Liu Liu 0009

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28ranked-venue papers
5as first author
19since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-5880-5974ORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 23 · 4 first-author · 15 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 19 · 4 first-author · 12 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 3 · 3 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 first-author
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 DCRR++: Unsupervised Reflection Removal and Novel View Synthesis via Dual-Pixel Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting
Kailong Yu, Mina Han, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu 0009, Miaomiao Liu 0001, Wei Liang 0008
Int. J. Comput. Vis.4
2025 EZSR: Event-based Zero-Shot Recognition
abstract
This paper studies zero-shot object recognition using event camera data. Guided by CLIP, which is pre-trained on RGB images, existing approaches achieve zero-shot object recognition by optimizing embedding similarities between event data and RGB images respectively encoded by an event encoder and the CLIP image encoder. Alternatively, several methods learn RGB frame reconstructions from event data for the CLIP image encoder. However, they often result in suboptimal zero-shot performance.This study develops an event encoder without relying on additional reconstruction networks. We theoretically analyze the performance bottlenecks of previous approaches: the embedding optimization objectives are prone to suffer from the spatial sparsity of event data, causing semantic misalignments between the learned event embedding space and the CLIP text embedding space. To mitigate the issue, we explore a scalar-wise modulation strategy. Furthermore, to scale up the number of events and RGB data pairs for training, we also study a pipeline for synthesizing event data from static RGB images in mass.Experimentally, we demonstrate an attractive scaling property in the number of parameters and synthesized data. We achieve superior zero-shot object recognition performance on extensive standard benchmark datasets, even compared with past supervised learning approaches. For example, our model with a ViT/B-16 backbone achieves 47.84% zero-shot accuracy on the N-ImageNet dataset.
Yan Yang 0011, Liyuan Pan, Dongxu Li 0003, Liu Liu 0009
CVPR4
2025 DynFocus: Dynamic Cooperative Network Empowers LLMs with Video Understanding
abstract
The challenge in LLM-based video understanding lies in preserving visual and semantic information in long videos while maintaining a memory-affordable token count. However, redundancy and correspondence in videos have hindered the performance potential of existing methods. Through statistical learning on current datasets, we observe that redundancy occurs in both repeated and answer-irrelevant frames, and the corresponding frames vary with different questions. This suggests the possibility of adopting dynamic encoding to balance detailed video information preservation with token budget reduction. To this end, we propose a dynamic cooperative network, DynFocus, for memory-efficient video encoding in this paper. Specifically, i) a Dynamic Event Prototype Estimation (DPE) module to dynamically select meaningful frames for question answering; (ii) a Compact Cooperative Encoding (CCE) module that encodes meaningful frames with detailed visual appearance and the remaining frames with sketchy perception separately. We evaluate our method on five publicly available benchmarks, and experimental results consistently demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Simon98-AI/ DynFocus
Qingpei Guo, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu 0009, Yu Guan 0001, Ming Yang 0007
CVPR4
2025 Enhanced Dual-Pixel Image Reflection Removal via Gaussian Splatting
abstract
Image de-reflection is a critical task in computer vision. Existing methods for de-reflection using monocular cameras face challenges due to the lack of depth cues to separate the transmission and reflection layers, particularly under strong illumination or multi-layer reflection scenarios. Although recent advances, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), utilize novel view-synthesis capabilities to separate transmitted and reflected layers, they still encounter difficulties in practice with monocular images. In this paper, we simplify the de-reflection task by combining dual-pixel (DP) technology with 3DGS, forming the first unsupervised de-reflection framework. Specifically, we propose the Dual-View Coordinated Reflection Removal (DCRR) Framework, which integrates depth cues from DP sensors with the rendering capabilities of 3DGS. The DCRR utilizes a dual-view approach that estimates the image transmission layer and opacity via differentiable rasterization with 3DGS and reconstructs the reflection layer through a lightweight multi-layer perceptron. We then present the Dual-Pixel-Driven Reflection Gaussian Pruning (DPRGP) to refine the separation process. By using the physical properties of DP sensors, DCRR achieves significant accuracy improvements in complex reflection scenarios. A real-world DP-based dataset that includes paired reflection/reflection-free images has been collected. Extensive experiments demonstrate our competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art de-reflection approaches.
