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Vincent Lepetit

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Published work

32 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Articulation in Prime: Primitive-Based Articulated Object Understanding from a Single Casual Video

Retrieving the 3D kinematics of articulated objects from monocular video is a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing methods rely on complex video setups or cues such as long-term point tracking or wide-baseline matching, but are frequently brittle under severe occlusions, rapid camera ego-motion, or weak local features. Learning-based methods, meanwhile, struggle to generalize beyond their training categories. We propose a category-agnostic optimization framework that treats articulated object understanding as a primitive-fitting problem. Geometric primitives serve as a proxy representation that avoids the pitfalls of unstable point tracks; a novel mechanism organizes them into coherent parts constrained by revolute and prismatic joints. Our formulation jointly optimizes part segmentation and joint parameters, recovering complex kinematics from a single casually captured video. A visibility-aware procedure handles partial observations and occlusions inherent to real-world data. We also propose the AiP-synth and AiP-real benchmarks, featuring significant camera motion and heavy occlusions, and outperform existing methods. Project page: https://aartykov.github.io/Articulation-in-Prime/

preprint2026arXiv

BOP-Distrib: Revisiting 6D Pose Estimation Benchmarks for Better Evaluation under Visual Ambiguities

6D pose estimation aims at determining the object pose that best explains the camera observation. The unique solution for non-ambiguous objects can turn into a multi-modal pose distribution for symmetrical objects or when occlusions of symmetry-breaking elements happen, depending on the viewpoint. Currently, 6D pose estimation methods are benchmarked on datasets that consider, for their ground truth annotations, visual ambiguities as only related to global object symmetries, whereas they should be defined per-image to account for the camera viewpoint. We thus first propose an automatic method to re-annotate those datasets with a 6D pose distribution specific to each image, taking into account the object surface visibility in the image to correctly determine the visual ambiguities. Second, given this improved ground truth, we re-evaluate the state-of-the-art single pose methods and show that this greatly modifies the ranking of these methods. Third, as some recent works focus on estimating the complete set of solutions, we derive a precision/recall formulation to evaluate them against our image-wise distribution ground truth, making it the first benchmark for pose distribution methods on real images.

preprint2022arXiv

Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose Estimation

We propose a robust and accurate method for estimating the 3D poses of two hands in close interaction from a single color image. This is a very challenging problem, as large occlusions and many confusions between the joints may happen. State-of-the-art methods solve this problem by regressing a heatmap for each joint, which requires solving two problems simultaneously: localizing the joints and recognizing them. In this work, we propose to separate these tasks by relying on a CNN to first localize joints as 2D keypoints, and on self-attention between the CNN features at these keypoints to associate them with the corresponding hand joint. The resulting architecture, which we call "Keypoint Transformer", is highly efficient as it achieves state-of-the-art performance with roughly half the number of model parameters on the InterHand2.6M dataset. We also show it can be easily extended to estimate the 3D pose of an object manipulated by one or two hands with high performance. Moreover, we created a new dataset of more than 75,000 images of two hands manipulating an object fully annotated in 3D and will make it publicly available.

preprint2022arXiv

MCTS with Refinement for Proposals Selection Games in Scene Understanding

We propose a novel method applicable in many scene understanding problems that adapts the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm, originally designed to learn to play games of high-state complexity. From a generated pool of proposals, our method jointly selects and optimizes proposals that minimize the objective term. In our first application for floor plan reconstruction from point clouds, our method selects and refines the room proposals, modelled as 2D polygons, by optimizing on an objective function combining the fitness as predicted by a deep network and regularizing terms on the room shapes. We also introduce a novel differentiable method for rendering the polygonal shapes of these proposals. Our evaluations on the recent and challenging Structured3D and Floor-SP datasets show significant improvements over the state-of-the-art, without imposing hard constraints nor assumptions on the floor plan configurations. In our second application, we extend our approach to reconstruct general 3D room layouts from a color image and obtain accurate room layouts. We also show that our differentiable renderer can easily be extended for rendering 3D planar polygons and polygon embeddings. Our method shows high performance on the Matterport3D-Layout dataset, without introducing hard constraints on room layout configurations.

