Consumer-grade cameras capture the RAW physical description of a scene and then process the image signals to obtain high-quality RGB images that are faithful to human visual perception. Conventionally, dense prediction scenes require high-precision recognition of objects in RGB images. However, predicting RGB data to exhibit the expected adaptability and robustness in harsh environments can be challenging. By capitalizing on the broader color gamut and higher bit depth offered by RAW data, in this paper, we demonstrate that RAW data can significantly improve the accuracy and robustness of object detectors in harsh environments. Firstly, we propose a general Pipeline for RAW Detection (PRD), along with a preprocessing strategy tailored to RAW data. Secondly, we design the RAW Corruption Benchmark (RCB) to address the dearth of benchmarks that reflect realistic scenarios in harsh environments. Thirdly, we demonstrate the significant improvement of RAW images in object detection for low-light and corrupt scenes. Specifically, our experiments indicate that PRD (using FCOS) outperforms RGB detection by 13.9mAP on LOD-Snow without generating restored images. Finally, we introduce a new nonlinear method called Functional Regularization (FR), which can effectively mine the unique characteristics of RAW data. The code is available at https://github.com/DreamerCCC/RawMining.

The remarkable breakthroughs in point cloud representation learning have boosted their usage in real-world applications such as self-driving cars and virtual reality. However, these applications usually have a strict requirement for not only accurate but also efficient 3D object detection. Recently, knowledge distillation has been proposed as an effective model compression technique, which transfers the knowledge from an over-parameterized teacher to a lightweight student and achieves consistent effectiveness in 2D vision. However, due to point clouds' sparsity and irregularity, directly applying previous image-based knowledge distillation methods to point cloud detectors usually leads to unsatisfactory performance. To fill the gap, this paper proposes PointDistiller; a structured knowledge distillation framework for point clouds-based 3D detection. Concretely, PointDistiller includes local distillation which extracts and distills the local geometric structure of point clouds with dynamic graph convolution and reweighted learning strategy, which highlights student learning on the crucial points or voxels to improve knowledge distillation efficiency. Extensive experiments on both voxels-based and raw points-based detectors have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method over seven previous knowledge distillation methods. For instance, our 4 x compressed PointPillars student achieves 2.8 and 3.4 mAP improvements on BEV and 3D object detection, outperforming its teacher by 0.9 and 1.8 mAP, respectively. Codes are available in https://github.com/RunpeiDong/PointDistiller.

To address the problem of incorrect labels in training data for deep learning, we propose a novel and simple training strategy, Iterative Cross Learning (ICL), that significantly improves the classification accuracy of neural networks with training data that has noisy labels. We randomly partition the noisy training data into multiple separate subsets, each of which is used to train an independent network. After these independent networks predict labels for the original data, if the labels agree, we update the label with the predicted result for that data point, but otherwise we update the label with a random label, a key to the success of our proposed method. The process is repeated, possibly with several stages, to gradually improve the performance. Testing our method on MNIST and CIFAR-10 with partially shuffled labels, ICL significantly improves the classification accuracy of existing methods when the data labels have noise, especially in heavy noise situations. Moreover, the proposed method doesn't require any change to the underlying neural networks' structure or loss function, so it can also easily be combined with other existing methods that address noisy labels, improving their performance.