Andreas Geiger

avg Riegler, G., Liao, Y., Donne, S., Koltun, V., Geiger, A. Connecting the Dots: Learning Representations for Active Monocular Depth Estimation In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019, June 2019 (inproceedings)

Paschalidou, D., Ulusoy, A. O., Geiger, A.

Superquadrics Revisited: Learning 3D Shape Parsing beyond Cuboids

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019, June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Abstracting complex 3D shapes with parsimonious part-based representations has been a long standing goal in computer vision. This paper presents a learning-based solution to this problem which goes beyond the traditional 3D cuboid representation by exploiting superquadrics as atomic elements. We demonstrate that superquadrics lead to more expressive 3D scene parses while being easier to learn than 3D cuboid representations. Moreover, we provide an analytical solution to the Chamfer loss which avoids the need for computational expensive reinforcement learning or iterative prediction. Our model learns to parse 3D objects into consistent superquadric representations without supervision. Results on various ShapeNet categories as well as the SURREAL human body dataset demonstrate the flexibility of our model in capturing fine details and complex poses that could not have been modelled using cuboids.

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Project Page Poster suppmat pdf Video blog handout [BibTex]

avg Paschalidou, D., Ulusoy, A. O., Geiger, A. Superquadrics Revisited: Learning 3D Shape Parsing beyond Cuboids In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019, June 2019 (inproceedings)

Project Page Poster suppmat pdf Video blog handout [BibTex]

Real-Time Dense Mapping for Self-Driving Vehicles using Fisheye Cameras

Cui, Z., Heng, L., Yeo, Y. C., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M., Sattler, T.

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2019, IEEE, International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a real-time dense geometric mapping algorithm for large-scale environments. Unlike existing methods which use pinhole cameras, our implementation is based on fisheye cameras which have larger field of view and benefit some other tasks including Visual-Inertial Odometry, localization and object detection around vehicles. Our algorithm runs on in-vehicle PCs at 15 Hz approximately, enabling vision-only 3D scene perception for self-driving vehicles. For each synchronized set of images captured by multiple cameras, we first compute a depth map for a reference camera using plane-sweeping stereo. To maintain both accuracy and efficiency, while accounting for the fact that fisheye images have a rather low resolution, we recover the depths using multiple image resolutions. We adopt the fast object detection framework YOLOv3 to remove potentially dynamic objects. At the end of the pipeline, we fuse the fisheye depth images into the truncated signed distance function (TSDF) volume to obtain a 3D map. We evaluate our method on large-scale urban datasets, and results show that our method works well even in complex environments.

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pdf video poster Project Page [BibTex]

avg Cui, Z., Heng, L., Yeo, Y. C., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M., Sattler, T. Real-Time Dense Mapping for Self-Driving Vehicles using Fisheye Cameras In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2019, IEEE, International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf video poster Project Page [BibTex]

Project AutoVision: Localization and 3D Scene Perception for an Autonomous Vehicle with a Multi-Camera System

Heng, L., Choi, B., Cui, Z., Geppert, M., Hu, S., Kuan, B., Liu, P., Nguyen, R. M. H., Yeo, Y. C., Geiger, A., Lee, G. H., Pollefeys, M., Sattler, T.

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2019, IEEE, International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Project AutoVision aims to develop localization and 3D scene perception capabilities for a self-driving vehicle. Such capabilities will enable autonomous navigation in urban and rural environments, in day and night, and with cameras as the only exteroceptive sensors. The sensor suite employs many cameras for both 360-degree coverage and accurate multi-view stereo; the use of low-cost cameras keeps the cost of this sensor suite to a minimum. In addition, the project seeks to extend the operating envelope to include GNSS-less conditions which are typical for environments with tall buildings, foliage, and tunnels. Emphasis is placed on leveraging multi-view geometry and deep learning to enable the vehicle to localize and perceive in 3D space. This paper presents an overview of the project, and describes the sensor suite and current progress in the areas of calibration, localization, and perception.

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avg Heng, L., Choi, B., Cui, Z., Geppert, M., Hu, S., Kuan, B., Liu, P., Nguyen, R. M. H., Yeo, Y. C., Geiger, A., Lee, G. H., Pollefeys, M., Sattler, T. Project AutoVision: Localization and 3D Scene Perception for an Autonomous Vehicle with a Multi-Camera System In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2019, IEEE, International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2019 (inproceedings)

MPI IS Yearbook 2019 (en) MPI IS Jahresbericht 2019 (de) [BibTex]

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems - Highlights

2019 (mpi_year_book)

Abstract

In the future, artificially intelligent systems will substantially change the way we live, work, and communicate. Intelligent systems will become increasingly important in all spheres of life – as virtual systems on the Internet, or as cyber-physical systems in the real world. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be used for autonomous driving, as well as to diagnose and fight diseases, or to carry out emergency operations that are too dangerous for humans. This is just the beginning.

