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Ping Tan

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Published work

21 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

H-OmniStereo: Zero-Shot Omnidirectional Stereo Matching with Heading-Aligned Normal Priors

Stereo matching on top-bottom equirectangular images provides an effective framework for full-surround perception, as vertically aligned epipolar lines enable the use of advanced perspective stereo architectures that are largely driven by large-scale datasets and monocular priors. However, the performance of such adaptations is severely limited by the scarcity of omnidirectional stereo datasets and the degradation of perspective monocular priors under spherical distortions. To address these challenges, we propose H-OmniStereo, a zero-shot omnidirectional stereo matching framework. First, we construct high-quality synthetic dataset comprising over 2.8 million top-bottom equirectangular stereo pairs to scale up training. Second, we introduce an equirectangular monocular normal estimator, specifically operating in a heading-aligned coordinate system. Beyond providing distortion-robust and cross-view-consistent geometric priors for establishing reliable correspondences in stereo matching, this design boosts training efficiency and accommodates train-test FoV mismatches. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves higher accuracy than existing methods on out-of-domain datasets and successfully generalizes to real-world consumer camera setups using a single model. The model and dataset will be released at https://github.com/JIANG-CX/H-OmniStereo.

preprint2026arXiv

SPATIALGEN: Layout-guided 3D Indoor Scene Generation

Creating high-fidelity 3D models of indoor environments is essential for applications in design, virtual reality, and robotics. However, manual 3D modeling remains time-consuming and labor-intensive. While recent advances in generative AI have enabled automated scene synthesis, existing methods often face challenges in balancing visual quality, diversity, semantic consistency, and user control. A major bottleneck is the lack of a large-scale, high-quality dataset tailored to this task. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive synthetic dataset, featuring 12,328 structured annotated scenes with 57,431 rooms, and 4.7M photorealistic 2D renderings. Leveraging this dataset, we present SpatialGen, a novel multi-view multi-modal diffusion model that generates realistic and semantically consistent 3D indoor scenes. Given a 3D layout and a reference image (derived from a text prompt), our model synthesizes appearance (color image), geometry (scene coordinate map), and semantic (semantic segmentation map) from arbitrary viewpoints, while preserving spatial consistency across modalities. SpatialGen consistently generates superior results to previous methods in our experiments. We are open-sourcing our data and models to empower the community and advance the field of indoor scene understanding and generation.

preprint2022arXiv

A Real World Dataset for Multi-view 3D Reconstruction

We present a dataset of 998 3D models of everyday tabletop objects along with their 847,000 real world RGB and depth images. Accurate annotations of camera poses and object poses for each image are performed in a semi-automated fashion to facilitate the use of the dataset for myriad 3D applications like shape reconstruction, object pose estimation, shape retrieval etc. We primarily focus on learned multi-view 3D reconstruction due to the lack of appropriate real world benchmark for the task and demonstrate that our dataset can fill that gap. The entire annotated dataset along with the source code for the annotation tools and evaluation baselines is available at http://www.ocrtoc.org/3d-reconstruction.html.

preprint2022arXiv

AutoAvatar: Autoregressive Neural Fields for Dynamic Avatar Modeling

Neural fields such as implicit surfaces have recently enabled avatar modeling from raw scans without explicit temporal correspondences. In this work, we exploit autoregressive modeling to further extend this notion to capture dynamic effects, such as soft-tissue deformations. Although autoregressive models are naturally capable of handling dynamics, it is non-trivial to apply them to implicit representations, as explicit state decoding is infeasible due to prohibitive memory requirements. In this work, for the first time, we enable autoregressive modeling of implicit avatars. To reduce the memory bottleneck and efficiently model dynamic implicit surfaces, we introduce the notion of articulated observer points, which relate implicit states to the explicit surface of a parametric human body model. We demonstrate that encoding implicit surfaces as a set of height fields defined on articulated observer points leads to significantly better generalization compared to a latent representation. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the state of the art, achieving plausible dynamic deformations even for unseen motions. https://zqbai-jeremy.github.io/autoavatar

preprint2022arXiv

Efficient Virtual View Selection for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

