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 panoramic video


ViewPoint: Panoramic Video Generation with Pretrained Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Panoramic video generation aims to synthesize 360-degree immersive videos, holding significant importance in the fields of VR, world models, and spatial intelligence. Existing works fail to synthesize high-quality panoramic videos due to the inherent modality gap between panoramic data and perspective data, which constitutes the majority of the training data for modern diffusion models. In this paper, we propose a novel framework utilizing pretrained perspective video models for generating panoramic videos. Specifically, we design a novel panorama representation named ViewPoint map, which possesses global spatial continuity and fine-grained visual details simultaneously. With our proposed Pano-Perspective attention mechanism, the model benefits from pretrained perspective priors and captures the panoramic spatial correlations of the ViewPoint map effectively.


QuaDreamer: Controllable Panoramic Video Generation for Quadruped Robots

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Panoramic cameras, capturing comprehensive 360-degree environmental data, are suitable for quadruped robots in surrounding perception and interaction with complex environments. However, the scarcity of high-quality panoramic training data-caused by inherent kinematic constraints and complex sensor calibration challenges-fundamentally limits the development of robust perception systems tailored to these embodied platforms. To address this issue, we propose QuaDreamer-the first panoramic data generation engine specifically designed for quadruped robots. QuaDreamer focuses on mimicking the motion paradigm of quadruped robots to generate highly controllable, realistic panoramic videos, providing a data source for downstream tasks. Specifically, to effectively capture the unique vertical vibration characteristics exhibited during quadruped locomotion, we introduce Vertical Jitter Encoding (VJE). VJE extracts controllable vertical signals through frequency-domain feature filtering and provides high-quality prompts. To facilitate high-quality panoramic video generation under jitter signal control, we propose a Scene-Object Controller (SOC) that effectively manages object motion and boosts background jitter control through the attention mechanism. To address panoramic distortions in wide-FoV video generation, we propose the Panoramic Enhancer (PE)-a dual-stream architecture that synergizes frequency-texture refinement for local detail enhancement with spatial-structure correction for global geometric consistency. We further demonstrate that the generated video sequences can serve as training data for the quadruped robot's panoramic visual perception model, enhancing the performance of multi-object tracking in 360-degree scenes. The source code and model weights will be publicly available at https://github.com/losehu/QuaDreamer.


VideoPanda: Video Panoramic Diffusion with Multi-view Attention

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Both single-view video inputs were generated using existing video generation models (Brooks et al., 2024; Runway, 2024). Auto-regressive generation is applied to extend the video length. A BSTRACT High resolution panoramic video content is paramount for immersive experiences in Virtual Reality, but is non-trivial to collect as it requires specialized equipment and intricate camera setups. In this work, we introduce VideoPanda, a novel approach for synthesizing 360 videos conditioned on text or single-view video data. VideoPanda leverages multi-view attention layers to augment a video diffusion model, enabling it to generate consistent multi-view videos that can be combined into immersive panoramic content. VideoPanda is trained jointly using two conditions: text-only and single-view video, and supports autoregressive generation of long-videos. To overcome the computational burden of multi-view video generation, we randomly subsample the duration and camera views used during training and show that the model is able to gracefully generalize to generating more frames during inference. Extensive evaluations on both real-world and synthetic video datasets demonstrate that VideoPanda generates more realistic and coherent 360 panoramas across all input conditions compared to existing methods. First and second author contributed equally. To enable such experiences, it is essential to have access to high-quality and high-resolution panoramic videos. However, recording such videos is both expensive and time-consuming, as it requires intricate camera setups and specialized equipment.


