Homography estimation is the task of determining the transformation from an image pair. Our approach focuses on employing detector-free feature matching methods to address this issue. Previous work has underscored the importance of incorporating semantic information, however there still lacks an efficient way to utilize semantic information. Previous methods suffer from treating the semantics as a pre-processing, causing the utilization of semantics overly coarse-grained and lack adaptability when dealing with different tasks. In our work, we seek another way to use the semantic information, that is semantic-aware feature representation learning framework. Based on this, we propose SRMatcher, a new detector-free feature matching method, which encourages the network to learn integrated semantic feature representation. Specifically, to capture precise and rich semantics, we leverage the capabilities of recently popularized vision foundation models (VFMs) trained on extensive datasets. Then, a cross-images Semantic-aware Fusion Block (SFB) is proposed to integrate its fine-grained semantic features into the feature representation space. In this way, by reducing errors stemming from semantic inconsistencies in matching pairs, our proposed SRMatcher is able to deliver more accurate and realistic outcomes. Extensive experiments show that SRMatcher surpasses solid baselines and attains SOTA results on multiple real-world datasets. Compared to the previous SOTA approach GeoFormer, SRMatcher increases the area under the cumulative curve (AUC) by about 11% on HPatches. Additionally, the SRMatcher could serve as a plug-and-play framework for other matching methods like LoFTR, yielding substantial precision improvement.
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires embodied agents to ground natural language instructions in visual perception and make navigation decisions in complex 3D environments, making it a central problem in embodied artificial intelligence. Since the introduction of the Room-to-Room (R2R) benchmark, VLN has made substantial progress. In recent years, as research settings have gradually expanded from closed and single indoor benchmark scenarios to open-world environments, the field has undergone a profound paradigm shift from passive instruction following on fixed benchmarks to autonomous cognitive navigation in open-world settings. However, existing surveys mainly organize prior work according to technical taxonomies, lacking a systematic characterization of this paradigm evolution. To address this gap, this survey proposes an evolution-centered unified analytical framework that reviews contemporary VLN research across four progressive layers: perception, cognition, learning, and generalization. It reveals the intrinsic connections and evolutionary logic among different technical lines, identifies key open challenges at each dimension, and outlines future research directions. This survey aims to provide VLN researchers with a clear panoramic view of capability evolution, while offering the broader embodied intelligence community a systematic roadmap from closed-benchmark evaluation toward trustworthy open-world deployment.
Emotional talking face generation aims to animate a human face in given reference images and generate a talking video that matches the content and emotion of driving audio. However, existing methods neglect that reference images may have a strong emotion that conflicts with the audio emotion, leading to severe emotion inaccuracy and distorted generated results. To tackle the issue, we introduce a cross-emotion memory network(CEM-Net), designed to generate emotional talking faces aligned with the driving audio when reference images exhibit strong emotion. Specifically, an Audio Emotion Enhancement module(AEE) is first devised with the cross-reconstruction training strategy to enhance audio emotion, overcoming the disruption from reference image emotion. Secondly, since reference images cannot provide sufficient facial motion information of the speaker under audio emotion, an Emotion Bridging Memory module(EBM) is utilized to compensate for the lacked information. It brings in expression displacement from the reference image emotion to the audio emotion and stores it in the memory.Given a cross-emotion feature as a query, the matching displacement can be retrieved at inference time. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our CEM-Net can synthesize expressive, natural and lip-synced talking face videos with better emotion accuracy.