Determining the relative pose of an object between two images is pivotal to the success of generalizable object pose estimation. Existing approaches typically approximate the continuous pose representation with a large number of discrete pose hypotheses, which incurs a computationally expensive process of scoring each hypothesis at test time. By contrast, we present a Deep Voxel Matching Network (DVMNet) that eliminates the need for pose hypotheses and computes the relative object pose in a single pass. To this end, we map the two input RGB images, reference and query, to their respective voxelized 3D representations. We then pass the resulting voxels through a pose estimation module, where the voxels are aligned and the pose is computed in an end-to-end fashion by solving a least-squares problem. To enhance robustness, we introduce a weighted closest voxel algorithm capable of mitigating the impact of noisy voxels. We conduct extensive experiments on the CO3D, LINEMOD, and Objaverse datasets, demonstrating that our method delivers more accurate relative pose estimates for novel objects at a lower computational cost compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code is released at: https://github.com/sailor-z/DVMNet/.

In persistent B+ -Tree, random updates of small key-value (KV) pairs will cause severe XPBuffer-induced write amplification (XBI-amplification) because CPU cacheline size is smaller than media access granularity in persistent memory (PM). We observe that XBI-amplification directly determines the application performance when the PM bandwidth is exhausted in multi-thread scenarios. However, none of the existing work can efficiently address the XBI-amplification issue while maintaining superior range query performance.

In this work, we tackle the task of estimating the 6D pose of an object from point cloud data. While recent learning-based approaches have shown remarkable success on synthetic datasets, we have observed them to fail in the presence of real-world data. We investigate the root causes of these failures and identify two main challenges: The sensitivity of the widely-used SVD-based loss function to the range of rotation between the two point clouds, and the difference in feature distributions between the source and target point clouds. We address the first challenge by introducing a directly supervised loss function that does not utilize the SVD operation. To tackle the second, we introduce a new normalization strategy, Match Normalization. Our two contributions are general and can be applied to many existing learning-based 3D object registration frameworks, which we illustrate by implementing them in two of them, DCP and IDAM. Our experiments on the real-scene TUD-L Hodan et al. 2018, LINEMOD Hinterstoisser et al. 2012 and Occluded-LINEMOD Brachmann et al. 2014 datasets evidence the benefits of our strategies. They allow for the first-time learning-based 3D object registration methods to achieve meaningful results on real-world data. We therefore expect them to be key to the future developments of point cloud registration methods.

Persistent memory allocation is a fundamental building block for developing high-performance and in-memory applications. Existing persistent memory allocators suffer from many performance issues. First, they may introduce repeated cache line flushes and small random accesses in persistent memory for their poor heap metadata management. Second, they use static slab segregation resulting in a dramatic increase in memory consumption when allocation request size is changed. Third, they are not aware of NUMA effect, leading to remote persistent memory accesses in memory allocation and deallocation processes. In this article, we design a novel allocator, named PMAlloc, to solve the above issues simultaneously. (1) PMAlloc eliminates cache line reflushes by mapping contiguous data blocks in slabs to interleaved metadata entries stored in different cache lines. (2) It writes small metadata units to a persistent bookkeeping log in a sequential pattern to remove random heap metadata accesses in persistent memory. (3) Instead of using static slab segregation, it supports slab morphing, which allows slabs to be transformed between size classes to significantly improve slab usage. (4) It uses a local-first allocation policy to avoid allocating remote memory blocks. And it supports a two-phase deallocation mechanism including recording and synchronization to minimize the number of remote memory access in the deallocation. PMAlloc is complementary to the existing consistency models. Results on six benchmarks demonstrate that PMAlloc improves the performance of state-of-the-art persistent memory allocators by up to 6.4× and 57× for small and large allocations, respectively. PMAlloc with NUMA optimizations brings a 2.9× speedup in multi-socket evaluation and is up to 36× faster than other persistent memory allocators. Using PMAlloc reduces memory usage by up to 57.8%. Besides, we integrate PMAlloc in a persistent FPTree. Compared to the state-of-the-art allocators, PMAlloc improves the performance of this application by up to 3.1×.