Kailong Yu, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu 0009, Wei Liang 0008
ACM Multimedia3
2025 Storyboard-guided Alignment for Fine-grained Video Action Recognition
abstract
Fine-grained video action recognition can be formulated as a video–text matching problem. Previous approaches primarily rely on global video semantics to consolidate video embeddings, often leading to misaligned video–text pairs due to inaccurate atomic-level action understanding. This inaccuracy arises due to i) videos with distinct global semantics may share similar atomic actions or visual appearances, and ii) atomic actions can be momentary, gradual, or not directly aligned with overarching video semantics. Inspired by storyboarding, where a script is segmented into individual shots, we propose a multi-granularity framework, SFAR. SFAR generates fine-grained descriptions of common atomic actions for each global semantic using a large language model. Unlike existing works that refine global semantics with auxiliary video frames, SFAR introduces a filtering metric to ensure correspondence between the descriptions and the global semantics, eliminating the need for direct video involvement and thereby enabling more nuanced recognition of subtle actions. By leveraging both global semantics and fine-grained descriptions, our SFAR effectively identifies prominent frames within videos, thereby improving the accuracy of embedding aggregation. Extensive experiments on various video action recognition datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of our SFAR in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings.
Enqi Liu, Liyuan Pan, Yan Yang 0011, Yiran Zhong, Zhijing Wu 0001, Xinxiao Wu, Liu Liu 0009
NeurIPS7
2024 Event Camera Data Dense Pre-training
Yan Yang 0011, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu 0009
ECCV (43)3
2024 Event-based Few-shot Fine-grained Human Action Recognition
abstract
Few-shot fine-grained human (FGH) action recognition is crucial in the context of human-robot interaction within open-set real-world environments. Existing works mainly focus on features extracted from RGB frames. However, their performances are drastically impacted in challenging scenarios, such as high-dynamic or low lighting conditions. Event cameras can independently and sparsely capture brightness changes in a scene at microsecond resolution and high dynamic range, which offer a promising solution. However, the modality differences between events and RGB frames, and the lack of paired fine-grained data hinder the development of event-based FGH action recognition. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the first Event Camera Fine-grained Human Action (E-FAction) dataset. This dataset comprises 3304 paired ‘event stream and RGB sequence’, covering 15 coarse action classes and 128 fine-grained actions. Then, we develop a versatile event feature extractor. Considering the spatial sparsity of event stream, we design two modules to mine the temporal motion and semantic features under the guidance of paired RGB frames, facilitating robust weight initialization for the feature extractor in few-shot FGH action recognition. We conduct extensive experiments on both published and our built synthetic and real datasets, and consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to existing baselines. Code and dataset will be available at link.
Zonglin Yang 0002, Yan Yang 0011, Yuheng Shi, Hao Yang 0040, Ruikun Zhang, Liu Liu 0009, Xinxiao Wu, Liyuan Pan
IROS6
2024 Geolocation on Cartographic Maps with Multi-Modal Fusion
abstract
We explore the geolocation problem, aiming to localize ground-view images on cartographic maps, without the need of any GPS priors. This task mimics the human wayfinding ability and offers high scalability and robustness by using the compact and semantic representations of maps. Current methods often rely on 2D maps to encode dense contextual information for ground-to-map matching. In this paper, we lift ground-to-map matching to a 2.5D space, where heights of structures (e.g. buildings) provide richer geometric information to guide the matching process. We propose a new approach to learning representative embeddings from multi-modal data. Specifically, we establish a projection relationship between 2D and 2.5D space. The projection is further used to combine multi-modal features from the 2D and 2.5D maps using an effective pixel-to-point fusion method. By encoding crucial geometric cues, our method learns discriminative location embeddings for matching panoramic images and maps. Additionally, we construct the first large-scale multi-modal geolocation dataset to validate our method and facilitate future research. Both single-image based and route based geolocation experiments are conducted to test our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significantly higher geolocation accuracy and faster convergence than previous 2D map-based approaches.
