Daily Papers

Point-cloud based 3D object detectors recently have achieved remarkable progress. However, most studies are limited to the development of network architectures for improving only their accuracy without consideration of the computational efficiency. In this paper, we first propose an autoencoder-style framework comprising channel-wise compression and decompression via interchange transfer-based knowledge distillation. To learn the map-view feature of a teacher network, the features from teacher and student networks are independently passed through the shared autoencoder; here, we use a compressed representation loss that binds the channel-wised compression knowledge from both student and teacher networks as a kind of regularization. The decompressed features are transferred in opposite directions to reduce the gap in the interchange reconstructions. Lastly, we present an head attention loss to match the 3D object detection information drawn by the multi-head self-attention mechanism. Through extensive experiments, we verify that our method can train the lightweight model that is well-aligned with the 3D point cloud detection task and we demonstrate its superiority using the well-known public datasets; e.g., Waymo and nuScenes.

Autonomous driving requires an accurate and fast 3D perception system that includes 3D object detection, tracking, and segmentation. Although recent low-cost camera-based approaches have shown promising results, they are susceptible to poor illumination or bad weather conditions and have a large localization error. Hence, fusing camera with low-cost radar, which provides precise long-range measurement and operates reliably in all environments, is promising but has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we propose Camera Radar Net (CRN), a novel camera-radar fusion framework that generates a semantically rich and spatially accurate bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map for various tasks. To overcome the lack of spatial information in an image, we transform perspective view image features to BEV with the help of sparse but accurate radar points. We further aggregate image and radar feature maps in BEV using multi-modal deformable attention designed to tackle the spatial misalignment between inputs. CRN with real-time setting operates at 20 FPS while achieving comparable performance to LiDAR detectors on nuScenes, and even outperforms at a far distance on 100m setting. Moreover, CRN with offline setting yields 62.4% NDS, 57.5% mAP on nuScenes test set and ranks first among all camera and camera-radar 3D object detectors.

Online scene perception and topology reasoning are critical for autonomous vehicles to understand their driving environments, particularly for mapless driving systems that endeavor to reduce reliance on costly High-Definition (HD) maps. However, recent advances in online scene understanding still face limitations, especially in long-range or occluded scenarios, due to the inherent constraints of onboard sensors. To address this challenge, we propose a Standard-Definition (SD) Map Enhanced scene Perception and Topology reasoning (SEPT) framework, which explores how to effectively incorporate the SD map as prior knowledge into existing perception and reasoning pipelines. Specifically, we introduce a novel hybrid feature fusion strategy that combines SD maps with Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features, considering both rasterized and vectorized representations, while mitigating potential misalignment between SD maps and BEV feature spaces. Additionally, we leverage the SD map characteristics to design an auxiliary intersection-aware keypoint detection task, which further enhances the overall scene understanding performance. Experimental results on the large-scale OpenLane-V2 dataset demonstrate that by effectively integrating SD map priors, our framework significantly improves both scene perception and topology reasoning, outperforming existing methods by a substantial margin.

In this paper, we propose a new operator, called 3D DeFormable Attention (DFA3D), for 2D-to-3D feature lifting, which transforms multi-view 2D image features into a unified 3D space for 3D object detection. Existing feature lifting approaches, such as Lift-Splat-based and 2D attention-based, either use estimated depth to get pseudo LiDAR features and then splat them to a 3D space, which is a one-pass operation without feature refinement, or ignore depth and lift features by 2D attention mechanisms, which achieve finer semantics while suffering from a depth ambiguity problem. In contrast, our DFA3D-based method first leverages the estimated depth to expand each view's 2D feature map to 3D and then utilizes DFA3D to aggregate features from the expanded 3D feature maps. With the help of DFA3D, the depth ambiguity problem can be effectively alleviated from the root, and the lifted features can be progressively refined layer by layer, thanks to the Transformer-like architecture. In addition, we propose a mathematically equivalent implementation of DFA3D which can significantly improve its memory efficiency and computational speed. We integrate DFA3D into several methods that use 2D attention-based feature lifting with only a few modifications in code and evaluate on the nuScenes dataset. The experiment results show a consistent improvement of +1.41\% mAP on average, and up to +15.1\% mAP improvement when high-quality depth information is available, demonstrating the superiority, applicability, and huge potential of DFA3D. The code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/3D-deformable-attention.git.

In this paper, we introduce Mask2Map, a novel end-to-end online HD map construction method designed for autonomous driving applications. Our approach focuses on predicting the class and ordered point set of map instances within a scene, represented in the bird's eye view (BEV). Mask2Map consists of two primary components: the Instance-Level Mask Prediction Network (IMPNet) and the Mask-Driven Map Prediction Network (MMPNet). IMPNet generates Mask-Aware Queries and BEV Segmentation Masks to capture comprehensive semantic information globally. Subsequently, MMPNet enhances these query features using local contextual information through two submodules: the Positional Query Generator (PQG) and the Geometric Feature Extractor (GFE). PQG extracts instance-level positional queries by embedding BEV positional information into Mask-Aware Queries, while GFE utilizes BEV Segmentation Masks to generate point-level geometric features. However, we observed limited performance in Mask2Map due to inter-network inconsistency stemming from different predictions to Ground Truth (GT) matching between IMPNet and MMPNet. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Inter-network Denoising Training method, which guides the model to denoise the output affected by both noisy GT queries and perturbed GT Segmentation Masks. Our evaluation conducted on nuScenes and Argoverse2 benchmarks demonstrates that Mask2Map achieves remarkable performance improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods, with gains of 10.1% mAP and 4.1 mAP, respectively. Our code can be found at https://github.com/SehwanChoi0307/Mask2Map.

We introduce MEt3R, a metric for multi-view consistency in generated images. Large-scale generative models for multi-view image generation are rapidly advancing the field of 3D inference from sparse observations. However, due to the nature of generative modeling, traditional reconstruction metrics are not suitable to measure the quality of generated outputs and metrics that are independent of the sampling procedure are desperately needed. In this work, we specifically address the aspect of consistency between generated multi-view images, which can be evaluated independently of the specific scene. Our approach uses DUSt3R to obtain dense 3D reconstructions from image pairs in a feed-forward manner, which are used to warp image contents from one view into the other. Then, feature maps of these images are compared to obtain a similarity score that is invariant to view-dependent effects. Using MEt3R, we evaluate the consistency of a large set of previous methods for novel view and video generation, including our open, multi-view latent diffusion model.

Reliable high-definition (HD) map construction is crucial for the driving safety of autonomous vehicles. Although recent studies demonstrate improved performance, their generalization capability across unfamiliar driving scenes remains unexplored. To tackle this issue, we propose UIGenMap, an uncertainty-instructed structure injection approach for generalizable HD map vectorization, which concerns the uncertainty resampling in statistical distribution and employs explicit instance features to reduce excessive reliance on training data. Specifically, we introduce the perspective-view (PV) detection branch to obtain explicit structural features, in which the uncertainty-aware decoder is designed to dynamically sample probability distributions considering the difference in scenes. With probabilistic embedding and selection, UI2DPrompt is proposed to construct PV-learnable prompts. These PV prompts are integrated into the map decoder by designed hybrid injection to compensate for neglected instance structures. To ensure real-time inference, a lightweight Mimic Query Distillation is designed to learn from PV prompts, which can serve as an efficient alternative to the flow of PV branches. Extensive experiments on challenging geographically disjoint (geo-based) data splits demonstrate that our UIGenMap achieves superior performance, with +5.7 mAP improvement on the nuScenes dataset. Source code will be available at https://github.com/xiaolul2/UIGenMap.

Understanding road geometry is a critical component of the autonomous vehicle (AV) stack. While high-definition (HD) maps can readily provide such information, they suffer from high labeling and maintenance costs. Accordingly, many recent works have proposed methods for estimating HD maps online from sensor data. The vast majority of recent approaches encode multi-camera observations into an intermediate representation, e.g., a bird's eye view (BEV) grid, and produce vector map elements via a decoder. While this architecture is performant, it decimates much of the information encoded in the intermediate representation, preventing downstream tasks (e.g., behavior prediction) from leveraging them. In this work, we propose exposing the rich internal features of online map estimation methods and show how they enable more tightly integrating online mapping with trajectory forecasting. In doing so, we find that directly accessing internal BEV features yields up to 73% faster inference speeds and up to 29% more accurate predictions on the real-world nuScenes dataset.

Stylizing a dynamic scene based on an exemplar image is critical for various real-world applications, including gaming, filmmaking, and augmented and virtual reality. However, achieving consistent stylization across both spatial and temporal dimensions remains a significant challenge. Most existing methods are designed for static scenes and often require an optimization process for each style image, limiting their adaptability. We introduce ZDySS, a zero-shot stylization framework for dynamic scenes, allowing our model to generalize to previously unseen style images at inference. Our approach employs Gaussian splatting for scene representation, linking each Gaussian to a learned feature vector that renders a feature map for any given view and timestamp. By applying style transfer on the learned feature vectors instead of the rendered feature map, we enhance spatio-temporal consistency across frames. Our method demonstrates superior performance and coherence over state-of-the-art baselines in tests on real-world dynamic scenes, making it a robust solution for practical applications.

Maps are a key component in image-based camera localization and visual SLAM systems: they are used to establish geometric constraints between images, correct drift in relative pose estimation, and relocalize cameras after lost tracking. The exact definitions of maps, however, are often application-specific and hand-crafted for different scenarios (e.g. 3D landmarks, lines, planes, bags of visual words). We propose to represent maps as a deep neural net called MapNet, which enables learning a data-driven map representation. Unlike prior work on learning maps, MapNet exploits cheap and ubiquitous sensory inputs like visual odometry and GPS in addition to images and fuses them together for camera localization. Geometric constraints expressed by these inputs, which have traditionally been used in bundle adjustment or pose-graph optimization, are formulated as loss terms in MapNet training and also used during inference. In addition to directly improving localization accuracy, this allows us to update the MapNet (i.e., maps) in a self-supervised manner using additional unlabeled video sequences from the scene. We also propose a novel parameterization for camera rotation which is better suited for deep-learning based camera pose regression. Experimental results on both the indoor 7-Scenes dataset and the outdoor Oxford RobotCar dataset show significant performance improvement over prior work. The MapNet project webpage is https://goo.gl/mRB3Au.

Large-scale pre-training has shown promising results on the vision-and-language navigation (VLN) task. However, most existing pre-training methods employ discrete panoramas to learn visual-textual associations. This requires the model to implicitly correlate incomplete, duplicate observations within the panoramas, which may impair an agent's spatial understanding. Thus, we propose a new map-based pre-training paradigm that is spatial-aware for use in VLN. Concretely, we build a local metric map to explicitly aggregate incomplete observations and remove duplicates, while modeling navigation dependency in a global topological map. This hybrid design can balance the demand of VLN for both short-term reasoning and long-term planning. Then, based on the hybrid map, we devise a pre-training framework to learn a multimodal map representation, which enhances spatial-aware cross-modal reasoning thereby facilitating the language-guided navigation goal. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the map-based pre-training route for VLN, and the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on four VLN benchmarks.

Reliable autonomous driving systems require high-definition (HD) map that contains detailed map information for planning and navigation. However, pre-build HD map requires a large cost. Visual-based Online Map Generation (OMG) has become an alternative low-cost solution to build a local HD map. Query-based BEV Transformer has been a base model for this task. This model learns HD map predictions from an initial map queries distribution which is obtained by offline optimization on training set. Besides the quality of BEV feature, the performance of this model also highly relies on the capacity of initial map query distribution. However, this distribution is limited because the limited query number. To make map predictions optimal on each test sample, it is essential to generate a suitable initial distribution for each specific scenario. This paper proposes to decompose the whole HD map distribution into a set of point representations, namely map query bank (MQBank). To build specific map query initial distributions of different scenarios, low-cost standard definition map (SD map) data is introduced as a kind of prior knowledge. Moreover, each layer of map decoder network learns instance-level map query features, which will lose detailed information of each point. However, BEV feature map is a point-level dense feature. It is important to keep point-level information in map queries when interacting with BEV feature map. This can also be solved with map query bank method. Final experiments show a new insight on SD map prior and a new record on OpenLaneV2 benchmark with 40.5%, 45.7% mAP on vehicle lane and pedestrian area.

Despite tremendous advancements in bird's-eye view (BEV) perception, existing models fall short in generating realistic and coherent semantic map layouts, and they fail to account for uncertainties arising from partial sensor information (such as occlusion or limited coverage). In this work, we introduce MapPrior, a novel BEV perception framework that combines a traditional discriminative BEV perception model with a learned generative model for semantic map layouts. Our MapPrior delivers predictions with better accuracy, realism, and uncertainty awareness. We evaluate our model on the large-scale nuScenes benchmark. At the time of submission, MapPrior outperforms the strongest competing method, with significantly improved MMD and ECE scores in camera- and LiDAR-based BEV perception.

Top-down Bird's Eye View (BEV) maps are a popular representation for ground robot navigation due to their richness and flexibility for downstream tasks. While recent methods have shown promise for predicting BEV maps from First-Person View (FPV) images, their generalizability is limited to small regions captured by current autonomous vehicle-based datasets. In this context, we show that a more scalable approach towards generalizable map prediction can be enabled by using two large-scale crowd-sourced mapping platforms, Mapillary for FPV images and OpenStreetMap for BEV semantic maps. We introduce Map It Anywhere (MIA), a data engine that enables seamless curation and modeling of labeled map prediction data from existing open-source map platforms. Using our MIA data engine, we display the ease of automatically collecting a dataset of 1.2 million pairs of FPV images & BEV maps encompassing diverse geographies, landscapes, environmental factors, camera models & capture scenarios. We further train a simple camera model-agnostic model on this data for BEV map prediction. Extensive evaluations using established benchmarks and our dataset show that the data curated by MIA enables effective pretraining for generalizable BEV map prediction, with zero-shot performance far exceeding baselines trained on existing datasets by 35%. Our analysis highlights the promise of using large-scale public maps for developing & testing generalizable BEV perception, paving the way for more robust autonomous navigation.

Maps are fundamental medium to visualize and represent the real word in a simple and 16 philosophical way. The emergence of the 3rd wave information has made a proportion of maps are available to be generated ubiquitously, which would significantly enrich the dimensions and perspectives to understand the characteristics of the real world. However, a majority of map dataset have never been discovered, acquired and effectively used, and the map data used in many applications might not be completely fitted for the authentic demands of these applications. This challenge is emerged due to the lack of numerous well-labelled benchmark datasets for implementing the deep learning approaches into identifying complicated map content. Thus, we develop a large-scale benchmark dataset that includes well-labelled dataset for map text annotation recognition, map scene classification, map super-resolution reconstruction, and map style transferring. Furthermore, these well-labelled datasets would facilitate the state-of-the-art machine intelligence technologies to conduct map feature detection, map pattern recognition and map content retrieval. We hope our efforts would be useful for AI-enhanced cartographical applications.

Map representation learned by expert demonstrations has shown promising research value. However, recent advancements in the visual navigation field face challenges due to the lack of human datasets in the real world for efficient supervised representation learning of the environments. We present a Landmark-Aware Visual Navigation (LAVN) dataset to allow for supervised learning of human-centric exploration policies and map building. We collect RGB observation and human point-click pairs as a human annotator explores virtual and real-world environments with the goal of full coverage exploration of the space. The human annotators also provide distinct landmark examples along each trajectory, which we intuit will simplify the task of map or graph building and localization. These human point-clicks serve as direct supervision for waypoint prediction when learning to explore in environments. Our dataset covers a wide spectrum of scenes, including rooms in indoor environments, as well as walkways outdoors. Dataset is available at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10608067.

Change detection in remote sensing imagery is essential for a variety of applications such as urban planning, disaster management, and climate research. However, existing methods for identifying semantically changed areas overlook the availability of semantic information in the form of existing maps describing features of the earth's surface. In this paper, we leverage this information for change detection in bi-temporal images. We show that the simple integration of the additional information via concatenation of latent representations suffices to significantly outperform state-of-the-art change detection methods. Motivated by this observation, we propose the new task of *Conditional Change Detection*, where pre-change semantic information is used as input next to bi-temporal images. To fully exploit the extra information, we propose *MapFormer*, a novel architecture based on a multi-modal feature fusion module that allows for feature processing conditioned on the available semantic information. We further employ a supervised, cross-modal contrastive loss to guide the learning of visual representations. Our approach outperforms existing change detection methods by an absolute 11.7\% and 18.4\% in terms of binary change IoU on DynamicEarthNet and HRSCD, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach to the quality of the pre-change semantic information and the absence pre-change imagery. The code is available at https://github.com/mxbh/mapformer.

Autonomous driving for urban and highway driving applications often requires High Definition (HD) maps to generate a navigation plan. Nevertheless, various challenges arise when generating and maintaining HD maps at scale. While recent online mapping methods have started to emerge, their performance especially for longer ranges is limited by heavy occlusion in dynamic environments. With these considerations in mind, our work focuses on leveraging lightweight and scalable priors-Standard Definition (SD) maps-in the development of online vectorized HD map representations. We first examine the integration of prototypical rasterized SD map representations into various online mapping architectures. Furthermore, to identify lightweight strategies, we extend the OpenLane-V2 dataset with OpenStreetMaps and evaluate the benefits of graphical SD map representations. A key finding from designing SD map integration components is that SD map encoders are model agnostic and can be quickly adapted to new architectures that utilize bird's eye view (BEV) encoders. Our results show that making use of SD maps as priors for the online mapping task can significantly speed up convergence and boost the performance of the online centerline perception task by 30% (mAP). Furthermore, we show that the introduction of the SD maps leads to a reduction of the number of parameters in the perception and reasoning task by leveraging SD map graphs while improving the overall performance. Project Page: https://henryzhangzhy.github.io/sdhdmap/.