3D hand pose estimation from single depth is a fundamental problem in computer vision, and has wide applications.However, the existing methods still can not achieve satisfactory hand pose estimation results due to view variation and occlusion of human hand. In this paper, we propose a new virtual view selection and fusion module for 3D hand pose estimation from single depth.We propose to automatically select multiple virtual viewpoints for pose estimation and fuse the results of all and find this empirically delivers accurate and robust pose estimation. In order to select most effective virtual views for pose fusion, we evaluate the virtual views based on the confidence of virtual views using a light-weight network via network distillation. Experiments on three main benchmark datasets including NYU, ICVL and Hands2019 demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts on NYU and ICVL, and achieves very competitive performance on Hands2019-Task1, and our proposed virtual view selection and fusion module is both effective for 3D hand pose estimation.

preprint2022arXiv

GAT-CADNet: Graph Attention Network for Panoptic Symbol Spotting in CAD Drawings

Spotting graphical symbols from the computer-aided design (CAD) drawings is essential to many industrial applications. Different from raster images, CAD drawings are vector graphics consisting of geometric primitives such as segments, arcs, and circles. By treating each CAD drawing as a graph, we propose a novel graph attention network GAT-CADNet to solve the panoptic symbol spotting problem: vertex features derived from the GAT branch are mapped to semantic labels, while their attention scores are cascaded and mapped to instance prediction. Our key contributions are three-fold: 1) the instance symbol spotting task is formulated as a subgraph detection problem and solved by predicting the adjacency matrix; 2) a relative spatial encoding (RSE) module explicitly encodes the relative positional and geometric relation among vertices to enhance the vertex attention; 3) a cascaded edge encoding (CEE) module extracts vertex attentions from multiple stages of GAT and treats them as edge encoding to predict the adjacency matrix. The proposed GAT-CADNet is intuitive yet effective and manages to solve the panoptic symbol spotting problem in one consolidated network. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the public benchmark show that our graph-based approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

preprint2022arXiv

NeW CRFs: Neural Window Fully-connected CRFs for Monocular Depth Estimation

Estimating the accurate depth from a single image is challenging since it is inherently ambiguous and ill-posed. While recent works design increasingly complicated and powerful networks to directly regress the depth map, we take the path of CRFs optimization. Due to the expensive computation, CRFs are usually performed between neighborhoods rather than the whole graph. To leverage the potential of fully-connected CRFs, we split the input into windows and perform the FC-CRFs optimization within each window, which reduces the computation complexity and makes FC-CRFs feasible. To better capture the relationships between nodes in the graph, we exploit the multi-head attention mechanism to compute a multi-head potential function, which is fed to the networks to output an optimized depth map. Then we build a bottom-up-top-down structure, where this neural window FC-CRFs module serves as the decoder, and a vision transformer serves as the encoder. The experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance across all metrics on both the KITTI and NYUv2 datasets, compared to previous methods. Furthermore, the proposed method can be directly applied to panorama images and outperforms all previous panorama methods on the MatterPort3D dataset. Project page: https://weihaosky.github.io/newcrfs.

preprint2022arXiv

QuadTree Attention for Vision Transformers

Transformers have been successful in many vision tasks, thanks to their capability of capturing long-range dependency. However, their quadratic computational complexity poses a major obstacle for applying them to vision tasks requiring dense predictions, such as object detection, feature matching, stereo, etc. We introduce QuadTree Attention, which reduces the computational complexity from quadratic to linear. Our quadtree transformer builds token pyramids and computes attention in a coarse-to-fine manner. At each level, the top K patches with the highest attention scores are selected, such that at the next level, attention is only evaluated within the relevant regions corresponding to these top K patches. We demonstrate that quadtree attention achieves state-of-the-art performance in various vision tasks, e.g. with 4.0% improvement in feature matching on ScanNet, about 50% flops reduction in stereo matching, 0.4-1.5% improvement in top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification, 1.2-1.8% improvement on COCO object detection, and 0.7-2.4% improvement on semantic segmentation over previous state-of-the-art transformers. The codes are available at https://github.com/Tangshitao/QuadtreeAttention.

