VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Aljosa Osep
dblp:128/7869
· DBLP profile ↗
39ranked-venue papers
6as first author
23since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-8105-4737ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 38 · 6 first-author · 23 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 22 · 1 first-author · 13 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 10 · 5 first-author · 3 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Zero-Shot 4D Lidar Panoptic SegmentationabstractZero-shot 4D segmentation and recognition of arbitrary objects in Lidar is crucial for embodied navigation, with applications ranging from streaming perception to semantic mapping and localization. However, the primary challenge in advancing research and developing generalized, versatile methods for spatio-temporal scene understanding in Lidar lies in the scarcity of datasets that provide the necessary diversity and scale of annotations. To overcome these challenges, we propose SAL-4D (Segment Anything in Lidar- 4D), a method that utilizes multi-modal robotic sensor setups as a bridge to distill recent developments in Video Object Segmentation (VOS) in conjunction with off-the-shelf Vision-Language foundation models to Lidar. We utilize VOS models to pseudo-label tracklets in short video sequences, annotate these tracklets with sequence-level CLIP tokens, and lift them to the 4D Lidar space using calibrated multi-modal sensory setups to distill them to our SAL-4D model. Due to temporal consistent predictions, we outperform prior art in 3D Zero-Shot Lidar Panoptic Segmentation (LPS) over 5 PQ, and unlock Zero-Shot 4D-LPS. Yushan Zhang, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé, Tim Meinhardt |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | Towards Learning to Complete Anything in LidarabstractWe propose CAL (Complete Anything in Lidar) for Lidar-based shape-completion in-the-wild. This is closely related to Lidar-based semantic/panoptic scene completion. However, contemporary methods can only complete and recognize objects from a closed vocabulary labeled in existing Lidar datasets. Different to that, our zero-shot approach leverages the temporal context from multi-modal sensor sequences to mine object shapes and semantic features of observed objects. These are then distilled into a Lidar-only instance-level completion and recognition model. Although we only mine partial shape completions, we find that our distilled model learns to infer full object shapes from multiple such partial observations across the dataset. We show that our model can be prompted on standard benchmarks for Semantic and Panoptic Scene Completion, localize objects as (amodal) 3D bounding boxes, and recognize objects beyond fixed class vocabularies. Ayça Takmaz, Cristiano Saltori, Neehar Peri, Tim Meinhardt, Riccardo de Lutio, Laura Leal-Taixé, Aljosa Osep |
ICML | 7 |
| 2025 | Native Segmentation Vision TransformersabstractUniform downsampling remains the de facto standard for reducing spatial resolution in vision backbones. In this work, we propose an alternative design built around a content-aware spatial grouping layer that dynamically assigns tokens to a reduced set based on image boundaries and their semantic content. Stacking our grouping layer across consecutive backbone stages results in hierarchical segmentation that arises *natively* in the feature extraction process, resulting in our coined Native Segmentation Vision Transformer.
We show that a careful design of our architecture enables the emergence of strong segmentation masks solely from grouping layers, that is, without additional segmentation-specific heads. This sets the foundation for a new paradigm of *native*, backbone-level segmentation, which enables strong zero-shot results without mask supervision, as well as a minimal and efficient standalone model design for downstream segmentation tasks. Guillem Brasó, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2025 | Lidar Panoptic Segmentation in an Open World
Anirudh Srinivasan Chakravarthy, Meghana Reddy Ganesina, Peiyun Hu, Laura Leal-Taixé, Shu Kong, Deva Ramanan, Aljosa Osep |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 7 |