Mengjie Zhou, Liu Liu 0009, Yiran Zhong, Andrew Calway
IROS2
2024 Convolutional Masked Image Modeling for Dense Prediction Tasks on Pathology Images
abstract
This paper studies a convolutional masked image modeling approach for boosting downstream dense prediction tasks on pathology images. Our method is self-supervised, and entails two strategies in sequence. Considering features contained in the pathology images usually have a large spatial span, e.g., glands, we insert [MASK] tokens to the masked regions after the stem layer of the convolutional network for encoding unmasked pixels, which facilitates information propagation through masked regions for reconstructing unmasked pixels. Furthermore, the pathology images contain features that are represented in diverse affine shapes and color spaces. We, therefore, enforce the network to learn the affine and color invariant embedding by imposing transformation constraints between the unmasked image-encoded embedding and reconstruction targets. Our approach is simple but effective. With extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets, we demonstrate superior transfer learning performance on downstream tasks over past state-of-the-art approaches.
Yan Yang 0011, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu 0009, Eric A. Stone
WACV3
2024 Weakly-Supervised Depth Estimation and Image Deblurring via Dual-Pixel Sensors
abstract
Dual-pixel (DP) imaging sensors are getting more popularly adopted by modern cameras. A DP camera captures a pair of images in a single snapshot by splitting each pixel in half. Several previous studies show how to recover depth information by treating the DP pair as an approximate stereo pair. However, dual-pixel disparity occurs only in image regions with defocus blur which is unlike classic stereo disparity. Heavy defocus blur in DP pairs affects the performance of depth estimation approaches based on matching. Therefore, we treat the blur removal and the depth estimation as a joint problem. We investigate the formation of the DP pair, which links the blur and depth information, rather than blindly removing the blur effect. We propose a mathematical DP model that can improve depth estimation by the blur. This exploration motivated us to propose our previous work, an end-to-end DDDNet (DP-based Depth and Deblur Network), which jointly estimates depth and restores the image in a supervised fashion. However, collecting the ground-truth (GT) depth map for the DP pair is challenging and limits the depth estimation potential of the DP sensor. Therefore, we propose an extension of the DDDNet, called WDDNet (Weakly-supervised Depth and Deblur Network), which includes an efficient reblur solver that does not require GT depth maps for training. To achieve this, we convert all-in-focus images into supervisory signals for unsupervised depth estimation in our WDDNet. We jointly estimate an all-in-focus image and a disparity map, then use a Reblur and Fstack module to regularize the disparity estimation and image restoration. We conducted extensive experiments on synthetic and real data to demonstrate the competitive performance of our method when compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) supervised approaches.
Liyuan Pan, Richard I. Hartley, Liu Liu 0009, Shah Ariful Hoque Chowdhury, Yan Yang 0011, Hongdong Li, Miaomiao Liu 0001
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.3
2023 K3DN: Disparity-Aware Kernel Estimation for Dual-Pixel Defocus Deblurring
abstract
The dual-pixel (DP) sensor captures a two-view image pair in a single snapshot by splitting each pixel in half. The disparity occurs in defocus blurred regions between the two views of the DP pair, while the in-focus sharp regions have zero disparity. This motivates us to propose a K3DN framework for DP pair deblurring, and it has three modules: i) a disparity-aware deblur module. It estimates a disparity feature map, which is used to query a trainable kernel set to estimate a blur kernel that best describes the spatially-varying blur. The kernel is constrained to be symmetrical per the DP formulation. A simple Fourier transform is performed for deblurring that follows the blur model; ii) a reblurring regularization module. It reuses the blur kernel, performs a simple convolution for reblurring, and regularizes the estimated kernel and disparity feature unsupervisedly, in the training stage; iii) a sharp region preservation module. It identifies in-focus regions that correspond to areas with zero disparity between DP images, aims to avoid the introduction of noises during the deblurring process, and improves image restoration performance. Experiments on four standard DP datasets show that the proposed K3DN outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with fewer parameters and flops at the same time.
