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While Gaussian Splatting (GS) demonstrates efficient and high-quality scene rendering and small area surface extraction ability, it falls short in handling large-scale aerial image surface extraction tasks. To overcome this, we present ULSR-GS, a framework dedicated to high-fidelity surface extraction in ultra-large-scale scenes, addressing the limitations of existing GS-based mesh extraction methods. Specifically, we propose a point-to-photo partitioning approach combined with a multi-view optimal view matching principle to select the best training images for each sub-region. Additionally, during training, ULSR-GS employs a densification strategy based on multi-view geometric consistency to enhance surface extraction details. Experimental results demonstrate that ULSR-GS outperforms other state-of-the-art GS-based works on large-scale aerial photogrammetry benchmark datasets, significantly improving surface extraction accuracy in complex urban environments. Project page: https://ulsrgs.github.io., Comment: Project page: https://ulsrgs.github.io

While deep learning-based robotic grasping technology has demonstrated strong adaptability, its computational complexity has also significantly increased, making it unsuitable for scenarios with high real-time requirements. Therefore, we propose a low computational complexity and high accuracy model named VMGNet for robotic grasping. For the first time, we introduce the Visual State Space into the robotic grasping field to achieve linear computational complexity, thereby greatly reducing the model's computational cost. Meanwhile, to improve the accuracy of the model, we propose an efficient and lightweight multi-scale feature fusion module, named Fusion Bridge Module, to extract and fuse information at different scales. We also present a new loss function calculation method to enhance the importance differences between subtasks, improving the model's fitting ability. Experiments show that VMGNet has only 8.7G Floating Point Operations and an inference time of 8.1 ms on our devices. VMGNet also achieved state-of-the-art performance on the Cornell and Jacquard public datasets. To validate VMGNet's effectiveness in practical applications, we conducted real grasping experiments in multi-object scenarios, and VMGNet achieved an excellent performance with a 94.4% success rate in real-world grasping tasks. The video for the real-world robotic grasping experiments is available at https://youtu.be/S-QHBtbmLc4.

One of the important factors of profitability is the volume of transactions. An accurate prediction of the future transaction volume becomes a pivotal factor in shaping corporate operations and decision-making processes. E-commerce has presented manufacturers with convenient sales channels to, with which the sales can increase dramatically. In this study, we introduce a solution that leverages the XGBoost model to tackle the challenge of predict-ing sales for consumer electronics products on the Amazon platform. Initial-ly, our attempts to solely predict sales volume yielded unsatisfactory results. However, by replacing the sales volume data with sales range values, we achieved satisfactory accuracy with our model. Furthermore, our results in-dicate that XGBoost exhibits superior predictive performance compared to traditional models.

Object selection is essential in virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs). Prior work mainly focuses on enhancing and evaluating techniques for selecting a single object in VR, leaving a gap in the techniques for multi-object selection, a more complex but common selection scenario. To enable multi-object selection, the interaction technique should support group selection in addition to the default pointing selection mode for acquiring a single target. This composite interaction could be particularly challenging when using freehand gestural input. In this work, we present an empirical comparison of six freehand techniques, which are comprised of three mode-switching gestures (Finger Segment, Multi-Finger, and Wrist Orientation) and two group selection techniques (Cone-casting Selection and Crossing Selection) derived from prior work. Our results demonstrate the performance, user experience, and preference of each technique. The findings derive three design implications that can guide the design of freehand techniques for multi-object selection in VR HMDs., Comment: To be presented at ACM ISS 2024

In the rapidly evolving field of 3D reconstruction, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) represent significant advancements. Although 2DGS compresses 3D Gaussian primitives into 2D Gaussian surfels to effectively enhance mesh extraction quality, this compression can potentially lead to a decrease in rendering quality. Additionally, unreliable densification processes and the calculation of depth through the accumulation of opacity can compromise the detail of mesh extraction. To address this issue, we introduce MVG-Splatting, a solution guided by Multi-View considerations. Specifically, we integrate an optimized method for calculating normals, which, combined with image gradients, helps rectify inconsistencies in the original depth computations. Additionally, utilizing projection strategies akin to those in Multi-View Stereo (MVS), we propose an adaptive quantile-based method that dynamically determines the level of additional densification guided by depth maps, from coarse to fine detail. Experimental evidence demonstrates that our method not only resolves the issues of rendering quality degradation caused by depth discrepancies but also facilitates direct mesh extraction from dense Gaussian point clouds using the Marching Cubes algorithm. This approach significantly enhances the overall fidelity and accuracy of the 3D reconstruction process, ensuring that both the geometric details and visual quality., Comment: https://mvgsplatting.github.io

