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Jun 26

EgoObjects: A Large-Scale Egocentric Dataset for Fine-Grained Object Understanding

Object understanding in egocentric visual data is arguably a fundamental research topic in egocentric vision. However, existing object datasets are either non-egocentric or have limitations in object categories, visual content, and annotation granularities. In this work, we introduce EgoObjects, a large-scale egocentric dataset for fine-grained object understanding. Its Pilot version contains over 9K videos collected by 250 participants from 50+ countries using 4 wearable devices, and over 650K object annotations from 368 object categories. Unlike prior datasets containing only object category labels, EgoObjects also annotates each object with an instance-level identifier, and includes over 14K unique object instances. EgoObjects was designed to capture the same object under diverse background complexities, surrounding objects, distance, lighting and camera motion. In parallel to the data collection, we conducted data annotation by developing a multi-stage federated annotation process to accommodate the growing nature of the dataset. To bootstrap the research on EgoObjects, we present a suite of 4 benchmark tasks around the egocentric object understanding, including a novel instance level- and the classical category level object detection. Moreover, we also introduce 2 novel continual learning object detection tasks. The dataset and API are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EgoObjects.

DetZero: Rethinking Offboard 3D Object Detection with Long-term Sequential Point Clouds

Existing offboard 3D detectors always follow a modular pipeline design to take advantage of unlimited sequential point clouds. We have found that the full potential of offboard 3D detectors is not explored mainly due to two reasons: (1) the onboard multi-object tracker cannot generate sufficient complete object trajectories, and (2) the motion state of objects poses an inevitable challenge for the object-centric refining stage in leveraging the long-term temporal context representation. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel paradigm of offboard 3D object detection, named DetZero. Concretely, an offline tracker coupled with a multi-frame detector is proposed to focus on the completeness of generated object tracks. An attention-mechanism refining module is proposed to strengthen contextual information interaction across long-term sequential point clouds for object refining with decomposed regression methods. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset show our DetZero outperforms all state-of-the-art onboard and offboard 3D detection methods. Notably, DetZero ranks 1st place on Waymo 3D object detection leaderboard with 85.15 mAPH (L2) detection performance. Further experiments validate the application of taking the place of human labels with such high-quality results. Our empirical study leads to rethinking conventions and interesting findings that can guide future research on offboard 3D object detection.

Navigation-Oriented Scene Understanding for Robotic Autonomy: Learning to Segment Driveability in Egocentric Images

This work tackles scene understanding for outdoor robotic navigation, solely relying on images captured by an on-board camera. Conventional visual scene understanding interprets the environment based on specific descriptive categories. However, such a representation is not directly interpretable for decision-making and constrains robot operation to a specific domain. Thus, we propose to segment egocentric images directly in terms of how a robot can navigate in them, and tailor the learning problem to an autonomous navigation task. Building around an image segmentation network, we present a generic affordance consisting of 3 driveability levels which can broadly apply to both urban and off-road scenes. By encoding these levels with soft ordinal labels, we incorporate inter-class distances during learning which improves segmentation compared to standard "hard" one-hot labelling. In addition, we propose a navigation-oriented pixel-wise loss weighting method which assigns higher importance to safety-critical areas. We evaluate our approach on large-scale public image segmentation datasets ranging from sunny city streets to snowy forest trails. In a cross-dataset generalization experiment, we show that our affordance learning scheme can be applied across a diverse mix of datasets and improves driveability estimation in unseen environments compared to general-purpose, single-dataset segmentation.

Samba: Synchronized Set-of-Sequences Modeling for Multiple Object Tracking

Multiple object tracking in complex scenarios - such as coordinated dance performances, team sports, or dynamic animal groups - presents unique challenges. In these settings, objects frequently move in coordinated patterns, occlude each other, and exhibit long-term dependencies in their trajectories. However, it remains a key open research question on how to model long-range dependencies within tracklets, interdependencies among tracklets, and the associated temporal occlusions. To this end, we introduce Samba, a novel linear-time set-of-sequences model designed to jointly process multiple tracklets by synchronizing the multiple selective state-spaces used to model each tracklet. Samba autoregressively predicts the future track query for each sequence while maintaining synchronized long-term memory representations across tracklets. By integrating Samba into a tracking-by-propagation framework, we propose SambaMOTR, the first tracker effectively addressing the aforementioned issues, including long-range dependencies, tracklet interdependencies, and temporal occlusions. Additionally, we introduce an effective technique for dealing with uncertain observations (MaskObs) and an efficient training recipe to scale SambaMOTR to longer sequences. By modeling long-range dependencies and interactions among tracked objects, SambaMOTR implicitly learns to track objects accurately through occlusions without any hand-crafted heuristics. Our approach significantly surpasses prior state-of-the-art on the DanceTrack, BFT, and SportsMOT datasets.

Leveraging Driver Field-of-View for Multimodal Ego-Trajectory Prediction

Understanding drivers' decision-making is crucial for road safety. Although predicting the ego-vehicle's path is valuable for driver-assistance systems, existing methods mainly focus on external factors like other vehicles' motions, often neglecting the driver's attention and intent. To address this gap, we infer the ego-trajectory by integrating the driver's gaze and the surrounding scene. We introduce RouteFormer, a novel multimodal ego-trajectory prediction network combining GPS data, environmental context, and the driver's field-of-view, comprising first-person video and gaze fixations. We also present the Path Complexity Index (PCI), a new metric for trajectory complexity that enables a more nuanced evaluation of challenging scenarios. To tackle data scarcity and enhance diversity, we introduce GEM, a comprehensive dataset of urban driving scenarios enriched with synchronized driver field-of-view and gaze data. Extensive evaluations on GEM and DR(eye)VE demonstrate that RouteFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving notable improvements in prediction accuracy across diverse conditions. Ablation studies reveal that incorporating driver field-of-view data yields significantly better average displacement error, especially in challenging scenarios with high PCI scores, underscoring the importance of modeling driver attention. All data and code are available at https://meakbiyik.github.io/routeformer.

Detection Recovery in Online Multi-Object Tracking with Sparse Graph Tracker

In existing joint detection and tracking methods, pairwise relational features are used to match previous tracklets to current detections. However, the features may not be discriminative enough for a tracker to identify a target from a large number of detections. Selecting only high-scored detections for tracking may lead to missed detections whose confidence score is low. Consequently, in the online setting, this results in disconnections of tracklets which cannot be recovered. In this regard, we present Sparse Graph Tracker (SGT), a novel online graph tracker using higher-order relational features which are more discriminative by aggregating the features of neighboring detections and their relations. SGT converts video data into a graph where detections, their connections, and the relational features of two connected nodes are represented by nodes, edges, and edge features, respectively. The strong edge features allow SGT to track targets with tracking candidates selected by top-K scored detections with large K. As a result, even low-scored detections can be tracked, and the missed detections are also recovered. The robustness of K value is shown through the extensive experiments. In the MOT16/17/20 and HiEve Challenge, SGT outperforms the state-of-the-art trackers with real-time inference speed. Especially, a large improvement in MOTA is shown in the MOT20 and HiEve Challenge. Code is available at https://github.com/HYUNJS/SGT.

Fast Encoder-Based 3D from Casual Videos via Point Track Processing

This paper addresses the long-standing challenge of reconstructing 3D structures from videos with dynamic content. Current approaches to this problem were not designed to operate on casual videos recorded by standard cameras or require a long optimization time. Aiming to significantly improve the efficiency of previous approaches, we present TracksTo4D, a learning-based approach that enables inferring 3D structure and camera positions from dynamic content originating from casual videos using a single efficient feed-forward pass. To achieve this, we propose operating directly over 2D point tracks as input and designing an architecture tailored for processing 2D point tracks. Our proposed architecture is designed with two key principles in mind: (1) it takes into account the inherent symmetries present in the input point tracks data, and (2) it assumes that the movement patterns can be effectively represented using a low-rank approximation. TracksTo4D is trained in an unsupervised way on a dataset of casual videos utilizing only the 2D point tracks extracted from the videos, without any 3D supervision. Our experiments show that TracksTo4D can reconstruct a temporal point cloud and camera positions of the underlying video with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while drastically reducing runtime by up to 95\%. We further show that TracksTo4D generalizes well to unseen videos of unseen semantic categories at inference time.

I-MPN: Inductive Message Passing Network for Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Annotation of Mobile Eye Tracking Data

Comprehending how humans process visual information in dynamic settings is crucial for psychology and designing user-centered interactions. While mobile eye-tracking systems combining egocentric video and gaze signals can offer valuable insights, manual analysis of these recordings is time-intensive. In this work, we present a novel human-centered learning algorithm designed for automated object recognition within mobile eye-tracking settings. Our approach seamlessly integrates an object detector with a spatial relation-aware inductive message-passing network (I-MPN), harnessing node profile information and capturing object correlations. Such mechanisms enable us to learn embedding functions capable of generalizing to new object angle views, facilitating rapid adaptation and efficient reasoning in dynamic contexts as users navigate their environment. Through experiments conducted on three distinct video sequences, our interactive-based method showcases significant performance improvements over fixed training/testing algorithms, even when trained on considerably smaller annotated samples collected through user feedback. Furthermore, we demonstrate exceptional efficiency in data annotation processes and surpass prior interactive methods that use complete object detectors, combine detectors with convolutional networks, or employ interactive video segmentation.

LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark

Despite great recent advances in visual tracking, its further development, including both algorithm design and evaluation, is limited due to lack of dedicated large-scale benchmarks. To address this problem, we present LaSOT, a high-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking benchmark. LaSOT contains a diverse selection of 85 object classes, and offers 1,550 totaling more than 3.87 million frames. Each video frame is carefully and manually annotated with a bounding box. This makes LaSOT, to our knowledge, the largest densely annotated tracking benchmark. Our goal in releasing LaSOT is to provide a dedicated high quality platform for both training and evaluation of trackers. The average video length of LaSOT is around 2,500 frames, where each video contains various challenge factors that exist in real world video footage,such as the targets disappearing and re-appearing. These longer video lengths allow for the assessment of long-term trackers. To take advantage of the close connection between visual appearance and natural language, we provide language specification for each video in LaSOT. We believe such additions will allow for future research to use linguistic features to improve tracking. Two protocols, full-overlap and one-shot, are designated for flexible assessment of trackers. We extensively evaluate 48 baseline trackers on LaSOT with in-depth analysis, and results reveal that there still exists significant room for improvement. The complete benchmark, tracking results as well as analysis are available at http://vision.cs.stonybrook.edu/~lasot/.

HEADS-UP: Head-Mounted Egocentric Dataset for Trajectory Prediction in Blind Assistance Systems

In this paper, we introduce HEADS-UP, the first egocentric dataset collected from head-mounted cameras, designed specifically for trajectory prediction in blind assistance systems. With the growing population of blind and visually impaired individuals, the need for intelligent assistive tools that provide real-time warnings about potential collisions with dynamic obstacles is becoming critical. These systems rely on algorithms capable of predicting the trajectories of moving objects, such as pedestrians, to issue timely hazard alerts. However, existing datasets fail to capture the necessary information from the perspective of a blind individual. To address this gap, HEADS-UP offers a novel dataset focused on trajectory prediction in this context. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a semi-local trajectory prediction approach to assess collision risks between blind individuals and pedestrians in dynamic environments. Unlike conventional methods that separately predict the trajectories of both the blind individual (ego agent) and pedestrians, our approach operates within a semi-local coordinate system, a rotated version of the camera's coordinate system, facilitating the prediction process. We validate our method on the HEADS-UP dataset and implement the proposed solution in ROS, performing real-time tests on an NVIDIA Jetson GPU through a user study. Results from both dataset evaluations and live tests demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our approach.

EgoLoc: Revisiting 3D Object Localization from Egocentric Videos with Visual Queries

With the recent advances in video and 3D understanding, novel 4D spatio-temporal methods fusing both concepts have emerged. Towards this direction, the Ego4D Episodic Memory Benchmark proposed a task for Visual Queries with 3D Localization (VQ3D). Given an egocentric video clip and an image crop depicting a query object, the goal is to localize the 3D position of the center of that query object with respect to the camera pose of a query frame. Current methods tackle the problem of VQ3D by unprojecting the 2D localization results of the sibling task Visual Queries with 2D Localization (VQ2D) into 3D predictions. Yet, we point out that the low number of camera poses caused by camera re-localization from previous VQ3D methods severally hinders their overall success rate. In this work, we formalize a pipeline (we dub EgoLoc) that better entangles 3D multiview geometry with 2D object retrieval from egocentric videos. Our approach involves estimating more robust camera poses and aggregating multi-view 3D displacements by leveraging the 2D detection confidence, which enhances the success rate of object queries and leads to a significant improvement in the VQ3D baseline performance. Specifically, our approach achieves an overall success rate of up to 87.12%, which sets a new state-of-the-art result in the VQ3D task. We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the VQ3D task and existing solutions, and highlight the remaining challenges in VQ3D. The code is available at https://github.com/Wayne-Mai/EgoLoc.

RoboSense: Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for Egocentric Robot Perception and Navigation in Crowded and Unstructured Environments

Reliable embodied perception from an egocentric perspective is challenging yet essential for autonomous navigation technology of intelligent mobile agents. With the growing demand of social robotics, near-field scene understanding becomes an important research topic in the areas of egocentric perceptual tasks related to navigation in both crowded and unstructured environments. Due to the complexity of environmental conditions and difficulty of surrounding obstacles owing to truncation and occlusion, the perception capability under this circumstance is still inferior. To further enhance the intelligence of mobile robots, in this paper, we setup an egocentric multi-sensor data collection platform based on 3 main types of sensors (Camera, LiDAR and Fisheye), which supports flexible sensor configurations to enable dynamic sight of view from ego-perspective, capturing either near or farther areas. Meanwhile, a large-scale multimodal dataset is constructed, named RoboSense, to facilitate egocentric robot perception. Specifically, RoboSense contains more than 133K synchronized data with 1.4M 3D bounding box and IDs annotated in the full 360^{circ} view, forming 216K trajectories across 7.6K temporal sequences. It has 270times and 18times as many annotations of surrounding obstacles within near ranges as the previous datasets collected for autonomous driving scenarios such as KITTI and nuScenes. Moreover, we define a novel matching criterion for near-field 3D perception and prediction metrics. Based on RoboSense, we formulate 6 popular tasks to facilitate the future research development, where the detailed analysis as well as benchmarks are also provided accordingly. Data desensitization measures have been conducted for privacy protection.

Multiple Object Tracking as ID Prediction

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has been a long-standing challenge in video understanding. A natural and intuitive approach is to split this task into two parts: object detection and association. Most mainstream methods employ meticulously crafted heuristic techniques to maintain trajectory information and compute cost matrices for object matching. Although these methods can achieve notable tracking performance, they often require a series of elaborate handcrafted modifications while facing complicated scenarios. We believe that manually assumed priors limit the method's adaptability and flexibility in learning optimal tracking capabilities from domain-specific data. Therefore, we introduce a new perspective that treats Multiple Object Tracking as an in-context ID Prediction task, transforming the aforementioned object association into an end-to-end trainable task. Based on this, we propose a simple yet effective method termed MOTIP. Given a set of trajectories carried with ID information, MOTIP directly decodes the ID labels for current detections to accomplish the association process. Without using tailored or sophisticated architectures, our method achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks by solely leveraging object-level features as tracking cues. The simplicity and impressive results of MOTIP leave substantial room for future advancements, thereby making it a promising baseline for subsequent research. Our code and checkpoints are released at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MOTIP.

DIVOTrack: A Novel Dataset and Baseline Method for Cross-View Multi-Object Tracking in DIVerse Open Scenes

Cross-view multi-object tracking aims to link objects between frames and camera views with substantial overlaps. Although cross-view multi-object tracking has received increased attention in recent years, existing datasets still have several issues, including 1) missing real-world scenarios, 2) lacking diverse scenes, 3) owning a limited number of tracks, 4) comprising only static cameras, and 5) lacking standard benchmarks, which hinder the investigation and comparison of cross-view tracking methods. To solve the aforementioned issues, we introduce DIVOTrack: a new cross-view multi-object tracking dataset for DIVerse Open scenes with dense tracking pedestrians in realistic and non-experimental environments. Our DIVOTrack has ten distinct scenarios and 550 cross-view tracks, surpassing all cross-view multi-object tracking datasets currently available. Furthermore, we provide a novel baseline cross-view tracking method with a unified joint detection and cross-view tracking framework named CrossMOT, which learns object detection, single-view association, and cross-view matching with an all-in-one embedding model. Finally, we present a summary of current methodologies and a set of standard benchmarks with our DIVOTrack to provide a fair comparison and conduct a comprehensive analysis of current approaches and our proposed CrossMOT. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/shengyuhao/DIVOTrack.

Calibrating Panoramic Depth Estimation for Practical Localization and Mapping

The absolute depth values of surrounding environments provide crucial cues for various assistive technologies, such as localization, navigation, and 3D structure estimation. We propose that accurate depth estimated from panoramic images can serve as a powerful and light-weight input for a wide range of downstream tasks requiring 3D information. While panoramic images can easily capture the surrounding context from commodity devices, the estimated depth shares the limitations of conventional image-based depth estimation; the performance deteriorates under large domain shifts and the absolute values are still ambiguous to infer from 2D observations. By taking advantage of the holistic view, we mitigate such effects in a self-supervised way and fine-tune the network with geometric consistency during the test phase. Specifically, we construct a 3D point cloud from the current depth prediction and project the point cloud at various viewpoints or apply stretches on the current input image to generate synthetic panoramas. Then we minimize the discrepancy of the 3D structure estimated from synthetic images without collecting additional data. We empirically evaluate our method in robot navigation and map-free localization where our method shows large performance enhancements. Our calibration method can therefore widen the applicability under various external conditions, serving as a key component for practical panorama-based machine vision systems.