preprint2022arXiv

MonteBoxFinder: Detecting and Filtering Primitives to Fit a Noisy Point Cloud

We present MonteBoxFinder, a method that, given a noisy input point cloud, fits cuboids to the input scene. Our primary contribution is a discrete optimization algorithm that, from a dense set of initially detected cuboids, is able to efficiently filter good boxes from the noisy ones. Inspired by recent applications of MCTS to scene understanding problems, we develop a stochastic algorithm that is, by design, more efficient for our task. Indeed, the quality of a fit for a cuboid arrangement is invariant to the order in which the cuboids are added into the scene. We develop several search baselines for our problem and demonstrate, on the ScanNet dataset, that our approach is more efficient and precise. Finally, we strongly believe that our core algorithm is very general and that it could be extended to many other problems in 3D scene understanding.

preprint2022arXiv

Templates for 3D Object Pose Estimation Revisited: Generalization to New Objects and Robustness to Occlusions

We present a method that can recognize new objects and estimate their 3D pose in RGB images even under partial occlusions. Our method requires neither a training phase on these objects nor real images depicting them, only their CAD models. It relies on a small set of training objects to learn local object representations, which allow us to locally match the input image to a set of "templates", rendered images of the CAD models for the new objects. In contrast with the state-of-the-art methods, the new objects on which our method is applied can be very different from the training objects. As a result, we are the first to show generalization without retraining on the LINEMOD and Occlusion-LINEMOD datasets. Our analysis of the failure modes of previous template-based approaches further confirms the benefits of local features for template matching. We outperform the state-of-the-art template matching methods on the LINEMOD, Occlusion-LINEMOD and T-LESS datasets. Our source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/template-pose

preprint2022arXiv

Visual Correspondence Hallucination

Given a pair of partially overlapping source and target images and a keypoint in the source image, the keypoint's correspondent in the target image can be either visible, occluded or outside the field of view. Local feature matching methods are only able to identify the correspondent's location when it is visible, while humans can also hallucinate its location when it is occluded or outside the field of view through geometric reasoning. In this paper, we bridge this gap by training a network to output a peaked probability distribution over the correspondent's location, regardless of this correspondent being visible, occluded, or outside the field of view. We experimentally demonstrate that this network is indeed able to hallucinate correspondences on pairs of images captured in scenes that were not seen at training-time. We also apply this network to an absolute camera pose estimation problem and find it is significantly more robust than state-of-the-art local feature matching-based competitors.

preprint2020arXiv

ALCN: Adaptive Local Contrast Normalization

To make Robotics and Augmented Reality applications robust to illumination changes, the current trend is to train a Deep Network with training images captured under many different lighting conditions. Unfortunately, creating such a training set is a very unwieldy and complex task. We therefore propose a novel illumination normalization method that can easily be used for different problems with challenging illumination conditions. Our preliminary experiments show that among current normalization methods, the Difference-of Gaussians method remains a very good baseline, and we introduce a novel illumination normalization model that generalizes it. Our key insight is then that the normalization parameters should depend on the input image, and we aim to train a Convolutional Neural Network to predict these parameters from the input image. This, however, cannot be done in a supervised manner, as the optimal parameters are not known a priori. We thus designed a method to train this network jointly with another network that aims to recognize objects under different illuminations: The latter network performs well when the former network predicts good values for the normalization parameters. We show that our method significantly outperforms standard normalization methods and would also be appear to be universal since it does not have to be re-trained for each new application. Our method improves the robustness to light changes of state-of-the-art 3D object detection and face recognition methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Casting Geometric Constraints in Semantic Segmentation as Semi-Supervised Learning

We propose a simple yet effective method to learn to segment new indoor scenes from video frames: State-of-the-art methods trained on one dataset, even as large as the SUNRGB-D dataset, can perform poorly when applied to images that are not part of the dataset, because of the dataset bias, a common phenomenon in computer vision. To make semantic segmentation more useful in practice, one can exploit geometric constraints. Our main contribution is to show that these constraints can be cast conveniently as semi-supervised terms, which enforce the fact that the same class should be predicted for the projections of the same 3D location in different images. This is interesting as we can exploit general existing techniques developed for semi-supervised learning to efficiently incorporate the constraints. We show that this approach can efficiently and accurately learn to segment target sequences of ScanNet and our own target sequences using only annotations from SUNRGB-D, and geometric relations between the video frames of target sequences.

