Small-scale robots hold significant promise in the field of minimally invasive surgery (MIS). In this paper, we present a miniature magnetic gripper and develop a data-driven kinematic model. The gripper comprises four fingers, wherein each finger has a maximum size not exceeding 3mm, 4mm and 5.5mm in three dimensions. By integrating permanent magnets and elastic ropes as internal actuation elements into the fingers, the gripper is equipped with the capability to open-close under an external magnetic field, facilitating the manipulation of small objects in confined spaces. Modeling and analysis of the magnetic gripper are undertaken, wherein the relationship between the open angle and the external magnetic field is established. The average error between the experimentally observed open angles and the model-predicted values is 2.31°. Subsequent experiments demonstrated the necessity of the magnetic gripper model for precise manipulation, verified its excellent sensitivity to magnetic fields, and demonstrated its potential for future applications in MIS.

One goal of dexterous robotic grasping is to allow robots to handle objects with the same level of flexibility and adaptability as humans. However, it remains a challenging task to generate an optimal grasping strategy for dexterous hands, especially when it comes to delicate manipulation and accurate adjustment the desired grasping poses for objects of varying shapes and sizes. In this paper, we propose a novel dexterous grasp generation scheme called GrainGrasp that provides fine-grained contact guidance for each fingertip. In particular, we employ a generative model to predict separate contact maps for each fingertip on the object point cloud, effectively capturing the specifics of finger-object interactions. In addition, we develop a new dexterous grasping optimization algorithm that solely relies on the point cloud as input, eliminating the necessity for complete mesh information of the object. By leveraging the contact maps of different fingertips, the proposed optimization algorithm can generate precise and determinable strategies for human-like object grasping. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme. Our code is available at https://github.com/wmtlab/GrainGrasp.

Large garages are ubiquitous yet intricate scenes that present unique challenges due to their monotonous colors, repetitive patterns, reflective surfaces, and transparent vehicle glass. Conventional Structure from Motion (SfM) methods for camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction often fail in these environments due to poor correspondence construction. To address these challenges, we introduce LetsGo, a LiDAR-assisted Gaussian splatting framework for large-scale garage modeling and rendering. We develop a handheld scanner, Polar, equipped with IMU, LiDAR, and a fisheye camera, to facilitate accurate data acquisition. Using this Polar device, we present the GarageWorld dataset, consisting of eight expansive garage scenes with diverse geometric structures, which will be made publicly available for further research. Our approach demonstrates that LiDAR point clouds collected by the Polar device significantly enhance a suite of 3D Gaussian splatting algorithms for garage scene modeling and rendering. We introduce a novel depth regularizer that effectively eliminates floating artifacts in rendered images. Additionally, we propose a multi-resolution 3D Gaussian representation designed for Level-of-Detail (LOD) rendering. This includes adapted scaling factors for individual levels and a random-resolution-level training scheme to optimize the Gaussians across different resolutions. This representation enables efficient rendering of large-scale garage scenes on lightweight devices via a web-based renderer. Experimental results on our GarageWorld dataset, as well as on ScanNet++ and KITTI-360, demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of rendering quality and resource efficiency.

Implicit neural representations such as Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) have focused mainly on modeling static objects captured under multi-view settings where real-time rendering can be achieved with smart data structures, e.g., PlenOctree. In this paper, we present a novel Fourier PlenOctree (FPO) technique to tackle efficient neural mod-eling and real-time rendering of dynamic scenes captured under the free-view video (FVV) setting. The key idea in our FPO is a novel combination of generalized NeRF, PlenOctree representation, volumetric fusion and Fourier transform. To accelerate FPO construction, we present a novel coarse-to-fine fusion scheme that leverages the gen-eralizable NeRF technique to generate the tree via spatial blending. To tackle dynamic scenes, we tailor the implicit network to model the Fourier coefficients of time-varying density and color attributes. Finally, we construct the FPO and train the Fourier coefficients directly on the leaves of a union PlenOctree structure of the dynamic sequence. We show that the resulting FPO enables compact memory overload to handle dynamic objects and supports efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is 3000 times faster than the original NeRF and achieves over an order of magnitude acceleration over SOTA while preserving high visual quality for the free-viewpoint rendering of unseen dynamic scenes.

Recent neural human representations can produce high-quality multi-view rendering but require using dense multi-view inputs and costly training. They are hence largely limited to static models as training each frame is infeasible. We present HumanNeRF - a neural representation with efficient generalization ability - for high-fidelity free-view synthesis of dynamic humans. Analogous to how IBRNet assists NeRF by avoiding perscene training, HumanNeRF employs an aggregated pixel-alignment feature across multi-view inputs along with a pose embedded non-rigid deformation field for tackling dynamic motions. The raw Human-NeRF can already produce reasonable rendering on sparse video inputs of unseen subjects and camera settings. To further improve the rendering quality, we augment our solution with in-hour scene-specific fine-tuning, and an appearance blending module for combining the benefits of both neural volumetric rendering and neural texture blending. Extensive experiments on various multi-view dynamic hu-man datasets demonstrate effectiveness of our approach in synthesizing photo-realistic free-view humans under challenging motions and with very sparse camera view inputs.