Learning-based outlier (mismatched correspondence) rejection for robust 3D registration generally formulates the outlier removal as an inlier/outlier classification problem. The core for this to be successful is to learn the discriminative inlier/outlier feature representations. In this paper, we develop a novel variational non-local network-based outlier rejection framework for robust alignment. By reformulating the non-local feature learning with variational Bayesian inference, the Bayesian-driven long-range dependencies can be modeled to aggregate discriminative geometric context information for inlier/outlier distinction. Specifically, to achieve such Bayesian-driven contextual dependencies, each query/key/value component in our nonlocal network predicts a prior feature distribution and a posterior one. Embedded with the inlier/outlier label, the posterior feature distribution is label-dependent and discriminative. Thus, pushing the prior to be close to the discriminative posterior in the training step enables the features sampled from this prior at test time to model highquality long-range dependencies. Notably, to achieve effective posterior feature guidance, a specific probabilistic graphical model is designed over our non-local model, which lets us derive a variational low bound as our optimization objective for model training. Finally, we propose a voting-based inlier searching strategy to cluster the high-quality hypothetical inliers for transformation estimation. Extensive experiments on 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, and KITTI datasets verify the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/Jiang-HB/VBReg.

In the current deep learning paradigm, the amount and quality of training data are as critical as the network architecture and its training details. However, collecting, processing, and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, particularly for tasks such as 3D object registration. While synthetic datasets can be created, they require expertise to design and include a limited number of categories. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called AutoSynth, which automatically generates 3D training data for point cloud registration. Specifically, AutoSynth automatically curates an optimal dataset by exploring a search space encompassing millions of potential datasets with diverse 3D shapes at a low cost. To achieve this, we generate synthetic 3D datasets by assembling shape primitives, and develop a meta-learning strategy to search for the best training data for 3D registration on real point clouds. For this search to remain tractable, we replace the point cloud registration network with a much smaller surrogate network, leading to a 4056.43 times speedup. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by implementing it with two different point cloud registration networks, BPNet [13] and IDAM [34]. Our results on TUD-L [26], LINEMOD [23] and Occluded-LINEMOD [7] evidence that a neural network trained on our searched dataset yields consistently better performance than the same one trained on the widely used ModelNet40 dataset [65].

In this paper, we propose a novel center-based decoupled point cloud registration framework for robust 6D object pose estimation in real-world scenarios. Our method decouples the translation from the entire transformation by predicting the object center and estimating the rotation in a center-aware manner. This center offset-based translation estimation is correspondence-free, freeing us from the difficulty of constructing correspondences in challenging scenarios, thus improving robustness. To obtain reliable center predictions, we use a multi-view (bird’s eye view and front view) object shape description of the source-point features, with both views jointly voting for the object center. Additionally, we propose an effective shape embedding module to augment the source features, largely completing the missing shape information due to partial scanning, thus facilitating the center prediction. With the center-aligned source and model point clouds, the rotation predictor utilizes feature similarity to establish putative correspondences for SVD-based rotation estimation. In particular, we introduce a center-aware hybrid feature descriptor with a normal correction technique to extract discriminative, part-aware features for high-quality correspondence construction. Our experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on real-world datasets such as TUD-L, LINEMOD, and Occluded-LINEMOD. Code is available at https://github.com/JiangHB/CenterReg.

In this work, we tackle the problem of 7-DoF grasping pose estimation(6-DoF with the opening width of parallel-jaw gripper) from point cloud data, which is a fundamental task in robotic manipulation. Most existing methods adopt 3D voxel CNNs as the backbone for their efficiency in handling unordered point cloud data. However, we found that these approaches overlook detailed information of the point clouds, resulting in decreased performance. Through our analysis, we identified quantization loss and boundary information loss within 3D convolutional layers as the primary causes of this issue. To address these challenges, we introduced two novel branches: one adds an extra positional encoding operation to preserve details and unique features for each point, and the other uses a 2D CNN to operate on the range-based image, which better aggregates boundary information on a continuous 2D domain. To integrate these branches with the original branch, we introduced a novel multi-source fusion gated mechanism to aggregate features. Our approach achieved state-of-the-art performance on the Graspnet-1Billion benchmark and demonstrated high success rates in real robotic experiments across different scenes. Our work has the potential to improve the performance of robotic grasping systems and contribute to the field of robotics.

In this paper, we introduce an SE(3) diffusion model-based point cloud registration framework for 6D object pose estimation in real-world scenarios. Our approach formulates the 3D registration task as a denoising diffusion process, which progressively refines the pose of the source point cloud to obtain a precise alignment with the model point cloud. Training our framework involves two operations: An SE(3) diffusion process and an SE(3) reverse process. The SE(3) diffusion process gradually perturbs the optimal rigid transformation of a pair of point clouds by continuously injecting noise (perturbation transformation). By contrast, the SE(3) reverse process focuses on learning a denoising network that refines the noisy transformation step-by-step, bringing it closer to the optimal transformation for accurate pose estimation. Unlike standard diffusion models used in linear Euclidean spaces, our diffusion model operates on the SE(3) manifold. This requires exploiting the linear Lie algebra $\mathfrak{se}(3)$ associated with SE(3) to constrain the transformation transitions during the diffusion and reverse processes. Additionally, to effectively train our denoising network, we derive a registration-specific variational lower bound as the optimization objective for model learning. Furthermore, we show that our denoising network can be constructed with a surrogate registration model, making our approach applicable to different deep registration networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our diffusion registration framework presents outstanding pose estimation performance on the real-world TUD-L, LINEMOD, and Occluded-LINEMOD datasets.