| 2024 | SeMoLi: What Moves Together Belongs TogetherabstractWe tackle semi-supervised object detection based on motion cues. Recent results suggest that heuristic-based clustering methods in conjunction with object trackers can be used to pseudo-label instances of moving objects and use these as supervisory signals to train 3D object detectors in Lidar data without manual supervision. We re-think this approach and suggest that both, object detection, as well as motion-inspired pseudo-labeling, can be tackled in a data-driven manner. We leverage recent advances in scene flow estimation to obtain point trajectories from which we extract long-term, class-agnostic motion patterns. Revisiting correlation clustering in the context of message passing networks, we learn to group those motion patterns to cluster points to object instances. By estimating the full extent of the objects, we obtain per-scan 3D bounding boxes that we use to supervise a Lidar object detection network. Our method not only outperforms prior heuristic-based approaches (57.5 AP, + 14 improvement over prior work), more importantly, we show we can pseudo-label and train object detectors across datasets. Jenny Seidenschwarz, Aljosa Osep, Francesco Ferroni, Simon Lucey, Laura Leal-Taixé |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2024 | Better Call SAL: Towards Learning to Segment Anything in Lidar
Aljosa Osep, Tim Meinhardt, Francesco Ferroni, Neehar Peri, Deva Ramanan, Laura Leal-Taixé |
ECCV (39) | 1 |
| 2023 | Pix2Map: Cross-Modal Retrieval for Inferring Street Maps from ImagesabstractSelf-driving vehicles rely on urban street maps for autonomous navigation. In this paper, we introduce Pix2Map, a method for inferring urban street map topology directly from ego-view images, as needed to continually update and expand existing maps. This is a challenging task, as we need to infer a complex urban road topology directly from raw image data. The main insight of this paper is that this problem can be posed as cross-modal retrieval by learning a joint, cross-modal embedding space for images and existing maps, represented as discrete graphs that encode the topological layout of the visual surroundings. We conduct our experimental evaluation using the Argoverse dataset and show that it is indeed possible to accurately retrieve street maps corresponding to both seen and unseen roads solely from image data. Moreover, we show that our retrieved maps can be used to update or expand existing maps and even show proof-of-concept results for visual localization and image retrieval from spatial graphs. Xindi Wu, KwunFung Lau, Francesco Ferroni, Aljosa Osep, Deva Ramanan |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2023 | Walking Your LiDOG: A Journey Through Multiple Domains for LiDAR Semantic SegmentationabstractThe ability to deploy robots that can operate safely in diverse environments is crucial for developing embodied intelligent agents. As a community, we have made tremendous progress in within-domain LiDAR semantic segmentation. However, do these methods generalize across domains? To answer this question, we design the first experimental setup for studying domain generalization (DG) for LiDAR semantic segmentation (DG-LSS). Our results confirm a significant gap between methods, evaluated in a cross-domain setting: for example, a model trained on the source dataset (SemanticKITTI) obtains 26.53 mIoU on the target data, compared to 48.49 mIoU obtained by the model trained on the target domain (nuScenes). To tackle this gap, we propose the first method specifically designed for DG-LSS, which obtains 34.88 mIoU on the target domain, outperforming all baselines. Our method augments a sparse-convolutional encoder-decoder 3D segmentation network with an additional, dense 2D convolutional decoder that learns to classify a birds-eye view of the point cloud. This simple auxiliary task encourages the 3D network to learn features that are robust to sensor placement shifts and resolution, and are transferable across domains. With this work, we aim to in spire the community to develop and evaluate future models in such cross-domain conditions. Cristiano Saltori, Aljosa Osep, Elisa Ricci 0001, Laura Leal-Taixé |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2023 | Lidar Panoptic Segmentation and Tracking without Bells and WhistlesabstractState-of-the-art lidar panoptic segmentation (LPS) methods follow “bottom-up” segmentation-centric fashion wherein they build upon semantic segmentation networks by utilizing clustering to obtain object instances. In this paper, we re-think this approach and propose a surprisingly simple yet effective detection-centric network for both LPS and tracking. Our network is modular by design and optimized for all aspects of both the panoptic segmentation and tracking task. One of the core components of our network is the object instance detection branch, which we train using point-level (modal) annotations, as available in segmentation-centric datasets. In the absence of amodal (cuboid) annotations, we regress modal centroids and object extent using trajectory-level supervision that provides information about object size, which cannot be inferred from single scans due to occlusions and the sparse nature of the lidar data. We obtain fine-grained instance segments by learning to associate lidar points with detected centroids. We evaluate our method on several 3D/4D LPS benchmarks and observe that our model establishes a new state-of-the-art among open-sourced models, outperforming recent query-based models. Abhinav Agarwalla, Xuhua Huang, Jason Ziglar, Francesco Ferroni, Laura Leal-Taixé, James Hays, Aljosa Osep, Deva Ramanan |
