SFNet: Learning Object-aware Semantic Correspondence

We address the problem of semantic correspondence, that is, establishing a dense flow field between images depicting different instances of the same object or scene category. We propose to use images annotated with binary foreground masks and subjected to synthetic geometric deformations to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) for this task. Using these masks as part of the supervisory signal offers a good compromise between semantic flow methods, where the amount of training data is limited by the cost of manually selecting point correspondences, and semantic alignment ones, where the regression of a single global geometric transformation between images may be sensitive to image-specific details such as background clutter. We propose a new CNN architecture, dubbed SFNet, which implements this idea. It leverages a new and differentiable version of the argmax function for end-to-end training, with a loss that combines mask and flow consistency with smoothness terms. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which significantly outperforms the state of the art on standard benchmarks.Comment: cvpr 2019 oral pape

Real-time Monocular Object SLAM

We present a real-time object-based SLAM system that leverages the largest object database to date. Our approach comprises two main components: 1) a monocular SLAM algorithm that exploits object rigidity constraints to improve the map and find its real scale, and 2) a novel object recognition algorithm based on bags of binary words, which provides live detections with a database of 500 3D objects. The two components work together and benefit each other: the SLAM algorithm accumulates information from the observations of the objects, anchors object features to especial map landmarks and sets constrains on the optimization. At the same time, objects partially or fully located within the map are used as a prior to guide the recognition algorithm, achieving higher recall. We evaluate our proposal on five real environments showing improvements on the accuracy of the map and efficiency with respect to other state-of-the-art techniques

Skeleton Driven Non-rigid Motion Tracking and 3D Reconstruction

This paper presents a method which can track and 3D reconstruct the non-rigid surface motion of human performance using a moving RGB-D camera. 3D reconstruction of marker-less human performance is a challenging problem due to the large range of articulated motions and considerable non-rigid deformations. Current approaches use local optimization for tracking. These methods need many iterations to converge and may get stuck in local minima during sudden articulated movements. We propose a puppet model-based tracking approach using skeleton prior, which provides a better initialization for tracking articulated movements. The proposed approach uses an aligned puppet model to estimate correct correspondences for human performance capture. We also contribute a synthetic dataset which provides ground truth locations for frame-by-frame geometry and skeleton joints of human subjects. Experimental results show that our approach is more robust when faced with sudden articulated motions, and provides better 3D reconstruction compared to the existing state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: Accepted in DICTA 201