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems - Highlights 2019 (mpi_year_book)

MPI IS Yearbook 2019 (en) MPI IS Jahresbericht 2019 (de) MPI IS Jahresbericht 2019 (de) [BibTex]

Geometric Image Synthesis

Abu Alhaija, H., Mustikovela, S. K., Geiger, A., Rother, C.

Computer Vision – ACCV 2018, 11366, pages: 85-100, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Jawahar, C. and Li, H. and Mori, G. and Schindler, K. ), Asian Conference on Computer Vision, 2019 (conference)

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DOI Project Page [BibTex]

avg Abu Alhaija, H., Mustikovela, S. K., Geiger, A., Rother, C. Geometric Image Synthesis Computer Vision – ACCV 2018, 11366, pages: 85-100, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Jawahar, C. and Li, H. and Mori, G. and Schindler, K. ), Asian Conference on Computer Vision, 2019 (conference)

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space

Mescheder, L., Oechsle, M., Niemeyer, M., Nowozin, S., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019, 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

With the advent of deep neural networks, learning-based approaches for 3D reconstruction have gained popularity. However, unlike for images, in 3D there is no canonical representation which is both computationally and memory efficient yet allows for representing high-resolution geometry of arbitrary topology. Many of the state-of-the-art learning-based 3D reconstruction approaches can hence only represent very coarse 3D geometry or are limited to a restricted domain. In this paper, we propose Occupancy Networks, a new representation for learning-based 3D reconstruction methods. Occupancy networks implicitly represent the 3D surface as the continuous decision boundary of a deep neural network classifier. In contrast to existing approaches, our representation encodes a description of the 3D output at infinite resolution without excessive memory footprint. We validate that our representation can efficiently encode 3D structure and can be inferred from various kinds of input. Our experiments demonstrate competitive results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for the challenging tasks of 3D reconstruction from single images, noisy point clouds and coarse discrete voxel grids. We believe that occupancy networks will become a useful tool in a wide variety of learning-based 3D tasks.

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Code Video pdf suppmat Project Page blog [BibTex]

avg Mescheder, L., Oechsle, M., Niemeyer, M., Nowozin, S., Geiger, A. Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019, 2019 (inproceedings)

Code Video pdf suppmat Project Page blog [BibTex]

2018

On the Integration of Optical Flow and Action Recognition

Sevilla-Lara, L., Liao, Y., Güney, F., Jampani, V., Geiger, A., Black, M. J.

In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), LNCS 11269, pages: 281-297, Springer, Cham, October 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Most of the top performing action recognition methods use optical flow as a "black box" input. Here we take a deeper look at the combination of flow and action recognition, and investigate why optical flow is helpful, what makes a flow method good for action recognition, and how we can make it better. In particular, we investigate the impact of different flow algorithms and input transformations to better understand how these affect a state-of-the-art action recognition method. Furthermore, we fine tune two neural-network flow methods end-to-end on the most widely used action recognition dataset (UCF101). Based on these experiments, we make the following five observations: 1) optical flow is useful for action recognition because it is invariant to appearance, 2) optical flow methods are optimized to minimize end-point-error (EPE), but the EPE of current methods is not well correlated with action recognition performance, 3) for the flow methods tested, accuracy at boundaries and at small displacements is most correlated with action recognition performance, 4) training optical flow to minimize classification error instead of minimizing EPE improves recognition performance, and 5) optical flow learned for the task of action recognition differs from traditional optical flow especially inside the human body and at the boundary of the body. These observations may encourage optical flow researchers to look beyond EPE as a goal and guide action recognition researchers to seek better motion cues, leading to a tighter integration of the optical flow and action recognition communities.

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arXiv DOI [BibTex]

2018

avg ps Sevilla-Lara, L., Liao, Y., Güney, F., Jampani, V., Geiger, A., Black, M. J. On the Integration of Optical Flow and Action Recognition In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), LNCS 11269, pages: 281-297, Springer, Cham, October 2018 (inproceedings)

arXiv DOI [BibTex]

Towards Robust Visual Odometry with a Multi-Camera System

Liu, P., Geppert, M., Heng, L., Sattler, T., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M.