Autonomous driving systems require High-Definition (HD) semantic maps to navigate around urban roads. Existing solutions approach the semantic mapping problem by offline manual annotation, which suffers from serious scalability issues. Recent learning-based methods produce dense rasterized segmentation predictions to construct maps. However, these predictions do not include instance information of individual map elements and require heuristic post-processing to obtain vectorized maps. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an end-to-end vectorized HD map learning pipeline, termed VectorMapNet. VectorMapNet takes onboard sensor observations and predicts a sparse set of polylines in the bird's-eye view. This pipeline can explicitly model the spatial relation between map elements and generate vectorized maps that are friendly to downstream autonomous driving tasks. Extensive experiments show that VectorMapNet achieve strong map learning performance on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 dataset, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by 14.2 mAP and 14.6mAP. Qualitatively, VectorMapNet is capable of generating comprehensive maps and capturing fine-grained details of road geometry. To the best of our knowledge, VectorMapNet is the first work designed towards end-to-end vectorized map learning from onboard observations. Our project website is available at https://tsinghua-mars-lab.github.io/vectormapnet/.

This study explores the recently proposed challenging multi-view Anomaly Detection (AD) task. Single-view tasks would encounter blind spots from other perspectives, resulting in inaccuracies in sample-level prediction. Therefore, we introduce the Multi-View Anomaly Detection (MVAD) framework, which learns and integrates features from multi-views. Specifically, we proposed a Multi-View Adaptive Selection (MVAS) algorithm for feature learning and fusion across multiple views. The feature maps are divided into neighbourhood attention windows to calculate a semantic correlation matrix between single-view windows and all other views, which is a conducted attention mechanism for each single-view window and the top-K most correlated multi-view windows. Adjusting the window sizes and top-K can minimise the computational complexity to linear. Extensive experiments on the Real-IAD dataset for cross-setting (multi/single-class) validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance among sample 4.1\%uparrow/ image 5.6\%uparrow/pixel 6.7\%uparrow levels with a total of ten metrics with only 18M parameters and fewer GPU memory and training time.

Automated feature detection in historical maps can significantly accelerate the reconstruction of the geospatial past. However, this process is often constrained by the time-consuming task of manually digitizing sufficient high-quality training data. The emergence of visual foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), offers a promising solution due to their remarkable generalization capabilities and rapid adaptation to new data distributions. Despite this, directly applying SAM in a zero-shot manner to historical map segmentation poses significant challenges, including poor recognition of certain geospatial features and a reliance on input prompts, which limits its ability to be fully automated. To address these challenges, we introduce MapSAM, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that adapts SAM into a prompt-free and versatile solution for various downstream historical map segmentation tasks. Specifically, we employ Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) to integrate domain-specific knowledge into the image encoder. Additionally, we develop an automatic prompt generation process, eliminating the need for manual input. We further enhance the positional prompt in SAM, transforming it into a higher-level positional-semantic prompt, and modify the cross-attention mechanism in the mask decoder with masked attention for more effective feature aggregation. The proposed MapSAM framework demonstrates promising performance across two distinct historical map segmentation tasks: one focused on linear features and the other on areal features. Experimental results show that it adapts well to various features, even when fine-tuned with extremely limited data (e.g. 10 shots).

Panoramic images, capturing a 360{\deg} field of view (FoV), encompass omnidirectional spatial information crucial for scene understanding. However, it is not only costly to obtain training-sufficient dense-annotated panoramas but also application-restricted when training models in a close-vocabulary setting. To tackle this problem, in this work, we define a new task termed Open Panoramic Segmentation (OPS), where models are trained with FoV-restricted pinhole images in the source domain in an open-vocabulary setting while evaluated with FoV-open panoramic images in the target domain, enabling the zero-shot open panoramic semantic segmentation ability of models. Moreover, we propose a model named OOOPS with a Deformable Adapter Network (DAN), which significantly improves zero-shot panoramic semantic segmentation performance. To further enhance the distortion-aware modeling ability from the pinhole source domain, we propose a novel data augmentation method called Random Equirectangular Projection (RERP) which is specifically designed to address object deformations in advance. Surpassing other state-of-the-art open-vocabulary semantic segmentation approaches, a remarkable performance boost on three panoramic datasets, WildPASS, Stanford2D3D, and Matterport3D, proves the effectiveness of our proposed OOOPS model with RERP on the OPS task, especially +2.2% on outdoor WildPASS and +2.4% mIoU on indoor Stanford2D3D. The source code is publicly available at https://junweizheng93.github.io/publications/OPS/OPS.html.

In this paper, we introduce MapBench-the first dataset specifically designed for human-readable, pixel-based map-based outdoor navigation, curated from complex path finding scenarios. MapBench comprises over 1600 pixel space map path finding problems from 100 diverse maps. In MapBench, LVLMs generate language-based navigation instructions given a map image and a query with beginning and end landmarks. For each map, MapBench provides Map Space Scene Graph (MSSG) as an indexing data structure to convert between natural language and evaluate LVLM-generated results. We demonstrate that MapBench significantly challenges state-of-the-art LVLMs both zero-shot prompting and a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) augmented reasoning framework that decomposes map navigation into sequential cognitive processes. Our evaluation of both open-source and closed-source LVLMs underscores the substantial difficulty posed by MapBench, revealing critical limitations in their spatial reasoning and structured decision-making capabilities. We release all the code and dataset in https://github.com/taco-group/MapBench.

We introduce a novel method for generating 360{\deg} panoramas from text prompts or images. Our approach leverages recent advances in 3D generation by employing multi-view diffusion models to jointly synthesize the six faces of a cubemap. Unlike previous methods that rely on processing equirectangular projections or autoregressive generation, our method treats each face as a standard perspective image, simplifying the generation process and enabling the use of existing multi-view diffusion models. We demonstrate that these models can be adapted to produce high-quality cubemaps without requiring correspondence-aware attention layers. Our model allows for fine-grained text control, generates high resolution panorama images and generalizes well beyond its training set, whilst achieving state-of-the-art results, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Project page: https://cubediff.github.io/

While interacting in the world is a multi-sensory experience, many robots continue to predominantly rely on visual perception to map and navigate in their environments. In this work, we propose Audio-Visual-Language Maps (AVLMaps), a unified 3D spatial map representation for storing cross-modal information from audio, visual, and language cues. AVLMaps integrate the open-vocabulary capabilities of multimodal foundation models pre-trained on Internet-scale data by fusing their features into a centralized 3D voxel grid. In the context of navigation, we show that AVLMaps enable robot systems to index goals in the map based on multimodal queries, e.g., textual descriptions, images, or audio snippets of landmarks. In particular, the addition of audio information enables robots to more reliably disambiguate goal locations. Extensive experiments in simulation show that AVLMaps enable zero-shot multimodal goal navigation from multimodal prompts and provide 50% better recall in ambiguous scenarios. These capabilities extend to mobile robots in the real world - navigating to landmarks referring to visual, audio, and spatial concepts. Videos and code are available at: https://avlmaps.github.io.

We present a method for generating Streetscapes-long sequences of views through an on-the-fly synthesized city-scale scene. Our generation is conditioned by language input (e.g., city name, weather), as well as an underlying map/layout hosting the desired trajectory. Compared to recent models for video generation or 3D view synthesis, our method can scale to much longer-range camera trajectories, spanning several city blocks, while maintaining visual quality and consistency. To achieve this goal, we build on recent work on video diffusion, used within an autoregressive framework that can easily scale to long sequences. In particular, we introduce a new temporal imputation method that prevents our autoregressive approach from drifting from the distribution of realistic city imagery. We train our Streetscapes system on a compelling source of data-posed imagery from Google Street View, along with contextual map data-which allows users to generate city views conditioned on any desired city layout, with controllable camera poses. Please see more results at our project page at https://boyangdeng.com/streetscapes.

Learning depth from spherical panoramas is becoming a popular research topic because a panorama has a full field-of-view of the environment and provides a relatively complete description of a scene. However, applying well-studied CNNs for perspective images to the standard representation of spherical panoramas, i.e., the equirectangular projection, is suboptimal, as it becomes distorted towards the poles. Another representation is the cubemap projection, which is distortion-free but discontinued on edges and limited in the field-of-view. This paper introduces a new framework to fuse features from the two projections, unidirectionally feeding the cubemap features to the equirectangular features only at the decoding stage. Unlike the recent bidirectional fusion approach operating at both the encoding and decoding stages, our fusion scheme is much more efficient. Besides, we also designed a more effective fusion module for our fusion scheme. Experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed fusion strategy and module, and our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on four popular datasets. Additional experiments show that our model also has the advantages of model complexity and generalization capability.The code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/UniFuse-Unidirectional-Fusion.

In this paper, we present PointmapDiffusion, a novel framework for single-image novel view synthesis (NVS) that utilizes pre-trained 2D diffusion models. Our method is the first to leverage pointmaps (i.e. rasterized 3D scene coordinates) as a conditioning signal, capturing geometric prior from the reference images to guide the diffusion process. By embedding reference attention blocks and a ControlNet for pointmap features, our model balances between generative capability and geometric consistency, enabling accurate view synthesis across varying viewpoints. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that PointmapDiffusion achieves high-quality, multi-view consistent results with significantly fewer trainable parameters compared to other baselines for single-image NVS tasks.

Panoramic video generation enables immersive 360{\deg} content creation, valuable in applications that demand scene-consistent world exploration. However, existing panoramic video generation models struggle to leverage pre-trained generative priors from conventional text-to-video models for high-quality and diverse panoramic videos generation, due to limited dataset scale and the gap in spatial feature representations. In this paper, we introduce PanoWan to effectively lift pre-trained text-to-video models to the panoramic domain, equipped with minimal modules. PanoWan employs latitude-aware sampling to avoid latitudinal distortion, while its rotated semantic denoising and padded pixel-wise decoding ensure seamless transitions at longitude boundaries. To provide sufficient panoramic videos for learning these lifted representations, we contribute PanoVid, a high-quality panoramic video dataset with captions and diverse scenarios. Consequently, PanoWan achieves state-of-the-art performance in panoramic video generation and demonstrates robustness for zero-shot downstream tasks.

We present a new dataset, Functional Map of the World (fMoW), which aims to inspire the development of machine learning models capable of predicting the functional purpose of buildings and land use from temporal sequences of satellite images and a rich set of metadata features. The metadata provided with each image enables reasoning about location, time, sun angles, physical sizes, and other features when making predictions about objects in the image. Our dataset consists of over 1 million images from over 200 countries. For each image, we provide at least one bounding box annotation containing one of 63 categories, including a "false detection" category. We present an analysis of the dataset along with baseline approaches that reason about metadata and temporal views. Our data, code, and pretrained models have been made publicly available.

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) have become increasingly popular, as their large field-of-view (FoV) can offer viewers the chance to freely choose the view directions in immersive environments such as virtual reality. The M\"obius transformation is typically employed to further provide the opportunity for movement and zoom on ODIs, but applying it to the image level often results in blurry effect and aliasing problem. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach, called OmniZoomer, to incorporate the M\"obius transformation into the network for movement and zoom on ODIs. By learning various transformed feature maps under different conditions, the network is enhanced to handle the increasing edge curvatures, which alleviates the blurry effect. Moreover, to address the aliasing problem, we propose two key components. Firstly, to compensate for the lack of pixels for describing curves, we enhance the feature maps in the high-resolution (HR) space and calculate the transformed index map with a spatial index generation module. Secondly, considering that ODIs are inherently represented in the spherical space, we propose a spherical resampling module that combines the index map and HR feature maps to transform the feature maps for better spherical correlation. The transformed feature maps are decoded to output a zoomed ODI. Experiments show that our method can produce HR and high-quality ODIs with the flexibility to move and zoom in to the object of interest. Project page is available at http://vlislab22.github.io/OmniZoomer/.

Top-view perspective denotes a typical way in which humans read and reason over different types of maps, and it is vital for localization and navigation of humans as well as of `non-human' agents, such as the ones backed by large Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Nonetheless, spatial reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs remain unattested and underexplored. In this work, we thus study their capability to understand and reason over spatial relations from the top view. The focus on top view also enables controlled evaluations at different granularity of spatial reasoning; we clearly disentangle different abilities (e.g., recognizing particular objects versus understanding their relative positions). We introduce the TopViewRS (Top-View Reasoning in Space) dataset, consisting of 11,384 multiple-choice questions with either realistic or semantic top-view map as visual input. We then use it to study and evaluate VLMs across 4 perception and reasoning tasks with different levels of complexity. Evaluation of 10 representative open- and closed-source VLMs reveals the gap of more than 50% compared to average human performance, and it is even lower than the random baseline in some cases. Although additional experiments show that Chain-of-Thought reasoning can boost model capabilities by 5.82% on average, the overall performance of VLMs remains limited. Our findings underscore the critical need for enhanced model capability in top-view spatial reasoning and set a foundation for further research towards human-level proficiency of VLMs in real-world multimodal tasks.

In this paper, we propose OpenSatMap, a fine-grained, high-resolution satellite dataset for large-scale map construction. Map construction is one of the foundations of the transportation industry, such as navigation and autonomous driving. Extracting road structures from satellite images is an efficient way to construct large-scale maps. However, existing satellite datasets provide only coarse semantic-level labels with a relatively low resolution (up to level 19), impeding the advancement of this field. In contrast, the proposed OpenSatMap (1) has fine-grained instance-level annotations; (2) consists of high-resolution images (level 20); (3) is currently the largest one of its kind; (4) collects data with high diversity. Moreover, OpenSatMap covers and aligns with the popular nuScenes dataset and Argoverse 2 dataset to potentially advance autonomous driving technologies. By publishing and maintaining the dataset, we provide a high-quality benchmark for satellite-based map construction and downstream tasks like autonomous driving.

Human perception of the world is shaped by a multitude of viewpoints and modalities. While many existing datasets focus on scene understanding from a certain perspective (e.g. egocentric or third-person views), our dataset offers a panoptic perspective (i.e. multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities). Specifically, we encapsulate third-person panoramic and front views, as well as egocentric monocular/binocular views with rich modalities including video, multi-channel audio, directional binaural delay, location data and textual scene descriptions within each scene captured, presenting comprehensive observation of the world. Figure 1 offers a glimpse of all 28 scene categories of our 360+x dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first database that covers multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities to mimic how daily information is accessed in the real world. Through our benchmark analysis, we presented 5 different scene understanding tasks on the proposed 360+x dataset to evaluate the impact and benefit of each data modality and perspective in panoptic scene understanding. We hope this unique dataset could broaden the scope of comprehensive scene understanding and encourage the community to approach these problems from more diverse perspectives.

While bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception models can be useful for building high-definition maps (HD-Maps) with less human labor, their results are often unreliable and demonstrate noticeable inconsistencies in the predicted HD-Maps from different viewpoints. This is because BEV perception is typically set up in an 'onboard' manner, which restricts the computation and consequently prevents algorithms from reasoning multiple views simultaneously. This paper overcomes these limitations and advocates a more practical 'offboard' HD-Map generation setup that removes the computation constraints, based on the fact that HD-Maps are commonly reusable infrastructures built offline in data centers. To this end, we propose a novel offboard pipeline called MV-Map that capitalizes multi-view consistency and can handle an arbitrary number of frames with the key design of a 'region-centric' framework. In MV-Map, the target HD-Maps are created by aggregating all the frames of onboard predictions, weighted by the confidence scores assigned by an 'uncertainty network'. To further enhance multi-view consistency, we augment the uncertainty network with the global 3D structure optimized by a voxelized neural radiance field (Voxel-NeRF). Extensive experiments on nuScenes show that our MV-Map significantly improves the quality of HD-Maps, further highlighting the importance of offboard methods for HD-Map generation.

Many historical map sheets are publicly available for studies that require long-term historical geographic data. The cartographic design of these maps includes a combination of map symbols and text labels. Automatically reading text labels from map images could greatly speed up the map interpretation and helps generate rich metadata describing the map content. Many text detection algorithms have been proposed to locate text regions in map images automatically, but most of the algorithms are trained on out-ofdomain datasets (e.g., scenic images). Training data determines the quality of machine learning models, and manually annotating text regions in map images is labor-extensive and time-consuming. On the other hand, existing geographic data sources, such as Open- StreetMap (OSM), contain machine-readable map layers, which allow us to separate out the text layer and obtain text label annotations easily. However, the cartographic styles between OSM map tiles and historical maps are significantly different. This paper proposes a method to automatically generate an unlimited amount of annotated historical map images for training text detection models. We use a style transfer model to convert contemporary map images into historical style and place text labels upon them. We show that the state-of-the-art text detection models (e.g., PSENet) can benefit from the synthetic historical maps and achieve significant improvement for historical map text detection.

A map, as crucial information for downstream applications of an autonomous driving system, is usually represented in lanelines or centerlines. However, existing literature on map learning primarily focuses on either detecting geometry-based lanelines or perceiving topology relationships of centerlines. Both of these methods ignore the intrinsic relationship of lanelines and centerlines, that lanelines bind centerlines. While simply predicting both types of lane in one model is mutually excluded in learning objective, we advocate lane segment as a new representation that seamlessly incorporates both geometry and topology information. Thus, we introduce LaneSegNet, the first end-to-end mapping network generating lane segments to obtain a complete representation of the road structure. Our algorithm features two key modifications. One is a lane attention module to capture pivotal region details within the long-range feature space. Another is an identical initialization strategy for reference points, which enhances the learning of positional priors for lane attention. On the OpenLane-V2 dataset, LaneSegNet outperforms previous counterparts by a substantial gain across three tasks, i.e., map element detection (+4.8 mAP), centerline perception (+6.9 DET_l), and the newly defined one, lane segment perception (+5.6 mAP). Furthermore, it obtains a real-time inference speed of 14.7 FPS. Code is accessible at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/LaneSegNet.