IROS | 7 |
| 2022 | Text2Pos: Text-to-Point-Cloud Cross-Modal LocalizationabstractNatural language-based communication with mobile devices and home appliances is becoming increasingly popular and has the potential to become natural for communicating with mobile robots in the future. Towards this goal, we investigate cross-modal text-to-point-cloud localization that will allow us to specify, for example, a vehicle pick-up or goods delivery location. In particular, we propose Text2Pos, a cross-modal localization module that learns to align textual descriptions with localization cues in a coarse-to-fine manner. Given a point cloud of the environment, Text2Pos locates a position that is specified via a natural language-based description of the immediate surroundings. To train Text2Pos and study its performance, we construct KITTI360Pose, the first dataset for this task based on the recently introduced KITTI360 dataset. Our experiments show that we can localize 65% of textual queries within 15m distance to query locations for top-10 retrieved locations. This is a starting point that we hope will spark future developments towards language-based navigation. “Alexa, hand me over my special delivery at the sidewalk in front of the yellow building next to the blue bus stop.” Manuel Kolmet, Qunjie Zhou, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2022 | Opening up Open World TrackingabstractTracking and detecting any object, including ones never-seen-before during model training, is a crucial but elusive capability of autonomous systems. An autonomous agent that is blind to never-seen-before objects poses a safety hazard when operating in the real world - and yet this is how almost all current systems work. One of the main obstacles towards advancing tracking any object is that this task is notoriously difficult to evaluate. A benchmark that would allow us to perform an apples-to-apples comparison of existing efforts is a crucial first step towards advancing this important research field. This paper addresses this evaluation deficit and lays out the landscape and evaluation methodology for detecting and tracking both known and unknown objects in the open-world setting. We propose a new benchmark, TAOOW. Tracking Any Object in an Open World, analyze existing efforts in multi-object tracking, and construct a baseline for this task while highlighting future challenges. We hope to open a new front in multi-object tracking research that will hopefully bring us a step closer to intelligent systems that can operate safely in the real world. Idil Esen Zulfikar, Jonathon Luiten, Achal Dave, Deva Ramanan, Bastian Leibe, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé |
CVPR | 7 |
| 2022 | Forecasting from LiDAR via Future Object DetectionabstractObject detection and forecasting are fundamental components of embodied perception. These two problems, how-ever, are largely studied in isolation by the community. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end approachfor detection and motion forecasting based on raw sensor measurement as opposed to ground truth tracks. Instead of predicting the current frame locations and forecasting forward in time, we directly predict future object locations and backcast to determine where each trajectory began. Our approach not only improves overall accuracy compared to other modular or end-to-end baselines, it also prompts us to rethink the role of explicit tracking for embodied perception. Additionally, by linking future and current locations in a many-to-one manner, our approach is able to reason about multiple futures, a capability that was previously considered difficult for end-to-end approaches. We conduct extensive experi-ments on the popular nuScenes dataset and demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our approach. In addition, we investigate the appropriateness of reusing standard forecasting metrics for an end-to-end setup, and find a number of limitations which allow us to build simple baselines to game these metrics. We address this issue with a novel set of joint forecasting and detection metrics that extend the commonly used AP metrics from the detection community to measuring forecasting accuracy. Our code is available on GitHub. Neehar Peri, Jonathon Luiten, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé, Deva Ramanan |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2022 | PolarMOT: How Far Can Geometric Relations Take us in 3D Multi-object Tracking?
Aleksandr Kim, Guillem Brasó, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé |
ECCV (22) | 3 |
| 2022 | Is Geometry Enough for Matching in Visual Localization?