preprint2020arXiv

General 3D Room Layout from a Single View by Render-and-Compare

We present a novel method to reconstruct the 3D layout of a room (walls, floors, ceilings) from a single perspective view in challenging conditions, by contrast with previous single-view methods restricted to cuboid-shaped layouts. This input view can consist of a color image only, but considering a depth map results in a more accurate reconstruction. Our approach is formalized as solving a constrained discrete optimization problem to find the set of 3D polygons that constitute the layout. In order to deal with occlusions between components of the layout, which is a problem ignored by previous works, we introduce an analysis-by-synthesis method to iteratively refine the 3D layout estimate. As no dataset was available to evaluate our method quantitatively, we created one together with several appropriate metrics. Our dataset consists of 293 images from ScanNet, which we annotated with precise 3D layouts. It offers three times more samples than the popular NYUv2 303 benchmark, and a much larger variety of layouts.

preprint2020arXiv

Geometric Correspondence Fields: Learned Differentiable Rendering for 3D Pose Refinement in the Wild

We present a novel 3D pose refinement approach based on differentiable rendering for objects of arbitrary categories in the wild. In contrast to previous methods, we make two main contributions: First, instead of comparing real-world images and synthetic renderings in the RGB or mask space, we compare them in a feature space optimized for 3D pose refinement. Second, we introduce a novel differentiable renderer that learns to approximate the rasterization backward pass from data instead of relying on a hand-crafted algorithm. For this purpose, we predict deep cross-domain correspondences between RGB images and 3D model renderings in the form of what we call geometric correspondence fields. These correspondence fields serve as pixel-level gradients which are analytically propagated backward through the rendering pipeline to perform a gradient-based optimization directly on the 3D pose. In this way, we precisely align 3D models to objects in RGB images which results in significantly improved 3D pose estimates. We evaluate our approach on the challenging Pix3D dataset and achieve up to 55% relative improvement compared to state-of-the-art refinement methods in multiple metrics.

preprint2020arXiv

HOnnotate: A method for 3D Annotation of Hand and Object Poses

We propose a method for annotating images of a hand manipulating an object with the 3D poses of both the hand and the object, together with a dataset created using this method. Our motivation is the current lack of annotated real images for this problem, as estimating the 3D poses is challenging, mostly because of the mutual occlusions between the hand and the object. To tackle this challenge, we capture sequences with one or several RGB-D cameras and jointly optimize the 3D hand and object poses over all the frames simultaneously. This method allows us to automatically annotate each frame with accurate estimates of the poses, despite large mutual occlusions. With this method, we created HO-3D, the first markerless dataset of color images with 3D annotations for both the hand and object. This dataset is currently made of 77,558 frames, 68 sequences, 10 persons, and 10 objects. Using our dataset, we develop a single RGB image-based method to predict the hand pose when interacting with objects under severe occlusions and show it generalizes to objects not seen in the dataset.

preprint2020arXiv

Measuring Generalisation to Unseen Viewpoints, Articulations, Shapes and Objects for 3D Hand Pose Estimation under Hand-Object Interaction

We study how well different types of approaches generalise in the task of 3D hand pose estimation under single hand scenarios and hand-object interaction. We show that the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods can drop, and that they fail mostly on poses absent from the training set. Unfortunately, since the space of hand poses is highly dimensional, it is inherently not feasible to cover the whole space densely, despite recent efforts in collecting large-scale training datasets. This sampling problem is even more severe when hands are interacting with objects and/or inputs are RGB rather than depth images, as RGB images also vary with lighting conditions and colors. To address these issues, we designed a public challenge (HANDS'19) to evaluate the abilities of current 3D hand pose estimators (HPEs) to interpolate and extrapolate the poses of a training set. More exactly, HANDS'19 is designed (a) to evaluate the influence of both depth and color modalities on 3D hand pose estimation, under the presence or absence of objects; (b) to assess the generalisation abilities w.r.t. four main axes: shapes, articulations, viewpoints, and objects; (c) to explore the use of a synthetic hand model to fill the gaps of current datasets. Through the challenge, the overall accuracy has dramatically improved over the baseline, especially on extrapolation tasks, from 27mm to 13mm mean joint error. Our analyses highlight the impacts of: Data pre-processing, ensemble approaches, the use of a parametric 3D hand model (MANO), and different HPE methods/backbones.