In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2018, International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a visual odometry (VO) algorithm for a multi-camera system and robust operation in challenging environments. Our algorithm consists of a pose tracker and a local mapper. The tracker estimates the current pose by minimizing photometric errors between the most recent keyframe and the current frame. The mapper initializes the depths of all sampled feature points using plane-sweeping stereo. To reduce pose drift, a sliding window optimizer is used to refine poses and structure jointly. Our formulation is flexible enough to support an arbitrary number of stereo cameras. We evaluate our algorithm thoroughly on five datasets. The datasets were captured in different conditions: daytime, night-time with near-infrared (NIR) illumination and night-time without NIR illumination. Experimental results show that a multi-camera setup makes the VO more robust to challenging environments, especially night-time conditions, in which a single stereo configuration fails easily due to the lack of features.

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avg Liu, P., Geppert, M., Heng, L., Sattler, T., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M. Towards Robust Visual Odometry with a Multi-Camera System In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2018, International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October 2018 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

Learning Priors for Semantic 3D Reconstruction

Cherabier, I., Schönberger, J., Oswald, M., Pollefeys, M., Geiger, A.

In Computer Vision – ECCV 2018, Springer International Publishing, Cham, September 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a novel semantic 3D reconstruction framework which embeds variational regularization into a neural network. Our network performs a fixed number of unrolled multi-scale optimization iterations with shared interaction weights. In contrast to existing variational methods for semantic 3D reconstruction, our model is end-to-end trainable and captures more complex dependencies between the semantic labels and the 3D geometry. Compared to previous learning-based approaches to 3D reconstruction, we integrate powerful long-range dependencies using variational coarse-to-fine optimization. As a result, our network architecture requires only a moderate number of parameters while keeping a high level of expressiveness which enables learning from very little data. Experiments on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our network achieves higher accuracy compared to a purely variational approach while at the same time requiring two orders of magnitude less iterations to converge. Moreover, our approach handles ten times more semantic class labels using the same computational resources.

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pdf suppmat Project Page Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

avg Cherabier, I., Schönberger, J., Oswald, M., Pollefeys, M., Geiger, A. Learning Priors for Semantic 3D Reconstruction In Computer Vision – ECCV 2018, Springer International Publishing, Cham, September 2018 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project Page Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Unsupervised Learning of Multi-Frame Optical Flow with Occlusions

Janai, J., Güney, F., Ranjan, A., Black, M. J., Geiger, A.

In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11220, pages: 713-731, Springer, Cham, September 2018 (inproceedings)

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pdf suppmat Video Project Page DOI Project Page [BibTex]

avg ps Janai, J., Güney, F., Ranjan, A., Black, M. J., Geiger, A. Unsupervised Learning of Multi-Frame Optical Flow with Occlusions In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11220, pages: 713-731, Springer, Cham, September 2018 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Video Project Page DOI Project Page [BibTex]

SphereNet: Learning Spherical Representations for Detection and Classification in Omnidirectional Images

Coors, B., Condurache, A. P., Geiger, A.

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), September 2018 (conference)

Abstract

Omnidirectional cameras offer great benefits over classical cameras wherever a wide field of view is essential, such as in virtual reality applications or in autonomous robots. Unfortunately, standard convolutional neural networks are not well suited for this scenario as the natural projection surface is a sphere which cannot be unwrapped to a plane without introducing significant distortions, particularly in the polar regions. In this work, we present SphereNet, a novel deep learning framework which encodes invariance against such distortions explicitly into convolutional neural networks. Towards this goal, SphereNet adapts the sampling locations of the convolutional filters, effectively reversing distortions, and wraps the filters around the sphere. By building on regular convolutions, SphereNet enables the transfer of existing perspective convolutional neural network models to the omnidirectional case. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the tasks of image classification and object detection, exploiting two newly created semi-synthetic and real-world omnidirectional datasets.

