CVPR 2024 Papers

LiDAR-based 3D object detection plays an essential role in autonomous driving. Existing high-performing 3D object detectors usually build dense feature maps in the backbone network and prediction head. However the computational costs introduced by the dense feature maps grow quadratically as the perception range increases making these models hard to scale up to long-range detection. Some recent works have attempted to construct fully sparse detectors to solve this issue; nevertheless the resulting models either rely on a complex multi-stage pipeline or exhibit inferior performance. In this work we propose a fully sparse adaptive feature diffusion network (SAFDNet) for LiDAR-based 3D object detection. In SAFDNet an adaptive feature diffusion strategy is designed to address the center feature missing problem. We conducted extensive experiments on Waymo Open nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets. SAFDNet performed slightly better than the previous SOTA on the first two datasets but much better on the last dataset which features long-range detection verifying the efficacy of SAFDNet in scenarios where long-range detection is required. Notably on Argoverse2 SAFDNet surpassed the previous best hybrid detector HEDNet by 2.6% mAP while being 2.1x faster and yielded 2.1% mAP gains over the previous best sparse detector FSDv2 while being 1.3x faster. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhanggang001/HEDNet.

Oriented object detection has been developed rapidly in the past few years where rotation equivariance is crucial for detectors to predict rotated boxes. It is expected that the prediction can maintain the corresponding rotation when objects rotate but severe mutation in angular prediction is sometimes observed when objects rotate near the boundary angle which is well-known boundary discontinuity problem. The problem has been long believed to be caused by the sharp loss increase at the angular boundary and widely used joint-optim IoU-like methods deal with this problem by loss-smoothing. However we experimentally find that even state-of-the-art IoU-like methods actually fail to solve the problem. On further analysis we find that the key to solution lies in encoding mode of the smoothing function rather than in joint or independent optimization. In existing IoU-like methods the model essentially attempts to fit the angular relationship between box and object where the break point at angular boundary makes the predictions highly unstable. To deal with this issue we propose a dual-optimization paradigm for angles. We decouple reversibility and joint-optim from single smoothing function into two distinct entities which for the first time achieves the objectives of both correcting angular boundary and blending angle with other parameters. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that boundary discontinuity problem is well-addressed. Moreover typical IoU-like methods are improved to the same level without obvious performance gap. The code is available at https://github.com/hangxu-cv/cvpr24acm.

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.

Oriented object detection has witnessed significant progress in recent years. However the impressive performance of oriented object detectors is at the huge cost of labor-intensive annotations and deteriorates once the annotated data becomes limited. Semi-supervised learning in which sufficient unannotated data are utilized to enhance the base detector is a promising method to address the annotation deficiency problem. Motivated by weakly supervised learning we introduce annotation-efficient point annotations for unannotated images and propose a weakly semi-supervised method for oriented object detection to balance the detection performance and annotation cost. Specifically we propose a Rotation-Modulated Relational Graph Matching method to match relations of proposals centered on annotated points between different models to alleviate the ambiguity of point annotations in depicting the oriented object. In addition we further propose a Relational Rank Distribution Matching method to align the rank distribution on classification and regression between different models. Finally to handle the difficult annotated points that both models are confused about we introduce weakly supervised learning to impose positive signals for difficult point-induced clusters to the base model and focus the base model on the occupancy between the predictions and annotated points. We perform extensive experiments on challenging datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed weakly semi-supervised method in effectively leveraging unannotated data for significant performance improvement.