preprint2020arXiv

Predicting Sharp and Accurate Occlusion Boundaries in Monocular Depth Estimation Using Displacement Fields

Current methods for depth map prediction from monocular images tend to predict smooth, poorly localized contours for the occlusion boundaries in the input image. This is unfortunate as occlusion boundaries are important cues to recognize objects, and as we show, may lead to a way to discover new objects from scene reconstruction. To improve predicted depth maps, recent methods rely on various forms of filtering or predict an additive residual depth map to refine a first estimate. We instead learn to predict, given a depth map predicted by some reconstruction method, a 2D displacement field able to re-sample pixels around the occlusion boundaries into sharper reconstructions. Our method can be applied to the output of any depth estimation method, in an end-to-end trainable fashion. For evaluation, we manually annotated the occlusion boundaries in all the images in the test split of popular NYUv2-Depth dataset. We show that our approach improves the localization of occlusion boundaries for all state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods that we could evaluate, without degrading the depth accuracy for the rest of the images.

preprint2020arXiv

Recent Advances in 3D Object and Hand Pose Estimation

3D object and hand pose estimation have huge potentials for Augmented Reality, to enable tangible interfaces, natural interfaces, and blurring the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds. In this chapter, we present the recent developments for 3D object and hand pose estimation using cameras, and discuss their abilities and limitations and the possible future development of the field.

preprint2020arXiv

S2DNet: Learning Accurate Correspondences for Sparse-to-Dense Feature Matching

Establishing robust and accurate correspondences is a fundamental backbone to many computer vision algorithms. While recent learning-based feature matching methods have shown promising results in providing robust correspondences under challenging conditions, they are often limited in terms of precision. In this paper, we introduce S2DNet, a novel feature matching pipeline, designed and trained to efficiently establish both robust and accurate correspondences. By leveraging a sparse-to-dense matching paradigm, we cast the correspondence learning problem as a supervised classification task to learn to output highly peaked correspondence maps. We show that S2DNet achieves state-of-the-art results on the HPatches benchmark, as well as on several long-term visual localization datasets.

preprint2016arXiv

Augmented Reality Oculus Rift

This paper covers the whole process of developing an Augmented Reality Stereoscopig Render Engine for the Oculus Rift. To capture the real world in form of a camera stream, two cameras with fish-eye lenses had to be installed on the Oculus Rift DK1 hardware. The idea was inspired by Steptoe \cite{steptoe2014presence}. After the introduction, a theoretical part covers all the most neccessary elements to achieve an AR System for the Oculus Rift, following the implementation part where the code from the AR Stereo Engine is explained in more detail. A short conclusion section shows some results, reflects some experiences and in the final chapter some future works will be discussed. The project can be accessed via the git repository https://github.com/MaXvanHeLL/ARift.git.

preprint2016arXiv

Direct Prediction of 3D Body Poses from Motion Compensated Sequences

We propose an efficient approach to exploiting motion information from consecutive frames of a video sequence to recover the 3D pose of people. Previous approaches typically compute candidate poses in individual frames and then link them in a post-processing step to resolve ambiguities. By contrast, we directly regress from a spatio-temporal volume of bounding boxes to a 3D pose in the central frame. We further show that, for this approach to achieve its full potential, it is essential to compensate for the motion in consecutive frames so that the subject remains centered. This then allows us to effectively overcome ambiguities and improve upon the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the Human3.6m, HumanEva, and KTH Multiview Football 3D human pose estimation benchmarks.

preprint2016arXiv

Efficiently Creating 3D Training Data for Fine Hand Pose Estimation

While many recent hand pose estimation methods critically rely on a training set of labelled frames, the creation of such a dataset is a challenging task that has been overlooked so far. As a result, existing datasets are limited to a few sequences and individuals, with limited accuracy, and this prevents these methods from delivering their full potential. We propose a semi-automated method for efficiently and accurately labeling each frame of a hand depth video with the corresponding 3D locations of the joints: The user is asked to provide only an estimate of the 2D reprojections of the visible joints in some reference frames, which are automatically selected to minimize the labeling work by efficiently optimizing a sub-modular loss function. We then exploit spatial, temporal, and appearance constraints to retrieve the full 3D poses of the hand over the complete sequence. We show that this data can be used to train a recent state-of-the-art hand pose estimation method, leading to increased accuracy. The code and dataset can be found on our website https://cvarlab.icg.tugraz.at/projects/hand_detection/