Amplifying robotics capacities with a human touch: An immersive low-latency panoramic remote system

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI and robotics technologies have witnessed remarkable advancements in the past decade, revolutionizing work patterns and opportunities in various domains. The application of these technologies has propelled society towards an era of symbiosis between humans and machines. To facilitate efficient communication between humans and intelligent robots, we propose the "Avatar" system, an immersive low-latency panoramic human-robot interaction platform. We have designed and tested a prototype of a rugged mobile platform integrated with edge computing units, panoramic video capture devices, power batteries, robot arms, and network communication equipment. Under favorable network conditions, we achieved a low-latency high-definition panoramic visual experience with a delay of 357ms. Operators can utilize VR headsets and controllers for real-time immersive control of robots and devices. The system enables remote control over vast physical distances, spanning campuses, provinces, countries, and even continents (New York to Shenzhen). Additionally, the system incorporates visual SLAM technology for map and trajectory recording, providing autonomous navigation capabilities. We believe that this intuitive system platform can enhance efficiency and situational experience in human-robot collaboration, and with further advancements in related technologies, it will become a versatile tool for efficient and symbiotic cooperation between AI and humans.


A Spatial-Temporal Dual-Mode Mixed Flow Network for Panoramic Video Salient Object Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

-- S alient object detection (SOD) in panoramic video is still in the initial exploration stage. The indirect application of 2D video SOD method to the detection of salient objects in panoramic video has many unmet challenges, such as low detection accuracy, hi gh model complexity, and poor generalization performance. To overcome these hurdles, we design an I nter - L ayer A ttention (ILA) module, an I nter - L ayer weight (ILW) module, and a B i - M odal A ttention (BMA) module. Based on these modules, we propose a Spati al - Te mporal D ual - M ode M ixed F low N etwork (STDMMF - Net) that exploits the spatial flow of panoramic video and the corresponding optical flow for SOD. First, the ILA module calculates the attention between adjacent level features of consecutive frames of panoramic video to improve the accuracy of extracting salient object features from the spatial flow. Then, the ILW module quantifies the salient object information contained in the features of each level to improve the fusion efficiency of the features of each level in the mixed flow. Finally, the BMA module improves the detection accuracy of STDMMF - Net. A large number of subjective and objective experimental results testify that the proposed method demonstrates better detection accuracy than the state - of - the - art (SOTA) methods . Moreover, the comprehensive performance of the proposed method is better in terms of memory required for model inference, testing time, complexity, and generalization performa nce. I NTRODUCTION he main goal of video salient object detection (SOD) is to find the most eye - catching object s in videos [1], [2], [3] .


People Tracking in Panoramic Video for Guiding Robots

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A guiding robot aims to effectively bring people to and from specific places within environments that are possibly unknown to them. During this operation the robot should be able to detect and track the accompanied person, trying never to lose sight of her/him. A solution to minimize this event is to use an omnidirectional camera: its 360{\deg} Field of View (FoV) guarantees that any framed object cannot leave the FoV if not occluded or very far from the sensor. However, the acquired panoramic videos introduce new challenges in perception tasks such as people detection and tracking, including the large size of the images to be processed, the distortion effects introduced by the cylindrical projection and the periodic nature of panoramic images. In this paper, we propose a set of targeted methods that allow to effectively adapt to panoramic videos a standard people detection and tracking pipeline originally designed for perspective cameras. Our methods have been implemented and tested inside a deep learning-based people detection and tracking framework with a commercial 360{\deg} camera. Experiments performed on datasets specifically acquired for guiding robot applications and on a real service robot show the effectiveness of the proposed approach over other state-of-the-art systems. We release with this paper the acquired and annotated datasets and the open-source implementation of our method.


'Hallucination machine' gives drug-free psychedelic trip

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A'hallucination machine' that sends your brain on a psychedelic trip without the need for drugs has been developed by scientists. Using Google Artificial Intelligence and a virtual reality headset, the device makes users hallucinate as if they have taken LSD or magic mushrooms. The machine was developed to help researchers better understand how the brain responds to altering realities. Brain scans taken on people using the machine could help determine if our'reality' is just a type of hallucination, the researchers claim. Through a virtual reality headset, the hallucination machine repeatedly shows selected images and patterns, such as a dog (top right) or colourful lines (bottom left) and spirals (bottom right) layered over reality.