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avg Coors, B., Condurache, A. P., Geiger, A. SphereNet: Learning Spherical Representations for Detection and Classification in Omnidirectional Images European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), September 2018 (conference)

pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

Robust Dense Mapping for Large-Scale Dynamic Environments

Barsan, I. A., Liu, P., Pollefeys, M., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2018, IEEE, International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a stereo-based dense mapping algorithm for large-scale dynamic urban environments. In contrast to other existing methods, we simultaneously reconstruct the static background, the moving objects, and the potentially moving but currently stationary objects separately, which is desirable for high-level mobile robotic tasks such as path planning in crowded environments. We use both instance-aware semantic segmentation and sparse scene flow to classify objects as either background, moving, or potentially moving, thereby ensuring that the system is able to model objects with the potential to transition from static to dynamic, such as parked cars. Given camera poses estimated from visual odometry, both the background and the (potentially) moving objects are reconstructed separately by fusing the depth maps computed from the stereo input. In addition to visual odometry, sparse scene flow is also used to estimate the 3D motions of the detected moving objects, in order to reconstruct them accurately. A map pruning technique is further developed to improve reconstruction accuracy and reduce memory consumption, leading to increased scalability. We evaluate our system thoroughly on the well-known KITTI dataset. Our system is capable of running on a PC at approximately 2.5Hz, with the primary bottleneck being the instance-aware semantic segmentation, which is a limitation we hope to address in future work.

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pdf Video Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

avg Barsan, I. A., Liu, P., Pollefeys, M., Geiger, A. Robust Dense Mapping for Large-Scale Dynamic Environments In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2018, IEEE, International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2018 (inproceedings)

pdf Video Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Learning 3D Shape Completion under Weak Supervision

Stutz, D., Geiger, A.

Arxiv, May 2018 (article)

Abstract

We address the problem of 3D shape completion from sparse and noisy point clouds, a fundamental problem in computer vision and robotics. Recent approaches are either data-driven or learning-based: Data-driven approaches rely on a shape model whose parameters are optimized to fit the observations; Learning-based approaches, in contrast, avoid the expensive optimization step by learning to directly predict complete shapes from incomplete observations in a fully-supervised setting. However, full supervision is often not available in practice. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised learning-based approach to 3D shape completion which neither requires slow optimization nor direct supervision. While we also learn a shape prior on synthetic data, we amortize, i.e., learn, maximum likelihood fitting using deep neural networks resulting in efficient shape completion without sacrificing accuracy. On synthetic benchmarks based on ShapeNet and ModelNet as well as on real robotics data from KITTI and Kinect, we demonstrate that the proposed amortized maximum likelihood approach is able to compete with fully supervised baselines and outperforms data-driven approaches, while requiring less supervision and being significantly faster.

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PDF Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

avg Stutz, D., Geiger, A. Learning 3D Shape Completion under Weak Supervision Arxiv, May 2018 (article)

PDF Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

RayNet: Learning Volumetric 3D Reconstruction with Ray Potentials

Paschalidou, D., Ulusoy, A. O., Schmitt, C., Gool, L., Geiger, A.

In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Computer Society, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2018, 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of reconstructing a dense 3D model using images captured from different views. Recent methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) allow learning the entire task from data. However, they do not incorporate the physics of image formation such as perspective geometry and occlusion. Instead, classical approaches based on Markov Random Fields (MRF) with ray-potentials explicitly model these physical processes, but they cannot cope with large surface appearance variations across different viewpoints. In this paper, we propose RayNet, which combines the strengths of both frameworks. RayNet integrates a CNN that learns view-invariant feature representations with an MRF that explicitly encodes the physics of perspective projection and occlusion. We train RayNet end-to-end using empirical risk minimization. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on challenging real-world datasets and demonstrate its benefits over a piece-wise trained baseline, hand-crafted models as well as other learning-based approaches.

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pdf suppmat Video Project Page code Poster Project Page [BibTex]

avg Paschalidou, D., Ulusoy, A. O., Schmitt, C., Gool, L., Geiger, A. RayNet: Learning Volumetric 3D Reconstruction with Ray Potentials In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Computer Society, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2018, 2018 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Video Project Page code Poster Project Page [BibTex]

Deep Marching Cubes: Learning Explicit Surface Representations

Liao, Y., Donne, S., Geiger, A.

Abstract

Existing learning based solutions to 3D surface prediction cannot be trained end-to-end as they operate on intermediate representations (eg, TSDF) from which 3D surface meshes must be extracted in a post-processing step (eg, via the marching cubes algorithm). In this paper, we investigate the problem of end-to-end 3D surface prediction. We first demonstrate that the marching cubes algorithm is not differentiable and propose an alternative differentiable formulation which we insert as a final layer into a 3D convolutional neural network. We further propose a set of loss functions which allow for training our model with sparse point supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that the model allows for predicting sub-voxel accurate 3D shapes of arbitrary topology. Additionally, it learns to complete shapes and to separate an object's inside from its outside even in the presence of sparse and incomplete ground truth. We investigate the benefits of our approach on the task of inferring shapes from 3D point clouds. Our model is flexible and can be combined with a variety of shape encoder and shape inference techniques.