preprint2016arXiv

Fine Hand Segmentation using Convolutional Neural Networks

We propose a method for extracting very accurate masks of hands in egocentric views. Our method is based on a novel Deep Learning architecture: In contrast with current Deep Learning methods, we do not use upscaling layers applied to a low-dimensional representation of the input image. Instead, we extract features with convolutional layers and map them directly to a segmentation mask with a fully connected layer. We show that this approach, when applied in a multi-scale fashion, is both accurate and efficient enough for real-time. We demonstrate it on a new dataset made of images captured in various environments, from the outdoors to offices.

preprint2016arXiv

Hands Deep in Deep Learning for Hand Pose Estimation

We introduce and evaluate several architectures for Convolutional Neural Networks to predict the 3D joint locations of a hand given a depth map. We first show that a prior on the 3D pose can be easily introduced and significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of the predictions. We also show how to use context efficiently to deal with ambiguities between fingers. These two contributions allow us to significantly outperform the state-of-the-art on several challenging benchmarks, both in terms of accuracy and computation times.

preprint2016arXiv

Hashmod: A Hashing Method for Scalable 3D Object Detection

We present a scalable method for detecting objects and estimating their 3D poses in RGB-D data. To this end, we rely on an efficient representation of object views and employ hashing techniques to match these views against the input frame in a scalable way. While a similar approach already exists for 2D detection, we show how to extend it to estimate the 3D pose of the detected objects. In particular, we explore different hashing strategies and identify the one which is more suitable to our problem. We show empirically that the complexity of our method is sublinear with the number of objects and we enable detection and pose estimation of many 3D objects with high accuracy while outperforming the state-of-the-art in terms of runtime.

preprint2016arXiv

Learning to Assign Orientations to Feature Points

We show how to train a Convolutional Neural Network to assign a canonical orientation to feature points given an image patch centered on the feature point. Our method improves feature point matching upon the state-of-the art and can be used in conjunction with any existing rotation sensitive descriptors. To avoid the tedious and almost impossible task of finding a target orientation to learn, we propose to use Siamese networks which implicitly find the optimal orientations during training. We also propose a new type of activation function for Neural Networks that generalizes the popular ReLU, maxout, and PReLU activation functions. This novel activation performs better for our task. We validate the effectiveness of our method extensively with four existing datasets, including two non-planar datasets, as well as our own dataset. We show that we outperform the state-of-the-art without the need of retraining for each dataset.

preprint2016arXiv

LIFT: Learned Invariant Feature Transform

We introduce a novel Deep Network architecture that implements the full feature point handling pipeline, that is, detection, orientation estimation, and feature description. While previous works have successfully tackled each one of these problems individually, we show how to learn to do all three in a unified manner while preserving end-to-end differentiability. We then demonstrate that our Deep pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a number of benchmark datasets, without the need of retraining.

preprint2016arXiv

Structured Prediction of 3D Human Pose with Deep Neural Networks

Most recent approaches to monocular 3D pose estimation rely on Deep Learning. They either train a Convolutional Neural Network to directly regress from image to 3D pose, which ignores the dependencies between human joints, or model these dependencies via a max-margin structured learning framework, which involves a high computational cost at inference time. In this paper, we introduce a Deep Learning regression architecture for structured prediction of 3D human pose from monocular images that relies on an overcomplete auto-encoder to learn a high-dimensional latent pose representation and account for joint dependencies. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art ones both in terms of structure preservation and prediction accuracy.

preprint2016arXiv

Training a Feedback Loop for Hand Pose Estimation

We propose an entirely data-driven approach to estimating the 3D pose of a hand given a depth image. We show that we can correct the mistakes made by a Convolutional Neural Network trained to predict an estimate of the 3D pose by using a feedback loop. The components of this feedback loop are also Deep Networks, optimized using training data. They remove the need for fitting a 3D model to the input data, which requires both a carefully designed fitting function and algorithm. We show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and is efficient as our implementation runs at over 400 fps on a single GPU.