Although deep learning based object detection is of great significance for various applications it faces challenges when deployed on edge devices due to the computation and energy limitations. Post-training quantization (PTQ) can improve inference efficiency through integer computing. However they suffer from severe performance degradation when performing full quantization due to overlooking the unique characteristics of regression tasks in object detection. In this paper we are the first to explore regression-friendly quantization and conduct full quantization on various detectors. We reveal the intrinsic reason behind the difficulty of quantizing regressors with empirical and theoretical justifications and introduce a novel Regression-specialized Post-Training Quantization (Reg-PTQ) scheme. It includes Filtered Global Loss Integration Calibration to combine the global loss with a two-step filtering mechanism mitigating the adverse impact of false positive bounding boxes and Learnable Logarithmic-Affine Quantizer tailored for the non-uniform distributed parameters in regression structures. Extensive experiments on prevalent detectors showcase the effectiveness of the well-designed Reg-PTQ. Notably our Reg-PTQ achieves 7.6 times and 5.4 times reduction in computation and storage consumption under INT4 with little performance degradation which indicates the immense potential of fully quantized detectors in real-world object detection applications.

Existing counting tasks are limited to the class level which don't account for fine-grained details within the class. In real applications it often requires in-context or referring human input for counting target objects. Take urban analysis as an example fine-grained information such as traffic flow in different directions pedestrians and vehicles waiting or moving at different sides of the junction is more beneficial. Current settings of both class-specific and class-agnostic counting treat objects of the same class indifferently which pose limitations in real use cases. To this end we propose a new task named Referring Expression Counting (REC) which aims to count objects with different attributes within the same class. To evaluate the REC task we create a novel dataset named REC-8K which contains 8011 images and 17122 referring expressions. Experiments on REC-8K show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with several text-based counting methods and an open-set object detection model. We also outperform prior models on the class agnostic counting (CAC) benchmark [36] for the zero-shot setting and perform on par with the few-shot methods. Code and dataset is available at https://github.com/sydai/referring-expression-counting.

Self-supervised feature reconstruction methods have shown promising advances in industrial image anomaly detection and localization. Despite this progress these methods still face challenges in synthesizing realistic and diverse anomaly samples as well as addressing the feature redundancy and pre-training bias of pre-trained feature. In this work we introduce RealNet a feature reconstruction network with realistic synthetic anomaly and adaptive feature selection. It is incorporated with three key innovations: First we propose Strength-controllable Diffusion Anomaly Synthesis (SDAS) a diffusion process-based synthesis strategy capable of generating samples with varying anomaly strengths that mimic the distribution of real anomalous samples. Second we develop Anomaly-aware Features Selection (AFS) a method for selecting representative and discriminative pre-trained feature subsets to improve anomaly detection performance while controlling computational costs. Third we introduce Reconstruction Residuals Selection (RRS) a strategy that adaptively selects discriminative residuals for comprehensive identification of anomalous regions across multiple levels of granularity. We assess RealNet on four benchmark datasets and our results demonstrate significant improvements in both Image AUROC and Pixel AUROC compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. The code data and models are available at https://github.com/cnulab/RealNet.

Industrial anomaly detection (IAD) has garnered significant attention and experienced rapid development. However the recent development of IAD approach has encountered certain difficulties due to dataset limitations. On the one hand most of the state-of-the-art methods have achieved saturation (over 99% in AUROC) on mainstream datasets such as MVTec and the differences of methods cannot be well distinguished leading to a significant gap between public datasets and actual application scenarios. On the other hand the research on various new practical anomaly detection settings is limited by the scale of the dataset posing a risk of overfitting in evaluation results. Therefore we propose a large-scale Real-world and multi-view Industrial Anomaly Detection dataset named Real-IAD which contains 150K high-resolution images of 30 different objects an order of magnitude larger than existing datasets. It has a larger range of defect area and ratio proportions making it more challenging than previous datasets. To make the dataset closer to real application scenarios we adopted a multi-view shooting method and proposed sample-level evaluation metrics. In addition beyond the general unsupervised anomaly detection setting we propose a new setting for Fully Unsupervised Industrial Anomaly Detection (FUIAD) based on the observation that the yield rate in industrial production is usually greater than 60% which has more practical application value. Finally we report the results of popular IAD methods on the Real-IAD dataset providing a highly challenging benchmark to promote the development of the IAD field.

