LiDAR Perception

This paper addresses the critical challenges of sparsity and occlusion in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. Current methods often rely on supplementary modules or specific architectural designs potentially limiting their applicability to new and evolving architectures. To our knowledge we are the first to propose a versatile technique that seamlessly integrates into any existing framework for 3D Object Detection marking the first instance of Weak-to-Strong generalization in 3D computer vision. We introduce a novel framework X-Ray Distillation with Object-Complete Frames suitable for both supervised and semi-supervised settings that leverages the temporal aspect of point cloud sequences. This method extracts crucial information from both previous and subsequent LiDAR frames creating Object-Complete frames that represent objects from multiple viewpoints thus addressing occlusion and sparsity. Given the limitation of not being able to generate Object-Complete frames during online inference we utilize Knowledge Distillation within a Teacher-Student framework. This technique encourages the strong Student model to emulate the behavior of the weaker Teacher which processes simple and informative Object-Complete frames effectively offering a comprehensive view of objects as if seen through X-ray vision. Our proposed methods surpass state-of-the-art in semi-supervised learning by 1-1.5 mAP and enhance the performance of five established supervised models by 1-2 mAP on standard autonomous driving datasets even with default hyperparameters. Code for Object-Complete frames is available here: https://github.com/sakharok13/X-Ray-Teacher-Patching-Tools.

In contrast to extensive studies on general vision pre-training for scalable visual autonomous driving remains seldom explored. Visual autonomous driving applications require features encompassing semantics 3D geometry and temporal information simultaneously for joint perception prediction and planning posing dramatic challenges for pre-training. To resolve this we bring up a new pre-training task termed as visual point cloud forecasting - predicting future point clouds from historical visual input. The key merit of this task captures the synergic learning of semantics 3D structures and temporal dynamics. Hence it shows superiority in various downstream tasks. To cope with this new problem we present ViDAR a general model to pre-train downstream visual encoders. It first extracts historical embeddings by the encoder. These representations are then transformed to 3D geometric space via a novel Latent Rendering operator for future point cloud prediction. Experiments show significant gain in downstream tasks e.g. 3.1% NDS on 3D detection 10% error reduction on motion forecasting and 15% less collision rate on planning.

Unsupervised point cloud shape correspondence aims to establish point-wise correspondences between source and target point clouds. Existing methods obtain correspondences directly by computing point-wise feature similarity between point clouds. However non-rigid objects possess strong deformability and unusual shapes making it a longstanding challenge to directly establish correspondences between point clouds with unconventional shapes. To address this challenge we propose an unsupervised Template-Assisted point cloud shape correspondence Network termed TANet including a template generation module and a template assistance module. The proposed TANet enjoys several merits. Firstly the template generation module establishes a set of learnable templates with explicit structures. Secondly we introduce a template assistance module that extensively leverages the generated templates to establish more accurate shape correspondences from multiple perspectives. Extensive experiments on four human and animal datasets demonstrate that TANet achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods.

Detecting objects in 3D under various (normal and adverse) weather conditions is essential for safe autonomous driving systems. Recent approaches have focused on employing weather-insensitive 4D radar sensors and leveraging them with other modalities such as LiDAR. However they fuse multi-modal information without considering the sensor characteristics and weather conditions and lose some height information which could be useful for localizing 3D objects. In this paper we propose a novel framework for robust LiDAR and 4D radar-based 3D object detection. Specifically we propose a 3D-LRF module that considers the distinct patterns they exhibit in 3D space (e.g. precise 3D mapping of LiDAR and wide-range weather-insensitive measurement of 4D radar) and extract fusion features based on their 3D spatial relationship. Then our weather-conditional radar-flow gating network modulates the information flow of fusion features depending on weather conditions and obtains enhanced feature that effectively incorporates the strength of two domains under various weather conditions. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves SoTA performance for 3D object detection under various weather conditions.