We have recently seen tremendous progress in the neural advances for photo-real human modeling and rendering. However, it's still challenging to integrate them into an existing mesh-based pipeline for downstream applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive neural approach for high-quality reconstruction, compression, and rendering of human performances from dense multi-view videos. Our core intuition is to bridge the traditional animated mesh workflow with a new class of highly efficient neural techniques. We first introduce a neural surface reconstructor for high-quality surface generation in minutes. It marries the implicit volumetric rendering of the truncated signed distance field (TSDF) with multi-resolution hash encoding. We further propose a hybrid neural tracker to generate animated meshes, which combines explicit non-rigid tracking with implicit dynamic deformation in a self-supervised framework. The former provides the coarse warping back into the canonical space, while the latter implicit one further predicts the displacements using the 4D hash encoding as in our reconstructor. Then, we discuss the rendering schemes using the obtained animated meshes, ranging from dynamic texturing to lumigraph rendering under various bandwidth settings. To strike an intricate balance between quality and bandwidth, we propose a hierarchical solution by first rendering 6 virtual views covering the performer and then conducting occlusion-aware neural texture blending. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in a variety of mesh-based applications and photo-realistic free-view experiences on various platforms, i.e., inserting virtual human performances into real environments through mobile AR or immersively watching talent shows with VR headsets.

Photo-realistic neural reconstruction and rendering of the human portrait are critical for numerous VR/AR applications. Still, existing solutions inherently rely on multi-view capture settings, and the one-shot solution to get rid of the tedious multi-view synchronization and calibration remains extremely challenging. In this paper, we propose MirrorNeRF - a one-shot neural portrait free-viewpoint rendering approach using a catadioptric imaging system with multiple sphere mirrors and a single high-resolution digital camera, which is the first to combine neural radiance field with catadioptric imaging so as to enable one-shot photo-realistic human portrait reconstruction and rendering, in a low-cost and casual capture setting. More specifically, we propose a light-weight catadioptric system design with a sphere mirror array to enable diverse ray sampling in the continuous 3D space as well as an effective online calibration for the camera and the mirror array. Our catadioptric imaging system can be easily deployed with a low budget and the casual capture ability for convenient daily usages. We introduce a novel neural warping radiance field representation to learn a continuous displacement field that implicitly compensates for the misalignment due to our flexible system setting. We further propose a density regularization scheme to leverage the inherent geometry information from the catadioptric data in a self-supervision manner, which not only improves the training efficiency but also provides more effective density supervision for higher rendering quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our scheme to achieve one-shot photo-realistic and high-quality appearance free-viewpoint rendering for human portrait scenes.

We present MVSNeRF, a novel neural rendering approach that can efficiently reconstruct neural radiance fields for view synthesis. Unlike prior works on neural radiance fields that consider per-scene optimization on densely captured images, we propose a generic deep neural network that can reconstruct radiance fields from only three nearby input views via fast network inference. Our approach leverages plane-swept cost volumes (widely used in multi-view stereo) for geometry-aware scene reasoning, and combines this with physically based volume rendering for neural radiance field reconstruction. We train our network on real objects in the DTU dataset, and test it on three different datasets to evaluate its effectiveness and generalizability. Our approach can generalize across scenes (even indoor scenes, completely different from our training scenes of objects) and generate realistic view synthesis results using only three input images, significantly outperforming concurrent works on generalizable radiance field reconstruction. Moreover, if dense images are captured, our estimated radiance field representation can be easily fine-tuned; this leads to fast per-scene reconstruction with higher rendering quality and substantially less optimization time than NeRF.

With the rapid development of the Internet, online reviews have touched on all aspects of our lives and have provided us with much convenience. However, they may also mislead our behavior, especially the deceptive online reviews. In order to filter out deceptive online reviews more precisely, mainly based on sentence joint topic sentiment model (SJTSM), and also integrating the good ideas of sentence latent dirichlet allocation (SenLDA) and CopulaLDA, in this paper we propose a deceptive review detection framework (DRDF) that combines the word-level, chunk-level, and sentence-level topic sentiment models to extract the reviews different features, which is regarded as the vector input of a multiple-classifier to detect deceptive reviews. It not only utilizes the correlation of different level topic-sentiment model representations of a text, but also incorporates the structure and the sentiment label information of reviews. Our compared experimental result on different public datasets has shown that its performance is superior to the existing methods of deceptive review detection.

Generating free-viewpoint videos is critical for immersive VR/AR experience, but recent neural advances still lack the editing ability to manipulate the visual perception for large dynamic scenes. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose the first approach for editable free-viewpoint video generation for large-scale view-dependent dynamic scenes using only 16 cameras. The core of our approach is a new layered neural representation, where each dynamic entity, including the environment itself, is formulated into a spatio-temporal coherent neural layered radiance representation called ST-NeRF. Such a layered representation supports manipulations of the dynamic scene while still supporting a wide free viewing experience. In our ST-NeRF, we represent the dynamic entity/layer as a continuous function, which achieves the disentanglement of location, deformation as well as the appearance of the dynamic entity in a continuous and self-supervised manner. We propose a scene parsing 4D label map tracking to disentangle the spatial information explicitly and a continuous deform module to disentangle the temporal motion implicitly. An object-aware volume rendering scheme is further introduced for the re-assembling of all the neural layers. We adopt a novel layered loss and motion-aware ray sampling strategy to enable efficient training for a large dynamic scene with multiple performers, Our framework further enables a variety of editing functions, i.e., manipulating the scale and location, duplicating or retiming individual neural layers to create numerous visual effects while preserving high realism. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to achieve high-quality, photo-realistic, and editable free-viewpoint video generation for dynamic scenes.