In recent years, infrastructure-based localization methods have achieved significant progress thanks to their reliable and drift-free localization capability. However, the pre-installed infrastructures suffer from inflexibilities and high maintenance costs. This poses an interesting problem of how to develop a drift-free localization system without using the pre-installed infrastructures. In this paper, an infrastructure-free and drift-free localization system is proposed using the ambient magnetic field (MF) information, namely IDF-MFL. IDF-MFL is infrastructure-free thanks to the high distinctiveness of the ambient MF information produced by inherent ferromagnetic objects in the environment, such as steel and reinforced concrete structures of buildings, and underground pipelines. The MF-based localization problem is defined as a stochastic optimization problem with the consideration of the non-Gaussian heavy-tailed noise introduced by MF measurement outliers (caused by dynamic ferromagnetic objects), and an outlier-robust state estimation algorithm is derived to find the optimal distribution of robot state that makes the expectation of MF matching cost achieves its lower bound. The proposed method is evaluated in multiple scenarios, including experiments on high-fidelity simulation, and real-world environments. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve high-accuracy, reliable, and real-time localization without any pre-installed infrastructures.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to adapt a model trained on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain by addressing the domain shift. Existing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods often fall short in fully leveraging contextual information from the target domain, leading to suboptimal decision boundary separation during source and target domain alignment. To address this, we introduce GrabDAE, an innovative UDA framework designed to tackle domain shift in visual classification tasks. GrabDAE incorporates two key innovations: the Grab-Mask module, which blurs background information in target domain images, enabling the model to focus on essential, domain-relevant features through contrastive learning; and the Denoising Auto-Encoder (DAE), which enhances feature alignment by reconstructing features and filtering noise, ensuring a more robust adaptation to the target domain. These components empower GrabDAE to effectively handle unlabeled target domain data, significantly improving both classification accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including VisDA-2017, Office-Home, and Office31, demonstrate that GrabDAE consistently surpasses state-of-the-art UDA methods, setting new performance benchmarks. By tackling UDA's critical challenges with its novel feature masking and denoising approach, GrabDAE offers both significant theoretical and practical advancements in domain adaptation.

Dense scene reconstruction for photo-realistic view synthesis has various applications, such as VR/AR, autonomous vehicles. However, most existing methods have difficulties in large-scale scenes due to three core challenges: \textit{(a) inaccurate depth input.} Accurate depth input is impossible to get in real-world large-scale scenes. \textit{(b) inaccurate pose estimation.} Most existing approaches rely on accurate pre-estimated camera poses. \textit{(c) insufficient scene representation capability.} A single global radiance field lacks the capacity to effectively scale to large-scale scenes. To this end, we propose an incremental joint learning framework, which can achieve accurate depth, pose estimation, and large-scale scene reconstruction. A vision transformer-based network is adopted as the backbone to enhance performance in scale information estimation. For pose estimation, a feature-metric bundle adjustment (FBA) method is designed for accurate and robust camera tracking in large-scale scenes. In terms of implicit scene representation, we propose an incremental scene representation method to construct the entire large-scale scene as multiple local radiance fields to enhance the scalability of 3D scene representation. Extended experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our method in depth estimation, pose estimation, and large-scale scene reconstruction.

In recent years, there have been significant advancements in 3D reconstruction and dense RGB-D SLAM systems. One notable development is the application of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) in these systems, which utilizes implicit neural representation to encode 3D scenes. This extension of NeRF to SLAM has shown promising results. However, the depth images obtained from consumer-grade RGB-D sensors are often sparse and noisy, which poses significant challenges for 3D reconstruction and affects the accuracy of the representation of the scene geometry. Moreover, the original hierarchical feature grid with occupancy value is inaccurate for scene geometry representation. Furthermore, the existing methods select random pixels for camera tracking, which leads to inaccurate localization and is not robust in real-world indoor environments. To this end, we present NeSLAM, an advanced framework that achieves accurate and dense depth estimation, robust camera tracking, and realistic synthesis of novel views. First, a depth completion and denoising network is designed to provide dense geometry prior and guide the neural implicit representation optimization. Second, the occupancy scene representation is replaced with Signed Distance Field (SDF) hierarchical scene representation for high-quality reconstruction and view synthesis. Furthermore, we also propose a NeRF-based self-supervised feature tracking algorithm for robust real-time tracking. Experiments on various indoor datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the system in reconstruction, tracking quality, and novel view synthesis.