We tackle the problem of 3D point cloud localization based on a few natural linguistic descriptions and introduce a novel neural network Text2Loc that fully interprets the semantic relationship between points and text. Text2Loc follows a coarse-to-fine localization pipeline: text-submap global place recognition followed by fine localization. In global place recognition relational dynamics among each textual hint are captured in a hierarchical transformer with max-pooling (HTM) whereas a balance between positive and negative pairs is maintained using text-submap contrastive learning. Moreover we propose a novel matching-free fine localization method to further refine the location predictions which completely removes the need for complicated text-instance matching and is lighter faster and more accurate than previous methods. Extensive experiments show that Text2Loc improves the localization accuracy by up to 2x over the state-of-the-art on the KITTI360Pose dataset. Our project page is publicly available at: https: //yan-xia.github.io/projects/text2loc/.

In many practical applications 3D point cloud analysis requires rotation invariance. In this paper we present a learnable descriptor invariant under 3D rotations and reflections i.e. the O(3) actions utilizing the recently introduced steerable 3D spherical neurons and vector neurons. Specifically we propose an embedding of the 3D spherical neurons into 4D vector neurons which leverages end-to-end training of the model. In our approach we perform TetraTransform---an equivariant embedding of the 3D input into 4D constructed from the steerable neurons---and extract deeper O(3)-equivariant features using vector neurons. This integration of the TetraTransform into the VN-DGCNN framework termed TetraSphere negligibly increases the number of parameters by less than 0.0002%. TetraSphere sets a new state-of-the-art performance classifying randomly rotated real-world object scans of the challenging subsets of ScanObjectNN. Additionally TetraSphere outperforms all equivariant methods on randomly rotated synthetic data: classifying objects from ModelNet40 and segmenting parts of the ShapeNet shapes. Thus our results reveal the practical value of steerable 3D spherical neurons for learning in 3D Euclidean space. The code is available at https://github.com/pavlo-melnyk/tetrasphere.

Cooperative perception offers several benefits for enhancing the capabilities of autonomous vehicles and improving road safety. Using roadside sensors in addition to onboard sensors increases reliability and extends the sensor range. External sensors offer higher situational awareness for automated vehicles and prevent occlusions. We propose CoopDet3D a cooperative multi-modal fusion model and TUMTraf-V2X a perception dataset for the cooperative 3D object detection and tracking task. Our dataset contains 2000 labeled point clouds and 5000 labeled images from five roadside and four onboard sensors. It includes 30k 3D boxes with track IDs and precise GPS and IMU data. We labeled nine categories and covered occlusion scenarios with challenging driving maneuvers like traffic violations near-miss events overtaking and U-turns. Through multiple experiments we show that our CoopDet3D camera-LiDAR fusion model achieves an increase of +14.36 3D mAP compared to a vehicle camera-LiDAR fusion model. Finally we make our dataset model labeling tool and devkit publicly available on our website: https://tum-traffic-dataset.github.io/tumtraf-v2x.

LiDAR Upsampling is a challenging task for the perception systems of robots and autonomous vehicles due to the sparse and irregular structure of large-scale scene contexts. Recent works propose to solve this problem by converting LiDAR data from 3D Euclidean space into an image super-resolution problem in 2D image space. Although their methods can generate high-resolution range images with fine-grained details the resulting 3D point clouds often blur out details and predict invalid points. In this paper we propose TULIP a new method to reconstruct high-resolution LiDAR point clouds from low-resolution LiDAR input. We also follow a range image-based approach but specifically modify the patch and window geometries of a Swin-Transformer-based network to better fit the characteristics of range images. We conducted several experiments on three public real-world and simulated datasets. TULIP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in all relevant metrics and generates robust and more realistic point clouds than prior works.

