Edge-Semantic Learning Strategy for Layout Estimation in Indoor Environment

Visual cognition of the indoor environment can benefit from the spatial layout estimation, which is to represent an indoor scene with a 2D box on a monocular image. In this paper, we propose to fully exploit the edge and semantic information of a room image for layout estimation. More specifically, we present an encoder-decoder network with shared encoder and two separate decoders, which are composed of multiple deconvolution (transposed convolution) layers, to jointly learn the edge maps and semantic labels of a room image. We combine these two network predictions in a scoring function to evaluate the quality of the layouts, which are generated by ray sampling and from a predefined layout pool. Guided by the scoring function, we apply a novel refinement strategy to further optimize the layout hypotheses. Experimental results show that the proposed network can yield accurate estimates of edge maps and semantic labels. By fully utilizing the two different types of labels, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art layout estimation performance on benchmark datasets

RoomNet: End-to-End Room Layout Estimation

This paper focuses on the task of room layout estimation from a monocular RGB image. Prior works break the problem into two sub-tasks: semantic segmentation of floor, walls, ceiling to produce layout hypotheses, followed by an iterative optimization step to rank these hypotheses. In contrast, we adopt a more direct formulation of this problem as one of estimating an ordered set of room layout keypoints. The room layout and the corresponding segmentation is completely specified given the locations of these ordered keypoints. We predict the locations of the room layout keypoints using RoomNet, an end-to-end trainable encoder-decoder network. On the challenging benchmark datasets Hedau and LSUN, we achieve state-of-the-art performance along with 200x to 600x speedup compared to the most recent work. Additionally, we present optional extensions to the RoomNet architecture such as including recurrent computations and memory units to refine the keypoint locations under the same parametric capacity.Comment: accepted at ICCV 201

OmniDepth: Dense Depth Estimation for Indoors Spherical Panoramas

Recent work on depth estimation up to now has only focused on projective images ignoring 360 content which is now increasingly and more easily produced. We show that monocular depth estimation models trained on traditional images produce sub-optimal results on omnidirectional images, showcasing the need for training directly on 360 datasets, which however, are hard to acquire. In this work, we circumvent the challenges associated with acquiring high quality 360 datasets with ground truth depth annotations, by re-using recently released large scale 3D datasets and re-purposing them to 360 via rendering. This dataset, which is considerably larger than similar projective datasets, is publicly offered to the community to enable future research in this direction. We use this dataset to learn in an end-to-end fashion the task of depth estimation from 360 images. We show promising results in our synthesized data as well as in unseen realistic images.Comment: Pre-print to appear in ECCV1

Monocular Object and Plane SLAM in Structured Environments

In this paper, we present a monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm using high-level object and plane landmarks. The built map is denser, more compact and semantic meaningful compared to feature point based SLAM. We first propose a high order graphical model to jointly infer the 3D object and layout planes from single images considering occlusions and semantic constraints. The extracted objects and planes are further optimized with camera poses in a unified SLAM framework. Objects and planes can provide more semantic constraints such as Manhattan plane and object supporting relationships compared to points. Experiments on various public and collected datasets including ICL NUIM and TUM Mono show that our algorithm can improve camera localization accuracy compared to state-of-the-art SLAM especially when there is no loop closure, and also generate dense maps robustly in many structured environments.Comment: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter

HorizonNet: Learning Room Layout with 1D Representation and Pano Stretch Data Augmentation

We present a new approach to the problem of estimating the 3D room layout from a single panoramic image. We represent room layout as three 1D vectors that encode, at each image column, the boundary positions of floor-wall and ceiling-wall, and the existence of wall-wall boundary. The proposed network, HorizonNet, trained for predicting 1D layout, outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches. The designed post-processing procedure for recovering 3D room layouts from 1D predictions can automatically infer the room shape with low computation cost - it takes less than 20ms for a panorama image while prior works might need dozens of seconds. We also propose Pano Stretch Data Augmentation, which can diversify panorama data and be applied to other panorama-related learning tasks. Due to the limited data available for non-cuboid layout, we relabel 65 general layout from the current dataset for finetuning. Our approach shows good performance on general layouts by qualitative results and cross-validation.Comment: CVPR 201

