Due to the density inconsistency and distribution difference between cross-source point clouds, previous methods fail in cross-source point cloud registration. We propose a density-robust feature extraction and matching scheme to achieve robust and accurate cross-source registration. To address the density inconsistency between cross-source data, we introduce a density-robust encoder for extracting density-robust features. To tackle the issue of challenging feature matching and few correct correspondences, we adopt a loose-to-strict matching pipeline with a ``loose generation, strict selection'' idea. Under it, we employ a one-to-many strategy to loosely generate initial correspondences. Subsequently, high-quality correspondences are strictly selected to achieve robust registration through sparse matching and dense matching. On the challenging Kinect-LiDAR scene in the cross-source 3DCSR dataset, our method improves feature matching recall by 63.5 percentage points (pp) and registration recall by 57.6 pp. It also achieves the best performance on 3DMatch, while maintaining robustness under diverse downsampling densities.

Obtaining enough high-quality correspondences is crucial for robust registration. Existing correspondence refinement methods mostly follow the paradigm of outlier removal, which either fails to correctly identify the accurate correspondences under extreme outlier ratios, or select too few correct correspondences to support robust registration. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach named Regor, which is a progressive correspondence regenerator that generates higher-quality matches whist sufficiently robust for numerous outliers. In each iteration, we first apply prior-guided local grouping and generalized mutual matching to generate the local region correspondences. A powerful center-aware three-point consistency is then presented to achieve local correspondence correction, instead of removal. Further, we employ global correspondence refinement to obtain accurate correspondences from a global perspective. Through progressive iterations, this process yields a large number of high-quality correspondences. Extensive experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate that the proposed Regor significantly outperforms existing outlier removal techniques. More critically, our approach obtain 10 times more correct correspondences than outlier removal methods. As a result, our method is able to achieve robust registration even with weak features. The code is available at [Regor].

Object detection in aerial images has always been a challenging task due to the generally small size of the objects. Most current detectors prioritize the development of new detection frameworks, often overlooking research on fundamental components such as feature pyramid networks. In this paper, we introduce the Cross-Layer Feature Pyramid Transformer (CFPT), a novel upsampler-free feature pyramid network designed specifically for small object detection in aerial images. CFPT incorporates two meticulously designed attention blocks with linear computational complexity: Cross-Layer Channel-Wise Attention (CCA) and Cross-Layer Spatial-Wise Attention (CSA). CCA achieves cross-layer interaction by dividing channel-wise token groups to perceive cross-layer global information along the spatial dimension, while CSA enables cross-layer interaction by dividing spatial-wise token groups to perceive cross-layer global information along the channel dimension. By integrating these modules, CFPT enables efficient cross-layer interaction in a single step, thereby avoiding the semantic gap and information loss associated with element-wise summation and layer-by-layer transmission. In addition, CFPT incorporates global contextual information, which improves detection performance for small objects. To further enhance location awareness during cross-layer interaction, we propose the Cross-Layer Consistent Relative Positional Encoding (CCPE) based on inter-layer mutual receptive fields. We evaluate the effectiveness of CFPT on three challenging object detection datasets in aerial images: VisDrone2019-DET, TinyPerson, and xView. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFPT outperforms state-of-the-art feature pyramid networks while incurring lower computational costs. The code is available at https://github.com/duzw9311/CFPT.

As a crucial component of object detectors, current detection heads often lack the capability to effectively utilize contextual information, adapt to deformable objects, and align features and tasks. However, most existing methods prioritize a single capability, lacking comprehensive approaches to introduce them simultaneously. In this paper, we propose the Enhanced Head to integrate the above three capabilities into the detectors concurrently. Specifically, we propose three attention blocks with linear complexity: Global Concentrated Attention (GCA), Local Deformable Cross-Task Attention (LDCA), and Boundary-Aware Cross-Task Attention (BACA). The GCA captures long-range dependencies efficiently by employing Spatial Information Concentration (SIC). The LDCA improves feature alignment and deformation adaptability by enabling local deformable cross-task feature interactions. The BACA aligns classification features with localization results, enhancing task alignment and further improving deformation adaptability through a region-deformable interaction scheme. We implement Enhanced Head as a plug-and-play detection head and evaluate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on the MS COCO and VisDrone datasets. For instance, on the COCO detection benchmark, our Enhanced Head achieves +3.6 AP gain for FSAF, +3.3 AP for RetinaNet, and +2.9 AP for ATSS while reducing the FLOPs.