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pdf suppmat Video Project Page Poster Project Page [BibTex]

avg Liao, Y., Donne, S., Geiger, A. Deep Marching Cubes: Learning Explicit Surface Representations In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Computer Society, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2018, 2018 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Video Project Page Poster Project Page [BibTex]

Semantic Visual Localization

Schönberger, J., Pollefeys, M., Geiger, A., Sattler, T.

Abstract

Robust visual localization under a wide range of viewing conditions is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Handling the difficult cases of this problem is not only very challenging but also of high practical relevance, eg, in the context of life-long localization for augmented reality or autonomous robots. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on a joint 3D geometric and semantic understanding of the world, enabling it to succeed under conditions where previous approaches failed. Our method leverages a novel generative model for descriptor learning, trained on semantic scene completion as an auxiliary task. The resulting 3D descriptors are robust to missing observations by encoding high-level 3D geometric and semantic information. Experiments on several challenging large-scale localization datasets demonstrate reliable localization under extreme viewpoint, illumination, and geometry changes.

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avg Schönberger, J., Pollefeys, M., Geiger, A., Sattler, T. Semantic Visual Localization In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Computer Society, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2018, 2018 (inproceedings)

Augmented Reality Meets Computer Vision: Efficient Data Generation for Urban Driving Scenes

Alhaija, H., Mustikovela, S., Mescheder, L., Geiger, A., Rother, C.

International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2018, 2018 (article)

Abstract

The success of deep learning in computer vision is based on the availability of large annotated datasets. To lower the need for hand labeled images, virtually rendered 3D worlds have recently gained popularity. Unfortunately, creating realistic 3D content is challenging on its own and requires significant human effort. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm which combines real and synthetic data for learning semantic instance segmentation and object detection models. Exploiting the fact that not all aspects of the scene are equally important for this task, we propose to augment real-world imagery with virtual objects of the target category. Capturing real-world images at large scale is easy and cheap, and directly provides real background appearances without the need for creating complex 3D models of the environment. We present an efficient procedure to augment these images with virtual objects. In contrast to modeling complete 3D environments, our data augmentation approach requires only a few user interactions in combination with 3D models of the target object category. Leveraging our approach, we introduce a novel dataset of augmented urban driving scenes with 360 degree images that are used as environment maps to create realistic lighting and reflections on rendered objects. We analyze the significance of realistic object placement by comparing manual placement by humans to automatic methods based on semantic scene analysis. This allows us to create composite images which exhibit both realistic background appearance as well as a large number of complex object arrangements. Through an extensive set of experiments, we conclude the right set of parameters to produce augmented data which can maximally enhance the performance of instance segmentation models. Further, we demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach on training standard deep models for semantic instance segmentation and object detection of cars in outdoor driving scenarios. We test the models trained on our augmented data on the KITTI 2015 dataset, which we have annotated with pixel-accurate ground truth, and on the Cityscapes dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that the models trained on augmented imagery generalize better than those trained on fully synthetic data or models trained on limited amounts of annotated real data.

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avg Alhaija, H., Mustikovela, S., Mescheder, L., Geiger, A., Rother, C. Augmented Reality Meets Computer Vision: Efficient Data Generation for Urban Driving Scenes International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2018, 2018 (article)

pdf suppmat Project Page Poster Project Page [BibTex]

Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?

Mescheder, L., Geiger, A., Nowozin, S.

International Conference on Machine learning (ICML), 2018 (conference)

Abstract

Recent work has shown local convergence of GAN training for absolutely continuous data and generator distributions. In this paper, we show that the requirement of absolute continuity is necessary: we describe a simple yet prototypical counterexample showing that in the more realistic case of distributions that are not absolutely continuous, unregularized GAN training is not always convergent. Furthermore, we discuss regularization strategies that were recently proposed to stabilize GAN training. Our analysis shows that GAN training with instance noise or zero-centered gradient penalties converges. On the other hand, we show that Wasserstein-GANs and WGAN-GP with a finite number of discriminator updates per generator update do not always converge to the equilibrium point. We discuss these results, leading us to a new explanation for the stability problems of GAN training. Based on our analysis, we extend our convergence results to more general GANs and prove local convergence for simplified gradient penalties even if the generator and data distributions lie on lower dimensional manifolds. We find these penalties to work well in practice and use them to learn high-resolution generative image models for a variety of datasets with little hyperparameter tuning.