VisualEchoes: Spatial Image Representation Learning through Echolocation

Several animal species (e.g., bats, dolphins, and whales) and even visually impaired humans have the remarkable ability to perform echolocation: a biological sonar used to perceive spatial layout and locate objects in the world. We explore the spatial cues contained in echoes and how they can benefit vision tasks that require spatial reasoning. First we capture echo responses in photo-realistic 3D indoor scene environments. Then we propose a novel interaction-based representation learning framework that learns useful visual features via echolocation. We show that the learned image features are useful for multiple downstream vision tasks requiring spatial reasoning---monocular depth estimation, surface normal estimation, and visual navigation---with results comparable or even better than heavily supervised pre-training. Our work opens a new path for representation learning for embodied agents, where supervision comes from interacting with the physical world.Comment: Appears in ECCV 202

Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning

Do visual tasks have a relationship, or are they unrelated? For instance, could having surface normals simplify estimating the depth of an image? Intuition answers these questions positively, implying existence of a structure among visual tasks. Knowing this structure has notable values; it is the concept underlying transfer learning and provides a principled way for identifying redundancies across tasks, e.g., to seamlessly reuse supervision among related tasks or solve many tasks in one system without piling up the complexity. We proposes a fully computational approach for modeling the structure of space of visual tasks. This is done via finding (first and higher-order) transfer learning dependencies across a dictionary of twenty six 2D, 2.5D, 3D, and semantic tasks in a latent space. The product is a computational taxonomic map for task transfer learning. We study the consequences of this structure, e.g. nontrivial emerged relationships, and exploit them to reduce the demand for labeled data. For example, we show that the total number of labeled datapoints needed for solving a set of 10 tasks can be reduced by roughly 2/3 (compared to training independently) while keeping the performance nearly the same. We provide a set of tools for computing and probing this taxonomical structure including a solver that users can employ to devise efficient supervision policies for their use cases.Comment: CVPR 2018 (Oral). See project website and live demos at http://taskonomy.vision

Structural and object detection for phosphene images

Prosthetic vision based on phosphenes is a promising way to provide visual perception to some blind people. However, phosphenic images are very limited in terms of spatial resolution (e.g.: 32 x 32 phosphene array) and luminance levels (e.g.: 8 gray levels), which results in the subject receiving very limited information about the scene. This requires using high-level processing to extract more information from the scene and present it to the subject with the phosphenes limitations. In this work, we study the recognition of indoor environments under simulated prosthetic vision. Most research in simulated prosthetic vision is performed based on static images, while very few researchers have addressed the problem of scene recognition through video sequences. We propose a new approach to build a schematic representation of indoor environments for phosphene images. Our schematic representation relies on two parallel CNNs for the extraction of structural informative edges of the room and the relevant object silhouettes based on mask segmentation. We have performed a study with twelve normally sighted subjects to evaluate how our methods were able to the room recognition by presenting phosphenic images and videos. We show how our method is able to increase the recognition ability of the user from 75% using alternative methods to 90% using our approach

Structured Depth Prediction in Challenging Monocular Video Sequences

In this paper, we tackle the problem of estimating the depth of a scene from a monocular video sequence. In particular, we handle challenging scenarios, such as non-translational camera motion and dynamic scenes, where traditional structure from motion and motion stereo methods do not apply. To this end, we first study the problem of depth estimation from a single image. In this context, we exploit the availability of a pool of images for which the depth is known, and formulate monocular depth estimation as a discrete-continuous optimization problem, where the continuous variables encode the depth of the superpixels in the input image, and the discrete ones represent relationships between neighboring superpixels. The solution to this discrete-continuous optimization problem is obtained by performing inference in a graphical model using particle belief propagation. To handle video sequences, we then extend our single image model to a two-frame one that naturally encodes short-range temporal consistency and inherently handles dynamic objects. Based on the prediction of this model, we then introduce a fully-connected pairwise CRF that accounts for longer range spatio-temporal interactions throughout a video. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in both the indoor and outdoor scenarios

GeoLayout: Geometry Driven Room Layout Estimation Based on Depth Maps of Planes

The task of room layout estimation is to locate the wall-floor, wall-ceiling, and wall-wall boundaries. Most recent methods solve this problem based on edge/keypoint detection or semantic segmentation. However, these approaches have shown limited attention on the geometry of the dominant planes and the intersection between them, which has significant impact on room layout. In this work, we propose to incorporate geometric reasoning to deep learning for layout estimation. Our approach learns to infer the depth maps of the dominant planes in the scene by predicting the pixel-level surface parameters, and the layout can be generated by the intersection of the depth maps. Moreover, we present a new dataset with pixel-level depth annotation of dominant planes. It is larger than the existing datasets and contains both cuboid and non-cuboid rooms. Experimental results show that our approach produces considerable performance gains on both 2D and 3D datasets