About me

I’m a senior Applied Scientist working on computer vision at AWS AI Labs. My speciality is in 3-D computer vision, visual-inertial sensor fusion, and system engineering.

I defended my Ph.D. thesis on Inertial-aided Visual Perception of Geometry and Semantics in August 2019. From Sept. 2014 - Sept. 2019, I’ve been working at UCLA Vision Lab with Prof. Stefano Soatto.

My research interests include computer vision, robotics, and machine learning. Specifically, I’m interested in developing models (include, but not limited to, deep learning models) and engineering systems to solve real-world problems in multi-sensor settings.

Our paper Geo-Supervised Visual Depth Prediction about leveraging visual-inertial sensor packages, and gravity-induced shape priors to improve depth prediction has won the Best Paper Award in Robot Vision at ICRA 2019, out of 2900 submissions.

Before joining Vision Lab, I've obtained my B.Eng. from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, 2014. I majored in Information and Electronic Engineering in undergraduate, and it was my great pleasure to be a member of the Advanced honor Class of Engineering Education (ACEE), where I practiced a lot in mathematical modeling contests and enjoyed exchanging ideas with other engineering majors.

A recent CV is available here.

The video below shows XIVO – our open-sourced VIO.

Awards & Distinctions

• Best Paper Award in Robot Vision, ICRA 2019.
• Meritorious Winner of Mathematical Contest in Modeling, 2013.
• National Scholarship, Ministry of Education, China.

What’s new

• July 2021. Our paper on Single View Physical Distance Estimation using Human Pose (pre-print) for the social distancing problem was accepted by ICCV 2021!
• February 2021. Our paper on An Adaptive Framework for Learning Unsupervised Depth Completion has been accepted by ICRA 2021.
• February 2020. Our paper on Unsupervised Depth Completion from Visual-Inertial Odometry has been accepted by ICRA 2020.
• September 2019. We open-sourced our VIO implementation, you can find the code here.

Software

• XIVO (X Inertial-aided Visual Odometry) or yet another visual-inertial odometry.[code]
• VISMA dataset and utilities for our ECCV paper on Visual-Inertial Object Detection and Mapping. [code]
• GeoSup code for our ICRA paper on Geo-Supervised Visual Depth Prediction. [code]
• A minimal implementation of \(SE(3)\) (actually \(SO(3)\times \mathbb{R}^3 \)) in Tensorflow for geometric learning. [code]
• A collection of PnP (Perspective-n-Point) RANSAC solvers. [code]

Demo

• Visual-Inertial Navigation and Semantic Mapping System @ CVPR 2016.
  [video]-[poster]
• Visual-Inertial Navigation, Mapping and Loop Closure @ SCR 2016.
  [video]-[poster]
• Re-localization and Failure Recovery for SLAM.
  [video]

Thesis

• Ph.D. Thesis: Inertial-aided Visual Perception of Geometry and Semantics
  [manuscript]-[slides]

• B.Eng. Thesis: Robust Wide-baseline Feature Matching for Panoramic Images
  

Publication

• Single View Physical Distance Estimation using Human Pose
  Xiaohan Fei, Henry Wang, Xiangyu Zeng, Lin Lee Cheong, Meng Wang, Joseph Tighe
  Accepted by International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021
  [pre-print]

• An Adaptive Framework for Learning Unsupervised Depth Completion
  Alex Wong, Xiaohan Fei, Byung-Woo Hong, and Stefano Soatto
  In International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2021
  Also in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2021
  [paper]

• Unsupervised Depth Completion from Visual-Inertial Odometry
  Alex Wong*, Xiaohan Fei*, Stephanie Tsuei, and Stefano Soatto
  In International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2020
  Also in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2020
  [paper]-[code]-[data]-[void benchmark]

• Geo-Supervised Visual Depth Prediction
  Xiaohan Fei, Alex Wong, and Stefano Soatto
  In International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2019
  (Best Paper Award in Robot Vision)
  Also in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2019
  [paper]-[poster]-[slides]-[code]

• Visual-Inertial Object Detection and Mapping
  Xiaohan Fei and Stefano Soatto
  In Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision, 2018
  [paper]-[poster]-[video]-[data]-[supmat]

• Visual-Inertial-Semantic Scene Representation for 3D Object Detection
  Jingming Dong*, Xiaohan Fei*, and Stefano Soatto
  In Proceedings of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2017
  [paper]-[poster]-[video]

• A Simple Hierarchical Pooling Data Structure for Loop Closure
  Xiaohan Fei, Konstantine Tsotsos, and Stefano Soatto
  In Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision, 2016
  [paper]-[poster]

Professional Services

Reviewer of major vision (CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV), and robotics (ICRA, IROS) conferences.

Talk & Workshop

• Inertial-aided Visual Perception for Localization, Mapping, and Detection, at Facebook Reality Labs, Microsoft Research, and MagicLeap, 2019.
• Visual-Inertial-Semantic Scene Representation, at Bridges to 3D Workshop, CVPR 2017.

Teaching

• Spring 2018. CS M152A, Introductory Digital Design Laboratory.
• In undergraduate, I was a TA of the graduate class taught by Prof. Xianyi Gong at Zhejiang University on Spectral Analysis of Signals – mostly solving problem sets of the Linear Estimaion book, and leading discussions.