Urban water-surface robust perception serves as the foundation for intelligent monitoring of aquatic environments and the autonomous navigation and operation of unmanned vessels, especially in the context of waterway safety. It is worth noting that current multi-sensor fusion and multi-task learning models consume substantial power and heavily rely on high-power GPUs for inference. This contributes to increased carbon emissions, a concern that runs counter to the prevailing emphasis on environmental preservation and the pursuit of sustainable, low-carbon urban environments. In light of these concerns, this paper concentrates on low-power, lightweight, multi-task panoptic perception through the fusion of visual and 4D radar data, which is seen as a promising low-cost perception method. We propose a framework named Achelous++ that facilitates the development and comprehensive evaluation of multi-task water-surface panoptic perception models. Achelous++ can simultaneously execute five perception tasks with high speed and low power consumption, including object detection, object semantic segmentation, drivable-area segmentation, waterline segmentation, and radar point cloud semantic segmentation. Furthermore, to meet the demand for developers to customize models for real-time inference on low-performance devices, a novel multi-modal pruning strategy known as Heterogeneous-Aware SynFlow (HA-SynFlow) is proposed. Besides, Achelous++ also supports random pruning at initialization with different layer-wise sparsity, such as Uniform and Erdos-Renyi-Kernel (ERK). Overall, our Achelous++ framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WaterScenes benchmark, excelling in both accuracy and power efficiency compared to other single-task and multi-task models. We release and maintain the code at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Achelous., Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures

With the rapid advancements of sensor technology and deep learning, autonomous driving systems are providing safe and efficient access to intelligent vehicles as well as intelligent transportation. Among these equipped sensors, the radar sensor plays a crucial role in providing robust perception information in diverse environmental conditions. This review focuses on exploring different radar data representations utilized in autonomous driving systems. Firstly, we introduce the capabilities and limitations of the radar sensor by examining the working principles of radar perception and signal processing of radar measurements. Then, we delve into the generation process of five radar representations, including the ADC signal, radar tensor, point cloud, grid map, and micro-Doppler signature. For each radar representation, we examine the related datasets, methods, advantages and limitations. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges faced in these data representations and propose potential research directions. Above all, this comprehensive review offers an in-depth insight into how these representations enhance autonomous system capabilities, providing guidance for radar perception researchers. To facilitate retrieval and comparison of different data representations, datasets and methods, we provide an interactive website at https://radar-camera-fusion.github.io/radar., Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2304.10410

Panoptic Driving Perception (PDP) is critical for the autonomous navigation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). A PDP model typically integrates multiple tasks, necessitating the simultaneous and robust execution of various perception tasks to facilitate downstream path planning. The fusion of visual and radar sensors is currently acknowledged as a robust and cost-effective approach. However, most existing research has primarily focused on fusing visual and radar features dedicated to object detection or utilizing a shared feature space for multiple tasks, neglecting the individual representation differences between various tasks. To address this gap, we propose a pair of Asymmetric Fair Fusion (AFF) modules with favorable explainability designed to efficiently interact with independent features from both visual and radar modalities, tailored to the specific requirements of object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. The AFF modules treat image and radar maps as irregular point sets and transform these features into a crossed-shared feature space for multitasking, ensuring equitable treatment of vision and radar point cloud features. Leveraging AFF modules, we propose a novel and efficient PDP model, ASY-VRNet, which processes image and radar features based on irregular super-pixel point sets. Additionally, we propose an effective multitask learning method specifically designed for PDP models. Compared to other lightweight models, ASY-VRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in object detection, semantic segmentation, and drivable-area segmentation on the WaterScenes benchmark. Our project is publicly available at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/ASY-VRNet., Comment: Accepted by IROS 2024