In this paper, we delve into the intricate dynamics of Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) by addressing a critical yet overlooked aspect -- the choice of viewpoint during sketch creation. Unlike photo systems that seamlessly handle diverse views through extensive datasets, sketch systems, with limited data collected from fixed perspectives, face challenges. Our pilot study, employing a pre-trained FG-SBIR model, highlights the system's struggle when query-sketches differ in viewpoint from target instances. Interestingly, a questionnaire however shows users desire autonomy, with a significant percentage favouring view-specific retrieval. To reconcile this, we advocate for a view-aware system, seamlessly accommodating both view-agnostic and view-specific tasks. Overcoming dataset limitations, our first contribution leverages multi-view 2D projections of 3D objects, instilling cross-modal view awareness. The second contribution introduces a customisable cross-modal feature through disentanglement, allowing effortless mode switching. Extensive experiments on standard datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.

Bird's eye view (BEV) representation is a new perception formulation for autonomous driving, which is based on spatial fusion. Further, temporal fusion is also introduced in BEV representation and gains great success. In this work, we propose a new method that unifies both spatial and temporal fusion and merges them into a unified mathematical formulation. The unified fusion could not only provide a new perspective on BEV fusion but also brings new capabilities. With the proposed unified spatial-temporal fusion, our method could support long-range fusion, which is hard to achieve in conventional BEV methods. Moreover, the BEV fusion in our work is temporal-adaptive and the weights of temporal fusion are learnable. In contrast, conventional methods mainly use fixed and equal weights for temporal fusion. Besides, the proposed unified fusion could avoid information lost in conventional BEV fusion methods and make full use of features. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the NuScenes dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed method and our method gains the state-of-the-art performance in the map segmentation task.

In the current era of generative AI breakthroughs, generating panoramic scenes from a single input image remains a key challenge. Most existing methods use diffusion-based iterative or simultaneous multi-view inpainting. However, the lack of global scene layout priors leads to subpar outputs with duplicated objects (e.g., multiple beds in a bedroom) or requires time-consuming human text inputs for each view. We propose L-MAGIC, a novel method leveraging large language models for guidance while diffusing multiple coherent views of 360 degree panoramic scenes. L-MAGIC harnesses pre-trained diffusion and language models without fine-tuning, ensuring zero-shot performance. The output quality is further enhanced by super-resolution and multi-view fusion techniques. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the resulting panoramic scenes feature better scene layouts and perspective view rendering quality compared to related works, with >70% preference in human evaluations. Combined with conditional diffusion models, L-MAGIC can accept various input modalities, including but not limited to text, depth maps, sketches, and colored scripts. Applying depth estimation further enables 3D point cloud generation and dynamic scene exploration with fluid camera motion. Code is available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/MMPano. The video presentation is available at https://youtu.be/XDMNEzH4-Ec?list=PLG9Zyvu7iBa0-a7ccNLO8LjcVRAoMn57s.

Predicting realistic ground views from satellite imagery in urban scenes is a challenging task due to the significant view gaps between satellite and ground-view images. We propose a novel pipeline to tackle this challenge, by generating geospecifc views that maximally respect the weak geometry and texture from multi-view satellite images. Different from existing approaches that hallucinate images from cues such as partial semantics or geometry from overhead satellite images, our method directly predicts ground-view images at geolocation by using a comprehensive set of information from the satellite image, resulting in ground-level images with a resolution boost at a factor of ten or more. We leverage a novel building refinement method to reduce geometric distortions in satellite data at ground level, which ensures the creation of accurate conditions for view synthesis using diffusion networks. Moreover, we proposed a novel geospecific prior, which prompts distribution learning of diffusion models to respect image samples that are closer to the geolocation of the predicted images. We demonstrate our pipeline is the first to generate close-to-real and geospecific ground views merely based on satellite images.

Cross-view image matching for geo-localisation is a challenging problem due to the significant visual difference between aerial and ground-level viewpoints. The method provides localisation capabilities from geo-referenced images, eliminating the need for external devices or costly equipment. This enhances the capacity of agents to autonomously determine their position, navigate, and operate effectively in GNSS-denied environments. Current research employs a variety of techniques to reduce the domain gap such as applying polar transforms to aerial images or synthesising between perspectives. However, these approaches generally rely on having a 360{\deg} field of view, limiting real-world feasibility. We propose BEV-CV, an approach introducing two key novelties with a focus on improving the real-world viability of cross-view geo-localisation. Firstly bringing ground-level images into a semantic Birds-Eye-View before matching embeddings, allowing for direct comparison with aerial image representations. Secondly, we adapt datasets into application realistic format - limited Field-of-View images aligned to vehicle direction. BEV-CV achieves state-of-the-art recall accuracies, improving Top-1 rates of 70{\deg} crops of CVUSA and CVACT by 23% and 24% respectively. Also decreasing computational requirements by reducing floating point operations to below previous works, and decreasing embedding dimensionality by 33% - together allowing for faster localisation capabilities.

Determining the location of an image anywhere on Earth is a complex visual task, which makes it particularly relevant for evaluating computer vision algorithms. Yet, the absence of standard, large-scale, open-access datasets with reliably localizable images has limited its potential. To address this issue, we introduce OpenStreetView-5M, a large-scale, open-access dataset comprising over 5.1 million geo-referenced street view images, covering 225 countries and territories. In contrast to existing benchmarks, we enforce a strict train/test separation, allowing us to evaluate the relevance of learned geographical features beyond mere memorization. To demonstrate the utility of our dataset, we conduct an extensive benchmark of various state-of-the-art image encoders, spatial representations, and training strategies. All associated codes and models can be found at https://github.com/gastruc/osv5m.

Can we relocalize in a scene represented by a single reference image? Standard visual relocalization requires hundreds of images and scale calibration to build a scene-specific 3D map. In contrast, we propose Map-free Relocalization, i.e., using only one photo of a scene to enable instant, metric scaled relocalization. Existing datasets are not suitable to benchmark map-free relocalization, due to their focus on large scenes or their limited variability. Thus, we have constructed a new dataset of 655 small places of interest, such as sculptures, murals and fountains, collected worldwide. Each place comes with a reference image to serve as a relocalization anchor, and dozens of query images with known, metric camera poses. The dataset features changing conditions, stark viewpoint changes, high variability across places, and queries with low to no visual overlap with the reference image. We identify two viable families of existing methods to provide baseline results: relative pose regression, and feature matching combined with single-image depth prediction. While these methods show reasonable performance on some favorable scenes in our dataset, map-free relocalization proves to be a challenge that requires new, innovative solutions.

This paper presents a vector HD-mapping algorithm that formulates the mapping as a tracking task and uses a history of memory latents to ensure consistent reconstructions over time. Our method, MapTracker, accumulates a sensor stream into memory buffers of two latent representations: 1) Raster latents in the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space and 2) Vector latents over the road elements (i.e., pedestrian-crossings, lane-dividers, and road-boundaries). The approach borrows the query propagation paradigm from the tracking literature that explicitly associates tracked road elements from the previous frame to the current, while fusing a subset of memory latents selected with distance strides to further enhance temporal consistency. A vector latent is decoded to reconstruct the geometry of a road element. The paper further makes benchmark contributions by 1) Improving processing code for existing datasets to produce consistent ground truth with temporal alignments and 2) Augmenting existing mAP metrics with consistency checks. MapTracker significantly outperforms existing methods on both nuScenes and Agroverse2 datasets by over 8% and 19% on the conventional and the new consistency-aware metrics, respectively. The code will be available on our project page: https://map-tracker.github.io.

3D immersive scene generation is a challenging yet critical task in computer vision and graphics. A desired virtual 3D scene should 1) exhibit omnidirectional view consistency, and 2) allow for free exploration in complex scene hierarchies. Existing methods either rely on successive scene expansion via inpainting or employ panorama representation to represent large FOV scene environments. However, the generated scene suffers from semantic drift during expansion and is unable to handle occlusion among scene hierarchies. To tackle these challenges, we introduce LayerPano3D, a novel framework for full-view, explorable panoramic 3D scene generation from a single text prompt. Our key insight is to decompose a reference 2D panorama into multiple layers at different depth levels, where each layer reveals the unseen space from the reference views via diffusion prior. LayerPano3D comprises multiple dedicated designs: 1) we introduce a novel text-guided anchor view synthesis pipeline for high-quality, consistent panorama generation. 2) We pioneer the Layered 3D Panorama as underlying representation to manage complex scene hierarchies and lift it into 3D Gaussians to splat detailed 360-degree omnidirectional scenes with unconstrained viewing paths. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework generates state-of-the-art 3D panoramic scene in both full view consistency and immersive exploratory experience. We believe that LayerPano3D holds promise for advancing 3D panoramic scene creation with numerous applications.

3D occupancy, an advanced perception technology for driving scenarios, represents the entire scene without distinguishing between foreground and background by quantifying the physical space into a grid map. The widely adopted projection-first deformable attention, efficient in transforming image features into 3D representations, encounters challenges in aggregating multi-view features due to sensor deployment constraints. To address this issue, we propose our learning-first view attention mechanism for effective multi-view feature aggregation. Moreover, we showcase the scalability of our view attention across diverse multi-view 3D tasks, including map construction and 3D object detection. Leveraging the proposed view attention as well as an additional multi-frame streaming temporal attention, we introduce ViewFormer, a vision-centric transformer-based framework for spatiotemporal feature aggregation. To further explore occupancy-level flow representation, we present FlowOcc3D, a benchmark built on top of existing high-quality datasets. Qualitative and quantitative analyses on this benchmark reveal the potential to represent fine-grained dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/ViewFormerOcc/ViewFormer-Occ.

Cross-modal retrieval aims to measure the content similarity between different types of data. The idea has been previously applied to visual, text, and speech data. In this paper, we present a novel cross-modal retrieval method specifically for multi-view images, called Cross-view Image Retrieval CVIR. Our approach aims to find a feature space as well as an embedding space in which samples from street-view images are compared directly to satellite-view images (and vice-versa). For this comparison, a novel deep metric learning based solution "DeepCVIR" has been proposed. Previous cross-view image datasets are deficient in that they (1) lack class information; (2) were originally collected for cross-view image geolocalization task with coupled images; (3) do not include any images from off-street locations. To train, compare, and evaluate the performance of cross-view image retrieval, we present a new 6 class cross-view image dataset termed as CrossViewRet which comprises of images including freeway, mountain, palace, river, ship, and stadium with 700 high-resolution dual-view images for each class. Results show that the proposed DeepCVIR outperforms conventional matching approaches on the CVIR task for the given dataset and would also serve as the baseline for future research.

Vectorized high-definition map online construction has garnered considerable attention in the field of autonomous driving research. Most existing approaches model changeable map elements using a fixed number of points, or predict local maps in a two-stage autoregressive manner, which may miss essential details and lead to error accumulation. Towards precise map element learning, we propose a simple yet effective architecture named PivotNet, which adopts unified pivot-based map representations and is formulated as a direct set prediction paradigm. Concretely, we first propose a novel point-to-line mask module to encode both the subordinate and geometrical point-line priors in the network. Then, a well-designed pivot dynamic matching module is proposed to model the topology in dynamic point sequences by introducing the concept of sequence matching. Furthermore, to supervise the position and topology of the vectorized point predictions, we propose a dynamic vectorized sequence loss. Extensive experiments and ablations show that PivotNet is remarkably superior to other SOTAs by 5.9 mAP at least. The code will be available soon.

Recent prosperity of text-to-image diffusion models, e.g. Stable Diffusion, has stimulated research to adapt them to 360-degree panorama generation. Prior work has demonstrated the feasibility of using conventional low-rank adaptation techniques on pre-trained diffusion models to generate panoramic images. However, the substantial domain gap between perspective and panoramic images raises questions about the underlying mechanisms enabling this empirical success. We hypothesize and examine that the trainable counterparts exhibit distinct behaviors when fine-tuned on panoramic data, and such an adaptation conceals some intrinsic mechanism to leverage the prior knowledge within the pre-trained diffusion models. Our analysis reveals the following: 1) the query and key matrices in the attention modules are responsible for common information that can be shared between the panoramic and perspective domains, thus are less relevant to panorama generation; and 2) the value and output weight matrices specialize in adapting pre-trained knowledge to the panoramic domain, playing a more critical role during fine-tuning for panorama generation. We empirically verify these insights by introducing a simple framework called UniPano, with the objective of establishing an elegant baseline for future research. UniPano not only outperforms existing methods but also significantly reduces memory usage and training time compared to prior dual-branch approaches, making it scalable for end-to-end panorama generation with higher resolution. The code will be released.

With the increasing popularity of autonomous driving based on the powerful and unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation, a demand for high-quality and large-scale multi-view video data with accurate annotation is urgently required. However, such large-scale multi-view data is hard to obtain due to expensive collection and annotation costs. To alleviate the problem, we propose a spatial-temporal consistent diffusion framework DrivingDiffusion, to generate realistic multi-view videos controlled by 3D layout. There are three challenges when synthesizing multi-view videos given a 3D layout: How to keep 1) cross-view consistency and 2) cross-frame consistency? 3) How to guarantee the quality of the generated instances? Our DrivingDiffusion solves the problem by cascading the multi-view single-frame image generation step, the single-view video generation step shared by multiple cameras, and post-processing that can handle long video generation. In the multi-view model, the consistency of multi-view images is ensured by information exchange between adjacent cameras. In the temporal model, we mainly query the information that needs attention in subsequent frame generation from the multi-view images of the first frame. We also introduce the local prompt to effectively improve the quality of generated instances. In post-processing, we further enhance the cross-view consistency of subsequent frames and extend the video length by employing temporal sliding window algorithm. Without any extra cost, our model can generate large-scale realistic multi-camera driving videos in complex urban scenes, fueling the downstream driving tasks. The code will be made publicly available.

Satellite-to-street view synthesis aims at generating a realistic street-view image from its corresponding satellite-view image. Although stable diffusion models have exhibit remarkable performance in a variety of image generation applications, their reliance on similar-view inputs to control the generated structure or texture restricts their application to the challenging cross-view synthesis task. In this work, we propose CrossViewDiff, a cross-view diffusion model for satellite-to-street view synthesis. To address the challenges posed by the large discrepancy across views, we design the satellite scene structure estimation and cross-view texture mapping modules to construct the structural and textural controls for street-view image synthesis. We further design a cross-view control guided denoising process that incorporates the above controls via an enhanced cross-view attention module. To achieve a more comprehensive evaluation of the synthesis results, we additionally design a GPT-based scoring method as a supplement to standard evaluation metrics. We also explore the effect of different data sources (e.g., text, maps, building heights, and multi-temporal satellite imagery) on this task. Results on three public cross-view datasets show that CrossViewDiff outperforms current state-of-the-art on both standard and GPT-based evaluation metrics, generating high-quality street-view panoramas with more realistic structures and textures across rural, suburban, and urban scenes. The code and models of this work will be released at https://opendatalab.github.io/CrossViewDiff/.

Cross-View Geo-Localisation is still a challenging task where additional modules, specific pre-processing or zooming strategies are necessary to determine accurate positions of images. Since different views have different geometries, pre-processing like polar transformation helps to merge them. However, this results in distorted images which then have to be rectified. Adding hard negatives to the training batch could improve the overall performance but with the default loss functions in geo-localisation it is difficult to include them. In this article, we present a simplified but effective architecture based on contrastive learning with symmetric InfoNCE loss that outperforms current state-of-the-art results. Our framework consists of a narrow training pipeline that eliminates the need of using aggregation modules, avoids further pre-processing steps and even increases the generalisation capability of the model to unknown regions. We introduce two types of sampling strategies for hard negatives. The first explicitly exploits geographically neighboring locations to provide a good starting point. The second leverages the visual similarity between the image embeddings in order to mine hard negative samples. Our work shows excellent performance on common cross-view datasets like CVUSA, CVACT, University-1652 and VIGOR. A comparison between cross-area and same-area settings demonstrate the good generalisation capability of our model.

LiDAR segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving perception. Recent trends favor point- or voxel-based methods as they often yield better performance than the traditional range view representation. In this work, we unveil several key factors in building powerful range view models. We observe that the "many-to-one" mapping, semantic incoherence, and shape deformation are possible impediments against effective learning from range view projections. We present RangeFormer -- a full-cycle framework comprising novel designs across network architecture, data augmentation, and post-processing -- that better handles the learning and processing of LiDAR point clouds from the range view. We further introduce a Scalable Training from Range view (STR) strategy that trains on arbitrary low-resolution 2D range images, while still maintaining satisfactory 3D segmentation accuracy. We show that, for the first time, a range view method is able to surpass the point, voxel, and multi-view fusion counterparts in the competing LiDAR semantic and panoptic segmentation benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and ScribbleKITTI.

Panoramic videos contain richer spatial information and have attracted tremendous amounts of attention due to their exceptional experience in some fields such as autonomous driving and virtual reality. However, existing datasets for video segmentation only focus on conventional planar images. To address the challenge, in this paper, we present a panoramic video dataset, PanoVOS. The dataset provides 150 videos with high video resolutions and diverse motions. To quantify the domain gap between 2D planar videos and panoramic videos, we evaluate 15 off-the-shelf video object segmentation (VOS) models on PanoVOS. Through error analysis, we found that all of them fail to tackle pixel-level content discontinues of panoramic videos. Thus, we present a Panoramic Space Consistency Transformer (PSCFormer), which can effectively utilize the semantic boundary information of the previous frame for pixel-level matching with the current frame. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with the previous SOTA models, our PSCFormer network exhibits a great advantage in terms of segmentation results under the panoramic setting. Our dataset poses new challenges in panoramic VOS and we hope that our PanoVOS can advance the development of panoramic segmentation/tracking.