CAMELTrack: Context-Aware Multi-cue ExpLoitation for Online Multi-Object Tracking

Online multi-object tracking has been recently dominated by tracking-by-detection (TbD) methods, where recent advances rely on increasingly sophisticated heuristics for tracklet representation, feature fusion, and multi-stage matching. The key strength of TbD lies in its modular design, enabling the integration of specialized off-the-shelf models like motion predictors and re-identification. However, the extensive usage of human-crafted rules for temporal associations makes these methods inherently limited in their ability to capture the complex interplay between various tracking cues. In this work, we introduce CAMEL, a novel association module for Context-Aware Multi-Cue ExpLoitation, that learns resilient association strategies directly from data, breaking free from hand-crafted heuristics while maintaining TbD's valuable modularity. At its core, CAMEL employs two transformer-based modules and relies on a novel association-centric training scheme to effectively model the complex interactions between tracked targets and their various association cues. Unlike end-to-end detection-by-tracking approaches, our method remains lightweight and fast to train while being able to leverage external off-the-shelf models. Our proposed online tracking pipeline, CAMELTrack, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple tracking benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/TrackingLaboratory/CAMELTrack.

The RoboDepth Challenge: Methods and Advancements Towards Robust Depth Estimation

Accurate depth estimation under out-of-distribution (OoD) scenarios, such as adverse weather conditions, sensor failure, and noise contamination, is desirable for safety-critical applications. Existing depth estimation systems, however, suffer inevitably from real-world corruptions and perturbations and are struggled to provide reliable depth predictions under such cases. In this paper, we summarize the winning solutions from the RoboDepth Challenge -- an academic competition designed to facilitate and advance robust OoD depth estimation. This challenge was developed based on the newly established KITTI-C and NYUDepth2-C benchmarks. We hosted two stand-alone tracks, with an emphasis on robust self-supervised and robust fully-supervised depth estimation, respectively. Out of more than two hundred participants, nine unique and top-performing solutions have appeared, with novel designs ranging from the following aspects: spatial- and frequency-domain augmentations, masked image modeling, image restoration and super-resolution, adversarial training, diffusion-based noise suppression, vision-language pre-training, learned model ensembling, and hierarchical feature enhancement. Extensive experimental analyses along with insightful observations are drawn to better understand the rationale behind each design. We hope this challenge could lay a solid foundation for future research on robust and reliable depth estimation and beyond. The datasets, competition toolkit, workshop recordings, and source code from the winning teams are publicly available on the challenge website.

TrajectoryFormer: 3D Object Tracking Transformer with Predictive Trajectory Hypotheses

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is vital for many applications including autonomous driving vehicles and service robots. With the commonly used tracking-by-detection paradigm, 3D MOT has made important progress in recent years. However, these methods only use the detection boxes of the current frame to obtain trajectory-box association results, which makes it impossible for the tracker to recover objects missed by the detector. In this paper, we present TrajectoryFormer, a novel point-cloud-based 3D MOT framework. To recover the missed object by detector, we generates multiple trajectory hypotheses with hybrid candidate boxes, including temporally predicted boxes and current-frame detection boxes, for trajectory-box association. The predicted boxes can propagate object's history trajectory information to the current frame and thus the network can tolerate short-term miss detection of the tracked objects. We combine long-term object motion feature and short-term object appearance feature to create per-hypothesis feature embedding, which reduces the computational overhead for spatial-temporal encoding. Additionally, we introduce a Global-Local Interaction Module to conduct information interaction among all hypotheses and models their spatial relations, leading to accurate estimation of hypotheses. Our TrajectoryFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Waymo 3D MOT benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/poodarchu/EFG .

MambaTrack: A Simple Baseline for Multiple Object Tracking with State Space Model

Tracking by detection has been the prevailing paradigm in the field of Multi-object Tracking (MOT). These methods typically rely on the Kalman Filter to estimate the future locations of objects, assuming linear object motion. However, they fall short when tracking objects exhibiting nonlinear and diverse motion in scenarios like dancing and sports. In addition, there has been limited focus on utilizing learning-based motion predictors in MOT. To address these challenges, we resort to exploring data-driven motion prediction methods. Inspired by the great expectation of state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, in long-term sequence modeling with near-linear complexity, we introduce a Mamba-based motion model named Mamba moTion Predictor (MTP). MTP is designed to model the complex motion patterns of objects like dancers and athletes. Specifically, MTP takes the spatial-temporal location dynamics of objects as input, captures the motion pattern using a bi-Mamba encoding layer, and predicts the next motion. In real-world scenarios, objects may be missed due to occlusion or motion blur, leading to premature termination of their trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we further expand the application of MTP. We employ it in an autoregressive way to compensate for missing observations by utilizing its own predictions as inputs, thereby contributing to more consistent trajectories. Our proposed tracker, MambaTrack, demonstrates advanced performance on benchmarks such as Dancetrack and SportsMOT, which are characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion.

Monocular Quasi-Dense 3D Object Tracking

A reliable and accurate 3D tracking framework is essential for predicting future locations of surrounding objects and planning the observer's actions in numerous applications such as autonomous driving. We propose a framework that can effectively associate moving objects over time and estimate their full 3D bounding box information from a sequence of 2D images captured on a moving platform. The object association leverages quasi-dense similarity learning to identify objects in various poses and viewpoints with appearance cues only. After initial 2D association, we further utilize 3D bounding boxes depth-ordering heuristics for robust instance association and motion-based 3D trajectory prediction for re-identification of occluded vehicles. In the end, an LSTM-based object velocity learning module aggregates the long-term trajectory information for more accurate motion extrapolation. Experiments on our proposed simulation data and real-world benchmarks, including KITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo datasets, show that our tracking framework offers robust object association and tracking on urban-driving scenarios. On the Waymo Open benchmark, we establish the first camera-only baseline in the 3D tracking and 3D detection challenges. Our quasi-dense 3D tracking pipeline achieves impressive improvements on the nuScenes 3D tracking benchmark with near five times tracking accuracy of the best vision-only submission among all published methods. Our code, data and trained models are available at https://github.com/SysCV/qd-3dt.

Aria Digital Twin: A New Benchmark Dataset for Egocentric 3D Machine Perception

We introduce the Aria Digital Twin (ADT) - an egocentric dataset captured using Aria glasses with extensive object, environment, and human level ground truth. This ADT release contains 200 sequences of real-world activities conducted by Aria wearers in two real indoor scenes with 398 object instances (324 stationary and 74 dynamic). Each sequence consists of: a) raw data of two monochrome camera streams, one RGB camera stream, two IMU streams; b) complete sensor calibration; c) ground truth data including continuous 6-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) poses of the Aria devices, object 6DoF poses, 3D eye gaze vectors, 3D human poses, 2D image segmentations, image depth maps; and d) photo-realistic synthetic renderings. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing egocentric dataset with a level of accuracy, photo-realism and comprehensiveness comparable to ADT. By contributing ADT to the research community, our mission is to set a new standard for evaluation in the egocentric machine perception domain, which includes very challenging research problems such as 3D object detection and tracking, scene reconstruction and understanding, sim-to-real learning, human pose prediction - while also inspiring new machine perception tasks for augmented reality (AR) applications. To kick start exploration of the ADT research use cases, we evaluated several existing state-of-the-art methods for object detection, segmentation and image translation tasks that demonstrate the usefulness of ADT as a benchmarking dataset.

HOT3D: Hand and Object Tracking in 3D from Egocentric Multi-View Videos

We introduce HOT3D, a publicly available dataset for egocentric hand and object tracking in 3D. The dataset offers over 833 minutes (more than 3.7M images) of multi-view RGB/monochrome image streams showing 19 subjects interacting with 33 diverse rigid objects, multi-modal signals such as eye gaze or scene point clouds, as well as comprehensive ground-truth annotations including 3D poses of objects, hands, and cameras, and 3D models of hands and objects. In addition to simple pick-up/observe/put-down actions, HOT3D contains scenarios resembling typical actions in a kitchen, office, and living room environment. The dataset is recorded by two head-mounted devices from Meta: Project Aria, a research prototype of light-weight AR/AI glasses, and Quest 3, a production VR headset sold in millions of units. Ground-truth poses were obtained by a professional motion-capture system using small optical markers attached to hands and objects. Hand annotations are provided in the UmeTrack and MANO formats and objects are represented by 3D meshes with PBR materials obtained by an in-house scanner. In our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-view egocentric data for three popular tasks: 3D hand tracking, 6DoF object pose estimation, and 3D lifting of unknown in-hand objects. The evaluated multi-view methods, whose benchmarking is uniquely enabled by HOT3D, significantly outperform their single-view counterparts.

