliable correspondences using object proposals. Unlike prevailing semantic flow approaches that operate on pixels or regularly sampled local regions, proposal flow benefits from the characteristics of modern object proposals, that exhibit high repeatability at multiple scales, and can take advantage of both local and geometric consistency constraints among proposals. We also show that the corresponding sparse proposal flow can effectively be transformed into a conventional dense flow field. We introduce two new challenging datasets that can be used to evaluate both general semantic flow techniques and region-based approaches such as proposal flow. We use these benchmarks to compare different matching algorithms, object proposals, and region features within proposal flow, to the state of the art in semantic flow. This comparison, along with experiments on standard datasets, demonstrates that proposal flow significantly outperforms existing semantic flow methods in various settings.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1511.0506