Addressing the challenges posed by the substantial gap in point cloud data collected from diverse sensors, achieving robust cross-source point cloud registration becomes a formidable task. In response, we present a novel framework for point cloud registration with broad applicability, suitable for both homologous and cross-source registration scenarios. To tackle the issues arising from different densities and distributions in cross-source point cloud data, we introduce a feature representation based on spherical voxels. Furthermore, addressing the challenge of numerous outliers and mismatches in cross-source registration, we propose a hierarchical correspondence filtering approach. This method progressively filters out mismatches, yielding a set of high-quality correspondences. Our method exhibits versatile applicability and excels in both traditional homologous registration and challenging cross-source registration scenarios. Specifically, in homologous registration using the 3DMatch dataset, we achieve the highest registration recall of 95.1% and an inlier ratio of 87.8%. In cross-source point cloud registration, our method attains the best RR on the 3DCSR dataset, demonstrating a 9.3 percentage points improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/GuiyuZhao/VRHCF.

In this paper, we introduce a new outlier removal method that fully leverages geometric and semantic information, to achieve robust registration. Current semantic-based registration methods only use semantics for point-to-point or instance semantic correspondence generation, which has two problems. First, these methods are highly dependent on the correctness of semantics. They perform poorly in scenarios with incorrect semantics and sparse semantics. Second, the use of semantics is limited only to the correspondence generation, resulting in bad performance in the weak geometry scene. To solve these problems, on the one hand, we propose secondary ground segmentation and loose semantic consistency based on regional voting. It improves the robustness to semantic correctness by reducing the dependence on single-point semantics. On the other hand, we propose semantic-geometric consistency for outlier removal, which makes full use of semantic information and significantly improves the quality of correspondences. In addition, a two-stage hypothesis verification is proposed, which solves the problem of incorrect transformation selection in the weak geometry scene. In the outdoor dataset, our method demonstrates superior performance, boosting a 22.5 percentage points improvement in registration recall and achieving better robustness under various conditions. Our code is available.

Feature upsampling is an essential operation in constructing deep convolutional neural networks. However, existing upsamplers either lack specific feature guidance or necessitate the utilization of high-resolution feature maps, resulting in a loss of performance and flexibility. In this paper, we find that the local self-attention naturally has the feature guidance capability, and its computational paradigm aligns closely with the essence of feature upsampling (i.e. feature reassembly of neighboring points). Therefore, we introduce local self-attention into the upsampling task and demonstrate that the majority of existing upsamplers can be regarded as special cases of upsamplers based on local self-attention. Considering the potential semantic gap between upsampled points and their neighboring points, we further introduce the deformation mechanism into the upsampler based on local self-attention, thereby proposing LDA-AQU. As a novel dynamic kernel-based upsampler, LDA-AQU utilizes the feature of queries to guide the model in adaptively adjusting the position and aggregation weight of neighboring points, thereby meeting the upsampling requirements across various complex scenarios. In addition, LDA-AQU is lightweight and can be easily integrated into various model architectures. We evaluate the effectiveness of LDA-AQU across four dense prediction tasks: object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and semantic segmentation. LDA-AQU consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art upsamplers, achieving performance enhancements of 1.7 AP, 1.5 AP, 2.0 PQ, and 2.5 mIoU compared to the baseline models in the aforementioned four tasks, respectively.

Point cloud registration aims to estimate a transformation that aligns point clouds collected from different perspectives. In learning-based point cloud registration, a robust descriptor is crucial for achieving high-accuracy registration. However, most existing methods are susceptible to noise and demonstrate poor generalization ability when applied to unseen datasets. Motivated by this, we introduce SphereNet to learn a noise-robust and unseen-general descriptor for point cloud registration. In our method, first, the spheroid generator builds a geometric domain based on spherical voxelization (SV) to encode geometric information. Then, the spherical interpolation of the sphere is introduced to realize robustness against noise. Finally, a new spherical convolutional neural network (CNN) with spherical integrity padding completes the extraction of descriptors, which reduces the loss of features and fully captures the geometric features. To evaluate our methods, a new benchmark 3DMatch-noise with strong noise is introduced. Extensive experiments are carried out on both indoor and outdoor datasets. Our results demonstrate that SphereNet achieves an increase in feature-matching recall of more than 25 percentage points (pp) on 3DMatch-noise under high-intensity noise. Moreover, SphereNet establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on the 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch benchmarks, achieving 93.5% and 75.6% registration recall (RR), respectively. Furthermore, SphereNet exhibits superior generalization ability on unseen datasets.