preprint2022arXiv

RCP: Recurrent Closest Point for Scene Flow Estimation on 3D Point Clouds

3D motion estimation including scene flow and point cloud registration has drawn increasing interest. Inspired by 2D flow estimation, recent methods employ deep neural networks to construct the cost volume for estimating accurate 3D flow. However, these methods are limited by the fact that it is difficult to define a search window on point clouds because of the irregular data structure. In this paper, we avoid this irregularity by a simple yet effective method.We decompose the problem into two interlaced stages, where the 3D flows are optimized point-wisely at the first stage and then globally regularized in a recurrent network at the second stage. Therefore, the recurrent network only receives the regular point-wise information as the input. In the experiments, we evaluate the proposed method on both the 3D scene flow estimation and the point cloud registration task. For 3D scene flow estimation, we make comparisons on the widely used FlyingThings3D and KITTIdatasets. For point cloud registration, we follow previous works and evaluate the data pairs with large pose and partially overlapping from ModelNet40. The results show that our method outperforms the previous method and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on both 3D scene flow estimation and point cloud registration, which demonstrates the superiority of the proposed zero-order method on irregular point cloud data.

preprint2022arXiv

RenderNet: Visual Relocalization Using Virtual Viewpoints in Large-Scale Indoor Environments

Visual relocalization has been a widely discussed problem in 3D vision: given a pre-constructed 3D visual map, the 6 DoF (Degrees-of-Freedom) pose of a query image is estimated. Relocalization in large-scale indoor environments enables attractive applications such as augmented reality and robot navigation. However, appearance changes fast in such environments when the camera moves, which is challenging for the relocalization system. To address this problem, we propose a virtual view synthesis-based approach, RenderNet, to enrich the database and refine poses regarding this particular scenario. Instead of rendering real images which requires high-quality 3D models, we opt to directly render the needed global and local features of virtual viewpoints and apply them in the subsequent image retrieval and feature matching operations respectively. The proposed method can largely improve the performance in large-scale indoor environments, e.g., achieving an improvement of 7.1\% and 12.2\% on the Inloc dataset.

preprint2022arXiv

Text/Speech-Driven Full-Body Animation

Due to the increasing demand in films and games, synthesizing 3D avatar animation has attracted much attention recently. In this work, we present a production-ready text/speech-driven full-body animation synthesis system. Given the text and corresponding speech, our system synthesizes face and body animations simultaneously, which are then skinned and rendered to obtain a video stream output. We adopt a learning-based approach for synthesizing facial animation and a graph-based approach to animate the body, which generates high-quality avatar animation efficiently and robustly. Our results demonstrate the generated avatar animations are realistic, diverse and highly text/speech-correlated.

preprint2022arXiv

Unseen Object 6D Pose Estimation: A Benchmark and Baselines

Estimating the 6D pose for unseen objects is in great demand for many real-world applications. However, current state-of-the-art pose estimation methods can only handle objects that are previously trained. In this paper, we propose a new task that enables and facilitates algorithms to estimate the 6D pose estimation of novel objects during testing. We collect a dataset with both real and synthetic images and up to 48 unseen objects in the test set. In the mean while, we propose a new metric named Infimum ADD (IADD) which is an invariant measurement for objects with different types of pose ambiguity. A two-stage baseline solution for this task is also provided. By training an end-to-end 3D correspondences network, our method finds corresponding points between an unseen object and a partial view RGBD image accurately and efficiently. It then calculates the 6D pose from the correspondences using an algorithm robust to object symmetry. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms several intuitive baselines and thus verify its effectiveness. All the data, code and models will be made publicly available. Project page: www.graspnet.net/unseen6d

preprint2022arXiv

VoLux-GAN: A Generative Model for 3D Face Synthesis with HDRI Relighting

We propose VoLux-GAN, a generative framework to synthesize 3D-aware faces with convincing relighting. Our main contribution is a volumetric HDRI relighting method that can efficiently accumulate albedo, diffuse and specular lighting contributions along each 3D ray for any desired HDR environmental map. Additionally, we show the importance of supervising the image decomposition process using multiple discriminators. In particular, we propose a data augmentation technique that leverages recent advances in single image portrait relighting to enforce consistent geometry, albedo, diffuse and specular components. Multiple experiments and comparisons with other generative frameworks show how our model is a step forward towards photorealistic relightable 3D generative models.