Panoramic image stitching provides a unified, wide-angle view of a scene that extends beyond the camera's field of view. Stitching frames of a panning video into a panoramic photograph is a well-understood problem for stationary scenes, but when objects are moving, a still panorama cannot capture the scene. We present a method for synthesizing a panoramic video from a casually-captured panning video, as if the original video were captured with a wide-angle camera. We pose panorama synthesis as a space-time outpainting problem, where we aim to create a full panoramic video of the same length as the input video. Consistent completion of the space-time volume requires a powerful, realistic prior over video content and motion, for which we adapt generative video models. Existing generative models do not, however, immediately extend to panorama completion, as we show. We instead apply video generation as a component of our panorama synthesis system, and demonstrate how to exploit the strengths of the models while minimizing their limitations. Our system can create video panoramas for a range of in-the-wild scenes including people, vehicles, and flowing water, as well as stationary background features.

Recent advancements in visual localization and mapping have demonstrated considerable success in integrating point and line features. However, expanding the localization framework to include additional mapping components frequently results in increased demand for memory and computational resources dedicated to matching tasks. In this study, we show how a lightweight neural network can learn to represent both 3D point and line features, and exhibit leading pose accuracy by harnessing the power of multiple learned mappings. Specifically, we utilize a single transformer block to encode line features, effectively transforming them into distinctive point-like descriptors. Subsequently, we treat these point and line descriptor sets as distinct yet interconnected feature sets. Through the integration of self- and cross-attention within several graph layers, our method effectively refines each feature before regressing 3D maps using two simple MLPs. In comprehensive experiments, our indoor localization findings surpass those of Hloc and Limap across both point-based and line-assisted configurations. Moreover, in outdoor scenarios, our method secures a significant lead, marking the most considerable enhancement over state-of-the-art learning-based methodologies. The source code and demo videos of this work are publicly available at: https://thpjp.github.io/pl2map/

Semantic 2D maps are commonly used by humans and machines for navigation purposes, whether it's walking or driving. However, these maps have limitations: they lack detail, often contain inaccuracies, and are difficult to create and maintain, especially in an automated fashion. Can we use raw imagery to automatically create better maps that can be easily interpreted by both humans and machines? We introduce SNAP, a deep network that learns rich neural 2D maps from ground-level and overhead images. We train our model to align neural maps estimated from different inputs, supervised only with camera poses over tens of millions of StreetView images. SNAP can resolve the location of challenging image queries beyond the reach of traditional methods, outperforming the state of the art in localization by a large margin. Moreover, our neural maps encode not only geometry and appearance but also high-level semantics, discovered without explicit supervision. This enables effective pre-training for data-efficient semantic scene understanding, with the potential to unlock cost-efficient creation of more detailed maps.

Learning feature representations of geographical space is vital for any machine learning model that integrates geolocated data, spanning application domains such as remote sensing, ecology, or epidemiology. Recent work mostly embeds coordinates using sine and cosine projections based on Double Fourier Sphere (DFS) features -- these embeddings assume a rectangular data domain even on global data, which can lead to artifacts, especially at the poles. At the same time, relatively little attention has been paid to the exact design of the neural network architectures these functional embeddings are combined with. This work proposes a novel location encoder for globally distributed geographic data that combines spherical harmonic basis functions, natively defined on spherical surfaces, with sinusoidal representation networks (SirenNets) that can be interpreted as learned Double Fourier Sphere embedding. We systematically evaluate the cross-product of positional embeddings and neural network architectures across various classification and regression benchmarks and synthetic evaluation datasets. In contrast to previous approaches that require the combination of both positional encoding and neural networks to learn meaningful representations, we show that both spherical harmonics and sinusoidal representation networks are competitive on their own but set state-of-the-art performances across tasks when combined. We provide source code at www.github.com/marccoru/locationencoder

Humans view the world through many sensory channels, e.g., the long-wavelength light channel, viewed by the left eye, or the high-frequency vibrations channel, heard by the right ear. Each view is noisy and incomplete, but important factors, such as physics, geometry, and semantics, tend to be shared between all views (e.g., a "dog" can be seen, heard, and felt). We investigate the classic hypothesis that a powerful representation is one that models view-invariant factors. We study this hypothesis under the framework of multiview contrastive learning, where we learn a representation that aims to maximize mutual information between different views of the same scene but is otherwise compact. Our approach scales to any number of views, and is view-agnostic. We analyze key properties of the approach that make it work, finding that the contrastive loss outperforms a popular alternative based on cross-view prediction, and that the more views we learn from, the better the resulting representation captures underlying scene semantics. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on image and video unsupervised learning benchmarks. Code is released at: http://github.com/HobbitLong/CMC/.

Choropleth maps are a common visual representation for region-specific tabular data and are used in a number of different venues (newspapers, articles, etc). These maps are human-readable but are often challenging to deal with when trying to extract data for screen readers, analyses, or other related tasks. Recent research into Visual-Question Answering (VQA) has studied question answering on human-generated charts (ChartQA), such as bar, line, and pie charts. However, little work has paid attention to understanding maps; general VQA models, and ChartQA models, suffer when asked to perform this task. To facilitate and encourage research in this area, we present MapQA, a large-scale dataset of ~800K question-answer pairs over ~60K map images. Our task tests various levels of map understanding, from surface questions about map styles to complex questions that require reasoning on the underlying data. We present the unique challenges of MapQA that frustrate most strong baseline algorithms designed for ChartQA and general VQA tasks. We also present a novel algorithm, Visual Multi-Output Data Extraction based QA (V-MODEQA) for MapQA. V-MODEQA extracts the underlying structured data from a map image with a multi-output model and then performs reasoning on the extracted data. Our experimental results show that V-MODEQA has better overall performance and robustness on MapQA than the state-of-the-art ChartQA and VQA algorithms by capturing the unique properties in map question answering.

Mobile UI understanding is important for enabling various interaction tasks such as UI automation and accessibility. Previous mobile UI modeling often depends on the view hierarchy information of a screen, which directly provides the structural data of the UI, with the hope to bypass challenging tasks of visual modeling from screen pixels. However, view hierarchies are not always available, and are often corrupted with missing object descriptions or misaligned structure information. As a result, despite the use of view hierarchies could offer short-term gains, it may ultimately hinder the applicability and performance of the model. In this paper, we propose Spotlight, a vision-only approach for mobile UI understanding. Specifically, we enhance a vision-language model that only takes the screenshot of the UI and a region of interest on the screen -- the focus -- as the input. This general architecture of Spotlight is easily scalable and capable of performing a range of UI modeling tasks. Our experiments show that our model establishes SoTA results on several representative UI tasks and outperforms previous methods that use both screenshots and view hierarchies as inputs. Furthermore, we explore multi-task learning and few-shot prompting capacities of the proposed models, demonstrating promising results in the multi-task learning direction.

We present SPAD, a novel approach for creating consistent multi-view images from text prompts or single images. To enable multi-view generation, we repurpose a pretrained 2D diffusion model by extending its self-attention layers with cross-view interactions, and fine-tune it on a high quality subset of Objaverse. We find that a naive extension of the self-attention proposed in prior work (e.g. MVDream) leads to content copying between views. Therefore, we explicitly constrain the cross-view attention based on epipolar geometry. To further enhance 3D consistency, we utilize Plucker coordinates derived from camera rays and inject them as positional encoding. This enables SPAD to reason over spatial proximity in 3D well. In contrast to recent works that can only generate views at fixed azimuth and elevation, SPAD offers full camera control and achieves state-of-the-art results in novel view synthesis on unseen objects from the Objaverse and Google Scanned Objects datasets. Finally, we demonstrate that text-to-3D generation using SPAD prevents the multi-face Janus issue. See more details at our webpage: https://yashkant.github.io/spad

Directly generating scenes from satellite imagery offers exciting possibilities for integration into applications like games and map services. However, challenges arise from significant view changes and scene scale. Previous efforts mainly focused on image or video generation, lacking exploration into the adaptability of scene generation for arbitrary views. Existing 3D generation works either operate at the object level or are difficult to utilize the geometry obtained from satellite imagery. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel architecture for direct 3D scene generation by introducing diffusion models into 3D sparse representations and combining them with neural rendering techniques. Specifically, our approach generates texture colors at the point level for a given geometry using a 3D diffusion model first, which is then transformed into a scene representation in a feed-forward manner. The representation can be utilized to render arbitrary views which would excel in both single-frame quality and inter-frame consistency. Experiments in two city-scale datasets show that our model demonstrates proficiency in generating photo-realistic street-view image sequences and cross-view urban scenes from satellite imagery.

We introduce DragView, a novel and interactive framework for generating novel views of unseen scenes. DragView initializes the new view from a single source image, and the rendering is supported by a sparse set of unposed multi-view images, all seamlessly executed within a single feed-forward pass. Our approach begins with users dragging a source view through a local relative coordinate system. Pixel-aligned features are obtained by projecting the sampled 3D points along the target ray onto the source view. We then incorporate a view-dependent modulation layer to effectively handle occlusion during the projection. Additionally, we broaden the epipolar attention mechanism to encompass all source pixels, facilitating the aggregation of initialized coordinate-aligned point features from other unposed views. Finally, we employ another transformer to decode ray features into final pixel intensities. Crucially, our framework does not rely on either 2D prior models or the explicit estimation of camera poses. During testing, DragView showcases the capability to generalize to new scenes unseen during training, also utilizing only unposed support images, enabling the generation of photo-realistic new views characterized by flexible camera trajectories. In our experiments, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of the performance of DragView with recent scene representation networks operating under pose-free conditions, as well as with generalizable NeRFs subject to noisy test camera poses. DragView consistently demonstrates its superior performance in view synthesis quality, while also being more user-friendly. Project page: https://zhiwenfan.github.io/DragView/.

Current methods for 3D scene reconstruction from sparse posed images employ intermediate 3D representations such as neural fields, voxel grids, or 3D Gaussians, to achieve multi-view consistent scene appearance and geometry. In this paper we introduce MVGD, a diffusion-based architecture capable of direct pixel-level generation of images and depth maps from novel viewpoints, given an arbitrary number of input views. Our method uses raymap conditioning to both augment visual features with spatial information from different viewpoints, as well as to guide the generation of images and depth maps from novel views. A key aspect of our approach is the multi-task generation of images and depth maps, using learnable task embeddings to guide the diffusion process towards specific modalities. We train this model on a collection of more than 60 million multi-view samples from publicly available datasets, and propose techniques to enable efficient and consistent learning in such diverse conditions. We also propose a novel strategy that enables the efficient training of larger models by incrementally fine-tuning smaller ones, with promising scaling behavior. Through extensive experiments, we report state-of-the-art results in multiple novel view synthesis benchmarks, as well as multi-view stereo and video depth estimation.

Place recognition is a key module for long-term SLAM systems. Current LiDAR-based place recognition methods usually use representations of point clouds such as unordered points or range images. These methods achieve high recall rates of retrieval, but their performance may degrade in the case of view variation or scene changes. In this work, we explore the potential of a different representation in place recognition, i.e. bird's eye view (BEV) images. We observe that the structural contents of BEV images are less influenced by rotations and translations of point clouds. We validate that, without any delicate design, a simple VGGNet trained on BEV images achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art place recognition methods in scenes of slight viewpoint changes. For more robust place recognition, we design a rotation-invariant network called BEVPlace. We use group convolution to extract rotation-equivariant local features from the images and NetVLAD for global feature aggregation. In addition, we observe that the distance between BEV features is correlated with the geometry distance of point clouds. Based on the observation, we develop a method to estimate the position of the query cloud, extending the usage of place recognition. The experiments conducted on large-scale public datasets show that our method 1) achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of recall rates, 2) is robust to view changes, 3) shows strong generalization ability, and 4) can estimate the positions of query point clouds. Source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zjuluolun/BEVPlace.

Panoramic images can broaden the Field of View (FoV), occlusion-aware prediction can deepen the understanding of the scene, and domain adaptation can transfer across viewing domains. In this work, we introduce a novel task, Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation (OASS), which simultaneously tackles all these three challenges. For benchmarking OASS, we establish a new human-annotated dataset for Blending Panoramic Amodal Seamless Segmentation, i.e., BlendPASS. Besides, we propose the first solution UnmaskFormer, aiming at unmasking the narrow FoV, occlusions, and domain gaps all at once. Specifically, UnmaskFormer includes the crucial designs of Unmasking Attention (UA) and Amodal-oriented Mix (AoMix). Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BlendPASS dataset, reaching a remarkable mAPQ of 26.58% and mIoU of 43.66%. On public panoramic semantic segmentation datasets, i.e., SynPASS and DensePASS, our method outperforms previous methods and obtains 45.34% and 48.08% in mIoU, respectively. The fresh BlendPASS dataset and our source code are available at https://github.com/yihong-97/OASS.

The absolute depth values of surrounding environments provide crucial cues for various assistive technologies, such as localization, navigation, and 3D structure estimation. We propose that accurate depth estimated from panoramic images can serve as a powerful and light-weight input for a wide range of downstream tasks requiring 3D information. While panoramic images can easily capture the surrounding context from commodity devices, the estimated depth shares the limitations of conventional image-based depth estimation; the performance deteriorates under large domain shifts and the absolute values are still ambiguous to infer from 2D observations. By taking advantage of the holistic view, we mitigate such effects in a self-supervised way and fine-tune the network with geometric consistency during the test phase. Specifically, we construct a 3D point cloud from the current depth prediction and project the point cloud at various viewpoints or apply stretches on the current input image to generate synthetic panoramas. Then we minimize the discrepancy of the 3D structure estimated from synthetic images without collecting additional data. We empirically evaluate our method in robot navigation and map-free localization where our method shows large performance enhancements. Our calibration method can therefore widen the applicability under various external conditions, serving as a key component for practical panorama-based machine vision systems.

Panorama video recently attracts more interest in both study and application, courtesy of its immersive experience. Due to the expensive cost of capturing 360-degree panoramic videos, generating desirable panorama videos by prompts is urgently required. Lately, the emerging text-to-video (T2V) diffusion methods demonstrate notable effectiveness in standard video generation. However, due to the significant gap in content and motion patterns between panoramic and standard videos, these methods encounter challenges in yielding satisfactory 360-degree panoramic videos. In this paper, we propose a pipeline named 360-Degree Video Diffusion model (360DVD) for generating 360-degree panoramic videos based on the given prompts and motion conditions. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight 360-Adapter accompanied by 360 Enhancement Techniques to transform pre-trained T2V models for panorama video generation. We further propose a new panorama dataset named WEB360 consisting of panoramic video-text pairs for training 360DVD, addressing the absence of captioned panoramic video datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of 360DVD for panorama video generation. Our project page is at https://akaneqwq.github.io/360DVD/.

We focus on a fundamental task of detecting meaningful line structures, a.k.a. semantic line, in natural scenes. Many previous methods regard this problem as a special case of object detection and adjust existing object detectors for semantic line detection. However, these methods neglect the inherent characteristics of lines, leading to sub-optimal performance. Lines enjoy much simpler geometric property than complex objects and thus can be compactly parameterized by a few arguments. To better exploit the property of lines, in this paper, we incorporate the classical Hough transform technique into deeply learned representations and propose a one-shot end-to-end learning framework for line detection. By parameterizing lines with slopes and biases, we perform Hough transform to translate deep representations into the parametric domain, in which we perform line detection. Specifically, we aggregate features along candidate lines on the feature map plane and then assign the aggregated features to corresponding locations in the parametric domain. Consequently, the problem of detecting semantic lines in the spatial domain is transformed into spotting individual points in the parametric domain, making the post-processing steps, i.e. non-maximal suppression, more efficient. Furthermore, our method makes it easy to extract contextual line features eg features along lines close to a specific line, that are critical for accurate line detection. In addition to the proposed method, we design an evaluation metric to assess the quality of line detection and construct a large scale dataset for the line detection task. Experimental results on our proposed dataset and another public dataset demonstrate the advantages of our method over previous state-of-the-art alternatives.

Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly enhanced the data synthesis with 2D control. Yet, precise 3D control in street view generation, crucial for 3D perception tasks, remains elusive. Specifically, utilizing Bird's-Eye View (BEV) as the primary condition often leads to challenges in geometry control (e.g., height), affecting the representation of object shapes, occlusion patterns, and road surface elevations, all of which are essential to perception data synthesis, especially for 3D object detection tasks. In this paper, we introduce MagicDrive, a novel street view generation framework, offering diverse 3D geometry controls including camera poses, road maps, and 3D bounding boxes, together with textual descriptions, achieved through tailored encoding strategies. Besides, our design incorporates a cross-view attention module, ensuring consistency across multiple camera views. With MagicDrive, we achieve high-fidelity street-view image & video synthesis that captures nuanced 3D geometry and various scene descriptions, enhancing tasks like BEV segmentation and 3D object detection.

With the ever-increasing volumes of the Earth observation data present in the archives of large programmes such as Copernicus, there is a growing need for efficient vector representations of the underlying raw data. The approach of extracting feature representations from pretrained deep neural networks is a powerful approach that can provide semantic abstractions of the input data. However, the way this is done for imagery archives containing geospatial data has not yet been defined. In this work, an extension is proposed to an existing community project, Major TOM, focused on the provision and standardization of open and free AI-ready datasets for Earth observation. Furthermore, four global and dense embedding datasets are released openly and for free along with the publication of this manuscript, resulting in the most comprehensive global open dataset of geospatial visual embeddings in terms of covered Earth's surface.

