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The increasing popularity of outdoor recreational activities (such as hiking and biking) has boosted the demand for a conversational AI system to provide informative and personalized suggestion on outdoor trails. Challenges arise in response to (1) how to provide accurate outdoor trail information via conversational AI; and (2) how to enable usable and efficient recommendation services. To address above, this paper discusses the preliminary and practical lessons learned from developing Judy, an outdoor trail recommendation chatbot based on the large language model (LLM) with retrieval augmented generation (RAG). To gain concrete system insights, we have performed case studies with the outdoor trails in Connecticut (CT), US. We have conducted web-based data collection, outdoor trail data management, and LLM model performance studies on the RAG-based recommendation. Our experimental results have demonstrated the accuracy, effectiveness, and usability of Judy in recommending outdoor trails based on the LLM with RAG.

Globally, 340 million people have blindness or moderate to severe visual impairment (BVI)$^1$ which limits independent outdoor navigation$^2$ and negatively affects their health and quality of life$^{3,4}$. We surveyed 112 people with BVI and found that an ideal outdoor navigation aid must be able to perform turn-by-turn directions, path guidance, and obstacle detection and avoidance. Existing navigation tools such as white canes, guide dogs, and electronic travel aids often lack one or more of these criteria and may be expensive or inaccessible$^{5,6}$. Here we introduce Mobilio, a smartphone application that incorporates machine learning, sensor fusion algorithms, and personalized audio feedback to meet all of the outdoor navigation criteria. The reliability of the smartphone sensors and models used for navigation were assessed with engineering tests in representative navigation scenarios. We performed a series of experiments where Mobilio personalized audio feedback for participants with BVI (n = 14), guided them along an outdoor community path, and helped them navigate an obstacle course. Participants walking with Mobilio and a white cane reduced time to navigate a community pa

Automatic counting soybean pods and seeds in outdoor fields allows for rapid yield estimation before harvesting, while indoor laboratory counting offers greater accuracy. Both methods can significantly accelerate the breeding process. However, it remains challenging for accurately counting pods and seeds in outdoor fields, and there are still no accurate enough tools for counting pods and seeds in laboratories. In this study, we developed efficient deep learning models for counting soybean pods and seeds in both outdoor fields and indoor laboratories. For outdoor fields, annotating not only visible seeds but also occluded seeds makes YOLO have the ability to estimate the number of soybean seeds that are occluded. Moreover, we enhanced YOLO architecture by integrating it with HQ-SAM (YOLO-SAM), and domain adaptation techniques (YOLO-DA), to improve model robustness and generalization across soybean images taken in outdoor fields. Testing on soybean images from the outdoor field, we achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 6.13 for pod counting and 10.05 for seed counting. For the indoor setting, we utilized Mask-RCNN supplemented with a Swin Transformer module (Mask-RCNN-Swin), model

Intrinsic image decomposition (IID) of outdoor scenes is crucial for relighting, editing, and understanding large-scale environments, but progress has been limited by the lack of real-world datasets with reliable albedo and shading supervision. We introduce Olbedo, a large-scale aerial dataset for outdoor albedo--shading decomposition in the wild. Olbedo contains 5,664 UAV images captured across four landscape types, multiple years, and diverse illumination conditions. Each view is accompanied by multi-view consistent albedo and shading maps, metric depth, surface normals, sun and sky shading components, camera poses, and, for recent flights, measured HDR sky domes. These annotations are derived from an inverse-rendering refinement pipeline over multi-view stereo reconstructions and calibrated sky illumination, together with per-pixel confidence masks. We demonstrate that Olbedo enables state-of-the-art diffusion-based IID models, originally trained on synthetic indoor data, to generalize to real outdoor imagery: fine-tuning on Olbedo significantly improves single-view outdoor albedo prediction on the MatrixCity benchmark. We further illustrate applications of Olbedo-trained models