preprint2020arXiv

Active Lighting Recurrence by Parallel Lighting Analogy for Fine-Grained Change Detection

This paper studies a new problem, namely active lighting recurrence (ALR) that physically relocalizes a light source to reproduce the lighting condition from single reference image for a same scene, which may suffer from fine-grained changes during twice observations. ALR is of great importance for fine-grained visual inspection and change detection, because some phenomena or minute changes can only be clearly observed under particular lighting conditions. Therefore, effective ALR should be able to online navigate a light source toward the target pose, which is challenging due to the complexity and diversity of real-world lighting and imaging processes. To this end, we propose to use the simple parallel lighting as an analogy model and based on Lambertian law to compose an instant navigation ball for this purpose. We theoretically prove the feasibility, i.e., equivalence and convergence, of this ALR approach for realistic near point light source and small near surface light source. Besides, we also theoretically prove the invariance of our ALR approach to the ambiguity of normal and lighting decomposition. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach have been verified by both extensive quantitative experiments and challenging real-world tasks on fine-grained change detection of cultural heritages. We also validate the generality of our approach to non-Lambertian scenes.

preprint2020arXiv

Cascade Cost Volume for High-Resolution Multi-View Stereo and Stereo Matching

The deep multi-view stereo (MVS) and stereo matching approaches generally construct 3D cost volumes to regularize and regress the output depth or disparity. These methods are limited when high-resolution outputs are needed since the memory and time costs grow cubically as the volume resolution increases. In this paper, we propose a both memory and time efficient cost volume formulation that is complementary to existing multi-view stereo and stereo matching approaches based on 3D cost volumes. First, the proposed cost volume is built upon a standard feature pyramid encoding geometry and context at gradually finer scales. Then, we can narrow the depth (or disparity) range of each stage by the depth (or disparity) map from the previous stage. With gradually higher cost volume resolution and adaptive adjustment of depth (or disparity) intervals, the output is recovered in a coarser to fine manner. We apply the cascade cost volume to the representative MVS-Net, and obtain a 23.1% improvement on DTU benchmark (1st place), with 50.6% and 74.2% reduction in GPU memory and run-time. It is also the state-of-the-art learning-based method on Tanks and Temples benchmark. The statistics of accuracy, run-time and GPU memory on other representative stereo CNNs also validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

preprint2020arXiv

Channel Equilibrium Networks for Learning Deep Representation

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are typically constructed by stacking multiple building blocks, each of which contains a normalization layer such as batch normalization (BN) and a rectified linear function such as ReLU. However, this work shows that the combination of normalization and rectified linear function leads to inhibited channels, which have small magnitude and contribute little to the learned feature representation, impeding the generalization ability of CNNs. Unlike prior arts that simply removed the inhibited channels, we propose to "wake them up" during training by designing a novel neural building block, termed Channel Equilibrium (CE) block, which enables channels at the same layer to contribute equally to the learned representation. We show that CE is able to prevent inhibited channels both empirically and theoretically. CE has several appealing benefits. (1) It can be integrated into many advanced CNN architectures such as ResNet and MobileNet, outperforming their original networks. (2) CE has an interesting connection with the Nash Equilibrium, a well-known solution of a non-cooperative game. (3) Extensive experiments show that CE achieves state-of-the-art performance on various challenging benchmarks such as ImageNet and COCO.

preprint2020arXiv

End-to-End Learning Local Multi-view Descriptors for 3D Point Clouds

In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework to learn local multi-view descriptors for 3D point clouds. To adopt a similar multi-view representation, existing studies use hand-crafted viewpoints for rendering in a preprocessing stage, which is detached from the subsequent descriptor learning stage. In our framework, we integrate the multi-view rendering into neural networks by using a differentiable renderer, which allows the viewpoints to be optimizable parameters for capturing more informative local context of interest points. To obtain discriminative descriptors, we also design a soft-view pooling module to attentively fuse convolutional features across views. Extensive experiments on existing 3D registration benchmarks show that our method outperforms existing local descriptors both quantitatively and qualitatively.