Qunjie Zhou, Sérgio Agostinho, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé |
ECCV (10) | 3 |
| 2022 | DirectTracker: 3D Multi-Object Tracking Using Direct Image Alignment and Photometric Bundle AdjustmentabstractDirect methods have shown excellent performance in the applications of visual odometry and SLAM. In this work we propose to leverage their effectiveness for the task of 3D multi-object tracking. To this end, we propose DirectTracker, a framework that effectively combines direct image alignment for the short-term tracking and sliding-window photometric bundle adjustment for 3D object detection. Object proposals are estimated based on the sparse sliding-window pointcloud and further refined using an optimization-based cost function that carefully combines 3D and 2D cues to ensure consistency in image and world space. We propose to evaluate 3D tracking using the recently introduced higher-order tracking accuracy (HOTA) metric and the generalized intersection over union sim-ilarity measure to mitigate the limitations of the conventional use of intersection over union for the evaluation of vision-based trackers. We perform evaluation on the KITTI Tracking benchmark for the Car class and show competitive performance in tracking objects both in 2D and 3D. Mariia Gladkova, Nikita Korobov, Nikolaus Demmel, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé, Daniel Cremers |
IROS | 4 |
| 2022 | Quo Vadis: Is Trajectory Forecasting the Key Towards Long-Term Multi-Object Tracking?abstractRecent developments in monocular multi-object tracking have been very successful in tracking visible objects and bridging short occlusion gaps, mainly relying on data-driven appearance models. While significant advancements have been made in short-term tracking performance, bridging longer occlusion gaps remains elusive: state-of-the-art object trackers only bridge less than 10% of occlusions longer than three seconds. We suggest that the missing key is reasoning about future trajectories over a longer time horizon. Intuitively, the longer the occlusion gap, the larger the search space for possible associations. In this paper, we show that even a small yet diverse set of trajectory predictions for moving agents will significantly reduce this search space and thus improve long-term tracking robustness. Our experiments suggest that the crucial components of our approach are reasoning in a bird's-eye view space and generating a small yet diverse set of forecasts while accounting for their localization uncertainty. This way, we can advance state-of-the-art trackers on the MOTChallenge dataset and significantly improve their long-term tracking performance. This paper's source code and experimental data are available at https://github.com/dendorferpatrick/QuoVadis. Patrick Dendorfer, Vladimir Yugay, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2022 | Learning to Discover and Detect ObjectsabstractWe tackle the problem of novel class discovery and localization (NCDL). In this setting, we assume a source dataset with supervision for only some object classes. Instances of other classes need to be discovered, classified, and localized automatically based on visual similarity without any human supervision. To tackle NCDL, we propose a two-stage object detection network Region-based NCDL (RNCDL) that uses a region proposal network to localize regions of interest (RoIs). We then train our network to learn to classify each RoI, either as one of the known classes, seen in the source dataset, or one of the novel classes, with a long-tail distribution constraint on the class assignments, reflecting the natural frequency of classes in the real world. By training our detection network with this objective in an end-to-end manner, it learns to classify all region proposals for a large variety of classes, including those not part of the labeled object class vocabulary. Our experiments conducted using COCO and LVIS datasets reveal that our method is significantly more effective than multi-stage pipelines that rely on traditional clustering algorithms. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generality of our approach by applying our method to a large-scale Visual Genome dataset, where our network successfully learns to detect various semantic classes without direct supervision. Vladimir Fomenko, Ismail Elezi, Deva Ramanan, Laura Leal-Taixé, Aljosa Osep |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2021 | 4D Panoptic LiDAR SegmentationabstractTemporal semantic scene understanding is critical for self-driving cars or robots operating in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose 4D panoptic LiDAR segmentation to assign a semantic class and a temporally-consistent instance ID to a sequence of 3D points. To this end, we present an approach and a point-centric evaluation metric. Our approach determines a semantic class for every point while modeling object instances as probability distributions in the 4D spatio-temporal domain. We process multiple point clouds in parallel and resolve point-to-instance associations, effectively alleviating the need for explicit temporal data association. Inspired by recent advances in benchmarking of multi-object tracking, we propose to adopt a new evaluation metric that separates the semantic and point-to-instance association aspects of the task. With this work, we aim at paving the road for future developments of temporal LiDAR panoptic perception. Mehmet Aygun, Aljosa Osep, Mark Weber, Maxim Maximov, Cyrill Stachniss, Jens Behley, Laura Leal-Taixé |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2021 | (Just) A Spoonful of Refinements Helps the Registration Error Go DownabstractWe tackle data-driven 3D point cloud registration. Given point correspondences, the standard Kabsch algorithm provides an optimal rotation estimate. This allows to train registration models in an end-to-end manner by differentiating the SVD operation. However, given the initial rotation estimate supplied by Kabsch, we show we can improve point correspondence learning during model training by extending the original optimization problem. In particular, we linearize the governing constraints of the rotation matrix and solve the resulting linear system of equations. We then iteratively produce new solutions by updating the initial estimate. Our experiments show that, by plugging our differentiable layer to existing learning-based registration methods, we improve the correspondence matching quality. This yields up to a 7% decrease in rotation error for correspondence-based data-driven registration methods. Sérgio Agostinho, Aljosa Osep, Alessio Del Bue, Laura Leal-Taixé |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2021 | MOTSynth: How Can Synthetic Data Help Pedestrian Detection and Tracking?abstractDeep learning-based methods for video pedestrian detection and tracking require large volumes of training data to achieve good performance. However, data acquisition in crowded public environments raises data privacy concerns – we are not allowed to simply record and store data without the explicit consent of all participants. Furthermore, the annotation of such data for computer vision applications usually requires a substantial amount of manual effort, especially in the video domain. Labeling instances of pedestrians in highly crowded scenarios can be challenging even for human annotators and may introduce errors in the training data. In this paper, we study how we can advance different aspects of multi-person tracking using solely synthetic data. To this end, we generate MOTSynth, a large, highly diverse synthetic dataset for object detection and tracking using a rendering game engine. Our experiments show that MOTSynth can be used as a replacement for real data on tasks such as pedestrian detection, re-identification, segmentation, and tracking. Matteo Fabbri, Guillem Brasó, Gianluca Maugeri, Orcun Cetintas, Riccardo Gasparini, Aljosa Osep, Simone Calderara, Laura Leal-Taixé, Rita Cucchiara |
ICCV | 6 |
| 2021 | EagerMOT: 3D Multi-Object Tracking via Sensor FusionabstractMulti-object tracking (MOT) enables mobile robots to perform well-informed motion planning and navigation by localizing surrounding objects in 3D space and time. Existing methods rely on depth sensors (e.g., LiDAR) to detect and track targets in 3D space, but only up to a limited sensing range due to the sparsity of the signal. On the other hand, cameras provide a dense and rich visual signal that helps to localize even distant objects, but only in the image domain. In this paper, we propose EagerMOT, a simple tracking formulation that eagerly integrates all available object observations from both sensor modalities to obtain a well-informed interpretation of the scene dynamics. Using images, we can identify distant incoming objects, while depth estimates allow for precise trajectory localization as soon as objects are within the depth-sensing range. With EagerMOT, we achieve state-of-the-art results across several MOT tasks on the KITTI and NuScenes datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/aleksandrkim61/EagerMOT Aleksandr Kim, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé |
ICRA | 2 |
| 2021 | MOTChallenge: A Benchmark for Single-Camera Multiple Target TrackingabstractAbstract Standardized benchmarks have been crucial in pushing the performance of computer vision algorithms, especially since the advent of deep learning. Although leaderboards should not be over-claimed, they often provide the most objective measure of performance and are therefore important guides for research. We present MOTChallenge , a benchmark for single-camera Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) launched in late 2014, to collect existing and new data and create a framework for the standardized evaluation of multiple object tracking methods. The benchmark is focused on multiple people tracking, since pedestrians are by far the most studied object in the tracking community, with applications ranging from robot navigation to self-driving cars. This paper collects the first three releases of the benchmark: (i) MOT15 , along with numerous state-of-the-art results that were submitted in the last years, (ii) MOT16 , which contains new challenging videos, and (iii) MOT17 , that extends MOT16 sequences with more precise labels and evaluates tracking performance on three different object detectors. The second and third release not only offers a significant increase in the number of labeled boxes, but also provide labels for multiple object classes beside pedestrians, as well as the level of visibility for every single object of interest. We finally provide a categorization of state-of-the-art trackers and a broad error analysis. This will help newcomers understand the related work and research trends in the MOT community, and hopefully shed some light into potential future research directions. Patrick Dendorfer, Aljosa Osep, Anton Milan, Konrad Schindler, Daniel Cremers, Ian D. Reid 0001, Stefan Roth 0001, Laura Leal-Taixé |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 2 |