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code video paper supplement slides poster Project Page [BibTex]

avg Mescheder, L., Geiger, A., Nowozin, S. Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge? International Conference on Machine learning (ICML), 2018 (conference)

code video paper supplement slides poster Project Page [BibTex]

Learning 3D Shape Completion from Laser Scan Data with Weak Supervision

Stutz, D., Geiger, A.

Abstract

3D shape completion from partial point clouds is a fundamental problem in computer vision and computer graphics. Recent approaches can be characterized as either data-driven or learning-based. Data-driven approaches rely on a shape model whose parameters are optimized to fit the observations. Learning-based approaches, in contrast, avoid the expensive optimization step and instead directly predict the complete shape from the incomplete observations using deep neural networks. However, full supervision is required which is often not available in practice. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised learning-based approach to 3D shape completion which neither requires slow optimization nor direct supervision. While we also learn a shape prior on synthetic data, we amortize, ie, learn, maximum likelihood fitting using deep neural networks resulting in efficient shape completion without sacrificing accuracy. Tackling 3D shape completion of cars on ShapeNet and KITTI, we demonstrate that the proposed amortized maximum likelihood approach is able to compete with a fully supervised baseline and a state-of-the-art data-driven approach while being significantly faster. On ModelNet, we additionally show that the approach is able to generalize to other object categories as well.

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avg Stutz, D., Geiger, A. Learning 3D Shape Completion from Laser Scan Data with Weak Supervision In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Computer Society, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2018, 2018 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project Page Poster Project Page [BibTex]

Learning 3D Shape Completion under Weak Supervision

Stutz, D., Geiger, A.

International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2018, 2018 (article)

Abstract

We address the problem of 3D shape completion from sparse and noisy point clouds, a fundamental problem in computer vision and robotics. Recent approaches are either data-driven or learning-based: Data-driven approaches rely on a shape model whose parameters are optimized to fit the observations; Learning-based approaches, in contrast, avoid the expensive optimization step by learning to directly predict complete shapes from incomplete observations in a fully-supervised setting. However, full supervision is often not available in practice. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised learning-based approach to 3D shape completion which neither requires slow optimization nor direct supervision. While we also learn a shape prior on synthetic data, we amortize, i.e., learn, maximum likelihood fitting using deep neural networks resulting in efficient shape completion without sacrificing accuracy. On synthetic benchmarks based on ShapeNet and ModelNet as well as on real robotics data from KITTI and Kinect, we demonstrate that the proposed amortized maximum likelihood approach is able to compete with a fully supervised baseline and outperforms the data-driven approach of Engelmann et al., while requiring less supervision and being significantly faster.

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avg Stutz, D., Geiger, A. Learning 3D Shape Completion under Weak Supervision International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2018, 2018 (article)

Learning Transformation Invariant Representations with Weak Supervision

Coors, B., Condurache, A., Mertins, A., Geiger, A.

In International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Deep convolutional neural networks are the current state-of-the-art solution to many computer vision tasks. However, their ability to handle large global and local image transformations is limited. Consequently, extensive data augmentation is often utilized to incorporate prior knowledge about desired invariances to geometric transformations such as rotations or scale changes. In this work, we combine data augmentation with an unsupervised loss which enforces similarity between the predictions of augmented copies of an input sample. Our loss acts as an effective regularizer which facilitates the learning of transformation invariant representations. We investigate the effectiveness of the proposed similarity loss on rotated MNIST and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) in the context of different classification models including ladder networks. Our experiments demonstrate improvements with respect to the standard data augmentation approach for supervised and semi-supervised learning tasks, in particular in the presence of little annotated data. In addition, we analyze the performance of the proposed approach with respect to its hyperparameters, including the strength of the regularization as well as the layer where representation similarity is enforced.

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avg Coors, B., Condurache, A., Mertins, A., Geiger, A. Learning Transformation Invariant Representations with Weak Supervision In International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, 2018 (inproceedings)

Object Scene Flow

Menze, M., Heipke, C., Geiger, A.

ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2018 (article)

Abstract

This work investigates the estimation of dense three-dimensional motion fields, commonly referred to as scene flow. While great progress has been made in recent years, large displacements and adverse imaging conditions as observed in natural outdoor environments are still very challenging for current approaches to reconstruction and motion estimation. In this paper, we propose a unified random field model which reasons jointly about 3D scene flow as well as the location, shape and motion of vehicles in the observed scene. We formulate the problem as the task of decomposing the scene into a small number of rigidly moving objects sharing the same motion parameters. Thus, our formulation effectively introduces long-range spatial dependencies which commonly employed local rigidity priors are lacking. Our inference algorithm then estimates the association of image segments and object hypotheses together with their three-dimensional shape and motion. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach by introducing a novel challenging scene flow benchmark which allows for a thorough comparison of the proposed scene flow approach with respect to various baseline models. In contrast to previous benchmarks, our evaluation is the first to provide stereo and optical flow ground truth for dynamic real-world urban scenes at large scale. Our experiments reveal that rigid motion segmentation can be utilized as an effective regularizer for the scene flow problem, improving upon existing two-frame scene flow methods. At the same time, our method yields plausible object segmentations without requiring an explicitly trained recognition model for a specific object class.

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Project Page [BibTex]

avg Menze, M., Heipke, C., Geiger, A. Object Scene Flow ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2018 (article)

Project Page [BibTex]

2017

The Numerics of GANs

Mescheder, L., Nowozin, S., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings from the conference "Neural Information Processing Systems 2017., (Editors: Guyon I. and Luxburg U.v. and Bengio S. and Wallach H. and Fergus R. and Vishwanathan S. and Garnett R.), Curran Associates, Inc., Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS), December 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the numerics of common algorithms for training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Using the formalism of smooth two-player games we analyze the associated gradient vector field of GAN training objectives. Our findings suggest that the convergence of current algorithms suffers due to two factors: i) presence of eigenvalues of the Jacobian of the gradient vector field with zero real-part, and ii) eigenvalues with big imaginary part. Using these findings, we design a new algorithm that overcomes some of these limitations and has better convergence properties. Experimentally, we demonstrate its superiority on training common GAN architectures and show convergence on GAN architectures that are known to be notoriously hard to train.

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2017

avg Mescheder, L., Nowozin, S., Geiger, A. The Numerics of GANs In Proceedings from the conference "Neural Information Processing Systems 2017., (Editors: Guyon I. and Luxburg U.v. and Bengio S. and Wallach H. and Fergus R. and Vishwanathan S. and Garnett R.), Curran Associates, Inc., Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS), December 2017 (inproceedings)

Bounding Boxes, Segmentations and Object Coordinates: How Important is Recognition for 3D Scene Flow Estimation in Autonomous Driving Scenarios?

Behl, A., Jafari, O. H., Mustikovela, S. K., Alhaija, H. A., Rother, C., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), October 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Existing methods for 3D scene flow estimation often fail in the presence of large displacement or local ambiguities, e.g., at texture-less or reflective surfaces. However, these challenges are omnipresent in dynamic road scenes, which is the focus of this work. Our main contribution is to overcome these 3D motion estimation problems by exploiting recognition. In particular, we investigate the importance of recognition granularity, from coarse 2D bounding box estimates over 2D instance segmentations to fine-grained 3D object part predictions. We compute these cues using CNNs trained on a newly annotated dataset of stereo images and integrate them into a CRF-based model for robust 3D scene flow estimation - an approach we term Instance Scene Flow. We analyze the importance of each recognition cue in an ablation study and observe that the instance segmentation cue is by far strongest, in our setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the challenging KITTI 2015 scene flow benchmark where we achieve state-of-the-art performance at the time of submission.

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avg Behl, A., Jafari, O. H., Mustikovela, S. K., Alhaija, H. A., Rother, C., Geiger, A. Bounding Boxes, Segmentations and Object Coordinates: How Important is Recognition for 3D Scene Flow Estimation in Autonomous Driving Scenarios? In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), October 2017 (inproceedings)

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Sparsity Invariant CNNs

Uhrig, J., Schneider, N., Schneider, L., Franke, U., Brox, T., Geiger, A.

International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2017, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), October 2017 (conference)

Abstract

In this paper, we consider convolutional neural networks operating on sparse inputs with an application to depth upsampling from sparse laser scan data. First, we show that traditional convolutional networks perform poorly when applied to sparse data even when the location of missing data is provided to the network. To overcome this problem, we propose a simple yet effective sparse convolution layer which explicitly considers the location of missing data during the convolution operation. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed network architecture in synthetic and real experiments \wrt various baseline approaches. Compared to dense baselines, the proposed sparse convolution network generalizes well to novel datasets and is invariant to the level of sparsity in the data. For our evaluation, we derive a novel dataset from the KITTI benchmark, comprising 93k depth annotated RGB images. Our dataset allows for training and evaluating depth upsampling and depth prediction techniques in challenging real-world settings.