preprint2020arXiv

Interpretable Foreground Object Search As Knowledge Distillation

This paper proposes a knowledge distillation method for foreground object search (FoS). Given a background and a rectangle specifying the foreground location and scale, FoS retrieves compatible foregrounds in a certain category for later image composition. Foregrounds within the same category can be grouped into a small number of patterns. Instances within each pattern are compatible with any query input interchangeably. These instances are referred to as interchangeable foregrounds. We first present a pipeline to build pattern-level FoS dataset containing labels of interchangeable foregrounds. We then establish a benchmark dataset for further training and testing following the pipeline. As for the proposed method, we first train a foreground encoder to learn representations of interchangeable foregrounds. We then train a query encoder to learn query-foreground compatibility following a knowledge distillation framework. It aims to transfer knowledge from interchangeable foregrounds to supervise representation learning of compatibility. The query feature representation is projected to the same latent space as interchangeable foregrounds, enabling very efficient and interpretable instance-level search. Furthermore, pattern-level search is feasible to retrieve more controllable, reasonable and diverse foregrounds. The proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by 10.42% in absolute difference and 24.06% in relative improvement evaluated by mean average precision (mAP). Extensive experimental results also demonstrate its efficacy from various aspects. The benchmark dataset and code will be release shortly.

preprint2020arXiv

LSM: Learning Subspace Minimization for Low-level Vision

We study the energy minimization problem in low-level vision tasks from a novel perspective. We replace the heuristic regularization term with a learnable subspace constraint, and preserve the data term to exploit domain knowledge derived from the first principle of a task. This learning subspace minimization (LSM) framework unifies the network structures and the parameters for many low-level vision tasks, which allows us to train a single network for multiple tasks simultaneously with completely shared parameters, and even generalizes the trained network to an unseen task as long as its data term can be formulated. We demonstrate our LSM framework on four low-level tasks including interactive image segmentation, video segmentation, stereo matching, and optical flow, and validate the network on various datasets. The experiments show that the proposed LSM generates state-of-the-art results with smaller model size, faster training convergence, and real-time inference.

preprint2020arXiv

Multi-View Photometric Stereo: A Robust Solution and Benchmark Dataset for Spatially Varying Isotropic Materials

We present a method to capture both 3D shape and spatially varying reflectance with a multi-view photometric stereo (MVPS) technique that works for general isotropic materials. Our algorithm is suitable for perspective cameras and nearby point light sources. Our data capture setup is simple, which consists of only a digital camera, some LED lights, and an optional automatic turntable. From a single viewpoint, we use a set of photometric stereo images to identify surface points with the same distance to the camera. We collect this information from multiple viewpoints and combine it with structure-from-motion to obtain a precise reconstruction of the complete 3D shape. The spatially varying isotropic bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) is captured by simultaneously inferring a set of basis BRDFs and their mixing weights at each surface point. In experiments, we demonstrate our algorithm with two different setups: a studio setup for highest precision and a desktop setup for best usability. According to our experiments, under the studio setting, the captured shapes are accurate to 0.5 millimeters and the captured reflectance has a relative root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 9%. We also quantitatively evaluate state-of-the-art MVPS on a newly collected benchmark dataset, which is publicly available for inspiring future research.

preprint2020arXiv

Self-Supervised Human Depth Estimation from Monocular Videos

Previous methods on estimating detailed human depth often require supervised training with `ground truth' depth data. This paper presents a self-supervised method that can be trained on YouTube videos without known depth, which makes training data collection simple and improves the generalization of the learned network. The self-supervised learning is achieved by minimizing a photo-consistency loss, which is evaluated between a video frame and its neighboring frames warped according to the estimated depth and the 3D non-rigid motion of the human body. To solve this non-rigid motion, we first estimate a rough SMPL model at each video frame and compute the non-rigid body motion accordingly, which enables self-supervised learning on estimating the shape details. Experiments demonstrate that our method enjoys better generalization and performs much better on data in the wild.