EgoSim: An Egocentric Multi-view Simulator and Real Dataset for Body-worn Cameras during Motion and Activity

Research on egocentric tasks in computer vision has mostly focused on head-mounted cameras, such as fisheye cameras or embedded cameras inside immersive headsets. We argue that the increasing miniaturization of optical sensors will lead to the prolific integration of cameras into many more body-worn devices at various locations. This will bring fresh perspectives to established tasks in computer vision and benefit key areas such as human motion tracking, body pose estimation, or action recognition -- particularly for the lower body, which is typically occluded. In this paper, we introduce EgoSim, a novel simulator of body-worn cameras that generates realistic egocentric renderings from multiple perspectives across a wearer's body. A key feature of EgoSim is its use of real motion capture data to render motion artifacts, which are especially noticeable with arm- or leg-worn cameras. In addition, we introduce MultiEgoView, a dataset of egocentric footage from six body-worn cameras and ground-truth full-body 3D poses during several activities: 119 hours of data are derived from AMASS motion sequences in four high-fidelity virtual environments, which we augment with 5 hours of real-world motion data from 13 participants using six GoPro cameras and 3D body pose references from an Xsens motion capture suit. We demonstrate EgoSim's effectiveness by training an end-to-end video-only 3D pose estimation network. Analyzing its domain gap, we show that our dataset and simulator substantially aid training for inference on real-world data. EgoSim code & MultiEgoView dataset: https://siplab.org/projects/EgoSim

COPILOT: Human-Environment Collision Prediction and Localization from Egocentric Videos

The ability to forecast human-environment collisions from egocentric observations is vital to enable collision avoidance in applications such as VR, AR, and wearable assistive robotics. In this work, we introduce the challenging problem of predicting collisions in diverse environments from multi-view egocentric videos captured from body-mounted cameras. Solving this problem requires a generalizable perception system that can classify which human body joints will collide and estimate a collision region heatmap to localize collisions in the environment. To achieve this, we propose a transformer-based model called COPILOT to perform collision prediction and localization simultaneously, which accumulates information across multi-view inputs through a novel 4D space-time-viewpoint attention mechanism. To train our model and enable future research on this task, we develop a synthetic data generation framework that produces egocentric videos of virtual humans moving and colliding within diverse 3D environments. This framework is then used to establish a large-scale dataset consisting of 8.6M egocentric RGBD frames. Extensive experiments show that COPILOT generalizes to unseen synthetic as well as real-world scenes. We further demonstrate COPILOT outputs are useful for downstream collision avoidance through simple closed-loop control. Please visit our project webpage at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/copilot.

TimberVision: A Multi-Task Dataset and Framework for Log-Component Segmentation and Tracking in Autonomous Forestry Operations

Timber represents an increasingly valuable and versatile resource. However, forestry operations such as harvesting, handling and measuring logs still require substantial human labor in remote environments posing significant safety risks. Progressively automating these tasks has the potential of increasing their efficiency as well as safety, but requires an accurate detection of individual logs as well as live trees and their context. Although initial approaches have been proposed for this challenging application domain, specialized data and algorithms are still too scarce to develop robust solutions. To mitigate this gap, we introduce the TimberVision dataset, consisting of more than 2k annotated RGB images containing a total of 51k trunk components including cut and lateral surfaces, thereby surpassing any existing dataset in this domain in terms of both quantity and detail by a large margin. Based on this data, we conduct a series of ablation experiments for oriented object detection and instance segmentation and evaluate the influence of multiple scene parameters on model performance. We introduce a generic framework to fuse the components detected by our models for both tasks into unified trunk representations. Furthermore, we automatically derive geometric properties and apply multi-object tracking to further enhance robustness. Our detection and tracking approach provides highly descriptive and accurate trunk representations solely from RGB image data, even under challenging environmental conditions. Our solution is suitable for a wide range of application scenarios and can be readily combined with other sensor modalities.

ShaSTA-Fuse: Camera-LiDAR Sensor Fusion to Model Shape and Spatio-Temporal Affinities for 3D Multi-Object Tracking

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is essential for an autonomous mobile agent to safely navigate a scene. In order to maximize the perception capabilities of the autonomous agent, we aim to develop a 3D MOT framework that fuses camera and LiDAR sensor information. Building on our prior LiDAR-only work, ShaSTA, which models shape and spatio-temporal affinities for 3D MOT, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion approach for learning affinities. At its core, this work proposes a fusion technique that generates a rich sensory signal incorporating information about depth and distant objects to enhance affinity estimation for improved data association, track lifecycle management, false-positive elimination, false-negative propagation, and track confidence score refinement. Our main contributions include a novel fusion approach for combining camera and LiDAR sensory signals to learn affinities, and a first-of-its-kind multimodal sequential track confidence refinement technique that fuses 2D and 3D detections. Additionally, we perform an ablative analysis on each fusion step to demonstrate the added benefits of incorporating the camera sensor, particular for small, distant objects that tend to suffer from the depth-sensing limits and sparsity of LiDAR sensors. In sum, our technique achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark amongst multimodal 3D MOT algorithms using CenterPoint detections.

Enhancing Worldwide Image Geolocation by Ensembling Satellite-Based Ground-Level Attribute Predictors

Geolocating images of a ground-level scene entails estimating the location on Earth where the picture was taken, in absence of GPS or other location metadata. Typically, methods are evaluated by measuring the Great Circle Distance (GCD) between a predicted location and ground truth. However, this measurement is limited because it only evaluates a single point, not estimates of regions or score heatmaps. This is especially important in applications to rural, wilderness and under-sampled areas, where finding the exact location may not be possible, and when used in aggregate systems that progressively narrow down locations. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric, Recall vs Area (RvA), which measures the accuracy of estimated distributions of locations. RvA treats image geolocation results similarly to document retrieval, measuring recall as a function of area: For a ranked list of (possibly non-contiguous) predicted regions, we measure the accumulated area required for the region to contain the ground truth coordinate. This produces a curve similar to a precision-recall curve, where "precision" is replaced by square kilometers area, allowing evaluation of performance for different downstream search area budgets. Following directly from this view of the problem, we then examine a simple ensembling approach to global-scale image geolocation, which incorporates information from multiple sources to help address domain shift, and can readily incorporate multiple models, attribute predictors, and data sources. We study its effectiveness by combining the geolocation models GeoEstimation and the current SOTA GeoCLIP, with attribute predictors based on ORNL LandScan and ESA-CCI Land Cover. We find significant improvements in image geolocation for areas that are under-represented in the training set, particularly non-urban areas, on both Im2GPS3k and Street View images.

Localizing Active Objects from Egocentric Vision with Symbolic World Knowledge

The ability to actively ground task instructions from an egocentric view is crucial for AI agents to accomplish tasks or assist humans virtually. One important step towards this goal is to localize and track key active objects that undergo major state change as a consequence of human actions/interactions to the environment without being told exactly what/where to ground (e.g., localizing and tracking the `sponge` in video from the instruction "Dip the `sponge` into the bucket."). While existing works approach this problem from a pure vision perspective, we investigate to which extent the textual modality (i.e., task instructions) and their interaction with visual modality can be beneficial. Specifically, we propose to improve phrase grounding models' ability on localizing the active objects by: (1) learning the role of `objects undergoing change` and extracting them accurately from the instructions, (2) leveraging pre- and post-conditions of the objects during actions, and (3) recognizing the objects more robustly with descriptional knowledge. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to extract the aforementioned action-object knowledge, and design a per-object aggregation masking technique to effectively perform joint inference on object phrases and symbolic knowledge. We evaluate our framework on Ego4D and Epic-Kitchens datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which leads to>54% improvements in all standard metrics on the TREK-150-OPE-Det localization + tracking task, >7% improvements in all standard metrics on the TREK-150-OPE tracking task, and >3% improvements in average precision (AP) on the Ego4D SCOD task.

StrongSORT: Make DeepSORT Great Again

Recently, Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has attracted rising attention, and accordingly, remarkable progresses have been achieved. However, the existing methods tend to use various basic models (e.g, detector and embedding model), and different training or inference tricks, etc. As a result, the construction of a good baseline for a fair comparison is essential. In this paper, a classic tracker, i.e., DeepSORT, is first revisited, and then is significantly improved from multiple perspectives such as object detection, feature embedding, and trajectory association. The proposed tracker, named StrongSORT, contributes a strong and fair baseline for the MOT community. Moreover, two lightweight and plug-and-play algorithms are proposed to address two inherent "missing" problems of MOT: missing association and missing detection. Specifically, unlike most methods, which associate short tracklets into complete trajectories at high computation complexity, we propose an appearance-free link model (AFLink) to perform global association without appearance information, and achieve a good balance between speed and accuracy. Furthermore, we propose a Gaussian-smoothed interpolation (GSI) based on Gaussian process regression to relieve the missing detection. AFLink and GSI can be easily plugged into various trackers with a negligible extra computational cost (1.7 ms and 7.1 ms per image, respectively, on MOT17). Finally, by fusing StrongSORT with AFLink and GSI, the final tracker (StrongSORT++) achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple public benchmarks, i.e., MOT17, MOT20, DanceTrack and KITTI. Codes are available at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/StrongSORT and https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmtracking.