High-level autonomous operations depend on a robot's ability to construct a sufficiently expressive model of its environment. Traditional three-dimensional (3D) scene representations, such as point clouds and occupancy grids, provide detailed geometric information but lack the structured, semantic organization needed for high-level reasoning. 3D scene graphs (3DSGs) address this limitation by integrating geometric, topological, and semantic relationships into a multi-level graph-based representation. By capturing hierarchical abstractions of objects and spatial layouts, 3DSGs enable robots to reason about environments in a structured manner, improving context-aware decision-making and adaptive planning. Although most recent work has focused on indoor 3DSGs, this paper investigates their construction and utility in outdoor environments. We present a method for generating a task-agnostic metric-semantic point cloud for large outdoor settings and propose modifications to existing indoor 3DSG generation techniques for outdoor applicability. Our preliminary qualitative results demonstrate the feasibility of outdoor 3DSGs and highlight their potential for future deployment in real-world

Outdoor health monitoring is essential to detect early abnormal health status for safeguarding human health and safety. Conventional outdoor monitoring relies on static multimodal deep learning frameworks, which requires extensive data training from scratch and fails to capture subtle health status changes. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) emerge as a promising alternative, utilizing only small datasets to fine-tune pre-trained information-rich models for enabling powerful health status monitoring. Unfortunately, MLLM-based outdoor health monitoring also faces significant challenges: I) sensor data contains input noise stemming from sensor data acquisition and fluctuation noise caused by sudden changes in physiological signals due to dynamic outdoor environments, thus degrading the training performance; ii) current transformer based MLLMs struggle to achieve robust multimodal fusion, as they lack a design for fusing the noisy modality; iii) modalities with varying noise levels hinder accurate recovery of missing data from fluctuating distributions. To combat these challenges, we propose an uncertainty-aware multimodal fusion framework, named DUAL-Health, for outdoor health

Robust place recognition is essential for reliable localization in robotics, particularly in complex environments with frequent indoor-outdoor transitions. However, existing LiDAR-based datasets often focus on outdoor scenarios and lack seamless domain shifts. In this paper, we propose RoboLoc, a benchmark dataset designed for GPS-free place recognition in indoor-outdoor environments with floor transitions. RoboLoc features real-world robot trajectories, diverse elevation profiles, and transitions between structured indoor and unstructured outdoor domains. We benchmark a variety of state-of-the-art models, point-based, voxel-based, and BEV-based architectures, highlighting their generalizability domain shifts. RoboLoc provides a realistic testbed for developing multi-domain localization systems in robotics and autonomous navigation

3D dense captioning stands as a cornerstone in achieving a comprehensive understanding of 3D scenes through natural language. It has recently witnessed remarkable achievements, particularly in indoor settings. However, the exploration of 3D dense captioning in outdoor scenes is hindered by two major challenges: 1) the domain gap between indoor and outdoor scenes, such as dynamics and sparse visual inputs, makes it difficult to directly adapt existing indoor methods; 2) the lack of data with comprehensive box-caption pair annotations specifically tailored for outdoor scenes. To this end, we introduce the new task of outdoor 3D dense captioning. As input, we assume a LiDAR point cloud and a set of RGB images captured by the panoramic camera rig. The expected output is a set of object boxes with captions. To tackle this task, we propose the TOD3Cap network, which leverages the BEV representation to generate object box proposals and integrates Relation Q-Former with LLaMA-Adapter to generate rich captions for these objects. We also introduce the TOD3Cap dataset, the largest one to our knowledge for 3D dense captioning in outdoor scenes, which contains 2.3M descriptions of 64.3K outdoor

Understanding open-world semantics is critical for robotic planning and control, particularly in unstructured outdoor environments. Existing vision-language mapping approaches typically rely on object-centric segmentation priors, which often fail outdoors due to semantic ambiguities and indistinct class boundaries. We propose OTAS - an Open-vocabulary Token Alignment method for outdoor Segmentation. OTAS addresses the limitations of open-vocabulary segmentation models by extracting semantic structure directly from the output tokens of pre-trained vision models. By clustering semantically similar structures across single and multiple views and grounding them in language, OTAS reconstructs a geometrically consistent feature field that supports open-vocabulary segmentation queries. Our method operates in a zero-shot manner, without scene-specific fine-tuning, and achieves real-time performance of up to ~17 fps. On the Off-Road Freespace Detection dataset, OTAS yields a modest IoU improvement over fine-tuned and open-vocabulary 2D segmentation baselines. In 3D segmentation on TartanAir, it achieves up to a 151% relative IoU improvement compared to existing open-vocabulary mapping metho

Existing research and physical activity guidelines highlight the benefits of outdoor physical activities for ageing populations. There is potential for technology to facilitate outdoor activity through Physical Web infrastructure. We proposed that embedding Physical Web applications that are engaging and interactive in public open spaces as part of interactive wellness parks can encourage older adults to participate in physical activities outdoors and motivate rehabilitation. We have created an initial design prototype based on design requirements generated from a qualitative field study with 24 older adults to explore their perceptions, experiences, and routines of outdoor physical activities. In this paper, we present an initial prototype and findings from a co-design session with 12 older adults, eliciting their feedback on the design and their ideas for future design iterations.