Training deep models for LiDAR semantic segmentation is challenging due to the inherent sparsity of point clouds. Utilizing temporal data is a natural remedy against the sparsity problem as it makes the input signal denser. However previous multi-frame fusion algorithms fall short in utilizing sufficient temporal information due to the memory constraint and they also ignore the informative temporal images. To fully exploit rich information hidden in long-term temporal point clouds and images we present the Temporal Aggregation Network termed TASeg. Specifically we propose a Temporal LiDAR Aggregation and Distillation (TLAD) algorithm which leverages historical priors to assign different aggregation steps for different classes. It can largely reduce memory and time overhead while achieving higher accuracy. Besides TLAD trains a teacher injected with gt priors to distill the model further boosting the performance. To make full use of temporal images we design a Temporal Image Aggregation and Fusion (TIAF) module which can greatly expand the camera FOV and enhance the present features. Temporal LiDAR points in the camera FOV are used as mediums to transform temporal image features to the present coordinate for temporal multi-modal fusion. Moreover we develop a Static-Moving Switch Augmentation (SMSA) algorithm which utilizes sufficient temporal information to enable objects to switch their motion states freely thus greatly increasing static and moving training samples. Our TASeg ranks 1st on three challenging tracks i.e. SemanticKITTI single-scan track multi-scan track and nuScenes LiDAR segmentation track strongly demonstrating the superiority of our method. Codes are available at https://github.com/LittlePey/TASeg.

Point cloud filtering is a fundamental 3D vision task which aims to remove noise while recovering the underlying clean surfaces. State-of-the-art methods remove noise by moving noisy points along stochastic trajectories to the clean surfaces. These methods often require regularization within the training objective and/or during post-processing to ensure fidelity. In this paper we introduce StraightPCF a new deep learning based method for point cloud filtering. It works by moving noisy points along straight paths thus reducing discretization errors while ensuring faster convergence to the clean surfaces. We model noisy patches as intermediate states between high noise patch variants and their clean counterparts and design the VelocityModule to infer a constant flow velocity from the former to the latter. This constant flow leads to straight filtering trajectories. In addition we introduce a DistanceModule that scales the straight trajectory using an estimated distance scalar to attain convergence near the clean surface. Our network is lightweight and only has 530K parameters being 17% of IterativePFN (a most recent point cloud filtering network). Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show our method achieves state-of-the-art results. Our method also demonstrates nice distributions of filtered points without the need for regularization. The implementation code can be found at: https://github.com/ddsediri/StraightPCF.

Coarse-to-fine 3D instance segmentation methods show weak performances compared to recent Grouping-based Kernel-based and Transformer-based methods. We argue that this is due to two limitations: 1) Instance size overestimation by axis-aligned bounding box(AABB) 2) False negative error accumulation from inaccurate box to the refinement phase. In this work we introduce Spherical Mask a novel coarse-to-fine approach based on spherical representation overcoming those two limitations with several benefits. Specifically our coarse detection estimates each instance with a 3D polygon using a center and radial distance predictions which avoids excessive size estimation of AABB. To cut the error propagation in the existing coarse-to-fine approaches we virtually migrate points based on the polygon allowing all foreground points including false negatives to be refined. During inference the proposal and point migration modules run in parallel and are assembled to form binary masks of instances. We also introduce two margin-based losses for the point migration to enforce corrections for the false positives/negatives and cohesion of foreground points significantly improving the performance. Experimental results from three datasets such as ScanNetV2 S3DIS and STPLS3D show that our proposed method outperforms existing works demonstrating the effectiveness of the new instance representation with spherical coordinates. The code is available at: https://github.com/yunshin/SphericalMask

Neural approaches have shown a significant progress on camera-based reconstruction. But they require either a fairly dense sampling of the viewing sphere or pre-training on an existing dataset thereby limiting their generalizability. In contrast photometric stereo (PS) approaches have shown great potential for achieving high-quality reconstruction under sparse viewpoints. Yet they are impractical because they typically require tedious laboratory conditions are restricted to dark rooms and often multi-staged making them subject to accumulated errors. To address these shortcomings we propose an end-to-end uncalibrated multi-view PS framework for reconstructing high-resolution shapes acquired from sparse viewpoints in a real-world environment. We relax the dark room assumption and allow a combination of static ambient lighting and dynamic near LED lighting thereby enabling easy data capture outside the lab. Experimental validation confirms that it outperforms existing baseline approaches in the regime of sparse viewpoints by a large margin. This allows to bring high accuracy 3D reconstruction from the dark room to the real world while maintaining a reasonable data capture complexity.