Recent work has shown that 3D Gaussian-based SLAM enables high-quality reconstruction, accurate pose estimation, and real-time rendering of scenes. However, these approaches are built on a tremendous number of redundant 3D Gaussian ellipsoids, leading to high memory and storage costs, and slow training speed. To address the limitation, we propose a compact 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM system that reduces the number and the parameter size of Gaussian ellipsoids. A sliding window-based masking strategy is first proposed to reduce the redundant ellipsoids. Then we observe that the covariance matrix (geometry) of most 3D Gaussian ellipsoids are extremely similar, which motivates a novel geometry codebook to compress 3D Gaussian geometric attributes, i.e., the parameters. Robust and accurate pose estimation is achieved by a global bundle adjustment method with reprojection loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves faster training and rendering speed while maintaining the state-of-the-art (SOTA) quality of the scene representation.

Tracking the object 6-DoF pose is crucial for various downstream robot tasks and real-world applications. In this paper, we investigate the real-world robot task of aerial vision guidance for aerial robotics manipulation, utilizing category-level 6-DoF pose tracking. Aerial conditions inevitably introduce special challenges, such as rapid viewpoint changes in pitch and roll and inter-frame differences. To support these challenges in task, we firstly introduce a robust category-level 6-DoF pose tracker (Robust6DoF). This tracker leverages shape and temporal prior knowledge to explore optimal inter-frame keypoint pairs, generated under a priori structural adaptive supervision in a coarse-to-fine manner. Notably, our Robust6DoF employs a Spatial-Temporal Augmentation module to deal with the problems of the inter-frame differences and intra-class shape variations through both temporal dynamic filtering and shape-similarity filtering. We further present a Pose-Aware Discrete Servo strategy (PAD-Servo), serving as a decoupling approach to implement the final aerial vision guidance task. It contains two servo action policies to better accommodate the structural properties of aerial robotics manipulation. Exhaustive experiments on four well-known public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our Robust6DoF. Real-world tests directly verify that our Robust6DoF along with PAD-Servo can be readily used in real-world aerial robotic applications.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is moving towards a robust perception age. However, LiDAR- and visual- SLAM may easily fail in adverse conditions (rain, snow, smoke and fog, etc.). In comparison, SLAM based on 4D Radar, thermal camera and IMU can work robustly. But only a few literature can be found. A major reason is the lack of related datasets, which seriously hinders the research. Even though some datasets are proposed based on 4D radar in past four years, they are mainly designed for object detection, rather than SLAM. Furthermore, they normally do not include thermal camera. Therefore, in this paper, NTU4DRadLM is presented to meet this requirement. The main characteristics are: 1) It is the only dataset that simultaneously includes all 6 sensors: 4D radar, thermal camera, IMU, 3D LiDAR, visual camera and RTK GPS. 2) Specifically designed for SLAM tasks, which provides fine-tuned ground truth odometry and intentionally formulated loop closures. 3) Considered both low-speed robot platform and fast-speed unmanned vehicle platform. 4) Covered structured, unstructured and semi-structured environments. 5) Considered both middle- and large- scale outdoor environments, i.e., the 6 trajectories range from 246m to 6.95km. 6) Comprehensively evaluated three types of SLAM algorithms. Totally, the dataset is around 17.6km, 85mins, 50GB and it will be accessible from this link: https://github.com/junzhang2016/NTU4DRadLM

Large-scale visual place recognition (VPR) is inherently challenging because not all visual cues in the image are beneficial to the task. In order to highlight the task-relevant visual cues in the feature embedding, the existing attention mechanisms are either based on artificial rules or trained in a thorough data-driven manner. To fill the gap between the two types, we propose a novel Semantic Reinforced Attention Learning Network (SRALNet), in which the inferred attention can benefit from both semantic priors and data-driven fine-tuning. The contribution lies in two-folds. (1) To suppress misleading local features, an interpretable local weighting scheme is proposed based on hierarchical feature distribution. (2) By exploiting the interpretability of the local weighting scheme, a semantic constrained initialization is proposed so that the local attention can be reinforced by semantic priors. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on city-scale VPR benchmark datasets.