Detecting edges in images suffers from the problems of (P1) heavy imbalance between positive and negative classes as well as (P2) label uncertainty owing to disagreement between different annotators. Existing solutions address P1 using class-balanced cross-entropy loss and dice loss and P2 by only predicting edges agreed upon by most annotators. In this paper we propose RankED a unified ranking-based approach that addresses both the imbalance problem (P1) and the uncertainty problem (P2). RankED tackles these two problems with two components: One component which ranks positive pixels over negative pixels and the second which promotes high confidence edge pixels to have more label certainty. We show that RankED outperforms previous studies and sets a new state-of-the-art on NYUD-v2 BSDS500 and Multi-cue datasets. Code is available at https://ranked-cvpr24.github.io.

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.

Object detection in radar imagery with neural networks shows great potential for improving autonomous driving. However obtaining annotated datasets from real radar images crucial for training these networks is challenging especially in scenarios with long-range detection and adverse weather and lighting conditions where radar performance excels. To address this challenge we present RadSimReal an innovative physical radar simulation capable of generating synthetic radar images with accompanying annotations for various radar types and environmental conditions all without the need for real data collection. Remarkably our findings demonstrate that training object detection models on RadSimReal data and subsequently evaluating them on real-world data produce performance levels comparable to models trained and tested on real data from the same dataset and even achieves better performance when testing across different real datasets. RadSimReal offers advantages over other physical radar simulations that it does not necessitate knowledge of the radar design details which are often not disclosed by radar suppliers and has faster run-time. This innovative tool has the potential to advance the development of computer vision algorithms for radar-based autonomous driving applications.

With recent video object segmentation (VOS) benchmarks evolving to challenging scenarios we revisit a simple but overlooked strategy: restricting the size of memory banks. This diverges from the prevalent practice of expanding memory banks to accommodate extensive historical information. Our specially designed "memory deciphering" study offers a pivotal insight underpinning such a strategy: expanding memory banks while seemingly beneficial actually increases the difficulty for VOS modules to decode relevant features due to the confusion from redundant information. By restricting memory banks to a limited number of essential frames we achieve a notable improvement in VOS accuracy. This process balances the importance and freshness of frames to maintain an informative memory bank within a bounded capacity. Additionally restricted memory banks reduce the training-inference discrepancy in memory lengths compared with continuous expansion. This fosters new opportunities in temporal reasoning and enables us to introduce the previously overlooked "temporal positional embedding." Finally our insights are embodied in "RMem" ("R" for restricted) a simple yet effective VOS modification that excels at challenging VOS scenarios and establishes new state of the art for object state changes (VOST dataset) and long videos (the Long Videos dataset). Our codes are available at https://github.com/Restricted-Memory/RMemand our demo can be watched on https://youtu.be/V3tCFQsJrrM.

We introduce a new RGB-D object dataset captured in the wild called WildRGB-D. Unlike most existing real-world object-centric datasets which only come with RGB capturing the direct capture of the depth channel allows better 3D annotations and broader downstream applications. WildRGB-D comprises large-scale category-level RGB-D object videos which are taken using an iPhone to go around the objects in 360 degrees. It contains around 8500 recorded objects and nearly 20000 RGB-D videos across 46 common object categories. These videos are taken with diverse cluttered backgrounds with three setups to cover as many real-world scenarios as possible: (i) a single object in one video; (ii) multiple objects in one video; and (iii) an object with a static hand in one video. The dataset is annotated with object masks real-world scale camera poses and reconstructed aggregated point clouds from RGBD videos. We benchmark four tasks with WildRGB-D including novel view synthesis camera pose estimation object 6d pose estimation and object surface reconstruction. Our experiments show that the large-scale capture of RGB-D objects provides a large potential to advance 3D object learning. Our project page is https://wildrgbd.github.io/.