Yan Yang 0011, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu 0009, Miaomiao Liu 0001
CVPR3
2023 Event Camera Data Pre-training
abstract
This paper proposes a pre-trained neural network for handling event camera data. Our model is a self-supervised learning framework, and uses paired event camera data and natural RGB images for training. Our method contains three modules connected in a sequence: i) a family of event data augmentations, generating meaningful event images for self-supervised training; ii) a conditional masking strategy to sample informative event patches from event images, encouraging our model to capture the spatial layout of a scene and accelerating training; iii) a contrastive learning approach, enforcing the similarity of embeddings between matching event images, and between paired event and RGB images. An embedding projection loss is proposed to avoid the model collapse when enforcing the event image embedding similarities. A probability distribution alignment loss is proposed to encourage the event image to be consistent with its paired RGB image in the feature space. Transfer learning performance on downstream tasks shows the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. For example, we achieve top-1 accuracy at 64.83% on the N-ImageNet dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yan98/Event-Camera-Data-Pre-training.
Yan Yang 0011, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu 0009
ICCV3
2023 Visual Localization Based on Multiple Maps
abstract
This paper proposes a multi-map based visual localization method for image sequences. Given multiple single-map based localization results, we combine them with SLAM to estimate robust and accurate camera poses under challenging conditions. Our method comprises three modules connected in a sequence. First, we reconstruct multiple reference maps using the Structure-from-Motion technique, one map for each reference sequence. A single-image-based localization pipeline is performed to estimate 6-DoF camera poses for each query image, one for each map. Second, a consensus set maximization module is proposed to select the best camera poses from multi-map poses, estimating one 6-DoF camera pose for each query image. Finally, a robust pose refinement module is proposed to optimize 6-DoF camera poses of query images, combining map-based localization and local SLAM information. Experiments show that the proposed pipeline achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging map-based localization benchmarks. Demonstrating the broad applicability of our method, we obtained first place in the challenge of Map-Based Localization for Autonomous Driving at ECCV2022.
Yukai Lin, Liu Liu 0009, Jiangwei Li
IROS2
2023 Accurate 3-DoF Camera Geo-Localization via Ground-to-Satellite Image Matching
abstract
We address the problem of ground-to-satellite image geo-localization, that is, estimating the camera latitude, longitude and orientation (azimuth angle) by matching a query image captured at the ground level against a large-scale database with geotagged satellite images. Our prior arts treat the above task as pure image retrieval by selecting the most similar satellite reference image matching the ground-level query image. However, such an approach often produces coarse location estimates because the geotag of the retrieved satellite image only corresponds to the image center while the ground camera can be located at any point within the image. To further consolidate our prior research finding, we present a novel geometry-aware geo-localization method. Our new method is able to achieve the fine-grained location of a query image, up to pixel size precision of the satellite image, once its coarse location and orientation have been determined. Moreover, we propose a new geometry-aware image retrieval pipeline to improve the coarse localization accuracy. Apart from a polar transform in our conference work, this new pipeline also maps satellite image pixels to the ground-level plane in the ground-view via a geometry-constrained projective transform to emphasize informative regions, such as road structures, for cross-view geo-localization. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our newly proposed framework. We also significantly improve the performance of coarse localization results compared to the state-of-the-art in terms of location recalls.