| 2021 | HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-object TrackingabstractMulti-object tracking (MOT) has been notoriously difficult to evaluate. Previous metrics overemphasize the importance of either detection or association. To address this, we present a novel MOT evaluation metric, higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA), which explicitly balances the effect of performing accurate detection, association and localization into a single unified metric for comparing trackers. HOTA decomposes into a family of sub-metrics which are able to evaluate each of five basic error types separately, which enables clear analysis of tracking performance. We evaluate the effectiveness of HOTA on the MOTChallenge benchmark, and show that it is able to capture important aspects of MOT performance not previously taken into account by established metrics. Furthermore, we show HOTA scores better align with human visual evaluation of tracking performance. Jonathon Luiten, Aljosa Osep, Patrick Dendorfer, Philip Torr 0001, Andreas Geiger 0001, Laura Leal-Taixé, Bastian Leibe |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 2 |
| 2020 | Goal-GAN: Multimodal Trajectory Prediction Based on Goal Position Estimation
Patrick Dendorfer, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé |
ACCV (2) | 2 |
| 2020 | Making a Case for 3D Convolutions for Object Segmentation in Videos
Sabarinath Mahadevan, Ali Athar, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé, Bastian Leibe, Sebastian Hennen |
BMVC | 3 |
| 2020 | How to Train Your Deep Multi-Object TrackerabstractThe recent trend in vision-based multi-object tracking (MOT) is heading towards leveraging the representational power of deep learning to jointly learn to detect and track objects. However, existing methods train only certain sub-modules using loss functions that often do not correlate with established tracking evaluation measures such as Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) and Precision (MOTP). As these measures are not differentiable, the choice of appropriate loss functions for end-to-end training of multi-object tracking methods is still an open research problem. In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing a differentiable proxy of MOTA and MOTP, which we combine in a loss function suitable for end-to-end training of deep multi-object trackers. As a key ingredient, we propose a Deep Hungarian Net (DHN) module that approximates the Hungarian matching algorithm. DHN allows estimating the correspondence between object tracks and ground truth objects to compute differentiable proxies of MOTA and MOTP, which are in turn used to optimize deep trackers directly. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed differentiable framework improves the performance of existing multi-object trackers, and we establish a new state of the art on the MOTChallenge benchmark. Our code is publicly available from https://github.com/yihongXU/deepMOT. Aljosa Osep, Yutong Ban, Radu Horaud, Laura Leal-Taixé, Xavier Alameda-Pineda |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2020 | STEm-Seg: Spatio-Temporal Embeddings for Instance Segmentation in Videos
Ali Athar, Sabarinath Mahadevan, Aljosa Osep, Laura Leal-Taixé, Bastian Leibe |
ECCV (11) | 3 |
| 2020 | 4D Generic Video Object ProposalsabstractMany high-level video understanding methods require input in the form of object proposals. Currently, such proposals are predominantly generated with the help of neural networks that were trained for detecting and segmenting a set of known object classes, which limits their applicability to cases where all objects of interest are represented in the training set. We propose an approach that can reliably extract spatio-temporal object proposals for both known and unknown object categories from stereo video. Our 4D Generic Video Tubes (4D-GVT) method combines motion cues, stereo data, and data-driven object instance segmentation in a probabilistic framework to compute a compact set of video-object proposals that precisely localizes object candidates and their contours in 3D space and time. Aljosa Osep, Paul Voigtlaender, Mark Weber, Jonathon Luiten, Bastian Leibe |
ICRA | 1 |
| 2019 | AlignNet-3D: Fast Point Cloud Registration of Partially Observed ObjectsabstractMethods tackling multi-object tracking need to estimate the number of targets in the sensing area as well as to estimate their continuous state. While the majority of existing methods focus on data association, precise state (3D pose) estimation is often only coarsely estimated by approximating targets with centroids or (3D) bounding boxes. However, in automotive scenarios, motion perception of surrounding agents is critical and inaccuracies in the vehicle close-range can have catastrophic consequences. In this work, we focus on precise 3D track state estimation and propose a learning-based approach for object-centric relative motion estimation of partially observed objects. Instead of approximating targets with their centroids, our approach is capable of utilizing noisy 3D point segments of objects to estimate their motion. To that end, we propose a simple, yet effective and efficient network, AlignNet-3D, that learns to align point clouds. Our evaluation on two different datasets demonstrates that our method outperforms computationally expensive, global 3D registration methods while being significantly more efficient. We make our data, code, and models available at https://www.vision.rwth-aachen.de/page/alignnet. Johannes Groß, Aljosa Osep, Bastian Leibe |
3DV | 2 |