Online Unsupervised Feature Learning for Visual Tracking

Feature encoding with respect to an over-complete dictionary learned by unsupervised methods, followed by spatial pyramid pooling, and linear classification, has exhibited powerful strength in various vision applications. Here we propose to use the feature learning pipeline for visual tracking. Tracking is implemented using tracking-by-detection and the resulted framework is very simple yet effective. First, online dictionary learning is used to build a dictionary, which captures the appearance changes of the tracking target as well as the background changes. Given a test image window, we extract local image patches from it and each local patch is encoded with respect to the dictionary. The encoded features are then pooled over a spatial pyramid to form an aggregated feature vector. Finally, a simple linear classifier is trained on these features. Our experiments show that the proposed powerful---albeit simple---tracker, outperforms all the state-of-the-art tracking methods that we have tested. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of different dictionary learning and feature encoding methods in the proposed tracking framework, and analyse the impact of each component in the tracking scenario. We also demonstrate the flexibility of feature learning by plugging it into Hare et al.'s tracking method. The outcome is, to our knowledge, the best tracker ever reported, which facilitates the advantages of both feature learning and structured output prediction.

Teaching VLMs to Localize Specific Objects from In-context Examples

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse visual tasks, including image recognition, video understanding, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) when explicitly trained for these tasks. Despite these advances, we find that current VLMs lack a fundamental cognitive ability: learning to localize objects in a scene by taking into account the context. In this work, we focus on the task of few-shot personalized localization, where a model is given a small set of annotated images (in-context examples) -- each with a category label and bounding box -- and is tasked with localizing the same object type in a query image. To provoke personalized localization abilities in models, we present a data-centric solution that fine-tunes them using carefully curated data from video object tracking datasets. By leveraging sequences of frames tracking the same object across multiple shots, we simulate instruction-tuning dialogues that promote context awareness. To reinforce this, we introduce a novel regularization technique that replaces object labels with pseudo-names, ensuring the model relies on visual context rather than prior knowledge. Our method significantly enhances few-shot localization performance without sacrificing generalization, as demonstrated on several benchmarks tailored to personalized localization. This work is the first to explore and benchmark personalized few-shot localization for VLMs, laying a foundation for future research in context-driven vision-language applications. The code for our project is available at https://github.com/SivanDoveh/IPLoc

RePo: Resilient Model-Based Reinforcement Learning by Regularizing Posterior Predictability

Visual model-based RL methods typically encode image observations into low-dimensional representations in a manner that does not eliminate redundant information. This leaves them susceptible to spurious variations -- changes in task-irrelevant components such as background distractors or lighting conditions. In this paper, we propose a visual model-based RL method that learns a latent representation resilient to such spurious variations. Our training objective encourages the representation to be maximally predictive of dynamics and reward, while constraining the information flow from the observation to the latent representation. We demonstrate that this objective significantly bolsters the resilience of visual model-based RL methods to visual distractors, allowing them to operate in dynamic environments. We then show that while the learned encoder is resilient to spirious variations, it is not invariant under significant distribution shift. To address this, we propose a simple reward-free alignment procedure that enables test time adaptation of the encoder. This allows for quick adaptation to widely differing environments without having to relearn the dynamics and policy. Our effort is a step towards making model-based RL a practical and useful tool for dynamic, diverse domains. We show its effectiveness in simulation benchmarks with significant spurious variations as well as a real-world egocentric navigation task with noisy TVs in the background. Videos and code at https://zchuning.github.io/repo-website/.

EgoLife: Towards Egocentric Life Assistant

We introduce EgoLife, a project to develop an egocentric life assistant that accompanies and enhances personal efficiency through AI-powered wearable glasses. To lay the foundation for this assistant, we conducted a comprehensive data collection study where six participants lived together for one week, continuously recording their daily activities - including discussions, shopping, cooking, socializing, and entertainment - using AI glasses for multimodal egocentric video capture, along with synchronized third-person-view video references. This effort resulted in the EgoLife Dataset, a comprehensive 300-hour egocentric, interpersonal, multiview, and multimodal daily life dataset with intensive annotation. Leveraging this dataset, we introduce EgoLifeQA, a suite of long-context, life-oriented question-answering tasks designed to provide meaningful assistance in daily life by addressing practical questions such as recalling past relevant events, monitoring health habits, and offering personalized recommendations. To address the key technical challenges of (1) developing robust visual-audio models for egocentric data, (2) enabling identity recognition, and (3) facilitating long-context question answering over extensive temporal information, we introduce EgoButler, an integrated system comprising EgoGPT and EgoRAG. EgoGPT is an omni-modal model trained on egocentric datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on egocentric video understanding. EgoRAG is a retrieval-based component that supports answering ultra-long-context questions. Our experimental studies verify their working mechanisms and reveal critical factors and bottlenecks, guiding future improvements. By releasing our datasets, models, and benchmarks, we aim to stimulate further research in egocentric AI assistants.

Towards Category Unification of 3D Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds

Category-specific models are provenly valuable methods in 3D single object tracking (SOT) regardless of Siamese or motion-centric paradigms. However, such over-specialized model designs incur redundant parameters, thus limiting the broader applicability of 3D SOT task. This paper first introduces unified models that can simultaneously track objects across all categories using a single network with shared model parameters. Specifically, we propose to explicitly encode distinct attributes associated to different object categories, enabling the model to adapt to cross-category data. We find that the attribute variances of point cloud objects primarily occur from the varying size and shape (e.g., large and square vehicles v.s. small and slender humans). Based on this observation, we design a novel point set representation learning network inheriting transformer architecture, termed AdaFormer, which adaptively encodes the dynamically varying shape and size information from cross-category data in a unified manner. We further incorporate the size and shape prior derived from the known template targets into the model's inputs and learning objective, facilitating the learning of unified representation. Equipped with such designs, we construct two category-unified models SiamCUT and MoCUT.Extensive experiments demonstrate that SiamCUT and MoCUT exhibit strong generalization and training stability. Furthermore, our category-unified models outperform the category-specific counterparts by a significant margin (e.g., on KITTI dataset, 12% and 3% performance gains on the Siamese and motion paradigms). Our code will be available.

Image-based Geo-localization for Robotics: Are Black-box Vision-Language Models there yet?

The advances in Vision-Language models (VLMs) offer exciting opportunities for robotic applications involving image geo-localization, the problem of identifying the geo-coordinates of a place based on visual data only. Recent research works have focused on using a VLM as embeddings extractor for geo-localization, however, the most sophisticated VLMs may only be available as black boxes that are accessible through an API, and come with a number of limitations: there is no access to training data, model features and gradients; retraining is not possible; the number of predictions may be limited by the API; training on model outputs is often prohibited; and queries are open-ended. The utilization of a VLM as a stand-alone, zero-shot geo-localization system using a single text-based prompt is largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, this paper undertakes the first systematic study, to the best of our knowledge, to investigate the potential of some of the state-of-the-art VLMs as stand-alone, zero-shot geo-localization systems in a black-box setting with realistic constraints. We consider three main scenarios for this thorough investigation: a) fixed text-based prompt; b) semantically-equivalent text-based prompts; and c) semantically-equivalent query images. We also take into account the auto-regressive and probabilistic generation process of the VLMs when investigating their utility for geo-localization task by using model consistency as a metric in addition to traditional accuracy. Our work provides new insights in the capabilities of different VLMs for the above-mentioned scenarios.

OOSTraj: Out-of-Sight Trajectory Prediction With Vision-Positioning Denoising

Trajectory prediction is fundamental in computer vision and autonomous driving, particularly for understanding pedestrian behavior and enabling proactive decision-making. Existing approaches in this field often assume precise and complete observational data, neglecting the challenges associated with out-of-view objects and the noise inherent in sensor data due to limited camera range, physical obstructions, and the absence of ground truth for denoised sensor data. Such oversights are critical safety concerns, as they can result in missing essential, non-visible objects. To bridge this gap, we present a novel method for out-of-sight trajectory prediction that leverages a vision-positioning technique. Our approach denoises noisy sensor observations in an unsupervised manner and precisely maps sensor-based trajectories of out-of-sight objects into visual trajectories. This method has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in out-of-sight noisy sensor trajectory denoising and prediction on the Vi-Fi and JRDB datasets. By enhancing trajectory prediction accuracy and addressing the challenges of out-of-sight objects, our work significantly contributes to improving the safety and reliability of autonomous driving in complex environments. Our work represents the first initiative towards Out-Of-Sight Trajectory prediction (OOSTraj), setting a new benchmark for future research. The code is available at https://github.com/Hai-chao-Zhang/OOSTraj.