Recent vision-only perception models for autonomous driving achieved promising results by encoding multi-view image features into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space. A critical step and the main bottleneck of these methods is transforming image features into the BEV coordinate frame. This paper focuses on leveraging geometry information, such as depth, to model such feature transformation. Existing works rely on non-parametric depth distribution modeling leading to significant memory consumption, or ignore the geometry information to address this problem. In contrast, we propose to use parametric depth distribution modeling for feature transformation. We first lift the 2D image features to the 3D space defined for the ego vehicle via a predicted parametric depth distribution for each pixel in each view. Then, we aggregate the 3D feature volume based on the 3D space occupancy derived from depth to the BEV frame. Finally, we use the transformed features for downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Existing semantic segmentation methods do also suffer from an hallucination problem as they do not take visibility information into account. This hallucination can be particularly problematic for subsequent modules such as control and planning. To mitigate the issue, our method provides depth uncertainty and reliable visibility-aware estimations. We further leverage our parametric depth modeling to present a novel visibility-aware evaluation metric that, when taken into account, can mitigate the hallucination problem. Extensive experiments on object detection and semantic segmentation on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods on both tasks.

We present GeoSynth, a model for synthesizing satellite images with global style and image-driven layout control. The global style control is via textual prompts or geographic location. These enable the specification of scene semantics or regional appearance respectively, and can be used together. We train our model on a large dataset of paired satellite imagery, with automatically generated captions, and OpenStreetMap data. We evaluate various combinations of control inputs, including different types of layout controls. Results demonstrate that our model can generate diverse, high-quality images and exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/mvrl/GeoSynth.

This paper proposes an efficient multi-camera to Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) view transformation method for 3D perception, dubbed MatrixVT. Existing view transformers either suffer from poor transformation efficiency or rely on device-specific operators, hindering the broad application of BEV models. In contrast, our method generates BEV features efficiently with only convolutions and matrix multiplications (MatMul). Specifically, we propose describing the BEV feature as the MatMul of image feature and a sparse Feature Transporting Matrix (FTM). A Prime Extraction module is then introduced to compress the dimension of image features and reduce FTM's sparsity. Moreover, we propose the Ring \& Ray Decomposition to replace the FTM with two matrices and reformulate our pipeline to reduce calculation further. Compared to existing methods, MatrixVT enjoys a faster speed and less memory footprint while remaining deploy-friendly. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that our method is highly efficient but obtains results on par with the SOTA method in object detection and map segmentation tasks

Multi-traversal data, commonly collected through daily commutes or by self-driving fleets, provides multiple viewpoints for scene reconstruction within a road block. This data offers significant potential for high-quality novel view synthesis, which is crucial for applications such as autonomous vehicle simulators. However, inherent challenges in multi-traversal data often result in suboptimal reconstruction quality, including variations in appearance and the presence of dynamic objects. To address these issues, we propose Multi-Traversal Gaussian Splatting (MTGS), a novel approach that reconstructs high-quality driving scenes from arbitrarily collected multi-traversal data by modeling a shared static geometry while separately handling dynamic elements and appearance variations. Our method employs a multi-traversal dynamic scene graph with a shared static node and traversal-specific dynamic nodes, complemented by color correction nodes with learnable spherical harmonics coefficient residuals. This approach enables high-fidelity novel view synthesis and provides flexibility to navigate any viewpoint. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale driving dataset, nuPlan, with multi-traversal data. Our results demonstrate that MTGS improves LPIPS by 23.5% and geometry accuracy by 46.3% compared to single-traversal baselines. The code and data would be available to the public.

Generating novel views from a single image remains a challenging task due to the complexity of 3D scenes and the limited diversity in the existing multi-view datasets to train a model on. Recent research combining large-scale text-to-image (T2I) models with monocular depth estimation (MDE) has shown promise in handling in-the-wild images. In these methods, an input view is geometrically warped to novel views with estimated depth maps, then the warped image is inpainted by T2I models. However, they struggle with noisy depth maps and loss of semantic details when warping an input view to novel viewpoints. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for single-shot novel view synthesis, a semantic-preserving generative warping framework that enables T2I generative models to learn where to warp and where to generate, through augmenting cross-view attention with self-attention. Our approach addresses the limitations of existing methods by conditioning the generative model on source view images and incorporating geometric warping signals. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our model outperforms existing methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. Project page is available at https://GenWarp-NVS.github.io/.

Large-scale visual localization systems continue to rely on 3D point clouds built from image collections using structure-from-motion. While the 3D points in these models are represented using local image features, directly matching a query image's local features against the point cloud is challenging due to the scale of the nearest-neighbor search problem. Many recent approaches to visual localization have thus proposed a hybrid method, where first a global (per image) embedding is used to retrieve a small subset of database images, and local features of the query are matched only against those. It seems to have become common belief that global embeddings are critical for said image-retrieval in visual localization, despite the significant downside of having to compute two feature types for each query image. In this paper, we take a step back from this assumption and propose Constrained Approximate Nearest Neighbors (CANN), a joint solution of k-nearest-neighbors across both the geometry and appearance space using only local features. We first derive the theoretical foundation for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval across multiple metrics and then showcase how CANN improves visual localization. Our experiments on public localization benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art global feature-based retrieval and approaches using local feature aggregation schemes. Moreover, it is an order of magnitude faster in both index and query time than feature aggregation schemes for these datasets. Code will be released.

Three-dimensional (3D) understanding of objects and scenes play a key role in humans' ability to interact with the world and has been an active area of research in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Large scale synthetic and object-centric 3D datasets have shown to be effective in training models that have 3D understanding of objects. However, applying a similar approach to real-world objects and scenes is difficult due to a lack of large-scale data. Videos are a potential source for real-world 3D data, but finding diverse yet corresponding views of the same content has shown to be difficult at scale. Furthermore, standard videos come with fixed viewpoints, determined at the time of capture. This restricts the ability to access scenes from a variety of more diverse and potentially useful perspectives. We argue that large scale 360 videos can address these limitations to provide: scalable corresponding frames from diverse views. In this paper, we introduce 360-1M, a 360 video dataset, and a process for efficiently finding corresponding frames from diverse viewpoints at scale. We train our diffusion-based model, Odin, on 360-1M. Empowered by the largest real-world, multi-view dataset to date, Odin is able to freely generate novel views of real-world scenes. Unlike previous methods, Odin can move the camera through the environment, enabling the model to infer the geometry and layout of the scene. Additionally, we show improved performance on standard novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction benchmarks.

We introduce WonderJourney, a modularized framework for perpetual 3D scene generation. Unlike prior work on view generation that focuses on a single type of scenes, we start at any user-provided location (by a text description or an image) and generate a journey through a long sequence of diverse yet coherently connected 3D scenes. We leverage an LLM to generate textual descriptions of the scenes in this journey, a text-driven point cloud generation pipeline to make a compelling and coherent sequence of 3D scenes, and a large VLM to verify the generated scenes. We show compelling, diverse visual results across various scene types and styles, forming imaginary "wonderjourneys". Project website: https://kovenyu.com/WonderJourney/

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has achieved substantial progress in novel view synthesis given multi-view images. Recently, some works have attempted to train a NeRF from a single image with 3D priors. They mainly focus on a limited field of view with a few occlusions, which greatly limits their scalability to real-world 360-degree panoramic scenarios with large-size occlusions. In this paper, we present PERF, a 360-degree novel view synthesis framework that trains a panoramic neural radiance field from a single panorama. Notably, PERF allows 3D roaming in a complex scene without expensive and tedious image collection. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel collaborative RGBD inpainting method and a progressive inpainting-and-erasing method to lift up a 360-degree 2D scene to a 3D scene. Specifically, we first predict a panoramic depth map as initialization given a single panorama and reconstruct visible 3D regions with volume rendering. Then we introduce a collaborative RGBD inpainting approach into a NeRF for completing RGB images and depth maps from random views, which is derived from an RGB Stable Diffusion model and a monocular depth estimator. Finally, we introduce an inpainting-and-erasing strategy to avoid inconsistent geometry between a newly-sampled view and reference views. The two components are integrated into the learning of NeRFs in a unified optimization framework and achieve promising results. Extensive experiments on Replica and a new dataset PERF-in-the-wild demonstrate the superiority of our PERF over state-of-the-art methods. Our PERF can be widely used for real-world applications, such as panorama-to-3D, text-to-3D, and 3D scene stylization applications. Project page and code are available at https://perf-project.github.io/ and https://github.com/perf-project/PeRF.

Generating dense multiview images from text prompts is crucial for creating high-fidelity 3D assets. Nevertheless, existing methods struggle with space-view correspondences, resulting in sparse and low-quality outputs. In this paper, we introduce CoSER, a novel consistent dense Multiview Text-to-Image Generator for Text-to-3D, achieving both efficiency and quality by meticulously learning neighbor-view coherence and further alleviating ambiguity through the swift traversal of all views. For achieving neighbor-view consistency, each viewpoint densely interacts with adjacent viewpoints to perceive the global spatial structure, and aggregates information along motion paths explicitly defined by physical principles to refine details. To further enhance cross-view consistency and alleviate content drift, CoSER rapidly scan all views in spiral bidirectional manner to aware holistic information and then scores each point based on semantic material. Subsequently, we conduct weighted down-sampling along the spatial dimension based on scores, thereby facilitating prominent information fusion across all views with lightweight computation. Technically, the core module is built by integrating the attention mechanism with a selective state space model, exploiting the robust learning capabilities of the former and the low overhead of the latter. Extensive evaluation shows that CoSER is capable of producing dense, high-fidelity, content-consistent multiview images that can be flexibly integrated into various 3D generation models.

As a fundamental problem in computer vision, multi-view stereo (MVS) aims at recovering the 3D geometry of a target from a set of 2D images. Recent advances in MVS have shown that it is important to perceive non-local structured information for recovering geometry in low-textured areas. In this work, we propose a Hierarchical Prior Mining for Non-local Multi-View Stereo (HPM-MVS). The key characteristics are the following techniques that exploit non-local information to assist MVS: 1) A Non-local Extensible Sampling Pattern (NESP), which is able to adaptively change the size of sampled areas without becoming snared in locally optimal solutions. 2) A new approach to leverage non-local reliable points and construct a planar prior model based on K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), to obtain potential hypotheses for the regions where prior construction is challenging. 3) A Hierarchical Prior Mining (HPM) framework, which is used to mine extensive non-local prior information at different scales to assist 3D model recovery, this strategy can achieve a considerable balance between the reconstruction of details and low-textured areas. Experimental results on the ETH3D and Tanks \& Temples have verified the superior performance and strong generalization capability of our method. Our code will be released.

The transformation of features from 2D perspective space to 3D space is essential to multi-view 3D object detection. Recent approaches mainly focus on the design of view transformation, either pixel-wisely lifting perspective view features into 3D space with estimated depth or grid-wisely constructing BEV features via 3D projection, treating all pixels or grids equally. However, choosing what to transform is also important but has rarely been discussed before. The pixels of a moving car are more informative than the pixels of the sky. To fully utilize the information contained in images, the view transformation should be able to adapt to different image regions according to their contents. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named FrustumFormer, which pays more attention to the features in instance regions via adaptive instance-aware resampling. Specifically, the model obtains instance frustums on the bird's eye view by leveraging image view object proposals. An adaptive occupancy mask within the instance frustum is learned to refine the instance location. Moreover, the temporal frustum intersection could further reduce the localization uncertainty of objects. Comprehensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of FrustumFormer, and we achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark. Codes and models will be made available at https://github.com/Robertwyq/Frustum.

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to fine-grained cross-view geo-localization. Our method aligns a warped ground image with a corresponding GPS-tagged satellite image covering the same area using homography estimation. We first employ a differentiable spherical transform, adhering to geometric principles, to accurately align the perspective of the ground image with the satellite map. This transformation effectively places ground and aerial images in the same view and on the same plane, reducing the task to an image alignment problem. To address challenges such as occlusion, small overlapping range, and seasonal variations, we propose a robust correlation-aware homography estimator to align similar parts of the transformed ground image with the satellite image. Our method achieves sub-pixel resolution and meter-level GPS accuracy by mapping the center point of the transformed ground image to the satellite image using a homography matrix and determining the orientation of the ground camera using a point above the central axis. Operating at a speed of 30 FPS, our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, reducing the mean metric localization error by 21.3% and 32.4% in same-area and cross-area generalization tasks on the VIGOR benchmark, respectively, and by 34.4% on the KITTI benchmark in same-area evaluation.

Synthesizing novel views for urban environments is crucial for tasks like autonomous driving and virtual tours. Compared to object-level or indoor situations, outdoor settings present unique challenges, such as inconsistency across frames due to moving vehicles and camera pose drift over lengthy sequences. In this paper, we introduce a method that tackles these challenges on view synthesis for outdoor scenarios. We employ a neural point light field scene representation and strategically detect and mask out dynamic objects to reconstruct novel scenes without artifacts. Moreover, we simultaneously optimize camera pose along with the view synthesis process, and thus, we simultaneously refine both elements. Through validation on real-world urban datasets, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results in synthesizing novel views of urban scenes.

We introduce LDL, a fast and robust algorithm that localizes a panorama to a 3D map using line segments. LDL focuses on the sparse structural information of lines in the scene, which is robust to illumination changes and can potentially enable efficient computation. While previous line-based localization approaches tend to sacrifice accuracy or computation time, our method effectively observes the holistic distribution of lines within panoramic images and 3D maps. Specifically, LDL matches the distribution of lines with 2D and 3D line distance functions, which are further decomposed along principal directions of lines to increase the expressiveness. The distance functions provide coarse pose estimates by comparing the distributional information, where the poses are further optimized using conventional local feature matching. As our pipeline solely leverages line geometry and local features, it does not require costly additional training of line-specific features or correspondence matching. Nevertheless, our method demonstrates robust performance on challenging scenarios including object layout changes, illumination shifts, and large-scale scenes, while exhibiting fast pose search terminating within a matter of milliseconds. We thus expect our method to serve as a practical solution for line-based localization, and complement the well-established point-based paradigm. The code for LDL is available through the following link: https://github.com/82magnolia/panoramic-localization.

Historical maps contain detailed geographic information difficult to find elsewhere covering long-periods of time (e.g., 125 years for the historical topographic maps in the US). However, these maps typically exist as scanned images without searchable metadata. Existing approaches making historical maps searchable rely on tedious manual work (including crowd-sourcing) to generate the metadata (e.g., geolocations and keywords). Optical character recognition (OCR) software could alleviate the required manual work, but the recognition results are individual words instead of location phrases (e.g., "Black" and "Mountain" vs. "Black Mountain"). This paper presents an end-to-end approach to address the real-world problem of finding and indexing historical map images. This approach automatically processes historical map images to extract their text content and generates a set of metadata that is linked to large external geospatial knowledge bases. The linked metadata in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format support complex queries for finding and indexing historical maps, such as retrieving all historical maps covering mountain peaks higher than 1,000 meters in California. We have implemented the approach in a system called mapKurator. We have evaluated mapKurator using historical maps from several sources with various map styles, scales, and coverage. Our results show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. The code has been made publicly available as modules of the Kartta Labs project at https://github.com/kartta-labs/Project.

Modern methods for vision-centric autonomous driving perception widely adopt the bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation to describe a 3D scene. Despite its better efficiency than voxel representation, it has difficulty describing the fine-grained 3D structure of a scene with a single plane. To address this, we propose a tri-perspective view (TPV) representation which accompanies BEV with two additional perpendicular planes. We model each point in the 3D space by summing its projected features on the three planes. To lift image features to the 3D TPV space, we further propose a transformer-based TPV encoder (TPVFormer) to obtain the TPV features effectively. We employ the attention mechanism to aggregate the image features corresponding to each query in each TPV plane. Experiments show that our model trained with sparse supervision effectively predicts the semantic occupancy for all voxels. We demonstrate for the first time that using only camera inputs can achieve comparable performance with LiDAR-based methods on the LiDAR segmentation task on nuScenes. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/TPVFormer.

Multi-camera 3D object detection for autonomous driving is a challenging problem that has garnered notable attention from both academia and industry. An obstacle encountered in vision-based techniques involves the precise extraction of geometry-conscious features from RGB images. Recent approaches have utilized geometric-aware image backbones pretrained on depth-relevant tasks to acquire spatial information. However, these approaches overlook the critical aspect of view transformation, resulting in inadequate performance due to the misalignment of spatial knowledge between the image backbone and view transformation. To address this issue, we propose a novel geometric-aware pretraining framework called GAPretrain. Our approach incorporates spatial and structural cues to camera networks by employing the geometric-rich modality as guidance during the pretraining phase. The transference of modal-specific attributes across different modalities is non-trivial, but we bridge this gap by using a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and structural hints derived from LiDAR point clouds to facilitate the pretraining process. GAPretrain serves as a plug-and-play solution that can be flexibly applied to multiple state-of-the-art detectors. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method. We achieve 46.2 mAP and 55.5 NDS on the nuScenes val set using the BEVFormer method, with a gain of 2.7 and 2.1 points, respectively. We also conduct experiments on various image backbones and view transformations to validate the efficacy of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/BEVPerception-Survey-Recipe.

