# Trans4Map: Revisiting Holistic Bird's-Eye-View Mapping from Egocentric Images to Allocentric Semantics with Vision Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.06205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06205/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [Pay Attention to MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08050/) (2021)
- [Learning to Explore using Active Neural SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05155/) (2020)
- [Cross-view Transformers for real-time Map-view Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02833/) (2022)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [Cross-view Semantic Segmentation for Sensing Surroundings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03560/) (2019)
- [Understanding The Robustness in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12451/) (2022)
- [MatchFormer: Interleaving Attention in Transformers for Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09645/) (2022)
- [Translating Images into Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00966/) (2021)
- [ACNet: Attention Based Network to Exploit Complementary Features for RGBD Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10089/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Anticipation for Efficient Exploration and Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09285/) (2020)
- [Structured Bird's-Eye-View Traffic Scene Understanding from Onboard Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01997/) (2021)
- [Monocular Semantic Occupancy Grid Mapping with Convolutional Variational Encoder-Decoder Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02176/) (2018)
- [Volumetric Instance-Aware Semantic Mapping and 3D Object Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00268/) (2019)
- [Bending Reality: Distortion-aware Transformers for Adapting to Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01452/) (2022)
- [RedNet: Residual Encoder-Decoder Network for indoor RGB-D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01054/) (2018)
- [Semantic MapNet: Building Allocentric Semantic Maps and Representations from Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01191/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [360BEV: Panoramic Semantic Mapping for Indoor Bird's-Eye View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11910/) (2023)
- [CoBEV: Elevating Roadside 3D Object Detection with Depth and Height Complementarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02815/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans have an innate ability to sense their surroundings, as they can extract the spatial representation from the egocentric perception and form an allocentric semantic map via spatial transformation and memory updating. However, endowing mobile agents with such a spatial sensing ability is still a challenge, due to two difficulties: (1) the previous convolutional models are limited by the local receptive field, thus, struggling to capture holistic long-range dependencies during observation; (2) the excessive computational budgets required for success, often lead to a separation of the mapping pipeline into stages, resulting the entire mapping process inefficient. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end one-stage Transformer-based framework for Mapping, termed Trans4Map. Our egocentric-to-allocentric mapping process includes three steps: (1) the efficient transformer extracts the contextual features from a batch of egocentric images; (2) the proposed Bidirectional Allocentric Memory (BAM) module projects egocentric features into the allocentric memory; (3) the map decoder parses the accumulated memory and predicts the top-down semantic segmentation map. In contrast, Trans4Map achieves state-of-the-art results, reducing 67.2% parameters, yet gaining a +3.25% mIoU and a +4.09% mBF1 improvements on the Matterport3D dataset. Code at: https://github.com/jamycheung/Trans4Map.