| 2019 | MOTS: Multi-Object Tracking and SegmentationabstractThis paper extends the popular task of multi-object tracking to multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS). Towards this goal, we create dense pixel-level annotations for two existing tracking datasets using a semi-automatic annotation procedure. Our new annotations comprise 65,213 pixel masks for 977 distinct objects (cars and pedestrians) in 10,870 video frames. For evaluation, we extend existing multi-object tracking metrics to this new task. Moreover, we propose a new baseline method which jointly addresses detection, tracking, and segmentation with a single convolutional network. We demonstrate the value of our datasets by achieving improvements in performance when training on MOTS annotations. We believe that our datasets, metrics and baseline will become a valuable resource towards developing multi-object tracking approaches that go beyond 2D bounding boxes. We make our annotations, code, and models available at https://www.vision.rwth-aachen.de/page/mots. Paul Voigtlaender, Michael Krause 0002, Aljosa Osep, Jonathon Luiten, Berin Balachandar Gnana Sekar, Andreas Geiger 0001, Bastian Leibe |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2019 | Large-Scale Object Mining for Object Discovery from Unlabeled VideoabstractThis paper addresses the problem of object discovery from unlabeled driving videos captured in a realistic automotive setting. Identifying recurring object categories in such raw video streams is a very challenging problem. Not only do object candidates first have to be localized in the input images, but many interesting object categories occur relatively infrequently. Object discovery will therefore have to deal with the difficulties of operating in the long tail of the object distribution. We demonstrate the feasibility of performing fully automatic object discovery in such a setting by mining object tracks using a generic object tracker. In order to facilitate further research in objet discovery, we release a collection of more than 360,000 automatically mined object tracks from 10 + hours of video data (560,000 frames). We use this dataset to evaluate the suitability of different feature representations and clustering strategies for object discovery. Aljosa Osep, Paul Voigtlaender, Jonathon Luiten, Stefan Breuers, Bastian Leibe |
ICRA | 1 |
| 2018 | Track, Then Decide: Category-Agnostic Vision-Based Multi-Object TrackingabstractThe most common paradigm for vision-based multi-object tracking is tracking-by-detection, due to the availability of reliable detectors for several important object categories such as cars and pedestrians. However, future mobile systems will need a capability to cope with rich human-made environments, in which obtaining detectors for every possible object category would be infeasible. In this paper, we address the problem of class-agnostic multi-object tracking using generic object proposals. We present an efficient segmentation mask-based tracker which associates pixel-precise masks reported by the segmentation. Our approach can utilize semantic information whenever it is available for classifying objects at the track level, while retaining the capability to track generic unknown objects in the absence of such information. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art tracking-by-detection methods for popular object categories such as cars and pedestrians. Additionally, we show that the proposed method can discover and robustly track a large variety of other objects. Aljosa Osep, Wolfgang Mehner, Paul Voigtlaender, Bastian Leibe |
ICRA | 1 |
| 2017 | Combined image- and world-space tracking in traffic scenesabstractTracking in urban street scenes plays a central role in autonomous systems such as self-driving cars. Most of the current vision-based tracking methods perform tracking in the image domain. Other approaches, e.g. based on LIDAR and radar, track purely in 3D. While some vision-based tracking methods invoke 3D information in parts of their pipeline, and some 3D-based methods utilize image-based information in components of their approach, we propose to use image- and world-space information jointly throughout our method. We present our tracking pipeline as a 3D extension of image-based tracking. From enhancing the detections with 3D measurements to the reported positions of every tracked object, we use world-space 3D information at every stage of processing. We accomplish this by our novel coupled 2D-3D Kalman filter, combined with a conceptually clean and extendable hypothesize-and-select framework. Our approach matches the current state-of-the-art on the official KITTI benchmark, which performs evaluation in the 2D image domain only. Further experiments show significant improvements in 3D localization precision by enabling our coupled 2D-3D tracking. Aljosa Osep, Wolfgang Mehner, Markus Mathias, Bastian Leibe |
ICRA | 1 |
| 2016 | Unsupervised Learning of Shape-Motion Patterns for Objects in Urban Street Scenes
Dirk Klostermann, Aljosa Osep, Jörg Stückler, Bastian Leibe |
BMVC | 2 |
| 2016 | Multi-scale object candidates for generic object tracking in street scenesabstractMost vision based systems for object tracking in urban environments focus on a limited number of important object categories such as cars or pedestrians, for which powerful detectors are available. However, practical driving scenarios contain many additional objects of interest, for which suitable detectors either do not yet exist or would be cumbersome to obtain. In this paper we propose a more general tracking approach which does not follow the often used tracking-by-detection principle. Instead, we investigate how far we can get by tracking unknown, generic objects in challenging street scenes. As such, we do not restrict ourselves to only tracking the most common categories, but are able to handle a large variety of static and moving objects. We evaluate our approach on the KITTI dataset and show competitive results for the annotated classes, even though we are not restricted to them. Aljosa Osep, Alexander Hermans, Francis Engelmann, Dirk Klostermann, Markus Mathias, Bastian Leibe |