Despite recent advancements in neural 3D reconstruction, the dependence on dense multi-view captures restricts their broader applicability. In this work, we propose ViewCrafter, a novel method for synthesizing high-fidelity novel views of generic scenes from single or sparse images with the prior of video diffusion model. Our method takes advantage of the powerful generation capabilities of video diffusion model and the coarse 3D clues offered by point-based representation to generate high-quality video frames with precise camera pose control. To further enlarge the generation range of novel views, we tailored an iterative view synthesis strategy together with a camera trajectory planning algorithm to progressively extend the 3D clues and the areas covered by the novel views. With ViewCrafter, we can facilitate various applications, such as immersive experiences with real-time rendering by efficiently optimizing a 3D-GS representation using the reconstructed 3D points and the generated novel views, and scene-level text-to-3D generation for more imaginative content creation. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the strong generalization capability and superior performance of our method in synthesizing high-fidelity and consistent novel views.

We propose a fast and generalizable solution to Multi-view Photometric Stereo (MVPS), called MVPSNet. The key to our approach is a feature extraction network that effectively combines images from the same view captured under multiple lighting conditions to extract geometric features from shading cues for stereo matching. We demonstrate these features, termed `Light Aggregated Feature Maps' (LAFM), are effective for feature matching even in textureless regions, where traditional multi-view stereo methods fail. Our method produces similar reconstruction results to PS-NeRF, a state-of-the-art MVPS method that optimizes a neural network per-scene, while being 411times faster (105 seconds vs. 12 hours) in inference. Additionally, we introduce a new synthetic dataset for MVPS, sMVPS, which is shown to be effective to train a generalizable MVPS method.

We are interested in the generation of navigation instructions, either in their own right or as training material for robotic navigation task. In this paper, we propose a new approach to navigation instruction generation by framing the problem as an image captioning task using semantic maps as visual input. Conventional approaches employ a sequence of panorama images to generate navigation instructions. Semantic maps abstract away from visual details and fuse the information in multiple panorama images into a single top-down representation, thereby reducing computational complexity to process the input. We present a benchmark dataset for instruction generation using semantic maps, propose an initial model and ask human subjects to manually assess the quality of generated instructions. Our initial investigations show promise in using semantic maps for instruction generation instead of a sequence of panorama images, but there is vast scope for improvement. We release the code for data preparation and model training at https://github.com/chengzu-li/VLGen.

Determining the exact latitude and longitude that a photo was taken is a useful and widely applicable task, yet it remains exceptionally difficult despite the accelerated progress of other computer vision tasks. Most previous approaches have opted to learn a single representation of query images, which are then classified at different levels of geographic granularity. These approaches fail to exploit the different visual cues that give context to different hierarchies, such as the country, state, and city level. To this end, we introduce an end-to-end transformer-based architecture that exploits the relationship between different geographic levels (which we refer to as hierarchies) and the corresponding visual scene information in an image through hierarchical cross-attention. We achieve this by learning a query for each geographic hierarchy and scene type. Furthermore, we learn a separate representation for different environmental scenes, as different scenes in the same location are often defined by completely different visual features. We achieve state of the art street level accuracy on 4 standard geo-localization datasets : Im2GPS, Im2GPS3k, YFCC4k, and YFCC26k, as well as qualitatively demonstrate how our method learns different representations for different visual hierarchies and scenes, which has not been demonstrated in the previous methods. These previous testing datasets mostly consist of iconic landmarks or images taken from social media, which makes them either a memorization task, or biased towards certain places. To address this issue we introduce a much harder testing dataset, Google-World-Streets-15k, comprised of images taken from Google Streetview covering the whole planet and present state of the art results. Our code will be made available in the camera-ready version.

Point-, voxel-, and range-views are three representative forms of point clouds. All of them have accurate 3D measurements but lack color and texture information. RGB images are a natural complement to these point cloud views and fully utilizing the comprehensive information of them benefits more robust perceptions. In this paper, we present a unified multi-modal LiDAR segmentation network, termed UniSeg, which leverages the information of RGB images and three views of the point cloud, and accomplishes semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation simultaneously. Specifically, we first design the Learnable cross-Modal Association (LMA) module to automatically fuse voxel-view and range-view features with image features, which fully utilize the rich semantic information of images and are robust to calibration errors. Then, the enhanced voxel-view and range-view features are transformed to the point space,where three views of point cloud features are further fused adaptively by the Learnable cross-View Association module (LVA). Notably, UniSeg achieves promising results in three public benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD); it ranks 1st on two challenges of two benchmarks, including the LiDAR semantic segmentation challenge of nuScenes and panoptic segmentation challenges of SemanticKITTI. Besides, we construct the OpenPCSeg codebase, which is the largest and most comprehensive outdoor LiDAR segmentation codebase. It contains most of the popular outdoor LiDAR segmentation algorithms and provides reproducible implementations. The OpenPCSeg codebase will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSeg.

Text-to-image generation has made remarkable progress with the emergence of diffusion models. However, it is still a difficult task to generate images for street views based on text, mainly because the road topology of street scenes is complex, the traffic status is diverse and the weather condition is various, which makes conventional text-to-image models difficult to deal with. To address these challenges, we propose a novel controllable text-to-image framework, named Text2Street. In the framework, we first introduce the lane-aware road topology generator, which achieves text-to-map generation with the accurate road structure and lane lines armed with the counting adapter, realizing the controllable road topology generation. Then, the position-based object layout generator is proposed to obtain text-to-layout generation through an object-level bounding box diffusion strategy, realizing the controllable traffic object layout generation. Finally, the multiple control image generator is designed to integrate the road topology, object layout and weather description to realize controllable street-view image generation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach achieves controllable street-view text-to-image generation and validates the effectiveness of the Text2Street framework for street views.

Grounding language to the visual observations of a navigating agent can be performed using off-the-shelf visual-language models pretrained on Internet-scale data (e.g., image captions). While this is useful for matching images to natural language descriptions of object goals, it remains disjoint from the process of mapping the environment, so that it lacks the spatial precision of classic geometric maps. To address this problem, we propose VLMaps, a spatial map representation that directly fuses pretrained visual-language features with a 3D reconstruction of the physical world. VLMaps can be autonomously built from video feed on robots using standard exploration approaches and enables natural language indexing of the map without additional labeled data. Specifically, when combined with large language models (LLMs), VLMaps can be used to (i) translate natural language commands into a sequence of open-vocabulary navigation goals (which, beyond prior work, can be spatial by construction, e.g., "in between the sofa and TV" or "three meters to the right of the chair") directly localized in the map, and (ii) can be shared among multiple robots with different embodiments to generate new obstacle maps on-the-fly (by using a list of obstacle categories). Extensive experiments carried out in simulated and real world environments show that VLMaps enable navigation according to more complex language instructions than existing methods. Videos are available at https://vlmaps.github.io.

We present a unified framework capable of solving a broad range of 3D tasks. Our approach features a stateful recurrent model that continuously updates its state representation with each new observation. Given a stream of images, this evolving state can be used to generate metric-scale pointmaps (per-pixel 3D points) for each new input in an online fashion. These pointmaps reside within a common coordinate system, and can be accumulated into a coherent, dense scene reconstruction that updates as new images arrive. Our model, called CUT3R (Continuous Updating Transformer for 3D Reconstruction), captures rich priors of real-world scenes: not only can it predict accurate pointmaps from image observations, but it can also infer unseen regions of the scene by probing at virtual, unobserved views. Our method is simple yet highly flexible, naturally accepting varying lengths of images that may be either video streams or unordered photo collections, containing both static and dynamic content. We evaluate our method on various 3D/4D tasks and demonstrate competitive or state-of-the-art performance in each. Project Page: https://cut3r.github.io/

For robots to perform a wide variety of tasks, they require a 3D representation of the world that is semantically rich, yet compact and efficient for task-driven perception and planning. Recent approaches have attempted to leverage features from large vision-language models to encode semantics in 3D representations. However, these approaches tend to produce maps with per-point feature vectors, which do not scale well in larger environments, nor do they contain semantic spatial relationships between entities in the environment, which are useful for downstream planning. In this work, we propose ConceptGraphs, an open-vocabulary graph-structured representation for 3D scenes. ConceptGraphs is built by leveraging 2D foundation models and fusing their output to 3D by multi-view association. The resulting representations generalize to novel semantic classes, without the need to collect large 3D datasets or finetune models. We demonstrate the utility of this representation through a number of downstream planning tasks that are specified through abstract (language) prompts and require complex reasoning over spatial and semantic concepts. (Project page: https://concept-graphs.github.io/ Explainer video: https://youtu.be/mRhNkQwRYnc )

Vision-language navigation (VLN), which entails an agent to navigate 3D environments following human instructions, has shown great advances. However, current agents are built upon panoramic observations, which hinders their ability to perceive 3D scene geometry and easily leads to ambiguous selection of panoramic view. To address these limitations, we present a BEV Scene Graph (BSG), which leverages multi-step BEV representations to encode scene layouts and geometric cues of indoor environment under the supervision of 3D detection. During navigation, BSG builds a local BEV representation at each step and maintains a BEV-based global scene map, which stores and organizes all the online collected local BEV representations according to their topological relations. Based on BSG, the agent predicts a local BEV grid-level decision score and a global graph-level decision score, combined with a sub-view selection score on panoramic views, for more accurate action prediction. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on REVERIE, R2R, and R4R, showing the potential of BEV perception in VLN.

Accurate obstacle identification represents a fundamental challenge within the scope of near-field perception for autonomous driving. Conventionally, fisheye cameras are frequently employed for comprehensive surround-view perception, including rear-view obstacle localization. However, the performance of such cameras can significantly deteriorate in low-light conditions, during nighttime, or when subjected to intense sun glare. Conversely, cost-effective sensors like ultrasonic sensors remain largely unaffected under these conditions. Therefore, we present, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end multimodal fusion model tailored for efficient obstacle perception in a bird's-eye-view (BEV) perspective, utilizing fisheye cameras and ultrasonic sensors. Initially, ResNeXt-50 is employed as a set of unimodal encoders to extract features specific to each modality. Subsequently, the feature space associated with the visible spectrum undergoes transformation into BEV. The fusion of these two modalities is facilitated via concatenation. At the same time, the ultrasonic spectrum-based unimodal feature maps pass through content-aware dilated convolution, applied to mitigate the sensor misalignment between two sensors in the fused feature space. Finally, the fused features are utilized by a two-stage semantic occupancy decoder to generate grid-wise predictions for precise obstacle perception. We conduct a systematic investigation to determine the optimal strategy for multimodal fusion of both sensors. We provide insights into our dataset creation procedures, annotation guidelines, and perform a thorough data analysis to ensure adequate coverage of all scenarios. When applied to our dataset, the experimental results underscore the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed multimodal fusion approach.

We introduce Geo4D, a method to repurpose video diffusion models for monocular 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes. By leveraging the strong dynamic prior captured by such video models, Geo4D can be trained using only synthetic data while generalizing well to real data in a zero-shot manner. Geo4D predicts several complementary geometric modalities, namely point, depth, and ray maps. It uses a new multi-modal alignment algorithm to align and fuse these modalities, as well as multiple sliding windows, at inference time, thus obtaining robust and accurate 4D reconstruction of long videos. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that Geo4D significantly surpasses state-of-the-art video depth estimation methods, including recent methods such as MonST3R, which are also designed to handle dynamic scenes.

Cross-view Geo-localisation is typically performed at a coarse granularity, because densely sampled satellite image patches overlap heavily. This heavy overlap would make disambiguating patches very challenging. However, by opting for sparsely sampled patches, prior work has placed an artificial upper bound on the localisation accuracy that is possible. Even a perfect oracle system cannot achieve accuracy greater than the average separation of the tiles. To solve this limitation, we propose combining cross-view geo-localisation and relative pose estimation to increase precision to a level practical for real-world application. We develop PEnG, a 2-stage system which first predicts the most likely edges from a city-scale graph representation upon which a query image lies. It then performs relative pose estimation within these edges to determine a precise position. PEnG presents the first technique to utilise both viewpoints available within cross-view geo-localisation datasets to enhance precision to a sub-metre level, with some examples achieving centimetre level accuracy. Our proposed ensemble achieves state-of-the-art precision - with relative Top-5m retrieval improvements on previous works of 213%. Decreasing the median euclidean distance error by 96.90% from the previous best of 734m down to 22.77m, when evaluating with 90 degree horizontal FOV images. Code will be made available: tavisshore.co.uk/PEnG

Geolocating images of a ground-level scene entails estimating the location on Earth where the picture was taken, in absence of GPS or other location metadata. Typically, methods are evaluated by measuring the Great Circle Distance (GCD) between a predicted location and ground truth. However, this measurement is limited because it only evaluates a single point, not estimates of regions or score heatmaps. This is especially important in applications to rural, wilderness and under-sampled areas, where finding the exact location may not be possible, and when used in aggregate systems that progressively narrow down locations. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric, Recall vs Area (RvA), which measures the accuracy of estimated distributions of locations. RvA treats image geolocation results similarly to document retrieval, measuring recall as a function of area: For a ranked list of (possibly non-contiguous) predicted regions, we measure the accumulated area required for the region to contain the ground truth coordinate. This produces a curve similar to a precision-recall curve, where "precision" is replaced by square kilometers area, allowing evaluation of performance for different downstream search area budgets. Following directly from this view of the problem, we then examine a simple ensembling approach to global-scale image geolocation, which incorporates information from multiple sources to help address domain shift, and can readily incorporate multiple models, attribute predictors, and data sources. We study its effectiveness by combining the geolocation models GeoEstimation and the current SOTA GeoCLIP, with attribute predictors based on ORNL LandScan and ESA-CCI Land Cover. We find significant improvements in image geolocation for areas that are under-represented in the training set, particularly non-urban areas, on both Im2GPS3k and Street View images.

Heatwaves pose significant health risks, particularly due to prolonged exposure to high summer temperatures. Vulnerable groups, especially pedestrians and cyclists on sun-exposed sidewalks, motivate the development of a route planning method that incorporates somatosensory temperature effects through shade ratio consideration. This paper is the first to introduce a pipeline that utilizes segmentation foundation models to extract shaded areas from high-resolution satellite images. These areas are then integrated into a multi-layered road map, enabling users to customize routes based on a balance between distance and shade exposure, thereby enhancing comfort and health during outdoor activities. Specifically, we construct a graph-based representation of the road map, where links indicate connectivity and are updated with shade ratio data for dynamic route planning. This system is already implemented online, with a video demonstration, and will be specifically adapted to assist travelers during the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Autonomous vehicles rely on HD maps for their operation, but offline HD maps eventually become outdated. For this reason, online HD map construction methods use live sensor data to infer map information instead. Research on real map changes shows that oftentimes entire parts of an HD map remain unchanged and can be used as a prior. We therefore introduce M3TR (Multi-Masking Map Transformer), a generalist approach for HD map completion both with and without offline HD map priors. As a necessary foundation, we address shortcomings in ground truth labels for Argoverse 2 and nuScenes and propose the first comprehensive benchmark for HD map completion. Unlike existing models that specialize in a single kind of map change, which is unrealistic for deployment, our Generalist model handles all kinds of changes, matching the effectiveness of Expert models. With our map masking as augmentation regime, we can even achieve a +1.4 mAP improvement without a prior. Finally, by fully utilizing prior HD map elements and optimizing query designs, M3TR outperforms existing methods by +4.3 mAP while being the first real-world deployable model for offline HD map priors. Code is available at https://github.com/immel-f/m3tr

In this paper, we present SPVLoc, a global indoor localization method that accurately determines the six-dimensional (6D) camera pose of a query image and requires minimal scene-specific prior knowledge and no scene-specific training. Our approach employs a novel matching procedure to localize the perspective camera's viewport, given as an RGB image, within a set of panoramic semantic layout representations of the indoor environment. The panoramas are rendered from an untextured 3D reference model, which only comprises approximate structural information about room shapes, along with door and window annotations. We demonstrate that a straightforward convolutional network structure can successfully achieve image-to-panorama and ultimately image-to-model matching. Through a viewport classification score, we rank reference panoramas and select the best match for the query image. Then, a 6D relative pose is estimated between the chosen panorama and query image. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach not only efficiently bridges the domain gap but also generalizes well to previously unseen scenes that are not part of the training data. Moreover, it achieves superior localization accuracy compared to the state of the art methods and also estimates more degrees of freedom of the camera pose. Our source code is publicly available at https://fraunhoferhhi.github.io/spvloc .

The blooming of virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies has driven an increasing demand for the creation of high-quality, immersive, and dynamic environments. However, existing generative techniques either focus solely on dynamic objects or perform outpainting from a single perspective image, failing to meet the needs of VR/AR applications. In this work, we tackle the challenging task of elevating a single panorama to an immersive 4D experience. For the first time, we demonstrate the capability to generate omnidirectional dynamic scenes with 360-degree views at 4K resolution, thereby providing an immersive user experience. Our method introduces a pipeline that facilitates natural scene animations and optimizes a set of 4D Gaussians using efficient splatting techniques for real-time exploration. To overcome the lack of scene-scale annotated 4D data and models, especially in panoramic formats, we propose a novel Panoramic Denoiser that adapts generic 2D diffusion priors to animate consistently in 360-degree images, transforming them into panoramic videos with dynamic scenes at targeted regions. Subsequently, we elevate the panoramic video into a 4D immersive environment while preserving spatial and temporal consistency. By transferring prior knowledge from 2D models in the perspective domain to the panoramic domain and the 4D lifting with spatial appearance and geometry regularization, we achieve high-quality Panorama-to-4D generation at a resolution of (4096 times 2048) for the first time. See the project website at https://4k4dgen.github.io.