Yujiao Shi 0002, Xin Yu 0002, Liu Liu 0009, Dylan Campbell, Piotr Koniusz, Hongdong Li
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.3
2022 Transcribing Natural Languages for the Deaf via Neural Editing Programs
abstract
This work studies the task of glossification, of which the aim is to em transcribe natural spoken language sentences for the Deaf (hard-of-hearing) community to ordered sign language glosses. Previous sequence-to-sequence language models trained with paired sentence-gloss data often fail to capture the rich connections between the two distinct languages, leading to unsatisfactory transcriptions. We observe that despite different grammars, glosses effectively simplify sentences for the ease of deaf communication, while sharing a large portion of vocabulary with sentences. This has motivated us to implement glossification by executing a collection of editing actions, e.g. word addition, deletion, and copying, called editing programs, on their natural spoken language counterparts. Specifically, we design a new neural agent that learns to synthesize and execute editing programs, conditioned on sentence contexts and partial editing results. The agent is trained to imitate minimal editing programs, while exploring more widely the program space via policy gradients to optimize sequence-wise transcription quality. Results show that our approach outperforms previous glossification models by a large margin, improving the BLEU-4 score from 16.45 to 18.89 on RWTH-PHOENIX-WEATHER-2014T and from 18.38 to 21.30 on CSL-Daily.
Dongxu Li 0003, Liu Liu 0009, Yiran Zhong, Lars Petersson, Hongdong Li
AAAI3
2022 ISG: I can See Your Gene Expression
Yan Yang 0011, Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu 0009, Eric A. Stone
BMVC3
2022 Biomass Prediction with 3D Point Clouds from LiDAR
abstract
With population growth and a shrinking rural workforce, agricultural technologies have become increasingly important. Above-ground biomass (AGB) is a key trait relevant to breeding, agronomy and crop physiology field experiments. However, measuring the biomass of a cereal plot requires cutting, drying and weighing processes, which are laborious, expensive and destructive tasks. This paper proposes a non-destructive and high-throughput method to predict biomass from field samples based on Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). Unlike previous methods that are based on the density of a point cloud or plant height, our biomass prediction network (BioNet) additionally considers plant structure. Our BioNet contains three modules: 1) a completion module to predict missing points due to canopy occlusion; 2) a regularization module to regularize the neural representation of the whole plot; and 3) a projection module to learn the salient structures from a bird’s eye view of the point cloud. An attention-based fusion block is used to achieve final biomass predictions. In addition, the complete dataset, including hand-measured biomass and LiDAR data, is made available to the community. Experiments show that our BioNet achieves ≈ 33% improvement over current state-of-the-art methods.
Liyuan Pan, Liu Liu 0009, Anthony G. Condon, Gonzalo M. Estavillo, Robert Coe, Geoff Bull, Eric A. Stone, Lars Petersson, Vivien Rolland
WACV2
2022 WAFP-Net: Weighted Attention Fusion Based Progressive Residual Learning for Depth Map Super-Resolution
abstract
Despite the remarkable progresses achieved in depth map super-resolution (DSR), it remains a major challenge to tackle with real-world degradation of low-resolution (LR) depth maps. Synthetic datasets are mainly used in existing DSR approaches, which is quite different from what would get from a real depth sensor. Besides, the enhancements of features in existing DSR approaches are not sufficiently enough, which also limit the performance. To alleviate these problems, we first propose two types of degradation models to describe the generation of LR depth maps, including bi-cubic down-sampling with noise and interval down-sampling, and different DSR models are learned correspondingly. Then, we propose a weighted attention fusion strategy that is embedded into a progressive residual learning framework, which guarantees that the high-resolution (HR) depth maps can be well recovered in a coarse-to-fine manner. The weighted attention fusion strategy can enhance the features with abundant high-frequency components in both global and local manners, thus better HR depth maps can be expected. Besides, to re-use the effective information in the progressive process sufficiently, a multi-stage fusion module is combined into the proposed framework, and the Total Generalized Variation (TGV) regularization and input loss are exploited to further improve the performance of our method. Extensive experiments of different benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches.