Current perception models for different tasks usually exist in modular forms on Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), which infer extremely slowly in parallel on edge devices, causing the asynchrony between perception results and USV position, and leading to error decisions of autonomous navigation. Compared with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), the robust perception of USVs develops relatively slowly. Moreover, most current multi-task perception models are huge in parameters, slow in inference and not scalable. Oriented on this, we propose Achelous, a low-cost and fast unified panoptic perception framework for water-surface perception based on the fusion of a monocular camera and 4D mmWave radar. Achelous can simultaneously perform five tasks, detection and segmentation of visual targets, drivable-area segmentation, waterline segmentation and radar point cloud segmentation. Besides, models in Achelous family, with less than around 5 million parameters, achieve about 18 FPS on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, 11 FPS faster than HybridNets, and exceed YOLOX-Tiny and Segformer-B0 on our collected dataset about 5 mAP$_{\text{50-95}}$ and 0.7 mIoU, especially under situations of adverse weather, dark environments and camera failure. To our knowledge, Achelous is the first comprehensive panoptic perception framework combining vision-level and point-cloud-level tasks for water-surface perception. To promote the development of the intelligent transportation community, we release our codes in \url{https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Achelous}., Comment: Accepted by ITSC 2023

Autonomous driving on water surfaces plays an essential role in executing hazardous and time-consuming missions, such as maritime surveillance, survivors rescue, environmental monitoring, hydrography mapping and waste cleaning. This work presents WaterScenes, the first multi-task 4D radar-camera fusion dataset for autonomous driving on water surfaces. Equipped with a 4D radar and a monocular camera, our Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) proffers all-weather solutions for discerning object-related information, including color, shape, texture, range, velocity, azimuth, and elevation. Focusing on typical static and dynamic objects on water surfaces, we label the camera images and radar point clouds at pixel-level and point-level, respectively. In addition to basic perception tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation, we also provide annotations for free-space segmentation and waterline segmentation. Leveraging the multi-task and multi-modal data, we conduct benchmark experiments on the uni-modality of radar and camera, as well as the fused modalities. Experimental results demonstrate that 4D radar-camera fusion can considerably improve the accuracy and robustness of perception on water surfaces, especially in adverse lighting and weather conditions. WaterScenes dataset is public on https://waterscenes.github.io., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

Driven by deep learning techniques, perception technology in autonomous driving has developed rapidly in recent years, enabling vehicles to accurately detect and interpret surrounding environment for safe and efficient navigation. To achieve accurate and robust perception capabilities, autonomous vehicles are often equipped with multiple sensors, making sensor fusion a crucial part of the perception system. Among these fused sensors, radars and cameras enable a complementary and cost-effective perception of the surrounding environment regardless of lighting and weather conditions. This review aims to provide a comprehensive guideline for radar-camera fusion, particularly concentrating on perception tasks related to object detection and semantic segmentation.Based on the principles of the radar and camera sensors, we delve into the data processing process and representations, followed by an in-depth analysis and summary of radar-camera fusion datasets. In the review of methodologies in radar-camera fusion, we address interrogative questions, including "why to fuse", "what to fuse", "where to fuse", "when to fuse", and "how to fuse", subsequently discussing various challenges and potential research directions within this domain. To ease the retrieval and comparison of datasets and fusion methods, we also provide an interactive website: https://radar-camera-fusion.github.io., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles (T-IV)

Visual cues are essential in computer-mediated communication. It is especially important when communication happens in a collaboration scenario that requires focusing several users' attention on aspecific object among other similar ones. This paper explores the effect of visual cues on pointing tasks in co-located Augmented Reality (AR) collaboration. A user study (N = 32, 16 pairs) was conducted to compare two types of visual cues: Pointing Line (PL)and Moving Track (MT). Both are head-based visual techniques.Through a series of collaborative pointing tasks on objects with different states (static and dynamic) and density levels (low, mediumand high), the results showed that PL was better on task performance and usability, but MT was rated higher on social presenceand user preference. Based on our results, some design implicationsare provided for pointing tasks in co-located AR collaboration.