Real-Time Seamless Single Shot 6D Object Pose Prediction

We propose a single-shot approach for simultaneously detecting an object in an RGB image and predicting its 6D pose without requiring multiple stages or having to examine multiple hypotheses. Unlike a recently proposed single-shot technique for this task (Kehl et al., ICCV'17) that only predicts an approximate 6D pose that must then be refined, ours is accurate enough not to require additional post-processing. As a result, it is much faster - 50 fps on a Titan X (Pascal) GPU - and more suitable for real-time processing. The key component of our method is a new CNN architecture inspired by the YOLO network design that directly predicts the 2D image locations of the projected vertices of the object's 3D bounding box. The object's 6D pose is then estimated using a PnP algorithm. For single object and multiple object pose estimation on the LINEMOD and OCCLUSION datasets, our approach substantially outperforms other recent CNN-based approaches when they are all used without post-processing. During post-processing, a pose refinement step can be used to boost the accuracy of the existing methods, but at 10 fps or less, they are much slower than our method.Comment: CVPR 201

Res2Net: A New Multi-scale Backbone Architecture

Representing features at multiple scales is of great importance for numerous vision tasks. Recent advances in backbone convolutional neural networks (CNNs) continually demonstrate stronger multi-scale representation ability, leading to consistent performance gains on a wide range of applications. However, most existing methods represent the multi-scale features in a layer-wise manner. In this paper, we propose a novel building block for CNNs, namely Res2Net, by constructing hierarchical residual-like connections within one single residual block. The Res2Net represents multi-scale features at a granular level and increases the range of receptive fields for each network layer. The proposed Res2Net block can be plugged into the state-of-the-art backbone CNN models, e.g., ResNet, ResNeXt, and DLA. We evaluate the Res2Net block on all these models and demonstrate consistent performance gains over baseline models on widely-used datasets, e.g., CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. Further ablation studies and experimental results on representative computer vision tasks, i.e., object detection, class activation mapping, and salient object detection, further verify the superiority of the Res2Net over the state-of-the-art baseline methods. The source code and trained models are available on https://mmcheng.net/res2net/.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

End-to-End Learning of Representations for Asynchronous Event-Based Data

Event cameras are vision sensors that record asynchronous streams of per-pixel brightness changes, referred to as "events". They have appealing advantages over frame-based cameras for computer vision, including high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and no motion blur. Due to the sparse, non-uniform spatiotemporal layout of the event signal, pattern recognition algorithms typically aggregate events into a grid-based representation and subsequently process it by a standard vision pipeline, e.g., Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In this work, we introduce a general framework to convert event streams into grid-based representations through a sequence of differentiable operations. Our framework comes with two main advantages: (i) allows learning the input event representation together with the task dedicated network in an end to end manner, and (ii) lays out a taxonomy that unifies the majority of extant event representations in the literature and identifies novel ones. Empirically, we show that our approach to learning the event representation end-to-end yields an improvement of approximately 12% on optical flow estimation and object recognition over state-of-the-art methods.Comment: To appear at ICCV 201