Xibin Song, Dingfu Zhou, Wei Li 0111, Yuchao Dai, Liu Liu 0009, Hongdong Li, Ruigang Yang, Liangjun Zhang
IEEE Trans. Multim.5
2021 PluckerNet: Learn To Register 3D Line Reconstructions
abstract
Aligning two partially-overlapped 3D line reconstructions in Euclidean space is challenging, as we need to simultaneously solve correspondences and relative pose between line reconstructions. This paper proposes a neural network based method and it has three modules connected in sequence: (i) a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) based network takes Plücker representations of lines as inputs, to extract discriminative line-wise features and matchabilities (how likely each line is going to have a match), (ii) an Optimal Transport (OT) layer takes two-view line-wise features and matchabilities as inputs to estimate a 2D joint probability matrix, with each item describes the matchness of a line pair, and (iii) line pairs with Top-K matching probabilities are fed to a 2-line minimal solver in a RANSAC framework to estimate a six Degree-of-Freedom (6-DoF) rigid transformation. Experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets show that registration (rotation and translation) precision of our method outperforms baselines significantly.
Liu Liu 0009, Hongdong Li, Haodong Yao, Ruyi Zha
CVPR1
2020 Optimal Feature Transport for Cross-View Image Geo-Localization
abstract
This paper addresses the problem of cross-view image geo-localization, where the geographic location of a ground-level street-view query image is estimated by matching it against a large scale aerial map (e.g., a high-resolution satellite image). State-of-the-art deep-learning based methods tackle this problem as deep metric learning which aims to learn global feature representations of the scene seen by the two different views. Despite promising results are obtained by such deep metric learning methods, they, however, fail to exploit a crucial cue relevant for localization, namely, the spatial layout of local features. Moreover, little attention is paid to the obvious domain gap (between aerial view and ground view) in the context of cross-view localization. This paper proposes a novel Cross-View Feature Transport (CVFT) technique to explicitly establish cross-view domain transfer that facilitates feature alignment between ground and aerial images. Specifically, we implement the CVFT as network layers, which transports features from one domain to the other, leading to more meaningful feature similarity comparison. Our model is differentiable and can be learned end-to-end. Experiments on large-scale datasets have demonstrated that our method has remarkably boosted the state-of-the-art cross-view localization performance, e.g., on the CVUSA dataset, with significant improvements for top-1 recall from 40.79% to 61.43%, and for top-10 from 76.36% to 90.49%. We expect the key insight of the paper (i.e., explicitly handling domain difference via domain transport) will prove to be useful for other similar problems in computer vision as well.
Yujiao Shi 0002, Xin Yu 0002, Liu Liu 0009, Tong Zhang 0023, Hongdong Li
AAAI3
2020 Channel Attention Based Iterative Residual Learning for Depth Map Super-Resolution
abstract
Despite the remarkable progresses made in deep learning based depth map super-resolution (DSR), how to tackle real-world degradation in low-resolution (LR) depth maps remains a major challenge. Existing DSR model is generally trained and tested on synthetic dataset, which is very different from what would get from a real depth sensor. In this paper, we argue that DSR models trained under this setting are restrictive and not effective in dealing with realworld DSR tasks. We make two contributions in tackling real-world degradation of different depth sensors. First, we propose to classify the generation of LR depth maps into two types: non-linear downsampling with noise and interval downsampling, for which DSR models are learned correspondingly. Second, we propose a new framework for real-world DSR, which consists of four modules : 1) An iterative residual learning module with deep supervision to learn effective high-frequency components of depth maps in a coarse-to-fine manner; 2) A channel attention strategy to enhance channels with abundant high-frequency components; 3) A multi-stage fusion module to effectively reexploit the results in the coarse-to-fine process; and 4) A depth refinement module to improve the depth map by TGV regularization and input loss. Extensive experiments on benchmarking datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over current state-of-the-art DSR methods.
