UC Irvine

3D scene perception aims to understand the geometric and semantic information of the surrounding environment. It is crucial in many downstream applications, such as autonomous driving, robotics, AR/VR, and human-computer interaction. Despite its significance, understanding the 3D scene has been a challenging task, due to the complex interactions between objects, heavy occlusions, cluttered indoor environments, major appearance, viewpoint and scale changes, etc. The study of 3D scene perception has been significantly reshaped by the powerful deep learning models. These models are capable of leveraging large-scale training data to achieve outstanding performance. Learning-based models unlock new challenges and opportunities in the field.

In this dissertation, we first present learning-based approaches to estimate depth maps, one of the crucial information in many 3D scene perception models. We describe two overlooked challenges in learning monocular depth estimators and present our proposed solutions. Specifically, we address the high-level domain gap between real and synthetic training data and the shift in camera pose distribution between training and testing data. Following that we present two application-driven works that leverage depth maps to achieve better 3D scene perception. We explore in detail the tasks of reference-based image inpainting and 3D object instance tracking in scenes from egocentric videos.