This paper aims to tackle the problem of photorealistic view synthesis from vehicle sensor data. Recent advancements in neural scene representation have achieved notable success in rendering high-quality autonomous driving scenes, but the performance significantly degrades as the viewpoint deviates from the training trajectory. To mitigate this problem, we introduce StreetCrafter, a novel controllable video diffusion model that utilizes LiDAR point cloud renderings as pixel-level conditions, which fully exploits the generative prior for novel view synthesis, while preserving precise camera control. Moreover, the utilization of pixel-level LiDAR conditions allows us to make accurate pixel-level edits to target scenes. In addition, the generative prior of StreetCrafter can be effectively incorporated into dynamic scene representations to achieve real-time rendering. Experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and PandaSet demonstrate that our model enables flexible control over viewpoint changes, enlarging the view synthesis regions for satisfying rendering, which outperforms existing methods.

Training perception systems for self-driving cars requires substantial annotations. However, manual labeling in 2D images is highly labor-intensive. While existing datasets provide rich annotations for pre-recorded sequences, they fall short in labeling rarely encountered viewpoints, potentially hampering the generalization ability for perception models. In this paper, we present PanopticNeRF-360, a novel approach that combines coarse 3D annotations with noisy 2D semantic cues to generate consistent panoptic labels and high-quality images from any viewpoint. Our key insight lies in exploiting the complementarity of 3D and 2D priors to mutually enhance geometry and semantics. Specifically, we propose to leverage noisy semantic and instance labels in both 3D and 2D spaces to guide geometry optimization. Simultaneously, the improved geometry assists in filtering noise present in the 3D and 2D annotations by merging them in 3D space via a learned semantic field. To further enhance appearance, we combine MLP and hash grids to yield hybrid scene features, striking a balance between high-frequency appearance and predominantly contiguous semantics. Our experiments demonstrate PanopticNeRF-360's state-of-the-art performance over existing label transfer methods on the challenging urban scenes of the KITTI-360 dataset. Moreover, PanopticNeRF-360 enables omnidirectional rendering of high-fidelity, multi-view and spatiotemporally consistent appearance, semantic and instance labels. We make our code and data available at https://github.com/fuxiao0719/PanopticNeRF

Vision-based localization in a prior map is of crucial importance for autonomous vehicles. Given a query image, the goal is to estimate the camera pose corresponding to the prior map, and the key is the registration problem of camera images within the map. While autonomous vehicles drive on the road under occlusion (e.g., car, bus, truck) and changing environment appearance (e.g., illumination changes, seasonal variation), existing approaches rely heavily on dense point descriptors at the feature level to solve the registration problem, entangling features with appearance and occlusion. As a result, they often fail to estimate the correct poses. To address these issues, we propose a sparse semantic map-based monocular localization method, which solves 2D-3D registration via a well-designed deep neural network. Given a sparse semantic map that consists of simplified elements (e.g., pole lines, traffic sign midpoints) with multiple semantic labels, the camera pose is then estimated by learning the corresponding features between the 2D semantic elements from the image and the 3D elements from the sparse semantic map. The proposed sparse semantic map-based localization approach is robust against occlusion and long-term appearance changes in the environments. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

Recent sparse multi-view scene reconstruction advances like DUSt3R and MASt3R no longer require camera calibration and camera pose estimation. However, they only process a pair of views at a time to infer pixel-aligned pointmaps. When dealing with more than two views, a combinatorial number of error prone pairwise reconstructions are usually followed by an expensive global optimization, which often fails to rectify the pairwise reconstruction errors. To handle more views, reduce errors, and improve inference time, we propose the fast single-stage feed-forward network MV-DUSt3R. At its core are multi-view decoder blocks which exchange information across any number of views while considering one reference view. To make our method robust to reference view selection, we further propose MV-DUSt3R+, which employs cross-reference-view blocks to fuse information across different reference view choices. To further enable novel view synthesis, we extend both by adding and jointly training Gaussian splatting heads. Experiments on multi-view stereo reconstruction, multi-view pose estimation, and novel view synthesis confirm that our methods improve significantly upon prior art. Code will be released.

The large abundance of perspective camera datasets facilitated the emergence of novel learning-based strategies for various tasks, such as camera localization, single image depth estimation, or view synthesis. However, panoramic or omnidirectional image datasets, including essential information, such as pose and depth, are mostly made with synthetic scenes. In this work, we introduce a large scale 360^{circ} videos dataset in the wild. This dataset has been carefully scraped from the Internet and has been captured from various locations worldwide. Hence, this dataset exhibits very diversified environments (e.g., indoor and outdoor) and contexts (e.g., with and without moving objects). Each of the 25K images constituting our dataset is provided with its respective camera's pose and depth map. We illustrate the relevance of our dataset for two main tasks, namely, single image depth estimation and view synthesis.

Model customization introduces new concepts to existing text-to-image models, enabling the generation of the new concept in novel contexts. However, such methods lack accurate camera view control w.r.t the object, and users must resort to prompt engineering (e.g., adding "top-view") to achieve coarse view control. In this work, we introduce a new task -- enabling explicit control of camera viewpoint for model customization. This allows us to modify object properties amongst various background scenes via text prompts, all while incorporating the target camera pose as additional control. This new task presents significant challenges in merging a 3D representation from the multi-view images of the new concept with a general, 2D text-to-image model. To bridge this gap, we propose to condition the 2D diffusion process on rendered, view-dependent features of the new object. During training, we jointly adapt the 2D diffusion modules and 3D feature predictions to reconstruct the object's appearance and geometry while reducing overfitting to the input multi-view images. Our method outperforms existing image editing and model personalization baselines in preserving the custom object's identity while following the input text prompt and the object's camera pose.

The choice of representation for geographic location significantly impacts the accuracy of models for a broad range of geospatial tasks, including fine-grained species classification, population density estimation, and biome classification. Recent works like SatCLIP and GeoCLIP learn such representations by contrastively aligning geolocation with co-located images. While these methods work exceptionally well, in this paper, we posit that the current training strategies fail to fully capture the important visual features. We provide an information-theoretic perspective on why the resulting embeddings from these methods discard crucial visual information that is important for many downstream tasks. To solve this problem, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented strategy called RANGE. We build our method on the intuition that the visual features of a location can be estimated by combining the visual features from multiple similar-looking locations. We evaluate our method across a wide variety of tasks. Our results show that RANGE outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models with significant margins in most tasks. We show gains of up to 13.1% on classification tasks and 0.145 R^2 on regression tasks. All our code and models will be made available at: https://github.com/mvrl/RANGE.

As a fundamental problem in ubiquitous computing and machine learning, sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) has drawn extensive attention and made great progress in recent years. HAR aims to recognize human activities based on the availability of rich time-series data collected from multi-modal sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes. However, recent deep learning methods are focusing on one view of the data, i.e., the temporal view, while shallow methods tend to utilize the hand-craft features for recognition, e.g., the statistics view. In this paper, to extract a better feature for advancing the performance, we propose a novel method, namely multi-view fusion transformer (MVFT) along with a novel attention mechanism. First, MVFT encodes three views of information, i.e., the temporal, frequent, and statistical views to generate multi-view features. Second, the novel attention mechanism uncovers inner- and cross-view clues to catalyze mutual interactions between three views for detailed relation modeling. Moreover, extensive experiments on two datasets illustrate the superiority of our methods over several state-of-the-art methods.

Unveiling an empty street from crowded observations captured by in-car cameras is crucial for autonomous driving. However, removing all temporarily static objects, such as stopped vehicles and standing pedestrians, presents a significant challenge. Unlike object-centric 3D inpainting, which relies on thorough observation in a small scene, street scene cases involve long trajectories that differ from previous 3D inpainting tasks. The camera-centric moving environment of captured videos further complicates the task due to the limited degree and time duration of object observation. To address these obstacles, we introduce StreetUnveiler to reconstruct an empty street. StreetUnveiler learns a 3D representation of the empty street from crowded observations. Our representation is based on the hard-label semantic 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) for its scalability and ability to identify Gaussians to be removed. We inpaint rendered image after removing unwanted Gaussians to provide pseudo-labels and subsequently re-optimize the 2DGS. Given its temporal continuous movement, we divide the empty street scene into observed, partial-observed, and unobserved regions, which we propose to locate through a rendered alpha map. This decomposition helps us to minimize the regions that need to be inpainted. To enhance the temporal consistency of the inpainting, we introduce a novel time-reversal framework to inpaint frames in reverse order and use later frames as references for earlier frames to fully utilize the long-trajectory observations. Our experiments conducted on the street scene dataset successfully reconstructed a 3D representation of the empty street. The mesh representation of the empty street can be extracted for further applications. The project page and more visualizations can be found at: https://streetunveiler.github.io

As there are now millions of publicly available neural networks, searching and analyzing large model repositories becomes increasingly important. Navigating so many models requires an atlas, but as most models are poorly documented charting such an atlas is challenging. To explore the hidden potential of model repositories, we chart a preliminary atlas representing the documented fraction of Hugging Face. It provides stunning visualizations of the model landscape and evolution. We demonstrate several applications of this atlas including predicting model attributes (e.g., accuracy), and analyzing trends in computer vision models. However, as the current atlas remains incomplete, we propose a method for charting undocumented regions. Specifically, we identify high-confidence structural priors based on dominant real-world model training practices. Leveraging these priors, our approach enables accurate mapping of previously undocumented areas of the atlas. We publicly release our datasets, code, and interactive atlas.

We present a method for generating consistent novel views from a single source image. Our approach focuses on maximizing the reuse of visible pixels from the source image. To achieve this, we use a monocular depth estimator that transfers visible pixels from the source view to the target view. Starting from a pre-trained 2D inpainting diffusion model, we train our method on the large-scale Objaverse dataset to learn 3D object priors. While training we use a novel masking mechanism based on epipolar lines to further improve the quality of our approach. This allows our framework to perform zero-shot novel view synthesis on a variety of objects. We evaluate the zero-shot abilities of our framework on three challenging datasets: Google Scanned Objects, Ray Traced Multiview, and Common Objects in 3D. See our webpage for more details: https://yashkant.github.io/invs/

Cross-View Geo-Localisation within urban regions is challenging in part due to the lack of geo-spatial structuring within current datasets and techniques. We propose utilising graph representations to model sequences of local observations and the connectivity of the target location. Modelling as a graph enables generating previously unseen sequences by sampling with new parameter configurations. To leverage this newly available information, we propose a GNN-based architecture, producing spatially strong embeddings and improving discriminability over isolated image embeddings. We outline SpaGBOL, introducing three novel contributions. 1) The first graph-structured dataset for Cross-View Geo-Localisation, containing multiple streetview images per node to improve generalisation. 2) Introducing GNNs to the problem, we develop the first system that exploits the correlation between node proximity and feature similarity. 3) Leveraging the unique properties of the graph representation - we demonstrate a novel retrieval filtering approach based on neighbourhood bearings. SpaGBOL achieves state-of-the-art accuracies on the unseen test graph - with relative Top-1 retrieval improvements on previous techniques of 11%, and 50% when filtering with Bearing Vector Matching on the SpaGBOL dataset.

Generative 3D reconstruction shows strong potential in incomplete observations. While sparse-view and single-image reconstruction are well-researched, partial observation remains underexplored. In this context, dense views are accessible only from a specific angular range, with other perspectives remaining inaccessible. This task presents two main challenges: (i) limited View Range: observations confined to a narrow angular scope prevent effective traditional interpolation techniques that require evenly distributed perspectives. (ii) inconsistent Generation: views created for invisible regions often lack coherence with both visible regions and each other, compromising reconstruction consistency. To address these challenges, we propose \method, a novel training-free approach that integrates the local dense observations and multi-source priors for reconstruction. Our method introduces a fusion-based strategy to effectively align these priors in DDIM sampling, thereby generating multi-view consistent images to supervise invisible views. We further design an iterative refinement strategy, which uses the geometric structures of the object to enhance reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show the superiority of our method over SOTAs, especially in invisible regions.

In this paper, we propose a new paradigm, named Historical Object Prediction (HoP) for multi-view 3D detection to leverage temporal information more effectively. The HoP approach is straightforward: given the current timestamp t, we generate a pseudo Bird's-Eye View (BEV) feature of timestamp t-k from its adjacent frames and utilize this feature to predict the object set at timestamp t-k. Our approach is motivated by the observation that enforcing the detector to capture both the spatial location and temporal motion of objects occurring at historical timestamps can lead to more accurate BEV feature learning. First, we elaborately design short-term and long-term temporal decoders, which can generate the pseudo BEV feature for timestamp t-k without the involvement of its corresponding camera images. Second, an additional object decoder is flexibly attached to predict the object targets using the generated pseudo BEV feature. Note that we only perform HoP during training, thus the proposed method does not introduce extra overheads during inference. As a plug-and-play approach, HoP can be easily incorporated into state-of-the-art BEV detection frameworks, including BEVFormer and BEVDet series. Furthermore, the auxiliary HoP approach is complementary to prevalent temporal modeling methods, leading to significant performance gains. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed HoP on the nuScenes dataset. We choose the representative methods, including BEVFormer and BEVDet4D-Depth to evaluate our method. Surprisingly, HoP achieves 68.5% NDS and 62.4% mAP with ViT-L on nuScenes test, outperforming all the 3D object detectors on the leaderboard. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Sense-X/HoP.

Denoising diffusion models have enabled high-quality image generation and editing. We present a method to localize the desired edit region implicit in a text instruction. We leverage InstructPix2Pix (IP2P) and identify the discrepancy between IP2P predictions with and without the instruction. This discrepancy is referred to as the relevance map. The relevance map conveys the importance of changing each pixel to achieve the edits, and is used to to guide the modifications. This guidance ensures that the irrelevant pixels remain unchanged. Relevance maps are further used to enhance the quality of text-guided editing of 3D scenes in the form of neural radiance fields. A field is trained on relevance maps of training views, denoted as the relevance field, defining the 3D region within which modifications should be made. We perform iterative updates on the training views guided by rendered relevance maps from the relevance field. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image and NeRF editing tasks. Project page: https://ashmrz.github.io/WatchYourSteps/

Modern reconstruction techniques can effectively model complex 3D scenes from sparse 2D views. However, automatically assessing the quality of novel views and identifying artifacts is challenging due to the lack of ground truth images and the limitations of no-reference image metrics in predicting detailed artifact maps. The absence of such quality metrics hinders accurate predictions of the quality of generated views and limits the adoption of post-processing techniques, such as inpainting, to enhance reconstruction quality. In this work, we propose a new no-reference metric, Puzzle Similarity, which is designed to localize artifacts in novel views. Our approach utilizes image patch statistics from the input views to establish a scene-specific distribution that is later used to identify poorly reconstructed regions in the novel views. We test and evaluate our method in the context of 3D reconstruction; to this end, we collected a novel dataset of human quality assessment in unseen reconstructed views. Through this dataset, we demonstrate that our method can not only successfully localize artifacts in novel views, correlating with human assessment, but do so without direct references. Surprisingly, our metric outperforms both no-reference metrics and popular full-reference image metrics. We can leverage our new metric to enhance applications like automatic image restoration, guided acquisition, or 3D reconstruction from sparse inputs.

Three-dimensional scene generation is crucial in computer vision, with applications spanning autonomous driving, gaming and the metaverse. Current methods either lack user control or rely on imprecise, non-intuitive conditions. In this work, we propose a method that uses, scene graphs, an accessible, user friendly control format to generate outdoor 3D scenes. We develop an interactive system that transforms a sparse scene graph into a dense BEV (Bird's Eye View) Embedding Map, which guides a conditional diffusion model to generate 3D scenes that match the scene graph description. During inference, users can easily create or modify scene graphs to generate large-scale outdoor scenes. We create a large-scale dataset with paired scene graphs and 3D semantic scenes to train the BEV embedding and diffusion models. Experimental results show that our approach consistently produces high-quality 3D urban scenes closely aligned with the input scene graphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to generate 3D outdoor scenes conditioned on scene graphs.

It is essential to have a method to map an unknown terrain for various applications. For places where human access is not possible, a method should be proposed to identify the environment. Exploration, disaster relief, transportation and many other purposes would be convenient if a map of the environment is available. Replicating the human vision system using stereo cameras would be an optimum solution. In this work, we have used laser ranging based technique fused with stereo cameras to extract dimension of objects for mapping. The distortions were calibrated using mathematical model of the camera. By means of Semi Global Block Matching [1] disparity map was generated and reduces the noise using novel noise reduction method of disparity map by dilation. The Data from the Laser Range Finder (LRF) and noise reduced vision data has been used to identify the object parameters.

Aerial imagery analysis is critical for many research fields. However, obtaining frequent high-quality aerial images is not always accessible due to its high effort and cost requirements. One solution is to use the Ground-to-Aerial (G2A) technique to synthesize aerial images from easily collectible ground images. However, G2A is rarely studied, because of its challenges, including but not limited to, the drastic view changes, occlusion, and range of visibility. In this paper, we present a novel Geometric Preserving Ground-to-Aerial (G2A) image synthesis (GPG2A) model that can generate realistic aerial images from ground images. GPG2A consists of two stages. The first stage predicts the Bird's Eye View (BEV) segmentation (referred to as the BEV layout map) from the ground image. The second stage synthesizes the aerial image from the predicted BEV layout map and text descriptions of the ground image. To train our model, we present a new multi-modal cross-view dataset, namely VIGORv2 which is built upon VIGOR with newly collected aerial images, maps, and text descriptions. Our extensive experiments illustrate that GPG2A synthesizes better geometry-preserved aerial images than existing models. We also present two applications, data augmentation for cross-view geo-localization and sketch-based region search, to further verify the effectiveness of our GPG2A. The code and data will be publicly available.