Xibin Song, Yuchao Dai, Dingfu Zhou, Liu Liu 0009, Wei Li 0111, Hongdong Li, Ruigang Yang
CVPR4
2020 Joint 3D Instance Segmentation and Object Detection for Autonomous Driving
abstract
Currently, in Autonomous Driving (AD), most of the 3D object detection frameworks (either anchor- or anchor-free-based) consider the detection as a Bounding Box (BBox) regression problem. However, this compact representation is not sufficient to explore all the information of the objects. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple but practical detection framework to jointly predict the 3D BBox and instance segmentation. For instance segmentation, we propose a Spatial Embeddings (SEs) strategy to assemble all foreground points into their corresponding object centers. Base on the SE results, the object proposals can be generated based on a simple clustering strategy. For each cluster, only one proposal is generated. Therefore, the Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) process is no longer needed here. Finally, with our proposed instance-aware ROI pooling, the BBox is refined by a second-stage network. Experimental results on the public KITTI dataset show that the proposed SEs can significantly improve the instance segmentation results compared with other feature embedding-based method. Meanwhile, it also outperforms most of the 3D object detectors on the KITTI testing benchmark.
Dingfu Zhou, Xibin Song, Liu Liu 0009, Junbo Yin, Yuchao Dai, Hongdong Li, Ruigang Yang
CVPR4
2020 Solving the Blind Perspective-n-Point Problem End-to-End with Robust Differentiable Geometric Optimization
Dylan Campbell, Liu Liu 0009, Stephen Gould
ECCV (2)2
2019 Lending Orientation to Neural Networks for Cross-View Geo-Localization
abstract
This paper studies image-based geo-localization (IBL) problem using ground-to-aerial cross-view matching. The goal is to predict the spatial location of a ground-level query image by matching it to a large geotagged aerial image database (e.g., satellite imagery). This is a challenging task due to the drastic differences in their viewpoints and visual appearances. Existing deep learning methods for this problem have been focused on maximizing feature similarity between spatially close-by image pairs, while minimizing other images pairs which are far apart. They do so by deep feature embedding based on visual appearance in those ground-and-aerial images. However, in everyday life, humans commonly use orientation information as an important cue for the task of spatial localization. Inspired by this insight, this paper proposes a novel method which endows deep neural networks with the `commonsense' of orientation. Given a ground-level spherical panoramic image as query input (and a large georeferenced satellite image database), we design a Siamese network which explicitly encodes the orientation (i.e., spherical directions) of each pixel of the images. Our method significantly boosts the discriminative power of the learned deep features, leading to a much higher recall and precision outperforming all previous methods. Our network is also more compact using only 1/5th number of parameters than a previously best-performing network. To evaluate the generalization of our method, we also created a large-scale cross-view localization benchmark containing 100K geotagged ground-aerial pairs covering a city. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Liumouliu/OriCNN.
Liu Liu 0009, Hongdong Li
CVPR1
2019 Stochastic Attraction-Repulsion Embedding for Large Scale Image Localization
abstract
This paper tackles the problem of large-scale image-based localization (IBL) where the spatial location of a query image is determined by finding out the most similar reference images in a large database. For solving this problem, a critical task is to learn discriminative image representation that captures informative information relevant for localization. We propose a novel representation learning method having higher location-discriminating power. It provides the following contributions: 1) we represent a place (location) as a set of exemplar images depicting the same landmarks and aim to maximize similarities among intra-place images while minimizing similarities among inter-place images; 2) we model a similarity measure as a probability distribution on L2-metric distances between intra-place and inter-place image representations; 3) we propose a new Stochastic Attraction and Repulsion Embedding (SARE) loss function minimizing the KL divergence between the learned and the actual probability distributions; 4) we give theoretical comparisons between SARE, triplet ranking and contrastive losses. It provides insights into why SARE is better by analyzing gradients. Our SARE loss is easy to implement and pluggable to any CNN. Experiments show that our proposed method improves the localization performance on standard benchmarks by a large margin. Demonstrating the broad applicability of our method, we obtained the third place out of 209 teams in the 2018 Google Landmark Retrieval Challenge. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/Liumouliu/deepIBL.
