Camouflaged Object Detection (COD), the task of identifying objects concealed within their environments, has seen rapid growth due to its wide range of practical applications. A key step toward developing trustworthy COD systems is the estimation and effective utilization of uncertainty. In this work, we propose a human-machine collaboration framework for classifying the presence of camouflaged objects, leveraging the complementary strengths of computer vision (CV) models and noninvasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Our approach introduces a multiview backbone to estimate uncertainty in CV model predictions, utilizes this uncertainty during training to improve efficiency, and defers low-confidence cases to human evaluation via RSVP-based BCIs during testing for more reliable decision-making. We evaluated the framework in the CAMO dataset, achieving state-of-the-art results with an average improvement of 4.56\% in balanced accuracy (BA) and 3.66\% in the F1 score compared to existing methods. For the best-performing participants, the improvements reached 7.6\% in BA and 6.66\% in the F1 score. Analysis of the training process revealed a strong correlation between our confidence measures and precision, while an ablation study confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed training policy and the human-machine collaboration strategy. In general, this work reduces human cognitive load, improves system reliability, and provides a strong foundation for advancements in real-world COD applications and human-computer interaction. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/ziyuey/Uncertainty-aware-human-machine-collaboration-in-camouflaged-object-identification.

Targeting the notorious cumulative drift errors in NeRF SLAM, we propose a Semantic-guided Loop Closure with Shared Latent Code, dubbed SLC$^2$-SLAM. Especially, we argue that latent codes stored in many NeRF SLAM systems are not fully exploited, as they are only used for better reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective way to detect potential loops using the same latent codes as local features. To further improve the loop detection performance, we use the semantic information, which are also decoded from the same latent codes to guide the aggregation of local features. Finally, with the potential loops detected, we close them with a graph optimization followed by bundle adjustment to refine both the estimated poses and the reconstructed scene. To evaluate the performance of our SLC$^2$-SLAM, we conduct extensive experiments on Replica and ScanNet datasets. Our proposed semantic-guided loop closure significantly outperforms the pre-trained NetVLAD and ORB combined with Bag-of-Words, which are used in all the other NeRF SLAM with loop closure. As a result, our SLC$^2$-SLAM also demonstrated better tracking and reconstruction performance, especially in larger scenes with more loops, like ScanNet.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for 3D scene representation, offering high-fidelity renderings and reconstructions from a set of sparse and unstructured sensor data. In the context of autonomous robotics, where perception and understanding of the environment are pivotal, NeRF holds immense promise for improving performance. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and analysis of the state-of-the-art techniques for utilizing NeRF to enhance the capabilities of autonomous robots. We especially focus on the perception, localization and navigation, and decision-making modules of autonomous robots and delve into tasks crucial for autonomous operation, including 3D reconstruction, segmentation, pose estimation, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), navigation and planning, and interaction. Our survey meticulously benchmarks existing NeRF-based methods, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. Moreover, we explore promising avenues for future research and development in this domain. Notably, we discuss the integration of advanced techniques such as 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS), large language models (LLM), and generative AIs, envisioning enhanced reconstruction efficiency, scene understanding, decision-making capabilities. This survey serves as a roadmap for researchers seeking to leverage NeRFs to empower autonomous robots, paving the way for innovative solutions that can navigate and interact seamlessly in complex environments.

We present AEGIS-Net, a novel indoor place recognition model that takes in RGB point clouds and generates global place descriptors by aggregating lower-level color, geometry features and higher-level implicit semantic features. However, rather than simple feature concatenation, self-attention modules are employed to select the most important local features that best describe an indoor place. Our AEGIS-Net is made of a semantic encoder, a semantic decoder and an attention-guided feature embedding. The model is trained in a 2-stage process with the first stage focusing on an auxiliary semantic segmentation task and the second one on the place recognition task. We evaluate our AEGIS-Net on the ScanNetPR dataset and compare its performance with a pre-deep-learning feature-based method and five state-of-the-art deep-learning-based methods. Our AEGIS-Net achieves exceptional performance and outperforms all six methods.

Visual-inertial initialization can be classified into joint and disjoint approaches. Joint approaches tackle both the visual and the inertial parameters together by aligning observations from feature-bearing points based on IMU integration then use a closed-form solution with visual and acceleration observations to find initial velocity and gravity. In contrast, disjoint approaches independently solve the Structure from Motion (SFM) problem and determine inertial parameters from up-to-scale camera poses obtained from pure monocular SLAM. However, previous disjoint methods have limitations, like assuming negligible acceleration bias impact or accurate rotation estimation by pure monocular SLAM. To address these issues, we propose EDI, a novel approach for fast, accurate, and robust visual-inertial initialization. Our method incorporates an Error-state Kalman Filter (ESKF) to estimate gyroscope bias and correct rotation estimates from monocular SLAM, overcoming dependence on pure monocular SLAM for rotation estimation. To estimate the scale factor without prior information, we offer a closed-form solution for initial velocity, scale, gravity, and acceleration bias estimation. To address gravity and acceleration bias coupling, we introduce weights in the linear least-squares equations, ensuring acceleration bias observability and handling outliers. Extensive evaluation on the EuRoC dataset shows that our method achieves an average scale error of 5.8% in less than 3 seconds, outperforming other state-of-the-art disjoint visual-inertial initialization approaches, even in challenging environments and with artificial noise corruption.

We present PVO, a novel panoptic visual odometry framework to achieve more comprehensive modeling of the scene motion, geometry, and panoptic segmentation information. Our PVO models visual odometry (VO) and video panoptic segmentation (VPS) in a unified view, which makes the two tasks mutually beneficial. Specifically, we introduce a panoptic update module into the VO Module with the guidance of image panoptic segmentation. This Panoptic-Enhanced VO Module can alleviate the impact of dynamic objects in the camera pose estimation with a panoptic-aware dynamic mask. On the other hand, the VO-Enhanced VPS Module also improves the segmentation accuracy by fusing the panoptic segmentation result of the current frame on the fly to the adjacent frames, using geometric information such as camera pose, depth, and optical flow obtained from the VO Module. These two modules contribute to each other through recurrent iterative optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PVO outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both visual odometry and video panoptic segmentation tasks.

In this work, we present a dense tracking and mapping system named Vox-Fusion, which seamlessly fuses neural implicit representations with traditional volumetric fusion methods. Our approach is inspired by the recently developed implicit mapping and positioning system and further extends the idea so that it can be freely applied to practical scenarios. Specifically, we leverage a voxel-based neural implicit surface representation to encode and optimize the scene inside each voxel. Furthermore, we adopt an octree-based structure to divide the scene and support dynamic expansion, enabling our system to track and map arbitrary scenes without knowing the environment like in previous works. Moreover, we proposed a high-performance multi-process framework to speed up the method, thus supporting some applications that require real-time performance. The evaluation results show that our methods can achieve better accuracy and completeness than previous methods. We also show that our Vox-Fusion can be used in augmented reality and virtual reality applications. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/zju3dv/Vox-Fusion.