Three-dimensional object detection is one of the key tasks in autonomous driving. To reduce costs in practice low-cost multi-view cameras for 3D object detection are proposed to replace the expansive LiDAR sensors. However relying solely on cameras is difficult to achieve highly accurate and robust 3D object detection. An effective solution to this issue is combining multi-view cameras with the economical millimeter-wave radar sensor to achieve more reliable multi-modal 3D object detection. In this paper we introduce RCBEVDet a radar-camera fusion 3D object detection method in the bird's eye view (BEV). Specifically we first design RadarBEVNet for radar BEV feature extraction. RadarBEVNet consists of a dual-stream radar backbone and a Radar Cross-Section (RCS) aware BEV encoder. In the dual-stream radar backbone a point-based encoder and a transformer-based encoder are proposed to extract radar features with an injection and extraction module to facilitate communication between the two encoders. The RCS-aware BEV encoder takes RCS as the object size prior to scattering the point feature in BEV. Besides we present the Cross-Attention Multi-layer Fusion module to automatically align the multi-modal BEV feature from radar and camera with the deformable attention mechanism and then fuse the feature with channel and spatial fusion layers. Experimental results show that RCBEVDet achieves new state-of-the-art radar-camera fusion results on nuScenes and view-of-delft (VoD) 3D object detection benchmarks. Furthermore RCBEVDet achieves better 3D detection results than all real-time camera-only and radar-camera 3D object detectors with a faster inference speed at 21 28 FPS. The source code will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/RCBEVDet.

We present Cutie a video object segmentation (VOS) network with object-level memory reading which puts the object representation from memory back into the video object segmentation result. Recent works on VOS employ bottom-up pixel-level memory reading which struggles due to matching noise especially in the presence of distractors resulting in lower performance in more challenging data. In contrast Cutie performs top-down object-level memory reading by adapting a small set of object queries. Via those it interacts with the bottom-up pixel features iteratively with a query-based object transformer (qt hence Cutie). The object queries act as a high-level summary of the target object while high-resolution feature maps are retained for accurate segmentation. Together with foreground-background masked attention Cutie cleanly separates the semantics of the foreground object from the background. On the challenging MOSE dataset Cutie improves by 8.7 J&F over XMem with a similar running time and improves by 4.2 J&F over DeAOT while being three times faster. Code is available at: hkchengrex.github.io/Cutie

Recent self-training techniques have shown notable improvements in unsupervised domain adaptation for 3D object detection (3D UDA). These techniques typically select pseudo labels i.e. 3D boxes to supervise models for the target domain. However this selection process inevitably introduces unreliable 3D boxes in which 3D points cannot be definitively assigned as foreground or background. Previous techniques mitigate this by reweighting these boxes as pseudo labels but these boxes can still poison the training process. To resolve this problem in this paper we propose a novel pseudo label refinery framework. Specifically in the selection process to improve the reliability of pseudo boxes we propose a complementary augmentation strategy. This strategy involves either removing all points within an unreliable box or replacing it with a high-confidence box. Moreover the point numbers of instances in high-beam datasets are considerably higher than those in low-beam datasets also degrading the quality of pseudo labels during the training process. We alleviate this issue by generating additional proposals and aligning RoI features across different domains. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the quality of pseudo labels and consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on six autonomous driving benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhanwei-Z/PERE.

The vision-language model has brought great improvement to few-shot industrial anomaly detection which usually needs to design of hundreds of prompts through prompt engineering. For automated scenarios we first use conventional prompt learning with many-class paradigm as the baseline to automatically learn prompts but found that it can not work well in one-class anomaly detection. To address the above problem this paper proposes a one-class prompt learning method for few-shot anomaly detection termed PromptAD. First we propose semantic concatenation which can transpose normal prompts into anomaly prompts by concatenating normal prompts with anomaly suffixes thus constructing a large number of negative samples used to guide prompt learning in one-class setting. Furthermore to mitigate the training challenge caused by the absence of anomaly images we introduce the concept of explicit anomaly margin which is used to explicitly control the margin between normal prompt features and anomaly prompt features through a hyper-parameter. For image-level/pixel-level anomaly detection PromptAD achieves first place in 11/12 few-shot settings on MVTec and VisA.