Liu Liu 0009, Hongdong Li, Yuchao Dai
ICCV1
2019 Spatial-Aware Feature Aggregation for Image based Cross-View Geo-Localization
abstract
In this paper, we develop a new deep network to explicitly address these inherent differences between ground and aerial views. We observe there exist some approximate domain correspondences between ground and aerial images. Specifically, pixels lying on the same azimuth direction in an aerial image approximately correspond to a vertical image column in the ground view image. Thus, we propose a two-step approach to exploit this prior knowledge. The first step is to apply a regular polar transform to warp an aerial image such that its domain is closer to that of a ground-view panorama. Note that polar transform as a pure geometric transformation is agnostic to scene content, hence cannot bring the two domains into full alignment. Then, we add a subsequent spatial-attention mechanism which further brings corresponding deep features closer in the embedding space. To improve the robustness of feature representation, we introduce a feature aggregation strategy via learning multiple spatial embeddings. By the above two-step approach, we achieve more discriminative deep representations, facilitating cross-view Geo-localization more accurate. Our experiments on standard benchmark datasets show significant performance boosting, achieving more than doubled recall rate compared with the previous state of the art.
Yujiao Shi 0002, Liu Liu 0009, Xin Yu 0002, Hongdong Li
NeurIPS2
2018 Robust and Efficient Relative Pose With a Multi-Camera System for Autonomous Driving in Highly Dynamic Environments
abstract
This paper studies the relative pose problem for autonomous vehicles driving in highly dynamic and possibly cluttered environments. This is a challenging scenario due to the existence of multiple, large, and independently moving objects in the environment, which often leads to an excessive portion of outliers and results in erroneous motion estimation. Existing algorithms cannot cope with such situations well. This paper proposes a new algorithm for relative pose estimation using a multi-camera system with multiple non-overlapping cameras. The method works robustly even when the number of outliers is overwhelming. By exploiting specific prior knowledge of the autonomous driving scene, we have developed an efficient 4-point algorithm for multi-camera relative pose estimation, which admits analytic solutions by solving a polynomial root finding equation, and runs extremely fast (at about 0.5 μs per root). When the solver is used in combination with a new random sample consensus sampling scheme by exploiting the conjugate motion constraint, we are able to quickly prune unpromising hypotheses and significantly improve the chance of finding inliers. Experiments on synthetic data have validated the performance of the proposed algorithm. Tests on real data further confirm the method's practical relevance.
Liu Liu 0009, Hongdong Li, Yuchao Dai, Quan Pan 0001
IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst.1
2017 Efficient Global 2D-3D Matching for Camera Localization in a Large-Scale 3D Map
abstract
Given an image of a street scene in a city, this paper develops a new method that can quickly and precisely pinpoint at which location (as well as viewing direction) the image was taken, against a pre-stored large-scale 3D point-cloud map of the city. We adopt the recently developed 2D-3D direct feature matching framework for this task [23,31,32,42-44]. This is a challenging task especially for large-scale problems. As the map size grows bigger, many 3D points in the wider geographical area can be visually very similar-or even identical-causing severe ambiguities in 2D-3D feature matching. The key is to quickly and unambiguously find the correct matches between a query image and the large 3D map. Existing methods solve this problem mainly via comparing individual features' visual similarities in a local and per feature manner, thus only local solutions can be found, inadequate for large-scale applications. In this paper, we introduce a global method which harnesses global contextual information exhibited both within the query image and among all the 3D points in the map. This is achieved by a novel global ranking algorithm, applied to a Markov network built upon the 3D map, which takes account of not only visual similarities between individual 2D-3D matches, but also their global compatibilities (as measured by co-visibility) among all matching pairs found in the scene. Tests on standard benchmark datasets show that our method achieved both higher precision and comparable recall, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Liu Liu 0009, Hongdong Li, Yuchao Dai
ICCV1