We introduce MVSplat360, a feed-forward approach for 360{\deg} novel view synthesis (NVS) of diverse real-world scenes, using only sparse observations. This setting is inherently ill-posed due to minimal overlap among input views and insufficient visual information provided, making it challenging for conventional methods to achieve high-quality results. Our MVSplat360 addresses this by effectively combining geometry-aware 3D reconstruction with temporally consistent video generation. Specifically, it refactors a feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model to render features directly into the latent space of a pre-trained Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) model, where these features then act as pose and visual cues to guide the denoising process and produce photorealistic 3D-consistent views. Our model is end-to-end trainable and supports rendering arbitrary views with as few as 5 sparse input views. To evaluate MVSplat360's performance, we introduce a new benchmark using the challenging DL3DV-10K dataset, where MVSplat360 achieves superior visual quality compared to state-of-the-art methods on wide-sweeping or even 360{\deg} NVS tasks. Experiments on the existing benchmark RealEstate10K also confirm the effectiveness of our model. The video results are available on our project page: https://donydchen.github.io/mvsplat360.

A proper scene representation is central to the pursuit of spatial intelligence where agents can robustly reconstruct and efficiently understand 3D scenes. A scene representation is either metric, such as landmark maps in 3D reconstruction, 3D bounding boxes in object detection, or voxel grids in occupancy prediction, or topological, such as pose graphs with loop closures in SLAM or visibility graphs in SfM. In this work, we propose to build Multiview Scene Graphs (MSG) from unposed images, representing a scene topologically with interconnected place and object nodes. The task of building MSG is challenging for existing representation learning methods since it needs to jointly address both visual place recognition, object detection, and object association from images with limited fields of view and potentially large viewpoint changes. To evaluate any method tackling this task, we developed an MSG dataset and annotation based on a public 3D dataset. We also propose an evaluation metric based on the intersection-over-union score of MSG edges. Moreover, we develop a novel baseline method built on mainstream pretrained vision models, combining visual place recognition and object association into one Transformer decoder architecture. Experiments demonstrate our method has superior performance compared to existing relevant baselines.

Recent novel view synthesis methods obtain promising results for relatively small scenes, e.g., indoor environments and scenes with a few objects, but tend to fail for unbounded outdoor scenes with a single image as input. In this paper, we introduce SAMPLING, a Scene-adaptive Hierarchical Multiplane Images Representation for Novel View Synthesis from a Single Image based on improved multiplane images (MPI). Observing that depth distribution varies significantly for unbounded outdoor scenes, we employ an adaptive-bins strategy for MPI to arrange planes in accordance with each scene image. To represent intricate geometry and multi-scale details, we further introduce a hierarchical refinement branch, which results in high-quality synthesized novel views. Our method demonstrates considerable performance gains in synthesizing large-scale unbounded outdoor scenes using a single image on the KITTI dataset and generalizes well to the unseen Tanks and Temples dataset.The code and models will soon be made available.

Monocular camera calibration is a key precondition for numerous 3D vision applications. Despite considerable advancements, existing methods often hinge on specific assumptions and struggle to generalize across varied real-world scenarios, and the performance is limited by insufficient training data. Recently, diffusion models trained on expansive datasets have been confirmed to maintain the capability to generate diverse, high-quality images. This success suggests a strong potential of the models to effectively understand varied visual information. In this work, we leverage the comprehensive visual knowledge embedded in pre-trained diffusion models to enable more robust and accurate monocular camera intrinsic estimation. Specifically, we reformulate the problem of estimating the four degrees of freedom (4-DoF) of camera intrinsic parameters as a dense incident map generation task. The map details the angle of incidence for each pixel in the RGB image, and its format aligns well with the paradigm of diffusion models. The camera intrinsic then can be derived from the incident map with a simple non-learning RANSAC algorithm during inference. Moreover, to further enhance the performance, we jointly estimate a depth map to provide extra geometric information for the incident map estimation. Extensive experiments on multiple testing datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, gaining up to a 40% reduction in prediction errors. Besides, the experiments also show that the precise camera intrinsic and depth maps estimated by our pipeline can greatly benefit practical applications such as 3D reconstruction from a single in-the-wild image.

Geolocation, the task of identifying an image's location, requires complex reasoning and is crucial for navigation, monitoring, and cultural preservation. However, current methods often produce coarse, imprecise, and non-interpretable localization. A major challenge lies in the quality and scale of existing geolocation datasets. These datasets are typically small-scale and automatically constructed, leading to noisy data and inconsistent task difficulty, with images that either reveal answers too easily or lack sufficient clues for reliable inference. To address these challenges, we introduce a comprehensive geolocation framework with three key components: GeoComp, a large-scale dataset; GeoCoT, a novel reasoning method; and GeoEval, an evaluation metric, collectively designed to address critical challenges and drive advancements in geolocation research. At the core of this framework is GeoComp (Geolocation Competition Dataset), a large-scale dataset collected from a geolocation game platform involving 740K users over two years. It comprises 25 million entries of metadata and 3 million geo-tagged locations spanning much of the globe, with each location annotated thousands to tens of thousands of times by human users. The dataset offers diverse difficulty levels for detailed analysis and highlights key gaps in current models. Building on this dataset, we propose Geographical Chain-of-Thought (GeoCoT), a novel multi-step reasoning framework designed to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision Models (LVMs) in geolocation tasks. GeoCoT improves performance by integrating contextual and spatial cues through a multi-step process that mimics human geolocation reasoning. Finally, using the GeoEval metric, we demonstrate that GeoCoT significantly boosts geolocation accuracy by up to 25% while enhancing interpretability.

Text-to-image diffusion models understand spatial relationship between objects, but do they represent the true 3D structure of the world from only 2D supervision? We demonstrate that yes, 3D knowledge is encoded in 2D image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion, and we show that this structure can be exploited for 3D vision tasks. Our method, Viewpoint Neural Textual Inversion (ViewNeTI), controls the 3D viewpoint of objects in generated images from frozen diffusion models. We train a small neural mapper to take camera viewpoint parameters and predict text encoder latents; the latents then condition the diffusion generation process to produce images with the desired camera viewpoint. ViewNeTI naturally addresses Novel View Synthesis (NVS). By leveraging the frozen diffusion model as a prior, we can solve NVS with very few input views; we can even do single-view novel view synthesis. Our single-view NVS predictions have good semantic details and photorealism compared to prior methods. Our approach is well suited for modeling the uncertainty inherent in sparse 3D vision problems because it can efficiently generate diverse samples. Our view-control mechanism is general, and can even change the camera view in images generated by user-defined prompts.

Recent progress in single-image 3D generation highlights the importance of multi-view coherency, leveraging 3D priors from large-scale diffusion models pretrained on Internet-scale images. However, the aspect of novel-view diversity remains underexplored within the research landscape due to the ambiguity in converting a 2D image into 3D content, where numerous potential shapes can emerge. Here, we aim to address this research gap by simultaneously addressing both consistency and diversity. Yet, striking a balance between these two aspects poses a considerable challenge due to their inherent trade-offs. This work introduces HarmonyView, a simple yet effective diffusion sampling technique adept at decomposing two intricate aspects in single-image 3D generation: consistency and diversity. This approach paves the way for a more nuanced exploration of the two critical dimensions within the sampling process. Moreover, we propose a new evaluation metric based on CLIP image and text encoders to comprehensively assess the diversity of the generated views, which closely aligns with human evaluators' judgments. In experiments, HarmonyView achieves a harmonious balance, demonstrating a win-win scenario in both consistency and diversity.

Worldwide Geo-localization aims to pinpoint the precise location of images taken anywhere on Earth. This task has considerable challenges due to immense variation in geographic landscapes. The image-to-image retrieval-based approaches fail to solve this problem on a global scale as it is not feasible to construct a large gallery of images covering the entire world. Instead, existing approaches divide the globe into discrete geographic cells, transforming the problem into a classification task. However, their performance is limited by the predefined classes and often results in inaccurate localizations when an image's location significantly deviates from its class center. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeoCLIP, a novel CLIP-inspired Image-to-GPS retrieval approach that enforces alignment between the image and its corresponding GPS locations. GeoCLIP's location encoder models the Earth as a continuous function by employing positional encoding through random Fourier features and constructing a hierarchical representation that captures information at varying resolutions to yield a semantically rich high-dimensional feature suitable to use even beyond geo-localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work employing GPS encoding for geo-localization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method via extensive experiments and ablations on benchmark datasets. We achieve competitive performance with just 20% of training data, highlighting its effectiveness even in limited-data settings. Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate geo-localization using a text query by leveraging CLIP backbone of our image encoder. The project webpage is available at: https://vicentevivan.github.io/GeoCLIP

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is a key task in Embodied AI, requiring agents to navigate diverse and unseen environments while following natural language instructions. Traditional approaches rely heavily on historical observations as spatio-temporal contexts for decision making, leading to significant storage and computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce MapNav, a novel end-to-end VLN model that leverages Annotated Semantic Map (ASM) to replace historical frames. Specifically, our approach constructs a top-down semantic map at the start of each episode and update it at each timestep, allowing for precise object mapping and structured navigation information. Then, we enhance this map with explicit textual labels for key regions, transforming abstract semantics into clear navigation cues and generate our ASM. MapNav agent using the constructed ASM as input, and use the powerful end-to-end capabilities of VLM to empower VLN. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MapNav achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both simulated and real-world environments, validating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, we will release our ASM generation source code and dataset to ensure reproducibility, contributing valuable resources to the field. We believe that our proposed MapNav can be used as a new memory representation method in VLN, paving the way for future research in this field.

In this paper, we present DendroMap, a novel approach to interactively exploring large-scale image datasets for machine learning (ML). ML practitioners often explore image datasets by generating a grid of images or projecting high-dimensional representations of images into 2-D using dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., t-SNE). However, neither approach effectively scales to large datasets because images are ineffectively organized and interactions are insufficiently supported. To address these challenges, we develop DendroMap by adapting Treemaps, a well-known visualization technique. DendroMap effectively organizes images by extracting hierarchical cluster structures from high-dimensional representations of images. It enables users to make sense of the overall distributions of datasets and interactively zoom into specific areas of interests at multiple levels of abstraction. Our case studies with widely-used image datasets for deep learning demonstrate that users can discover insights about datasets and trained models by examining the diversity of images, identifying underperforming subgroups, and analyzing classification errors. We conducted a user study that evaluates the effectiveness of DendroMap in grouping and searching tasks by comparing it with a gridified version of t-SNE and found that participants preferred DendroMap. DendroMap is available at https://div-lab.github.io/dendromap/.

Existing vision-based 3D occupancy prediction methods are inherently limited in accuracy due to their exclusive reliance on street-view imagery, neglecting the potential benefits of incorporating satellite views. We propose SA-Occ, the first Satellite-Assisted 3D occupancy prediction model, which leverages GPS & IMU to integrate historical yet readily available satellite imagery into real-time applications, effectively mitigating limitations of ego-vehicle perceptions, involving occlusions and degraded performance in distant regions. To address the core challenges of cross-view perception, we propose: 1) Dynamic-Decoupling Fusion, which resolves inconsistencies in dynamic regions caused by the temporal asynchrony between satellite and street views; 2) 3D-Proj Guidance, a module that enhances 3D feature extraction from inherently 2D satellite imagery; and 3) Uniform Sampling Alignment, which aligns the sampling density between street and satellite views. Evaluated on Occ3D-nuScenes, SA-Occ achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially among single-frame methods, with a 39.05% mIoU (a 6.97% improvement), while incurring only 6.93 ms of additional latency per frame. Our code and newly curated dataset are available at https://github.com/chenchen235/SA-Occ.

360-degree images offer a significantly wider field of view compared to traditional pinhole cameras, enabling sparse sampling and dense 3D reconstruction in low-texture environments. This makes them crucial for applications in VR, AR, and related fields. However, the inherent distortion caused by the wide field of view affects feature extraction and matching, leading to geometric consistency issues in subsequent multi-view reconstruction. In this work, we propose 360Recon, an innovative MVS algorithm for ERP images. The proposed spherical feature extraction module effectively mitigates distortion effects, and by combining the constructed 3D cost volume with multi-scale enhanced features from ERP images, our approach achieves high-precision scene reconstruction while preserving local geometric consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that 360Recon achieves state-of-the-art performance and high efficiency in depth estimation and 3D reconstruction on existing public panoramic reconstruction datasets.

Road unevenness significantly impacts the safety and comfort of various traffic participants, especially vulnerable road users such as cyclists and wheelchair users. This paper introduces StreetSurfaceVis, a novel dataset comprising 9,122 street-level images collected from a crowdsourcing platform and manually annotated by road surface type and quality. The dataset is intended to train models for comprehensive surface assessments of road networks. Existing open datasets are constrained by limited geospatial coverage and camera setups, typically excluding cycleways and footways. By crafting a heterogeneous dataset, we aim to fill this gap and enable robust models that maintain high accuracy across diverse image sources. However, the frequency distribution of road surface types and qualities is highly imbalanced. We address the challenge of ensuring sufficient images per class while reducing manual annotation by proposing a sampling strategy that incorporates various external label prediction resources. More precisely, we estimate the impact of (1) enriching the image data with OpenStreetMap tags, (2) iterative training and application of a custom surface type classification model, (3) amplifying underrepresented classes through prompt-based classification with GPT-4o or similarity search using image embeddings. We show that utilizing a combination of these strategies effectively reduces manual annotation workload while ensuring sufficient class representation.

Camera relocalization methods range from dense image alignment to direct camera pose regression from a query image. Among these, sparse feature matching stands out as an efficient, versatile, and generally lightweight approach with numerous applications. However, feature-based methods often struggle with significant viewpoint and appearance changes, leading to matching failures and inaccurate pose estimates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that leverages a globally sparse yet locally dense 3D representation of 2D features. By tracking and triangulating landmarks over a sequence of frames, we construct a sparse voxel map optimized to render image patch descriptors observed during tracking. Given an initial pose estimate, we first synthesize descriptors from the voxels using volumetric rendering and then perform feature matching to estimate the camera pose. This methodology enables the generation of descriptors for unseen views, enhancing robustness to view changes. We extensively evaluate our method on the 7-Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets. Our results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art feature representation techniques in indoor environments, achieving up to a 39% improvement in median translation error. Additionally, our approach yields comparable results to other methods for outdoor scenarios while maintaining lower memory and computational costs.

Generating consistent ground-view images from satellite imagery is challenging, primarily due to the large discrepancies in viewing angles and resolution between satellite and ground-level domains. Previous efforts mainly concentrated on single-view generation, often resulting in inconsistencies across neighboring ground views. In this work, we propose a novel cross-view synthesis approach designed to overcome these challenges by ensuring consistency across ground-view images generated from satellite views. Our method, based on a fixed latent diffusion model, introduces two conditioning modules: satellite-guided denoising, which extracts high-level scene layout to guide the denoising process, and satellite-temporal denoising, which captures camera motion to maintain consistency across multiple generated views. We further contribute a large-scale satellite-ground dataset containing over 100,000 perspective pairs to facilitate extensive ground scene or video generation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods on perceptual and temporal metrics, achieving high photorealism and consistency in multi-view outputs.

Monitoring of land cover and land use is crucial in natural resources management. Automatic visual mapping can carry enormous economic value for agriculture, forestry, or public administration. Satellite or aerial images combined with computer vision and deep learning enable precise assessment and can significantly speed up change detection. Aerial imagery usually provides images with much higher pixel resolution than satellite data allowing more detailed mapping. However, there is still a lack of aerial datasets made for the segmentation, covering rural areas with a resolution of tens centimeters per pixel, manual fine labels, and highly publicly important environmental instances like buildings, woods, water, or roads. Here we introduce LandCover.ai (Land Cover from Aerial Imagery) dataset for semantic segmentation. We collected images of 216.27 sq. km rural areas across Poland, a country in Central Europe, 39.51 sq. km with resolution 50 cm per pixel and 176.76 sq. km with resolution 25 cm per pixel and manually fine annotated four following classes of objects: buildings, woodlands, water, and roads. Additionally, we report simple benchmark results, achieving 85.56% of mean intersection over union on the test set. It proves that the automatic mapping of land cover is possible with a relatively small, cost-efficient, RGB-only dataset. The dataset is publicly available at https://landcover.ai.linuxpolska.com/

In autonomous driving, predicting future events in advance and evaluating the foreseeable risks empowers autonomous vehicles to better plan their actions, enhancing safety and efficiency on the road. To this end, we propose Drive-WM, the first driving world model compatible with existing end-to-end planning models. Through a joint spatial-temporal modeling facilitated by view factorization, our model generates high-fidelity multiview videos in driving scenes. Building on its powerful generation ability, we showcase the potential of applying the world model for safe driving planning for the first time. Particularly, our Drive-WM enables driving into multiple futures based on distinct driving maneuvers, and determines the optimal trajectory according to the image-based rewards. Evaluation on real-world driving datasets verifies that our method could generate high-quality, consistent, and controllable multiview videos, opening up possibilities for real-world simulations and safe planning.

Active Visual Exploration (AVE) is a task that involves dynamically selecting observations (glimpses), which is critical to facilitate comprehension and navigation within an environment. While modern AVE methods have demonstrated impressive performance, they are constrained to fixed-scale glimpses from rigid grids. In contrast, existing mobile platforms equipped with optical zoom capabilities can capture glimpses of arbitrary positions and scales. To address this gap between software and hardware capabilities, we introduce AdaGlimpse. It uses Soft Actor-Critic, a reinforcement learning algorithm tailored for exploration tasks, to select glimpses of arbitrary position and scale. This approach enables our model to rapidly establish a general awareness of the environment before zooming in for detailed analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that AdaGlimpse surpasses previous methods across various visual tasks while maintaining greater applicability in realistic AVE scenarios.