3DMOTFormer: Graph Transformer for Online 3D Multi-Object Tracking

Tracking 3D objects accurately and consistently is crucial for autonomous vehicles, enabling more reliable downstream tasks such as trajectory prediction and motion planning. Based on the substantial progress in object detection in recent years, the tracking-by-detection paradigm has become a popular choice due to its simplicity and efficiency. State-of-the-art 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) approaches typically rely on non-learned model-based algorithms such as Kalman Filter but require many manually tuned parameters. On the other hand, learning-based approaches face the problem of adapting the training to the online setting, leading to inevitable distribution mismatch between training and inference as well as suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose 3DMOTFormer, a learned geometry-based 3D MOT framework building upon the transformer architecture. We use an Edge-Augmented Graph Transformer to reason on the track-detection bipartite graph frame-by-frame and conduct data association via edge classification. To reduce the distribution mismatch between training and inference, we propose a novel online training strategy with an autoregressive and recurrent forward pass as well as sequential batch optimization. Using CenterPoint detections, our approach achieves 71.2% and 68.2% AMOTA on the nuScenes validation and test split, respectively. In addition, a trained 3DMOTFormer model generalizes well across different object detectors. Code is available at: https://github.com/dsx0511/3DMOTFormer.

EgoGen: An Egocentric Synthetic Data Generator

Understanding the world in first-person view is fundamental in Augmented Reality (AR). This immersive perspective brings dramatic visual changes and unique challenges compared to third-person views. Synthetic data has empowered third-person-view vision models, but its application to embodied egocentric perception tasks remains largely unexplored. A critical challenge lies in simulating natural human movements and behaviors that effectively steer the embodied cameras to capture a faithful egocentric representation of the 3D world. To address this challenge, we introduce EgoGen, a new synthetic data generator that can produce accurate and rich ground-truth training data for egocentric perception tasks. At the heart of EgoGen is a novel human motion synthesis model that directly leverages egocentric visual inputs of a virtual human to sense the 3D environment. Combined with collision-avoiding motion primitives and a two-stage reinforcement learning approach, our motion synthesis model offers a closed-loop solution where the embodied perception and movement of the virtual human are seamlessly coupled. Compared to previous works, our model eliminates the need for a pre-defined global path, and is directly applicable to dynamic environments. Combined with our easy-to-use and scalable data generation pipeline, we demonstrate EgoGen's efficacy in three tasks: mapping and localization for head-mounted cameras, egocentric camera tracking, and human mesh recovery from egocentric views. EgoGen will be fully open-sourced, offering a practical solution for creating realistic egocentric training data and aiming to serve as a useful tool for egocentric computer vision research. Refer to our project page: https://ego-gen.github.io/.

Estimation of Appearance and Occupancy Information in Birds Eye View from Surround Monocular Images

Autonomous driving requires efficient reasoning about the location and appearance of the different agents in the scene, which aids in downstream tasks such as object detection, object tracking, and path planning. The past few years have witnessed a surge in approaches that combine the different taskbased modules of the classic self-driving stack into an End-toEnd(E2E) trainable learning system. These approaches replace perception, prediction, and sensor fusion modules with a single contiguous module with shared latent space embedding, from which one extracts a human-interpretable representation of the scene. One of the most popular representations is the Birds-eye View (BEV), which expresses the location of different traffic participants in the ego vehicle frame from a top-down view. However, a BEV does not capture the chromatic appearance information of the participants. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel representation that captures various traffic participants appearance and occupancy information from an array of monocular cameras covering 360 deg field of view (FOV). We use a learned image embedding of all camera images to generate a BEV of the scene at any instant that captures both appearance and occupancy of the scene, which can aid in downstream tasks such as object tracking and executing language-based commands. We test the efficacy of our approach on synthetic dataset generated from CARLA. The code, data set, and results can be found at https://rebrand.ly/APP OCC-results.

PlanarTrack: A Large-scale Challenging Benchmark for Planar Object Tracking

Planar object tracking is a critical computer vision problem and has drawn increasing interest owing to its key roles in robotics, augmented reality, etc. Despite rapid progress, its further development, especially in the deep learning era, is largely hindered due to the lack of large-scale challenging benchmarks. Addressing this, we introduce PlanarTrack, a large-scale challenging planar tracking benchmark. Specifically, PlanarTrack consists of 1,000 videos with more than 490K images. All these videos are collected in complex unconstrained scenarios from the wild, which makes PlanarTrack, compared with existing benchmarks, more challenging but realistic for real-world applications. To ensure the high-quality annotation, each frame in PlanarTrack is manually labeled using four corners with multiple-round careful inspection and refinement. To our best knowledge, PlanarTrack, to date, is the largest and most challenging dataset dedicated to planar object tracking. In order to analyze the proposed PlanarTrack, we evaluate 10 planar trackers and conduct comprehensive comparisons and in-depth analysis. Our results, not surprisingly, demonstrate that current top-performing planar trackers degenerate significantly on the challenging PlanarTrack and more efforts are needed to improve planar tracking in the future. In addition, we further derive a variant named PlanarTrack_{BB} for generic object tracking from PlanarTrack. Our evaluation of 10 excellent generic trackers on PlanarTrack_{BB} manifests that, surprisingly, PlanarTrack_{BB} is even more challenging than several popular generic tracking benchmarks and more attention should be paid to handle such planar objects, though they are rigid. All benchmarks and evaluations will be released at the project webpage.

ViewSpatial-Bench: Evaluating Multi-perspective Spatial Localization in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and reasoning about visual content, but significant challenges persist in tasks requiring cross-viewpoint understanding and spatial reasoning. We identify a critical limitation: current VLMs excel primarily at egocentric spatial reasoning (from the camera's perspective) but fail to generalize to allocentric viewpoints when required to adopt another entity's spatial frame of reference. We introduce ViewSpatial-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically for multi-viewpoint spatial localization recognition evaluation across five distinct task types, supported by an automated 3D annotation pipeline that generates precise directional labels. Comprehensive evaluation of diverse VLMs on ViewSpatial-Bench reveals a significant performance disparity: models demonstrate reasonable performance on camera-perspective tasks but exhibit reduced accuracy when reasoning from a human viewpoint. By fine-tuning VLMs on our multi-perspective spatial dataset, we achieve an overall performance improvement of 46.24% across tasks, highlighting the efficacy of our approach. Our work establishes a crucial benchmark for spatial intelligence in embodied AI systems and provides empirical evidence that modeling 3D spatial relationships enhances VLMs' corresponding spatial comprehension capabilities.

CloudTracks: A Dataset for Localizing Ship Tracks in Satellite Images of Clouds

Clouds play a significant role in global temperature regulation through their effect on planetary albedo. Anthropogenic emissions of aerosols can alter the albedo of clouds, but the extent of this effect, and its consequent impact on temperature change, remains uncertain. Human-induced clouds caused by ship aerosol emissions, commonly referred to as ship tracks, provide visible manifestations of this effect distinct from adjacent cloud regions and therefore serve as a useful sandbox to study human-induced clouds. However, the lack of large-scale ship track data makes it difficult to deduce their general effects on cloud formation. Towards developing automated approaches to localize ship tracks at scale, we present CloudTracks, a dataset containing 3,560 satellite images labeled with more than 12,000 ship track instance annotations. We train semantic segmentation and instance segmentation model baselines on our dataset and find that our best model substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art for ship track localization (61.29 vs. 48.65 IoU). We also find that the best instance segmentation model is able to identify the number of ship tracks in each image more accurately than the previous state-of-the-art (1.64 vs. 4.99 MAE). However, we identify cases where the best model struggles to accurately localize and count ship tracks, so we believe CloudTracks will stimulate novel machine learning approaches to better detect elongated and overlapping features in satellite images. We release our dataset openly at {zenodo.org/records/10042922}.

EgoMe: Follow Me via Egocentric View in Real World

When interacting with the real world, human often take the egocentric (first-person) view as a benchmark, naturally transferring behaviors observed from a exocentric (third-person) view to their own. This cognitive theory provides a foundation for researching how robots can more effectively imitate human behavior. However, current research either employs multiple cameras with different views focusing on the same individual's behavior simultaneously or encounters unpair ego-exo view scenarios, there is no effort to fully exploit human cognitive behavior in the real world. To fill this gap, in this paper, we introduce a novel large-scale egocentric dataset, called EgoMe, which towards following the process of human imitation learning via egocentric view in the real world. Our dataset includes 7902 pairs of videos (15804 videos) for diverse daily behaviors in real-world scenarios. For a pair of videos, one video captures a exocentric view of the imitator observing the demonstrator's actions, while the other captures a egocentric view of the imitator subsequently following those actions. Notably, our dataset also contain exo-ego eye gaze, angular velocity, acceleration, magnetic strength and other sensor multi-modal data for assisting in establishing correlations between observing and following process. In addition, we also propose eight challenging benchmark tasks for fully leveraging this data resource and promoting the research of robot imitation learning ability. Extensive statistical analysis demonstrates significant advantages compared to existing datasets. The proposed EgoMe dataset and benchmark will be released soon.