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avg Uhrig, J., Schneider, N., Schneider, L., Franke, U., Brox, T., Geiger, A. Sparsity Invariant CNNs International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2017, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), October 2017 (conference)

pdf suppmat Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

OctNetFusion: Learning Depth Fusion from Data

Riegler, G., Ulusoy, A. O., Bischof, H., Geiger, A.

International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2017, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), October 2017 (conference)

Abstract

In this paper, we present a learning based approach to depth fusion, i.e., dense 3D reconstruction from multiple depth images. The most common approach to depth fusion is based on averaging truncated signed distance functions, which was originally proposed by Curless and Levoy in 1996. While this method is simple and provides great results, it is not able to reconstruct (partially) occluded surfaces and requires a large number frames to filter out sensor noise and outliers. Motivated by the availability of large 3D model repositories and recent advances in deep learning, we present a novel 3D CNN architecture that learns to predict an implicit surface representation from the input depth maps. Our learning based method significantly outperforms the traditional volumetric fusion approach in terms of noise reduction and outlier suppression. By learning the structure of real world 3D objects and scenes, our approach is further able to reconstruct occluded regions and to fill in gaps in the reconstruction. We demonstrate that our learning based approach outperforms both vanilla TSDF fusion as well as TV-L1 fusion on the task of volumetric fusion. Further, we demonstrate state-of-the-art 3D shape completion results.

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pdf Video 1 Video 2 Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

avg Riegler, G., Ulusoy, A. O., Bischof, H., Geiger, A. OctNetFusion: Learning Depth Fusion from Data International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2017, International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), October 2017 (conference)

pdf Video 1 Video 2 Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Direct Visual Odometry for a Fisheye-Stereo Camera

Liu, P., Heng, L., Sattler, T., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M.

In Proceedings IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a direct visual odometry algorithm for a fisheye-stereo camera. Our algorithm performs simultaneous camera motion estimation and semi-dense reconstruction. The pipeline consists of two threads: a tracking thread and a mapping thread. In the tracking thread, we estimate the camera pose via semi-dense direct image alignment. To have a wider field of view (FoV) which is important for robotic perception, we use fisheye images directly without converting them to conventional pinhole images which come with a limited FoV. To address the epipolar curve problem, plane-sweeping stereo is used for stereo matching and depth initialization. Multiple depth hypotheses are tracked for selected pixels to better capture the uncertainty characteristics of stereo matching. Temporal motion stereo is then used to refine the depth and remove false positive depth hypotheses. Our implementation runs at an average of 20 Hz on a low-end PC. We run experiments in outdoor environments to validate our algorithm, and discuss the experimental results. We experimentally show that we are able to estimate 6D poses with low drift, and at the same time, do semi-dense 3D reconstruction with high accuracy.

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avg Liu, P., Heng, L., Sattler, T., Geiger, A., Pollefeys, M. Direct Visual Odometry for a Fisheye-Stereo Camera In Proceedings IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 2017 (inproceedings)

Augmented Reality Meets Deep Learning for Car Instance Segmentation in Urban Scenes

Alhaija, H. A., Mustikovela, S. K., Mescheder, L., Geiger, A., Rother, C.

In Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference 2017, Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference, September 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract

The success of deep learning in computer vision is based on the availability of large annotated datasets. To lower the need for hand labeled images, virtually rendered 3D worlds have recently gained popularity. Unfortunately, creating realistic 3D content is challenging on its own and requires significant human effort. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm which combines real and synthetic data for learning semantic instance segmentation models. Exploiting the fact that not all aspects of the scene are equally important for this task, we propose to augment real-world imagery with virtual objects of the target category. Capturing real-world images at large scale is easy and cheap, and directly provides real background appearances without the need for creating complex 3D models of the environment. We present an efficient procedure to augment these images with virtual objects. This allows us to create realistic composite images which exhibit both realistic background appearance as well as a large number of complex object arrangements. In contrast to modeling complete 3D environments, our data augmentation approach requires only a few user interactions in combination with 3D shapes of the target object category. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach for training a state-of-the-art high-capacity deep model for semantic instance segmentation. In particular, we consider the task of segmenting car instances on the KITTI dataset which we have annotated with pixel-accurate ground truth. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on augmented imagery generalize better than those trained on synthetic data or models trained on limited amounts of annotated real data.

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avg Alhaija, H. A., Mustikovela, S. K., Mescheder, L., Geiger, A., Rother, C. Augmented Reality Meets Deep Learning for Car Instance Segmentation in Urban Scenes In Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference 2017, Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference, September 2017 (inproceedings)