In this work we explore a novel task of generating human grasps based on single-view scene point clouds which more accurately mirrors the typical real-world situation of observing objects from a single viewpoint. Due to the incompleteness of object point clouds and the presence of numerous scene points the generated hand is prone to penetrating into the invisible parts of the object and the model is easily affected by scene points. Thus we introduce S2HGrasp a framework composed of two key modules: the Global Perception module that globally perceives partial object point clouds and the DiffuGrasp module designed to generate high-quality human grasps based on complex inputs that include scene points. Additionally we introduce S2HGD dataset which comprises approximately 99000 single-object single-view scene point clouds of 1668 unique objects each annotated with one human grasp. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that S2HGrasp can not only generate natural human grasps regardless of scene points but also effectively prevent penetration between the hand and invisible parts of the object. Moreover our model showcases strong generalization capability when applied to unseen objects. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/S2HGrasp.

We tackle semi-supervised object detection based on motion cues. Recent results suggest that heuristic-based clustering methods in conjunction with object trackers can be used to pseudo-label instances of moving objects and use these as supervisory signals to train 3D object detectors in Lidar data without manual supervision. We re-think this approach and suggest that both object detection as well as motion-inspired pseudo-labeling can be tackled in a data-driven manner. We leverage recent advances in scene flow estimation to obtain point trajectories from which we extract long-term class-agnostic motion patterns. Revisiting correlation clustering in the context of message passing networks we learn to group those motion patterns to cluster points to object instances. By estimating the full extent of the objects we obtain per-scan 3D bounding boxes that we use to supervise a Lidar object detection network. Our method not only outperforms prior heuristic-based approaches (57.5 AP +14 improvement over prior work) more importantly we show we can pseudo-label and train object detectors across datasets.

Computer vision techniques play a central role in the perception stack of autonomous vehicles. Such methods are employed to perceive the vehicle surroundings given sensor data. 3D LiDAR sensors are commonly used to collect sparse 3D point clouds from the scene. However compared to human perception such systems struggle to deduce the unseen parts of the scene given those sparse point clouds. In this matter the scene completion task aims at predicting the gaps in the LiDAR measurements to achieve a more complete scene representation. Given the promising results of recent diffusion models as generative models for images we propose extending them to achieve scene completion from a single 3D LiDAR scan. Previous works used diffusion models over range images extracted from LiDAR data directly applying image-based diffusion methods. Distinctly we propose to directly operate on the points reformulating the noising and denoising diffusion process such that it can efficiently work at scene scale. Together with our approach we propose a regularization loss to stabilize the noise predicted during the denoising process. Our experimental evaluation shows that our method can complete the scene given a single LiDAR scan as input producing a scene with more details compared to state-of-the-art scene completion methods. We believe that our proposed diffusion process formulation can support further research in diffusion models applied to scene-scale point cloud data.

Conventional radar feature extraction faces limitations due to low spatial resolution noise multipath reflection the presence of ghost targets and motion blur. Such limitations can be exacerbated by nonlinear object motion particularly from an ego-centric viewpoint. It becomes evident that to address these challenges the key lies in exploiting temporal feature relation over an extended horizon and enforcing spatial motion consistence for effective association. To this end this paper proposes SIRA (Scalable Inter-frame Relation and Association) with two designs. First inspired by Swin Transformer we introduce extended temporal relation generalizing the existing temporal relation layer from two consecutive frames to multiple inter-frames with temporally regrouped window attention for scalability. Second we propose motion consistency track with the concept of a pseudo-tracklet generated from observational data for better trajectory prediction and subsequent object association. Our approach achieves 58.11 mAP@0.5 for oriented object detection and 47.79 MOTA for multiple object tracking on the Radiate dataset surpassing previous state-of-the-art by a margin of +4.11 mAP@0.5 and +9.94 MOTA respectively.

