Spatial Intelligence
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Glossary

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Terms and abbreviations are listed in the order of their first appearance in the chapters.

Term Description Reference
LLMs Large Language Models. Models trained on large text corpora to process and generate language. Sec. 1.1.1
RL Reinforcement Learning. Learning to select actions through interaction and reward feedback. Sec. 1.1.2
GIS Geographic Information Systems. Systems for storing, managing, and analyzing geographically referenced data. Sec. 1.1.4
VQA Visual Question Answering. Answering natural-language questions about visual content. Sec. 1.1.4
VLN Vision-and-Language Navigation. Navigation using visual observations and natural-language instructions. Sec. 1.1.4
GIScience Geographic Information Science. The study of geographic information, its representation, and its analysis. Sec. 1.2.2
SLAM Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Joint estimation of an agent’s pose and a map of its environment. Sec. 1.2.2
TSDF Truncated Signed Distance Function. A signed distance function whose values are limited to a fixed range around a surface. Sec. 1.2.2
SDF Signed Distance Function. A function giving the distance to a surface, with a sign distinguishing its two sides. Sec. 1.2.2
VO Visual Odometry. Estimation of camera motion from a sequence of images. Sec. 1.2.3
LiDAR Light Detection and Ranging. Sensing that uses laser light to measure distances. Sec. 1.2.3
CT Computed Tomography. Imaging that reconstructs cross-sectional structure from X-ray measurements. Sec. 1.2.3
MRI Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Imaging that uses magnetic fields and radiofrequency signals to depict internal anatomy. Sec. 1.2.3
CNNs Convolutional Neural Networks. Neural networks that use convolutional filters to extract local features. Sec. 1.2.3
BEV Bird’s-Eye View. A top-down representation of a scene. Sec. 1.2.3
NeRF Neural Radiance Field. A continuous representation of scene density and view-dependent radiance for novel-view synthesis. Sec. 1.2.4
CoT Chain-of-Thought. A sequence of intermediate reasoning steps used to solve a problem. Sec. 1.2.4
VLA Vision-Language-Action Model. A model that maps visual observations and language instructions to actions. Sec. 1.2.4
VLMs Vision-Language Models. Models that jointly process visual and linguistic information. Sec. 1.2.4
3DGS 3D Gaussian Splatting. A method for representing and rendering scenes using optimized 3D Gaussians. Sec. 1.2.4
JEPA Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture. An architecture that predicts target representations in an embedding space. Sec. 1.2.5
XR Extended Reality. An umbrella term for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. Sec. 2.2.3
RGB-D RGB and Depth. Image data combining color channels with depth measurements. Sec. 4.2
MLP Multilayer Perceptron. A feedforward neural network with fully connected layers. Sec. 4.2.6
SfM Structure from Motion. Recovery of camera poses and 3D structure from overlapping images. Sec. 4.2.7
DSL Domain-Specific Language. A programming language designed for a particular class of tasks. Sec. 5.1
IMU Inertial Measurement Unit. A sensor unit that measures acceleration and angular velocity. Sec. 5.5
IoU Intersection over Union. The size of the overlap between two regions divided by the size of their union. Sec. 6.1.1
mAP Mean Average Precision. Average precision averaged across classes or evaluation categories. Sec. 6.1.1
PnP Perspective-n-Point. Estimation of camera pose from corresponding 3D points and 2D image locations. Sec. 6.1.3
MVS Multi-View Stereo. Dense reconstruction of 3D geometry from images with known camera poses. Sec. 6.2.1
UAV Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. An aircraft operated without a pilot on board. Sec. 6.2.3
RANSAC Random Sample Consensus. Robust model fitting by testing hypotheses from randomly sampled subsets of observations. Sec. 6.2.4
LPIPS Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity. A perceptual image distance computed from deep visual features. Sec. 6.3.5
PSNR Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio. An image quality measure derived from mean squared reconstruction error. Sec. 6.3.5
SSIM Structural Similarity Index. An image similarity measure based on local luminance, contrast, and structure. Sec. 6.3.5
VAE Variational Autoencoder. A generative model that learns a probabilistic latent representation of data. Sec. 6.5.2
IK Inverse Kinematics. Finding joint configurations that achieve a desired pose of an end effector or body part. Sec. 7.1
TAMP Task and Motion Planning. Joint planning of discrete task actions and feasible continuous motions. Sec. 7.1.4
MPC Model Predictive Control. Control that repeatedly optimizes a finite-horizon plan and executes its first action. Sec. 7.1.4
GNNs Graph Neural Networks. Neural networks that learn representations by aggregating information over graph connections. Sec. 7.2.1
POMDP Partially Observable Markov Decision Process. A sequential decision model in which the agent observes the environment state only indirectly. Sec. 7.2.5
RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Generation conditioned on information retrieved from an external collection or memory. Sec. 7.3.6
ToM Theory of Mind. Reasoning about the beliefs, intentions, and knowledge of other agents. Sec. 7.3.7
FVD Fréchet Video Distance. A distance between feature distributions of generated and reference videos. Sec. 7.3.8
FID Fréchet Inception Distance. A distance between Inception feature distributions of generated and reference images. Sec. 7.3.8
GANs Generative Adversarial Networks. Generative models trained through competition between a generator and a discriminator. Sec. 8.1.1
DDIM Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model. A diffusion sampling formulation that supports deterministic sampling and fewer sampling steps. Sec. 8.1.3
SDS Score Distillation Sampling. Optimization of a representation using guidance from a pretrained diffusion model. Sec. 8.2.1
GNSS Global Navigation Satellite System. A satellite system providing positioning, navigation, and timing information. Sec. 9.2.4
BIM Building Information Modeling. Creation and management of digital models describing a building’s physical and functional properties. Sec. 14.1