Publications | Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

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.

Learning Non-volumetric Depth Fusion using Successive Reprojections

Donne, 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, June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Given a set of input views, multi-view stereopsis techniques estimate depth maps to represent the 3D reconstruction of the scene; these are fused into a single, consistent, reconstruction -- most often a point cloud. In this work we propose to learn an auto-regressive depth refinement directly from data. While deep learning has improved the accuracy and speed of depth estimation significantly, learned MVS techniques remain limited to the planesweeping paradigm. We refine a set of input depth maps by successively reprojecting information from neighbouring views to leverage multi-view constraints. Compared to learning-based volumetric fusion techniques, an image-based representation allows significantly more detailed reconstructions; compared to traditional point-based techniques, our method learns noise suppression and surface completion in a data-driven fashion. Due to the limited availability of high-quality reconstruction datasets with ground truth, we introduce two novel synthetic datasets to (pre-)train our network. Our approach is able to improve both the output depth maps and the reconstructed point cloud, for both learned and traditional depth estimation front-ends, on both synthetic and real data.

avg

pdf suppmat Project Page Video Poster blog [BibTex]

avg Donne, S., Geiger, A. Learning Non-volumetric Depth Fusion using Successive Reprojections 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)

pdf suppmat Project Page Video Poster blog [BibTex]

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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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)

NoVA: Learning to See in Novel Viewpoints and Domains

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

In 2019 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2019 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Domain adaptation techniques enable the re-use and transfer of existing labeled datasets from a source to a target domain in which little or no labeled data exists. Recently, image-level domain adaptation approaches have demonstrated impressive results in adapting from synthetic to real-world environments by translating source images to the style of a target domain. However, the domain gap between source and target may not only be caused by a different style but also by a change in viewpoint. This case necessitates a semantically consistent translation of source images and labels to the style and viewpoint of the target domain. In this work, we propose the Novel Viewpoint Adaptation (NoVA) model, which enables unsupervised adaptation to a novel viewpoint in a target domain for which no labeled data is available. NoVA utilizes an explicit representation of the 3D scene geometry to translate source view images and labels to the target view. Experiments on adaptation to synthetic and real-world datasets show the benefit of NoVA compared to state-of-the-art domain adaptation approaches on the task of semantic segmentation.

avg

pdf suppmat poster video [BibTex]

avg Coors, B., Condurache, A. P., Geiger, A. NoVA: Learning to See in Novel Viewpoints and Domains In 2019 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2019 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat poster video [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.

avg

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.

avg ps

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.

avg

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.

avg

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)

avg ps

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.

avg

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]

Conditional Affordance Learning for Driving in Urban Environments

Conference on Robot Learning 2018, 2018 (conference)

avg

pdf suppmat Video Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

avg Conditional Affordance Learning for Driving in Urban Environments Conference on Robot Learning 2018, 2018 (conference)

pdf suppmat Video Project Page 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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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.

avg

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

Geometric Image Synthesis

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

(conference)

avg

avg Alhaija, H. A., Mustikovela, S. K., Geiger, A., Rother, C. Geometric Image Synthesis (conference)