Robots should exist anywhere humans do: indoors, outdoors, and even unmapped environments. In contrast, the focus of recent advancements in Object Goal Navigation(OGN) has targeted navigating in indoor environments by leveraging spatial and semantic cues that do not generalize outdoors. While these contributions provide valuable insights into indoor scenarios, the broader spectrum of real-world robotic applications often extends to outdoor settings. As we transition to the vast and complex terrains of outdoor environments, new challenges emerge. Unlike the structured layouts found indoors, outdoor environments lack clear spatial delineations and are riddled with inherent semantic ambiguities. Despite this, humans navigate with ease because we can reason about the unseen. We introduce a new task OUTDOOR, a new mechanism for Large Language Models (LLMs) to accurately hallucinate possible futures, and a new computationally aware success metric for pushing research forward in this more complex domain. Additionally, we show impressive results on both a simulated drone and physical quadruped in outdoor environments. Our agent has no premapping and our formalism outperforms naive LLM-base

Scene coordinate regression achieves impressive results in outdoor LiDAR localization but requires days of training. Since training needs to be repeated for each new scene, long training times make these methods impractical for time-sensitive applications, such as autonomous driving, drones, and robotics. We identify large coverage areas and vast data in large-scale outdoor scenes as key challenges that limit fast training. In this paper, we propose LightLoc, the first method capable of efficiently learning localization in a new scene at light speed. LightLoc introduces two novel techniques to address these challenges. First, we introduce sample classification guidance to assist regression learning, reducing ambiguity from similar samples and improving training efficiency. Second, we propose redundant sample downsampling to remove well-learned frames during training, reducing training time without compromising accuracy. Additionally, the fast training and confidence estimation capabilities of sample classification enable its integration into SLAM, effectively eliminating error accumulation. Extensive experiments on large-scale outdoor datasets demonstrate that LightLoc achieves sta

Neural fields (NFs) have achieved remarkable success in scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, existing NF approaches that rely on RGB or LiDAR inputs often struggle under adverse weather conditions, limiting their robustness in real-world outdoor environments such as autonomous driving. In contrast, millimeter-wave radar is inherently resilient to environmental variations, yet its integration with NFs remains largely underexplored. Moreover, outdoor driving scenes frequently involve dynamic objects, making spatiotemporal modeling crucial for temporally consistent novel view synthesis. To address these challenges, we present RF4D, a radar-based neural field framework tailored for novel view synthesis in outdoor dynamic scenes. RF4D explicitly incorporates temporal information into its representation, enabling more accurate modeling of object motion. A dedicated scene flow module further predicts temporal offsets between adjacent frames, enforcing temporal occupancy coherence during dynamic scene reconstruction. Moreover, we propose a radar-specific power rendering formulation grounded in radar sensing physics, improving both synthesis accuracy and interpretability.

Three-dimensional scene generation is crucial in computer vision, with applications spanning autonomous driving, gaming and the metaverse. Current methods either lack user control or rely on imprecise, non-intuitive conditions. In this work, we propose a method that uses, scene graphs, an accessible, user friendly control format to generate outdoor 3D scenes. We develop an interactive system that transforms a sparse scene graph into a dense BEV (Bird's Eye View) Embedding Map, which guides a conditional diffusion model to generate 3D scenes that match the scene graph description. During inference, users can easily create or modify scene graphs to generate large-scale outdoor scenes. We create a large-scale dataset with paired scene graphs and 3D semantic scenes to train the BEV embedding and diffusion models. Experimental results show that our approach consistently produces high-quality 3D urban scenes closely aligned with the input scene graphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to generate 3D outdoor scenes conditioned on scene graphs.