preprint2015arXiv

Global 6DOF Pose Estimation from Untextured 2D City Models

We propose a method for estimating the 3D pose for the camera of a mobile device in outdoor conditions, using only an untextured 2D model. Previous methods compute only a relative pose using a SLAM algorithm, or require many registered images, which are cumbersome to acquire. By contrast, our method returns an accurate, absolute camera pose in an absolute referential using simple 2D+height maps, which are broadly available, to refine a first estimate of the pose provided by the device's sensors. We show how to first estimate the camera absolute orientation from straight line segments, and then how to estimate the translation by aligning the 2D map with a semantic segmentation of the input image. We demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of our approach on a challenging dataset.

preprint2015arXiv

Predicting People's 3D Poses from Short Sequences

We propose an efficient approach to exploiting motion information from consecutive frames of a video sequence to recover the 3D pose of people. Instead of computing candidate poses in individual frames and then linking them, as is often done, we regress directly from a spatio-temporal block of frames to a 3D pose in the central one. We will demonstrate that this approach allows us to effectively overcome ambiguities and to improve upon the state-of-the-art on challenging sequences.

preprint2015arXiv

TILDE: A Temporally Invariant Learned DEtector

We introduce a learning-based approach to detect repeatable keypoints under drastic imaging changes of weather and lighting conditions to which state-of-the-art keypoint detectors are surprisingly sensitive. We first identify good keypoint candidates in multiple training images taken from the same viewpoint. We then train a regressor to predict a score map whose maxima are those points so that they can be found by simple non-maximum suppression. As there are no standard datasets to test the influence of these kinds of changes, we created our own, which we will make publicly available. We will show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in such challenging conditions, while still achieving state-of-the-art performance on the untrained standard Oxford dataset.

preprint2014arXiv

Beyond KernelBoost

In this Technical Report we propose a set of improvements with respect to the KernelBoost classifier presented in [Becker et al., MICCAI 2013]. We start with a scheme inspired by Auto-Context, but that is suitable in situations where the lack of large training sets poses a potential problem of overfitting. The aim is to capture the interactions between neighboring image pixels to better regularize the boundaries of segmented regions. As in Auto-Context [Tu et al., PAMI 2009] the segmentation process is iterative and, at each iteration, the segmentation results for the previous iterations are taken into account in conjunction with the image itself. However, unlike in [Tu et al., PAMI 2009], we organize our recursion so that the classifiers can progressively focus on difficult-to-classify locations. This lets us exploit the power of the decision-tree paradigm while avoiding over-fitting. In the context of this architecture, KernelBoost represents a powerful building block due to its ability to learn on the score maps coming from previous iterations. We first introduce two important mechanisms to empower the KernelBoost classifier, namely pooling and the clustering of positive samples based on the appearance of the corresponding ground-truth. These operations significantly contribute to increase the effectiveness of the system on biomedical images, where texture plays a major role in the recognition of the different image components. We then present some other techniques that can be easily integrated in the KernelBoost framework to further improve the accuracy of the final segmentation. We show extensive results on different medical image datasets, including some multi-label tasks, on which our method is shown to outperform state-of-the-art approaches. The resulting segmentations display high accuracy, neat contours, and reduced noise.

preprint2014arXiv

Flying Objects Detection from a Single Moving Camera

We propose an approach to detect flying objects such as UAVs and aircrafts when they occupy a small portion of the field of view, possibly moving against complex backgrounds, and are filmed by a camera that itself moves. Solving such a difficult problem requires combining both appearance and motion cues. To this end we propose a regression-based approach to motion stabilization of local image patches that allows us to achieve effective classification on spatio-temporal image cubes and outperform state-of-the-art techniques. As the problem is relatively new, we collected two challenging datasets for UAVs and Aircrafts, which can be used as benchmarks for flying objects detection and vision-guided collision avoidance.

preprint2014arXiv

On Rendering Synthetic Images for Training an Object Detector

We propose a novel approach to synthesizing images that are effective for training object detectors. Starting from a small set of real images, our algorithm estimates the rendering parameters required to synthesize similar images given a coarse 3D model of the target object. These parameters can then be reused to generate an unlimited number of training images of the object of interest in arbitrary 3D poses, which can then be used to increase classification performances. A key insight of our approach is that the synthetically generated images should be similar to real images, not in terms of image quality, but rather in terms of features used during the detector training. We show in the context of drone, plane, and car detection that using such synthetically generated images yields significantly better performances than simply perturbing real images or even synthesizing images in such way that they look very realistic, as is often done when only limited amounts of training data are available.