ICRA | 1 |
| 2016 | Scene flow propagation for semantic mapping and object discovery in dynamic street scenesabstractScene understanding is an important prerequisite for vehicles and robots that operate autonomously in dynamic urban street scenes. For navigation and high-level behavior planning, the robots not only require a persistent 3D model of the static surroundings-equally important, they need to perceive and keep track of dynamic objects. In this paper, we propose a method that incrementally fuses stereo frame observations into temporally consistent semantic 3D maps. In contrast to previous work, our approach uses scene flow to propagate dynamic objects within the map. Our method provides a persistent 3D occupancy as well as semantic belief on static as well as moving objects. This allows for advanced reasoning on objects despite noisy single-frame observations and occlusions. We develop a novel approach to discover object instances based on the temporally consistent shape, appearance, motion, and semantic cues in our maps. We evaluate our approaches to dynamic semantic mapping and object discovery on the popular KITTI benchmark and demonstrate improved results compared to single-frame methods. Deyvid Kochanov, Aljosa Osep, Jörg Stückler, Bastian Leibe |
IROS | 2 |
| 2015 | A fixed-dimensional 3D shape representation for matching partially observed objects in street scenesabstractIn this paper, we present an object-centric, fixed-dimensional 3D shape representation for robust matching of partially observed object shapes, which is an important component for object categorization from 3D data. A main problem when working with RGB-D data from stereo, Kinect, or laser sensors is that the 3D information is typically quite noisy. For that reason, we accumulate shape information over time and register it in a common reference frame. Matching the resulting shapes requires a strategy for dealing with partial observations. We therefore investigate several distance functions and kernels that implement different such strategies and compare their matching performance in quantitative experiments. We show that the resulting representation achieves good results for a large variety of vision tasks, such as multi-class classification, person orientation estimation, and articulated body pose estimation, where robust 3D shape matching is essential. Dennis Mitzel, Jasper Diesel, Aljosa Osep, Umer Rafi, Bastian Leibe |
ICRA | 3 |
| 2013 | Multi-view Normal Field Integration for 3D Reconstruction of Mirroring ObjectsabstractIn this paper, we present a novel, robust multi-view normal field integration technique for reconstructing the full 3D shape of mirroring objects. We employ a turntable-based setup with several cameras and displays. These are used to display illumination patterns which are reflected by the object surface. The pattern information observed in the cameras enables the calculation of individual volumetric normal fields for each combination of camera, display and turntable angle. As the pattern information might be blurred depending on the surface curvature or due to non-perfect mirroring surface characteristics, we locally adapt the decoding to the finest still resolvable pattern resolution. In complex real-world scenarios, the normal fields contain regions without observations due to occlusions and outliers due to interreflections and noise. Therefore, a robust reconstruction using only normal information is challenging. Via a non-parametric clustering of normal hypotheses derived for each point in the scene, we obtain both the most likely local surface normal and a local surface consistency estimate. This information is utilized in an iterative min-cut based variational approach to reconstruct the surface geometry. Michael Weinmann, Aljosa Osep, Roland Ruiters, Reinhard Klein |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2012 | Fusing Structured Light Consistency and Helmholtz Normals for 3D ReconstructionabstractIn this paper, we propose a 3D reconstruction approach which combines a structured light based consistency measure with dense normal information obtained by exploiting the Helmholtz reciprocity principle. This combination compensates for the individual limitations of techniques providing normal information, which are mainly affected by low-frequency drift, and those providing positional information, which are often not well-suited to recover fine details. To obtain Helmholtz reciprocal samples, we employ a turntable-based setup. Due to the reciprocity, the structured light directly provides the occlusion information needed during the normal estimation for both the cameras and light sources. We perform the reconstruction by solving one global variational problem which integrates all available measurements simultaneously, over all cameras, light source positions and turntable rotations. For this, we employ an octree-based continuous min-cut framework in order to alleviate metrification errors while maintaining memory efficiency. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm both on synthetic and real-world data. Michael Weinmann, Roland Ruiters, Aljosa Osep, Christopher Schwartz, Reinhard Klein |
BMVC | 3 |