This paper considers a network referred to as SoftGroup for accurate and scalable 3D instance segmentation. Existing state-of-the-art methods produce hard semantic predictions followed by grouping instance segmentation results. Unfortunately, errors stemming from hard decisions propagate into the grouping, resulting in poor overlap between predicted instances and ground truth and substantial false positives. To address the abovementioned problems, SoftGroup allows each point to be associated with multiple classes to mitigate the uncertainty stemming from semantic prediction. It also suppresses false positive instances by learning to categorize them as background. Regarding scalability, the existing fast methods require computational time on the order of tens of seconds on large-scale scenes, which is unsatisfactory and far from applicable for real-time. Our finding is that the$k$-Nearest Neighbor ($k$-NN) module, which serves as the prerequisite of grouping, introduces a computational bottleneck. SoftGroup is extended to resolve this computational bottleneck, referred to as SoftGroup++. The proposed SoftGroup++ reduces time complexity with octree$k$-NN and reduces search space with class-aware pyramid scaling and late devoxelization. Experimental results on various indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate the efficacy and generality of the proposed SoftGroup and SoftGroup++. Their performances surpass the best-performing baseline by a large margin (6%$\sim$16%) in terms of AP$_{50}$. On datasets with large-scale scenes, SoftGroup++ achieves a 6× speed boost on average compared to SoftGroup. Furthermore, SoftGroup can be extended to perform object detection and panoptic segmentation with nontrivial improvements over existing methods.

Existing state-of-the-art 3D instance segmentation methods perform semantic segmentation followed by grouping. The hard predictions are made when performing semantic segmentation such that each point is associated with a single class. However, the errors stemming from hard decision propagate into grouping that results in (1) low overlaps between the predicted instance with the ground truth and (2) substantial false positives. To address the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a 3D instance segmentation method referred to as SoftGroup by performing bottom-up soft grouping followed by top-down refinement. SoftGroup allows each point to be associated with multiple classes to mitigate the problems stemming from semantic prediction errors and suppresses false positive instances by learning to categorize them as background. Experimental results on different datasets and multiple evaluation metrics demonstrate the efficacy of SoftGroup. Its performance surpasses the strongest prior method by a significant margin of$+6.2\%$on the ScanNet v2 hidden test set and$+6.8\%$on S3DIS Area 5 in terms of$AP_{50}$. Soft-Group is also fast, running at 345ms per scan with a sin-gle Titan X on ScanNet v2 dataset. The source code and trained models for both datasets are available at https://github.com/thangvubk/SoftGroup.git.

A bounding box commonly serves as the proxy for 2D object detection. However, extending this practice to 3D detection raises sensitivity to localization error. This problem is acute on flat objects since small localization error may lead to low overlaps between the prediction and ground truth. To address this problem, this paper proposes Sphere Region Proposal Network (SphereRPN) which detects objects by learning spheres as opposed to bounding boxes. We demonstrate that spherical proposals are more robust to localization error compared to bounding boxes. The proposed SphereRPN is not only accurate but also fast. Experiment results on the standard ScanNet dataset show that the proposed SphereRPN outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin while being $2 \times$ to $7 \times$ faster. The code will be made publicly available.

This paper proposes Weakly-supervised Moment Retrieval Network (WMRN) for Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (VCMR), which retrieves pertinent temporal moments related to natural language query in a large video corpus. Previous methods for VCMR require full supervision of temporal boundary information for training, which involves a labor-intensive process of annotating the boundaries in a large number of videos. To leverage this, the proposed WMRN performs VCMR in a weakly-supervised manner, where WMRN is learned without ground-truth labels but only with video and text queries. For weakly-supervised VCMR, WMRN addresses the following two limitations of prior methods: (1) Blurry attention over video features due to redundant video candidate proposals generation, (2) Insufficient learning due to weak supervision only with video-query pairs. To this end, WMRN is based on (1) Text Guided Proposal Generation (TGPG) that effectively generates text guided multi-scale video proposals in the prospective region related to query, and (2) Hard Negative Proposal Sampling (HNPS) that enhances video-language alignment via extracting negative video proposals in positive video sample for contrastive learning. Experimental results show that WMRN achieves state-of-the-art performance on TVR and DiDeMo benchmarks in the weakly-supervised setting. To validate the attainments of proposed components of WMRN, comprehensive ablation studies and qualitative analysis are conducted.