Single-photon Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems are often equipped with an array of detectors for improved spatial resolution and sensing speed. However given a fixed amount of flux produced by the laser transmitter across the scene the per-pixel Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) will decrease when more pixels are packed in a unit space. This presents a fundamental trade-off between the spatial resolution of the sensor array and the SNR received at each pixel. Theoretical characterization of this fundamental limit is explored. By deriving the photon arrival statistics and introducing a series of new approximation techniques the Mean Squared Error (MSE) of the maximum-likelihood estimator of the time delay is derived. The theoretical predictions align well with simulations and real data.

The inherent noisy and sparse characteristics of radar data pose challenges in finding effective representations for 3D object detection. In this paper we propose RadarDistill a novel knowledge distillation (KD) method which can improve the representation of radar data by leveraging LiDAR data. RadarDistill successfully transfers desirable characteristics of LiDAR features into radar features using three key components: Cross-Modality Alignment (CMA) Activation-based Feature Distillation (AFD) and Proposal-based Feature Distillation (PFD). CMA enhances the density of radar features by employing multiple layers of dilation operations effectively addressing the challenge of inefficient knowledge transfer from LiDAR to radar. AFD selectively transfers knowledge based on regions of the LiDAR features with a specific focus on areas where activation intensity exceeds a predefined threshold. PFD similarly guides the radar network to selectively mimic features from the LiDAR network within the object proposals. Our comparative analyses conducted on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that RadarDistill achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for radar-only object detection task recording 20.5% in mAP and 43.7% in NDS. Also RadarDistill significantly improves the performance of the camera-radar fusion model.

Lidar has become a cornerstone sensing modality for 3D vision especially for large outdoor scenarios and autonomous driving. Conventional lidar sensors are capable of providing centimeter-accurate distance information by emitting laser pulses into a scene and measuring the time-of-flight (ToF) of the reflection. However the polarization of the received light that depends on the surface orientation and material properties is usually not considered. As such the polarization modality has the potential to improve scene reconstruction beyond distance measurements. In this work we introduce a novel long-range polarization wavefront lidar sensor (PolLidar) that modulates the polarization of the emitted and received light. Departing from conventional lidar sensors PolLidar allows access to the raw time-resolved polarimetric wavefronts. We leverage polarimetric wavefronts to estimate normals distance and material properties in outdoor scenarios with a novel learned reconstruction method. To train and evaluate the method we introduce a simulated and real-world long-range dataset with paired raw lidar data ground truth distance and normal maps. We find that the proposed method improves normal and distance reconstruction by 53% mean angular error and 41% mean absolute error compared to existing shape-from-polarization (SfP) and ToF methods. Code and data are open-sourced here.

Single point-supervised object detection is gaining attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However existing approaches focus on generating horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs) while ignoring oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) commonly used for objects in aerial images. This paper proposes PointOBB the first single Point-based OBB generation method for oriented object detection. PointOBB operates through the collaborative utilization of three distinctive views: an original view a resized view and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Upon the original view we leverage the resized and rot/flp views to build a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module respectively. In the former module a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss is designed to enhance the deep network's ability to perceive the object scale. For accurate object angle predictions the latter module incorporates self-supervised learning to predict angles which is associated with a scale-guided Dense-to-Sparse (DS) matching strategy for aggregating dense angles corresponding to sparse objects. The resized and rot/flp views are switched using a progressive multi-view switching strategy during training to achieve coupled optimization of scale and angle. Experimental results on the DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 datasets demonstrate that PointOBB achieves promising performance and significantly outperforms potential point-supervised baselines.