ECO: Incremental Ego-Centric Octree Update for Point Streams
Authors: Jaemin Yu, Seongyoon Jeong, Kang-Wook Chon, Duksu Kim
Organizations: Korea University of Technology and Education (KOREATECH), Cheonan, Republic of Korea
Abstract
Constructing octrees for mobile robots that process continuous point streams in real time poses significant computational and memory challenges. Standard global structures often suffer from high latency and unbalanced tree growth. We introduce the Ego-Centric Octree (ECO), a spatial data structure that acts as a 3D sliding window, dynamically bounding the mapping space to the robot's immediate surroundings. ECO uses an efficient incremental update algorithm that categorizes the environment into shift-out, shift-in, and overlap regions, eliminating redundant global coordinate transformations. Evaluations on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate that ECO reduces update times by up to 25.60% (24.87% on average) compared to full static reconstruction and by up to 67.52% (54.60% on average) compared to a bounded incremental baseline. Furthermore, ECO substantially lowers the total system latency of downstream tasks, running up to 34.17% faster than full reconstruction in voxel-map generation. In dynamic scenes, ECO naturally retains a short-term temporal memory of moving objects, providing useful temporal context while keeping update cost bounded and the tree balanced for real-time spatial perception.
Understanding 3D scenes from egocentric video is fundamental for robotics and autonomous navigation, yet rapid viewpoint changes and partial occlusions make building structured representations challenging. Existing 3D tracking and scene graph construction methods primarily address explicit interactions or assume static scenes, limiting their ability to capture complex dynamics. We introduce EgoTrack3D, a modular framework that reconstructs and maintains a dynamic 3D scene representation directly from egocentric RGB video. The framework lifts 2D segmentation masks into a global 3D coordinate frame, using a point-based motion scoring mechanism alongside a voxel-based merging heuristic to associate object tracks. EgoTrack3D maintains accurate representations over time, achieving an 11% improvement in percentage of correct locations (PCL) relative to the strongest baseline on the Aria Digital Twin (ADT) dataset, while addressing the more general setting of persistent 3D tracking for both static and dynamic objects. Furthermore, to demonstrate the system's robustness under degraded conditions that simulate real-world deployment constraints, we replace dense depth maps with sparse 3D bounding box estimation and integrate interaction-guided dynamic association, enabling EgoTrack3D to maintain accurate spatial representations despite noisy observations.
Jan Kulik, Bjarni Dagur Thor Karason, Yung-Hsu Yang +3
Crucial for autonomous exploration, online 3D occupancy prediction and mapping incrementally constructs dense spatial representations on the fly. However, recent Gaussian-centric methods struggle with structural boundary fidelity and rely heavily on predefined scene-size priors, fundamentally limiting their operational efficiency. In this work, we present VEOcc, a voxel-centric framework formulated as a recursive perception-and-assimilation paradigm. By eliminating the need for initial scale estimation, VEOcc enables highly streamlined, open-ended map expansion. Furthermore, to robustly aggregate noisy temporal observations within the discrete voxel space, we propose a Spatio-Temporal-Aware Online Update Strategy. It integrates Cross-Temporal Logit Aggregation (TLA) for temporal consistency, Reliability-Aware Confidence Modulation (RCM) for spatial uncertainty calibration, and Confidence-Driven Incremental State Update (CSU) for robust global state assimilation. % Extensive experiments on Occ-ScanNet and EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet demonstrate that VEOcc establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both local and embodied settings, providing an accurate and efficient solution for real-world exploration. Extensive experiments on Occ-ScanNet and EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet demonstrate that VEOcc establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both local and embodied settings. Notably, zero-shot evaluations on self-collected video sequences further confirm its robust out-of-distribution generalization capability in completely unseen real-world environments. Ultimately, our framework provides an accurate and highly efficient solution for autonomous exploration. Code and supplementary visualizations are available on our project page: https://wryzju.github.io/VEOcc/.
In this paper, we explore dense voxel streaming for accurate and efficient 3D occupancy prediction. While dense voxel representations offer fine-grained spatial details and streaming paradigm enables efficient temporal processing, naively combining the two introduces key challenges: (i) warping-induced distortions caused by interpolation used for temporal alignment, and (ii) degraded dynamic object representations due to motion misalignment and detail loss in image-to-voxel projection. To address these, we propose StreamOcc, a novel framework that utilizes two aggregation strategies. Specifically, it first refines propagated voxel features to reduce warping artifacts before temporal accumulation, and then selectively injects instance-level query features encoding dynamic-object semantics into the corresponding occupied voxel regions, preserving temporally consistent modeling while strengthening dynamic object representations. Unlocking effective dense voxel streaming, StreamOcc achieves state-of-the-art performance on SurroundOcc-benchmark and Occ3D-nuScenes under real-time constraints, outperforming the prior best methods by +1.3/2.5 and +1.5/2.0 in (overall/dynamic object) mIoU, respectively, while running at 83.3 ms per frame with only 2.8 GB of memory. The project page is available at https://moonseokha.github.io/StreamOcc/.