This paper addresses the challenge of deploying salient object detection (SOD) on resource-constrained devices with real-time performance. While recent advances in deep neural networks have improved SOD, existing top-leading models are computationally expensive. We propose an efficient network design that combines traditional wisdom on SOD and the representation power of modern CNNs. Like biologically-inspired classical SOD methods relying on computing contrast cues to determine saliency of image regions, our model leverages Pixel Difference Convolutions (PDCs) to encode the feature contrasts. Differently, PDCs are incorporated in a CNN architecture so that the valuable contrast cues are extracted from rich feature maps. For efficiency, we introduce a difference convolution reparameterization (DCR) strategy that embeds PDCs into standard convolutions, eliminating computation and parameters at inference. Additionally, we introduce SpatioTemporal Difference Convolution (STDC) for video SOD, enhancing the standard 3D convolution with spatiotemporal contrast capture. Our models, SDNet for image SOD and STDNet for video SOD, achieve significant improvements in efficiency-accuracy trade-offs. On a Jetson Orin device, our models with $< $< 1M parameters operate at 46 FPS and 150 FPS on streamed images and videos, surpassing the second-best lightweight models in our experiments by more than $2\times$2× and $3\times$3× in speed with superior accuracy.

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° panoramic scenes. L-MAGIC harnesses pretrained 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/ZhipengCai/L-MAGIC-code-release.

We present a visual-inertial depth estimation pipeline that integrates monocular depth estimation and visual- inertial odometry to produce dense depth estimates with metric scale. Our approach performs global scale and shift alignment against sparse metric depth, followed by learning-based dense alignment. We evaluate on the TartanAir and VOID datasets, observing up to 30% reduction in inverse RMSE with dense scale alignment relative to performing just global alignment alone. Our approach is especially competitive at low density; with just 150 sparse metric depth points, our dense- to-dense depth alignment method achieves over 50 % lower iRMSE over sparse-to-dense depth completion by KBNet, currently the state of the art on VOID. We demonstrate successful zero-shot transfer from synthetic TartanAir to real-world VOID data and perform generalization tests on NYUv2 and VCU-RVI. Our approach is modular and is compatible with a variety of monocular depth estimation models.

Depth sensing is a critical function for robotic tasks such as localization, mapping and obstacle detection. There has been a significant and growing interest in depth estimation from a single RGB image, due to the relatively low cost and size of monocular cameras. However, state-of-the-art single-view depth estimation algorithms are based on fairly complex deep neural networks that are too slow for real-time inference on an embedded platform, for instance, mounted on a micro aerial vehicle. In this paper, we address the problem of fast depth estimation on embedded systems. We propose an efficient and lightweight encoder-decoder network architecture and apply network pruning to further reduce computational complexity and latency. In particular, we focus on the design of a low-latency decoder. Our methodology demonstrates that it is possible to achieve similar accuracy as prior work on depth estimation, but at inference speeds that are an order of magnitude faster. Our proposed network, FastDepth, runs at 178 fps on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 GPU and at 27 fps when using only the TX2 CPU, with active power consumption under 10 W. FastDepth achieves close to state-of-the-art accuracy on the NYU Depth v2 dataset. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper demonstrates real-time monocular depth estimation using a deep neural network with the lowest latency and highest throughput on an embedded platform that can be carried by a micro aerial vehicle.