UncTrack: Reliable Visual Object Tracking with Uncertainty-Aware Prototype Memory Network

Transformer-based trackers have achieved promising success and become the dominant tracking paradigm due to their accuracy and efficiency. Despite the substantial progress, most of the existing approaches tackle object tracking as a deterministic coordinate regression problem, while the target localization uncertainty has been greatly overlooked, which hampers trackers' ability to maintain reliable target state prediction in challenging scenarios. To address this issue, we propose UncTrack, a novel uncertainty-aware transformer tracker that predicts the target localization uncertainty and incorporates this uncertainty information for accurate target state inference. Specifically, UncTrack utilizes a transformer encoder to perform feature interaction between template and search images. The output features are passed into an uncertainty-aware localization decoder (ULD) to coarsely predict the corner-based localization and the corresponding localization uncertainty. Then the localization uncertainty is sent into a prototype memory network (PMN) to excavate valuable historical information to identify whether the target state prediction is reliable or not. To enhance the template representation, the samples with high confidence are fed back into the prototype memory bank for memory updating, making the tracker more robust to challenging appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ManOfStory/UncTrack.

EgoVid-5M: A Large-Scale Video-Action Dataset for Egocentric Video Generation

Video generation has emerged as a promising tool for world simulation, leveraging visual data to replicate real-world environments. Within this context, egocentric video generation, which centers on the human perspective, holds significant potential for enhancing applications in virtual reality, augmented reality, and gaming. However, the generation of egocentric videos presents substantial challenges due to the dynamic nature of egocentric viewpoints, the intricate diversity of actions, and the complex variety of scenes encountered. Existing datasets are inadequate for addressing these challenges effectively. To bridge this gap, we present EgoVid-5M, the first high-quality dataset specifically curated for egocentric video generation. EgoVid-5M encompasses 5 million egocentric video clips and is enriched with detailed action annotations, including fine-grained kinematic control and high-level textual descriptions. To ensure the integrity and usability of the dataset, we implement a sophisticated data cleaning pipeline designed to maintain frame consistency, action coherence, and motion smoothness under egocentric conditions. Furthermore, we introduce EgoDreamer, which is capable of generating egocentric videos driven simultaneously by action descriptions and kinematic control signals. The EgoVid-5M dataset, associated action annotations, and all data cleansing metadata will be released for the advancement of research in egocentric video generation.

Large-Scale Person Detection and Localization using Overhead Fisheye Cameras

Location determination finds wide applications in daily life. Instead of existing efforts devoted to localizing tourist photos captured by perspective cameras, in this article, we focus on devising person positioning solutions using overhead fisheye cameras. Such solutions are advantageous in large field of view (FOV), low cost, anti-occlusion, and unaggressive work mode (without the necessity of cameras carried by persons). However, related studies are quite scarce, due to the paucity of data. To stimulate research in this exciting area, we present LOAF, the first large-scale overhead fisheye dataset for person detection and localization. LOAF is built with many essential features, e.g., i) the data cover abundant diversities in scenes, human pose, density, and location; ii) it contains currently the largest number of annotated pedestrian, i.e., 457K bounding boxes with groundtruth location information; iii) the body-boxes are labeled as radius-aligned so as to fully address the positioning challenge. To approach localization, we build a fisheye person detection network, which exploits the fisheye distortions by a rotation-equivariant training strategy and predict radius-aligned human boxes end-to-end. Then, the actual locations of the detected persons are calculated by a numerical solution on the fisheye model and camera altitude data. Extensive experiments on LOAF validate the superiority of our fisheye detector w.r.t. previous methods, and show that our whole fisheye positioning solution is able to locate all persons in FOV with an accuracy of 0.5 m, within 0.1 s.

HiMo: High-Speed Objects Motion Compensation in Point Clouds

LiDAR point clouds often contain motion-induced distortions, degrading the accuracy of object appearances in the captured data. In this paper, we first characterize the underlying reasons for the point cloud distortion and show that this is present in public datasets. We find that this distortion is more pronounced in high-speed environments such as highways, as well as in multi-LiDAR configurations, a common setup for heavy vehicles. Previous work has dealt with point cloud distortion from the ego-motion but fails to consider distortion from the motion of other objects. We therefore introduce a novel undistortion pipeline, HiMo, that leverages scene flow estimation for object motion compensation, correcting the depiction of dynamic objects. We further propose an extension of a state-of-the-art self-supervised scene flow method. Due to the lack of well-established motion distortion metrics in the literature, we also propose two metrics for compensation performance evaluation: compensation accuracy at a point level and shape similarity on objects. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 dataset and a new real-world dataset. Our new dataset is collected from heavy vehicles equipped with multi-LiDARs and on highways as opposed to mostly urban settings in the existing datasets. The source code, including all methods and the evaluation data, will be provided upon publication. See https://kin-zhang.github.io/HiMo for more details.

Privacy-preserving Pedestrian Tracking using Distributed 3D LiDARs

The growing demand for intelligent environments unleashes an extraordinary cycle of privacy-aware applications that makes individuals' life more comfortable and safe. Examples of these applications include pedestrian tracking systems in large areas. Although the ubiquity of camera-based systems, they are not a preferable solution due to the vulnerability of leaking the privacy of pedestrians. In this paper, we introduce a novel privacy-preserving system for pedestrian tracking in smart environments using multiple distributed LiDARs of non-overlapping views. The system is designed to leverage LiDAR devices to track pedestrians in partially covered areas due to practical constraints, e.g., occlusion or cost. Therefore, the system uses the point cloud captured by different LiDARs to extract discriminative features that are used to train a metric learning model for pedestrian matching purposes. To boost the system's robustness, we leverage a probabilistic approach to model and adapt the dynamic mobility patterns of individuals and thus connect their sub-trajectories. We deployed the system in a large-scale testbed with 70 colorless LiDARs and conducted three different experiments. The evaluation result at the entrance hall confirms the system's ability to accurately track the pedestrians with a 0.98 F-measure even with zero-covered areas. This result highlights the promise of the proposed system as the next generation of privacy-preserving tracking means in smart environments.

Joint Visual Grounding and Tracking with Natural Language Specification

Tracking by natural language specification aims to locate the referred target in a sequence based on the natural language description. Existing algorithms solve this issue in two steps, visual grounding and tracking, and accordingly deploy the separated grounding model and tracking model to implement these two steps, respectively. Such a separated framework overlooks the link between visual grounding and tracking, which is that the natural language descriptions provide global semantic cues for localizing the target for both two steps. Besides, the separated framework can hardly be trained end-to-end. To handle these issues, we propose a joint visual grounding and tracking framework, which reformulates grounding and tracking as a unified task: localizing the referred target based on the given visual-language references. Specifically, we propose a multi-source relation modeling module to effectively build the relation between the visual-language references and the test image. In addition, we design a temporal modeling module to provide a temporal clue with the guidance of the global semantic information for our model, which effectively improves the adaptability to the appearance variations of the target. Extensive experimental results on TNL2K, LaSOT, OTB99, and RefCOCOg demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms for both tracking and grounding. Code is available at https://github.com/lizhou-cs/JointNLT.

MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention

Tracking often uses a multi-stage pipeline of feature extraction, target information integration, and bounding box estimation. To simplify this pipeline and unify the process of feature extraction and target information integration, we present a compact tracking framework, termed as MixFormer, built upon transformers. Our core design is to utilize the flexibility of attention operations, and propose a Mixed Attention Module (MAM) for simultaneous feature extraction and target information integration. This synchronous modeling scheme allows to extract target-specific discriminative features and perform extensive communication between target and search area. Based on MAM, we build our MixFormer tracking framework simply by stacking multiple MAMs with progressive patch embedding and placing a localization head on top. In addition, to handle multiple target templates during online tracking, we devise an asymmetric attention scheme in MAM to reduce computational cost, and propose an effective score prediction module to select high-quality templates. Our MixFormer sets a new state-of-the-art performance on five tracking benchmarks, including LaSOT, TrackingNet, VOT2020, GOT-10k, and UAV123. In particular, our MixFormer-L achieves NP score of 79.9% on LaSOT, 88.9% on TrackingNet and EAO of 0.555 on VOT2020. We also perform in-depth ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of simultaneous feature extraction and information integration. Code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MixFormer.

HD-EPIC: A Highly-Detailed Egocentric Video Dataset

We present a validation dataset of newly-collected kitchen-based egocentric videos, manually annotated with highly detailed and interconnected ground-truth labels covering: recipe steps, fine-grained actions, ingredients with nutritional values, moving objects, and audio annotations. Importantly, all annotations are grounded in 3D through digital twinning of the scene, fixtures, object locations, and primed with gaze. Footage is collected from unscripted recordings in diverse home environments, making HDEPIC the first dataset collected in-the-wild but with detailed annotations matching those in controlled lab environments. We show the potential of our highly-detailed annotations through a challenging VQA benchmark of 26K questions assessing the capability to recognise recipes, ingredients, nutrition, fine-grained actions, 3D perception, object motion, and gaze direction. The powerful long-context Gemini Pro only achieves 38.5% on this benchmark, showcasing its difficulty and highlighting shortcomings in current VLMs. We additionally assess action recognition, sound recognition, and long-term video-object segmentation on HD-EPIC. HD-EPIC is 41 hours of video in 9 kitchens with digital twins of 413 kitchen fixtures, capturing 69 recipes, 59K fine-grained actions, 51K audio events, 20K object movements and 37K object masks lifted to 3D. On average, we have 263 annotations per minute of our unscripted videos.