Image data captured outdoors often exhibit unbounded scenes and unconstrained, varying lighting conditions, making it challenging to decompose them into geometry, reflectance, and illumination. Recent works have focused on achieving this decomposition using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) or the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation but remain hindered by two key limitations: the high computational overhead associated with neural networks of NeRF and the use of low-frequency lighting representations, which often result in inefficient rendering and suboptimal relighting accuracy. We propose ROSGS, a two-stage pipeline designed to efficiently reconstruct relightable outdoor scenes using the Gaussian Splatting representation. By leveraging monocular normal priors, ROSGS first reconstructs the scene's geometry with the compact 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) representation, providing an efficient and accurate geometric foundation. Building upon this reconstructed geometry, ROSGS then decomposes the scene's texture and lighting through a hybrid lighting model. This model effectively represents typical outdoor lighting by employing a spherical Gaussian function to capture the directiona

3D visual grounding (VG) aims to locate objects or regions within 3D scenes guided by natural language descriptions. While indoor 3D VG has advanced, outdoor 3D VG remains underexplored due to two challenges: (1) large-scale outdoor LiDAR scenes are dominated by background points and contain limited foreground information, making cross-modal alignment and contextual understanding more difficult; and (2) most outdoor datasets lack spatial annotations for referential non-target objects, which hinders explicit learning of referential context. To this end, we propose LidaRefer, a context-aware 3D VG framework for outdoor scenes. LidaRefer incorporates an object-centric feature selection strategy to focus on semantically relevant visual features while reducing computational overhead. Then, its transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture excels at establishing fine-grained cross-modal alignment between refined visual features and word-level text features, and capturing comprehensive global context. Additionally, we present Discriminative-Supportive Collaborative localization (DiSCo), a novel supervision strategy that explicitly models spatial relationships between target, contextual,

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently gained popularity in SLAM applications due to its fast rendering and high-fidelity representation. However, existing 3DGS-SLAM systems have predominantly focused on indoor environments and relied on active depth sensors, leaving a gap for large-scale outdoor applications. We present BGS-SLAM, the first binocular 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM system designed for outdoor scenarios. Our approach uses only RGB stereo pairs without requiring LiDAR or active sensors. BGS-SLAM leverages depth estimates from pre-trained deep stereo networks to guide 3D Gaussian optimization with a multi-loss strategy enhancing both geometric consistency and visual quality. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that BGS-SLAM achieves superior tracking accuracy and mapping performance compared to other 3DGS-based solutions in complex outdoor environments.

Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to navigate through realistic 3D outdoor environments based on natural language instructions. The performance of existing VLN methods is limited by insufficient diversity in navigation environments and limited training data. To address these issues, we propose VLN-Video, which utilizes the diverse outdoor environments present in driving videos in multiple cities in the U.S. augmented with automatically generated navigation instructions and actions to improve outdoor VLN performance. VLN-Video combines the best of intuitive classical approaches and modern deep learning techniques, using template infilling to generate grounded navigation instructions, combined with an image rotation similarity-based navigation action predictor to obtain VLN style data from driving videos for pretraining deep learning VLN models. We pre-train the model on the Touchdown dataset and our video-augmented dataset created from driving videos with three proxy tasks: Masked Language Modeling, Instruction and Trajectory Matching, and Next Action Prediction, so as to learn temporally-aware and visually-aligned instruction representations. The learne

Outdoor scene reconstruction remains challenging due to the stark contrast between well-textured, nearby regions and distant backgrounds dominated by low detail, uneven illumination, and sky effects. We introduce a two-stage Gaussian Splatting framework that explicitly separates and optimizes these regions, yielding higher-fidelity novel view synthesis. In stage one, background primitives are initialized within a spherical shell and optimized using a loss that combines a background-only photometric term with two geometric regularizers: one constraining Gaussians to remain inside the shell, and another aligning them with local tangential planes. In stage two, foreground Gaussians are initialized from a Structure-from-Motion reconstruction, added and refined using the standard rendering loss, while the background set remains fixed but contributes to the final image formation. Experiments on diverse outdoor datasets show that our method reduces background artifacts and improves perceptual quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, the explicit background separation enables automatic, object-free environment map estimation, opening new possibilities for photorealistic ou