Persistent memory allocation is a fundamental building block for developing high-performance and in-memory applications. Existing persistent memory allocators suffer from suboptimal heap organizations that introduce repeated cache line flushes and small random accesses in persistent memory. Worse, many allocators use static slab segregation resulting in a dramatic increase in memory consumption when allocation request size is changed. In this paper, we design a novel allocator, named NVAlloc, to solve the above issues simultaneously. First, NVAlloc eliminates cache line reflushes by mapping contiguous data blocks in slabs to interleaved metadata entries stored in different cache lines. Second, it writes small metadata units to a persistent bookkeeping log in a sequential pattern to remove random heap metadata accesses in persistent memory. Third, instead of using static slab segregation, it supports slab morphing, which allows slabs to be transformed between size classes to significantly improve slab usage. NVAlloc is complementary to the existing consistency models. Results on 6 benchmarks demonstrate that NVAlloc improves the performance of state-of-the-art persistent memory allocators by up to 6.4x and 57x for small and large allocations, respectively. Using NVAlloc reduces memory usage by up to 57.8%. Besides, we integrate NVAlloc in a persistent FPTree. Compared to the state-of-the-art allocators, NVAlloc improves the performance of this application by up to 3.1x.

Eigendecomposition of symmetric matrices is at the heart of many computer vision algorithms. However, the derivatives of the eigenvectors tend to be numerically unstable, whether using the SVD to compute them analytically or using the Power Iteration (PI) method to approximate them. This instability arises in the presence of eigenvalues that are close to each other. This makes integrating eigendecomposition into deep networks difficult and often results in poor convergence, particularly when dealing with large matrices. While this can be mitigated by partitioning the data into small arbitrary groups, doing so has no theoretical basis and makes it impossible to exploit the full power of eigendecomposition. In previous work, we mitigated this using SVD during the forward pass and PI to compute the gradients during the backward pass. However, the iterative deflation procedure required to compute multiple eigenvectors using PI tends to accumulate errors and yield inaccurate gradients. Here, we show that the Taylor expansion of the SVD gradient is theoretically equivalent to the gradient obtained using PI without relying in practice on an iterative process and thus yields more accurate gradients. We demonstrate the benefits of this increased accuracy for image classification and style transfer.

Many classical Computer Vision problems, such as essential matrix computation and pose estimation from 3D to 2D correspondences, can be tackled by solving a linear least-square problem, which can be done by finding the eigenvector corresponding to the smallest, or zero, eigenvalue of a matrix representing a linear system. Incorporating this in deep learning frameworks would allow us to explicitly encode known notions of geometry, instead of having the network implicitly learn them from data. However, performing eigendecomposition within a network requires the ability to differentiate this operation. While theoretically doable, this introduces numerical instability in the optimization process in practice. In this paper, we introduce an eigendecomposition-free approach to training a deep network whose loss depends on the eigenvector corresponding to a zero eigenvalue of a matrix predicted by the network. We demonstrate that our approach is much more robust than explicit differentiation of the eigendecomposition using two general tasks, outlier rejection and denoising, with several practical examples including wide-baseline stereo, the perspective-n-point problem, and ellipse fitting. Empirically, our method has better convergence properties and yields state-of-the-art results.

Eigendecomposition (ED) is widely used in deep networks. However, the backpropagation of its results tends to be numerically unstable, whether using ED directly or approximating it with the Power Iteration method, particularly when dealing with large matrices. While this can be mitigated by partitioning the data in small and arbitrary groups, doing so has no theoretical basis and makes its impossible to exploit the power of ED to the full. In this paper, we introduce a numerically stable and differentiable approach to leveraging eigenvectors in deep networks. It can handle large matrices without requiring to split them. We demonstrate the better robustness of our approach over standard ED and PI for ZCA whitening, an alternative to batch normalization, and for PCA denoising, which we introduce as a new normalization strategy for deep networks, aiming to further denoise the network's features.