COMODO: Cross-Modal Video-to-IMU Distillation for Efficient Egocentric Human Activity Recognition

Egocentric video-based models capture rich semantic information and have demonstrated strong performance in human activity recognition (HAR). However, their high power consumption, privacy concerns, and dependence on lighting conditions limit their feasibility for continuous on-device recognition. In contrast, inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors offer an energy-efficient and privacy-preserving alternative, yet they suffer from limited large-scale annotated datasets, leading to weaker generalization in downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose COMODO, a cross-modal self-supervised distillation framework that transfers rich semantic knowledge from the video modality to the IMU modality without requiring labeled annotations. COMODO leverages a pretrained and frozen video encoder to construct a dynamic instance queue, aligning the feature distributions of video and IMU embeddings. By distilling knowledge from video representations, our approach enables the IMU encoder to inherit rich semantic information from video while preserving its efficiency for real-world applications. Experiments on multiple egocentric HAR datasets demonstrate that COMODO consistently improves downstream classification performance, achieving results comparable to or exceeding fully supervised fine-tuned models. Moreover, COMODO exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization. Benefiting from its simplicity, our method is also generally applicable to various video and time-series pre-trained models, offering the potential to leverage more powerful teacher and student foundation models in future research. The code is available at https://github.com/Breezelled/COMODO .

VisionTrap: Vision-Augmented Trajectory Prediction Guided by Textual Descriptions

Predicting future trajectories for other road agents is an essential task for autonomous vehicles. Established trajectory prediction methods primarily use agent tracks generated by a detection and tracking system and HD map as inputs. In this work, we propose a novel method that also incorporates visual input from surround-view cameras, allowing the model to utilize visual cues such as human gazes and gestures, road conditions, vehicle turn signals, etc, which are typically hidden from the model in prior methods. Furthermore, we use textual descriptions generated by a Vision-Language Model (VLM) and refined by a Large Language Model (LLM) as supervision during training to guide the model on what to learn from the input data. Despite using these extra inputs, our method achieves a latency of 53 ms, making it feasible for real-time processing, which is significantly faster than that of previous single-agent prediction methods with similar performance. Our experiments show that both the visual inputs and the textual descriptions contribute to improvements in trajectory prediction performance, and our qualitative analysis highlights how the model is able to exploit these additional inputs. Lastly, in this work we create and release the nuScenes-Text dataset, which augments the established nuScenes dataset with rich textual annotations for every scene, demonstrating the positive impact of utilizing VLM on trajectory prediction. Our project page is at https://moonseokha.github.io/VisionTrap/

Learning Navigational Visual Representations with Semantic Map Supervision

Being able to perceive the semantics and the spatial structure of the environment is essential for visual navigation of a household robot. However, most existing works only employ visual backbones pre-trained either with independent images for classification or with self-supervised learning methods to adapt to the indoor navigation domain, neglecting the spatial relationships that are essential to the learning of navigation. Inspired by the behavior that humans naturally build semantically and spatially meaningful cognitive maps in their brains during navigation, in this paper, we propose a novel navigational-specific visual representation learning method by contrasting the agent's egocentric views and semantic maps (Ego^2-Map). We apply the visual transformer as the backbone encoder and train the model with data collected from the large-scale Habitat-Matterport3D environments. Ego^2-Map learning transfers the compact and rich information from a map, such as objects, structure and transition, to the agent's egocentric representations for navigation. Experiments show that agents using our learned representations on object-goal navigation outperform recent visual pre-training methods. Moreover, our representations significantly improve vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments for both high-level and low-level action spaces, achieving new state-of-the-art results of 47% SR and 41% SPL on the test server.

Beyond MOT: Semantic Multi-Object Tracking

Current multi-object tracking (MOT) aims to predict trajectories of targets (i.e., ''where'') in videos. Yet, knowing merely ''where'' is insufficient in many crucial applications. In comparison, semantic understanding such as fine-grained behaviors, interactions, and overall summarized captions (i.e., ''what'') from videos, associated with ''where'', is highly-desired for comprehensive video analysis. Thus motivated, we introduce Semantic Multi-Object Tracking (SMOT), that aims to estimate object trajectories and meanwhile understand semantic details of associated trajectories including instance captions, instance interactions, and overall video captions, integrating ''where'' and ''what'' for tracking. In order to foster the exploration of SMOT, we propose BenSMOT, a large-scale Benchmark for Semantic MOT. Specifically, BenSMOT comprises 3,292 videos with 151K frames, covering various scenarios for semantic tracking of humans. BenSMOT provides annotations for the trajectories of targets, along with associated instance captions in natural language, instance interactions, and overall caption for each video sequence. To our best knowledge, BenSMOT is the first publicly available benchmark for SMOT. Besides, to encourage future research, we present a novel tracker named SMOTer, which is specially designed and end-to-end trained for SMOT, showing promising performance. By releasing BenSMOT, we expect to go beyond conventional MOT by predicting ''where'' and ''what'' for SMOT, opening up a new direction in tracking for video understanding. We will release BenSMOT and SMOTer at https://github.com/Nathan-Li123/SMOTer.

Semantic MapNet: Building Allocentric Semantic Maps and Representations from Egocentric Views

We study the task of semantic mapping - specifically, an embodied agent (a robot or an egocentric AI assistant) is given a tour of a new environment and asked to build an allocentric top-down semantic map ("what is where?") from egocentric observations of an RGB-D camera with known pose (via localization sensors). Towards this goal, we present SemanticMapNet (SMNet), which consists of: (1) an Egocentric Visual Encoder that encodes each egocentric RGB-D frame, (2) a Feature Projector that projects egocentric features to appropriate locations on a floor-plan, (3) a Spatial Memory Tensor of size floor-plan length x width x feature-dims that learns to accumulate projected egocentric features, and (4) a Map Decoder that uses the memory tensor to produce semantic top-down maps. SMNet combines the strengths of (known) projective camera geometry and neural representation learning. On the task of semantic mapping in the Matterport3D dataset, SMNet significantly outperforms competitive baselines by 4.01-16.81% (absolute) on mean-IoU and 3.81-19.69% (absolute) on Boundary-F1 metrics. Moreover, we show how to use the neural episodic memories and spatio-semantic allocentric representations build by SMNet for subsequent tasks in the same space - navigating to objects seen during the tour("Find chair") or answering questions about the space ("How many chairs did you see in the house?"). Project page: https://vincentcartillier.github.io/smnet.html.

PVT++: A Simple End-to-End Latency-Aware Visual Tracking Framework

Visual object tracking is essential to intelligent robots. Most existing approaches have ignored the online latency that can cause severe performance degradation during real-world processing. Especially for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where robust tracking is more challenging and onboard computation is limited, the latency issue can be fatal. In this work, we present a simple framework for end-to-end latency-aware tracking, i.e., end-to-end predictive visual tracking (PVT++). Unlike existing solutions that naively append Kalman Filters after trackers, PVT++ can be jointly optimized, so that it takes not only motion information but can also leverage the rich visual knowledge in most pre-trained tracker models for robust prediction. Besides, to bridge the training-evaluation domain gap, we propose a relative motion factor, empowering PVT++ to generalize to the challenging and complex UAV tracking scenes. These careful designs have made the small-capacity lightweight PVT++ a widely effective solution. Additionally, this work presents an extended latency-aware evaluation benchmark for assessing an any-speed tracker in the online setting. Empirical results on a robotic platform from the aerial perspective show that PVT++ can achieve significant performance gain on various trackers and exhibit higher accuracy than prior solutions, largely mitigating the degradation brought by latency.

PowerBEV: A Powerful Yet Lightweight Framework for Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View

Accurately perceiving instances and predicting their future motion are key tasks for autonomous vehicles, enabling them to navigate safely in complex urban traffic. While bird's-eye view (BEV) representations are commonplace in perception for autonomous driving, their potential in a motion prediction setting is less explored. Existing approaches for BEV instance prediction from surround cameras rely on a multi-task auto-regressive setup coupled with complex post-processing to predict future instances in a spatio-temporally consistent manner. In this paper, we depart from this paradigm and propose an efficient novel end-to-end framework named POWERBEV, which differs in several design choices aimed at reducing the inherent redundancy in previous methods. First, rather than predicting the future in an auto-regressive fashion, POWERBEV uses a parallel, multi-scale module built from lightweight 2D convolutional networks. Second, we show that segmentation and centripetal backward flow are sufficient for prediction, simplifying previous multi-task objectives by eliminating redundant output modalities. Building on this output representation, we propose a simple, flow warping-based post-processing approach which produces more stable instance associations across time. Through this lightweight yet powerful design, POWERBEV outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on the NuScenes Dataset and poses an alternative paradigm for BEV instance prediction. We made our code publicly available at: https://github.com/EdwardLeeLPZ/PowerBEV.