S4Net: Single Stage Salient-Instance Segmentation

We consider an interesting problem-salient instance segmentation in this paper. Other than producing bounding boxes, our network also outputs high-quality instance-level segments. Taking into account the category-independent property of each target, we design a single stage salient instance segmentation framework, with a novel segmentation branch. Our new branch regards not only local context inside each detection window but also its surrounding context, enabling us to distinguish the instances in the same scope even with obstruction. Our network is end-to-end trainable and runs at a fast speed (40 fps when processing an image with resolution 320x320). We evaluate our approach on a publicly available benchmark and show that it outperforms other alternative solutions. We also provide a thorough analysis of the design choices to help readers better understand the functions of each part of our network. The source code can be found at \url{https://github.com/RuochenFan/S4Net}

SLS4D: Sparse Latent Space for 4D Novel View Synthesis

Neural radiance field (NeRF) has achieved great success in novel view synthesis and 3D representation for static scenarios. Existing dynamic NeRFs usually exploit a locally dense grid to fit the deformation field; however, they fail to capture the global dynamics and concomitantly yield models of heavy parameters. We observe that the 4D space is inherently sparse. Firstly, the deformation field is sparse in spatial but dense in temporal due to the continuity of of motion. Secondly, the radiance field is only valid on the surface of the underlying scene, usually occupying a small fraction of the whole space. We thus propose to represent the 4D scene using a learnable sparse latent space, a.k.a. SLS4D. Specifically, SLS4D first uses dense learnable time slot features to depict the temporal space, from which the deformation field is fitted with linear multi-layer perceptions (MLP) to predict the displacement of a 3D position at any time. It then learns the spatial features of a 3D position using another sparse latent space. This is achieved by learning the adaptive weights of each latent code with the attention mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our SLS4D: it achieves the best 4D novel view synthesis using only about $6\%$ parameters of the most recent work.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

MonoNeuralFusion: Online Monocular Neural 3D Reconstruction with Geometric Priors

High-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction from monocular videos continues to be challenging, especially for complete and fine-grained geometry reconstruction. The previous 3D reconstruction approaches with neural implicit representations have shown a promising ability for complete scene reconstruction, while their results are often over-smooth and lack enough geometric details. This paper introduces a novel neural implicit scene representation with volume rendering for high-fidelity online 3D scene reconstruction from monocular videos. For fine-grained reconstruction, our key insight is to incorporate geometric priors into both the neural implicit scene representation and neural volume rendering, thus leading to an effective geometry learning mechanism based on volume rendering optimization. Benefiting from this, we present MonoNeuralFusion to perform the online neural 3D reconstruction from monocular videos, by which the 3D scene geometry is efficiently generated and optimized during the on-the-fly 3D monocular scanning. The extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches show that our MonoNeuralFusion consistently generates much better complete and fine-grained reconstruction results, both quantitatively and qualitatively.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure

Semantic-Aware Transformation-Invariant RoI Align

Great progress has been made in learning-based object detection methods in the last decade. Two-stage detectors often have higher detection accuracy than one-stage detectors, due to the use of region of interest (RoI) feature extractors which extract transformation-invariant RoI features for different RoI proposals, making refinement of bounding boxes and prediction of object categories more robust and accurate. However, previous RoI feature extractors can only extract invariant features under limited transformations. In this paper, we propose a novel RoI feature extractor, termed Semantic RoI Align (SRA), which is capable of extracting invariant RoI features under a variety of transformations for two-stage detectors. Specifically, we propose a semantic attention module to adaptively determine different sampling areas by leveraging the global and local semantic relationship within the RoI. We also propose a Dynamic Feature Sampler which dynamically samples features based on the RoI aspect ratio to enhance the efficiency of SRA, and a new position embedding, \ie Area Embedding, to provide more accurate position information for SRA through an improved sampling area representation. Experiments show that our model significantly outperforms baseline models with slight computational overhead. In addition, it shows excellent generalization ability and can be used to improve performance with various state-of-the-art backbones and detection methods

PCT: Point cloud transformer

The irregular domain and lack of ordering make it challenging to design deep neural networks for point cloud processing. This paper presents a novel framework named Point Cloud Transformer(PCT) for point cloud learning. PCT is based on Transformer, which achieves huge success in natural language processing and displays great potential in image processing. It is inherently permutation invariant for processing a sequence of points, making it well-suited for point cloud learning. To better capture local context within the point cloud, we enhance input embedding with the support of farthest point sampling and nearest neighbor search. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the PCT achieves the state-of-the-art performance on shape classification, part segmentation and normal estimation tasks.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Attention Mechanisms in Computer Vision: A Survey

Humans can naturally and effectively find salient regions in complex scenes. Motivated by this observation, attention mechanisms were introduced into computer vision with the aim of imitating this aspect of the human visual system. Such an attention mechanism can be regarded as a dynamic weight adjustment process based on features of the input image. Attention mechanisms have achieved great success in many visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, video understanding, image generation, 3D vision, multi-modal tasks and self-supervised learning. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of various attention mechanisms in computer vision and categorize them according to approach, such as channel attention, spatial attention, temporal attention and branch attention; a related repository https://github.com/MenghaoGuo/Awesome-Vision-Attentions is dedicated to collecting related work. We also suggest future directions for attention mechanism research.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figure

Learning virtual view selection for 3D scene semantic segmentation

2D-3D joint learning is essential and effective for fundamental 3D vision tasks, such as 3D semantic segmentation, due to the complementary information these two visual modalities contain. Most current 3D scene semantic segmentation methods process 2D images “as they are”, i.e., only real captured 2D images are used. However, such captured 2D images may be redundant, with abundant occlusion and/or limited field of view (FoV), leading to poor performance for the current methods involving 2D inputs. In this paper, we propose a general learning framework for joint 2D-3D scene understanding by selecting informative virtual 2D views of the underlying 3D scene. We then feed both the 3D geometry and the generated virtual 2D views into any joint 2D-3D-input or pure 3D-input based deep neural models for improving 3D scene understanding. Specifically, we generate virtual 2D views based on an information score map learned from the current 3D scene semantic segmentation results. To achieve this, we formalize the learning of the information score map as a deep reinforcement learning process, which rewards good predictions using a deep neural network. To obtain a compact set of virtual 2D views that jointly cover informative surfaces of the 3D scene as much as possible, we further propose an efficient greedy virtual view coverage strategy in the normal-sensitive 6D space, including 3-dimensional point coordinates and 3-dimensional normal. We have validated our proposed framework for various joint 2D-3D-input or pure 3D-input based deep neural models on two real-world 3D scene datasets, i.e., ScanNet v2 and S3DIS, and the results demonstrate that our method obtains a consistent gain over baseline models and achieves new top accuracy for joint 2D and 3D scene semantic segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/smy-THU/VirtualViewSelection