Zenghui Zhang

Ziteng Cui, Guo-Jun Qi, Lin Gu et al.

Dark environment becomes a challenge for computer vision algorithms owing to insufficient photons and undesirable noise. To enhance object detection in a dark environment, we propose a novel multitask auto encoding transformation (MAET) model which is able to explore the intrinsic pattern behind illumination translation. In a self-supervision manner, the MAET learns the intrinsic visual structure by encoding and decoding the realistic illumination-degrading transformation considering the physical noise model and image signal processing (ISP). Based on this representation, we achieve the object detection task by decoding the bounding box coordinates and classes. To avoid the over-entanglement of two tasks, our MAET disentangles the object and degrading features by imposing an orthogonal tangent regularity. This forms a parametric manifold along which multitask predictions can be geometrically formulated by maximizing the orthogonality between the tangents along the outputs of respective tasks. Our framework can be implemented based on the mainstream object detection architecture and directly trained end-to-end using normal target detection datasets, such as VOC and COCO. We have achieved the state-of-the-art performance using synthetic and real-world datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/cuiziteng/MAET.

Ziteng Cui, Yingying Zhu, Lin Gu et al.

Image restoration algorithms such as super resolution (SR) are indispensable pre-processing modules for object detection in low quality images. Most of these algorithms assume the degradation is fixed and known a priori. However, in practical, either the real degradation or optimal up-sampling ratio rate is unknown or differs from assumption, leading to a deteriorating performance for both the pre-processing module and the consequent high-level task such as object detection. Here, we propose a novel self-supervised framework to detect objects in degraded low resolution images. We utilizes the downsampling degradation as a kind of transformation for self-supervised signals to explore the equivariant representation against various resolutions and other degradation conditions. The Auto Encoding Resolution in Self-supervision (AERIS) framework could further take the advantage of advanced SR architectures with an arbitrary resolution restoring decoder to reconstruct the original correspondence from the degraded input image. Both the representation learning and object detection are optimized jointly in an end-to-end training fashion. The generic AERIS framework could be implemented on various mainstream object detection architectures with different backbones. The extensive experiments show that our methods has achieved superior performance compared with existing methods when facing variant degradation situations. Code would be released at https://github.com/cuiziteng/ECCV_AERIS.

Shenghan Su, Lin Gu, Yue Yang et al.

The long-standing theory that a colour-naming system evolves under dual pressure of efficient communication and perceptual mechanism is supported by more and more linguistic studies, including analysing four decades of diachronic data from the Nafaanra language. This inspires us to explore whether machine learning could evolve and discover a similar colour-naming system via optimising the communication efficiency represented by high-level recognition performance. Here, we propose a novel colour quantisation transformer, CQFormer, that quantises colour space while maintaining the accuracy of machine recognition on the quantised images. Given an RGB image, Annotation Branch maps it into an index map before generating the quantised image with a colour palette; meanwhile the Palette Branch utilises a key-point detection way to find proper colours in the palette among the whole colour space. By interacting with colour annotation, CQFormer is able to balance both the machine vision accuracy and colour perceptual structure such as distinct and stable colour distribution for discovered colour system. Very interestingly, we even observe the consistent evolution pattern between our artificial colour system and basic colour terms across human languages. Besides, our colour quantisation method also offers an efficient quantisation method that effectively compresses the image storage while maintaining high performance in high-level recognition tasks such as classification and detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method with extremely low bit-rate colours, showing potential to integrate into quantisation network to quantities from image to network activation. The source code is available at https://github.com/ryeocthiv/CQFormer

Tao Wang, Kean Chen, Weiyao Lin et al.

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) focuses on modeling the relationship of detected objects among consecutive frames and merge them into different trajectories. MOT remains a challenging task as noisy and confusing detection results often hinder the final performance. Furthermore, most existing research are focusing on improving detection algorithms and association strategies. As such, we propose a novel framework that can effectively predict and mask-out the noisy and confusing detection results before associating the objects into trajectories. In particular, we formulate such "bad" detection results as a sequence of events and adopt the spatio-temporal point process}to model such events. Traditionally, the occurrence rate in a point process is characterized by an explicitly defined intensity function, which depends on the prior knowledge of some specific tasks. Thus, designing a proper model is expensive and time-consuming, with also limited ability to generalize well. To tackle this problem, we adopt the convolutional recurrent neural network (conv-RNN) to instantiate the point process, where its intensity function is automatically modeled by the training data. Furthermore, we show that our method captures both temporal and spatial evolution, which is essential in modeling events for MOT. Experimental results demonstrate notable improvements in addressing noisy and confusing detection results in MOT datasets. An improved state-of-the-art performance is achieved by incorporating our baseline MOT algorithm with the spatio-temporal point process model.

Yang Cheng, Ziteng Cui, Shenghan Su et al.

White balance (WB) is a key step in the image signal processor (ISP) pipeline that mitigates color casts caused by varying illumination and restores the scene's true colors. Currently, sRGB-based WB editing for post-ISP WB correction is widely used to address color constancy failures in the ISP pipeline when the original camera RAW is unavailable. However, additive color models (e.g., sRGB) are inherently limited by fixed nonlinear transformations and entangled color channels, which often impede their generalization to complex lighting conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for WB correction that leverages a perception-inspired Learnable HSI (LHSI) color space. Built upon a cylindrical color model that naturally separates luminance from chromatic components, our framework further introduces dedicated parameters to enhance this disentanglement and learnable mapping to adaptively refine the flexibility. Moreover, a new Mamba-based network is introduced, which is tailored to the characteristics of the proposed LHSI color space. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, highlighting the potential of perception-inspired color space design in computational photography. The source code is available at https://github.com/YangCheng58/WB_Color_Space.

Shenghan Su, Ziteng Cui, Weiwei Guo et al.

Deep learning methods exhibit outstanding performance in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image interpretation tasks. However, these are black box models that limit the comprehension of their predictions. Therefore, to meet this challenge, we have utilized explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods for the SAR image classification task. Specifically, we trained state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks for each polarization format on OpenSARUrban dataset and then investigate eight explanation methods to analyze the predictions of the CNN classifiers of SAR images. These XAI methods are also evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively which shows that Occlusion achieves the most reliable interpretation performance in terms of Max-Sensitivity but with a low-resolution explanation heatmap. The explanation results provide some insights into the internal mechanism of black-box decisions for SAR image classification.

Hongjun Xie, Jiahang Zhu, Zhiming Shao et al.

Starlink, as a representative low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband system, makes high-bitrate video streaming possible in regions where terrestrial broadband is unavailable. However, its access links exhibit rapid throughput fluctuations caused by satellite mobility and handovers. Existing learned adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms can achieve high average quality of experience (QoE), yet high-bitrate Starlink streaming exposes severe session-level rebuffering that is not captured by average QoE alone. To address it, this paper proposes SafeSABR, a risk-calibrated learned ABR framework for Starlink networks. SafeSABR formulates Starlink ABR as a QoE--severe-risk tradeoff and follows a three-stage design: behavior-cloning pretraining learns a high-QoE ABR prior, risk-calibrated reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning reduces severe-tail action tendencies, and a runtime safety auditor uses safe-capacity lower bounds to check policy-requested bitrates before execution. Experiments on real Starlink traces compare SafeSABR with online, prediction-assisted, and learned ABR baselines. Compared with advanced methods, SafeSABR reduces severe-stall sessions from 22.8% to 7.2% and worst-5% session rebuffering from 54.30 s to 22.68 s, with a 1.8% QoE cost. Component analyses further show that risk-calibrated fine-tuning and safe-capacity auditing reduce unsafe bitrate decisions and downstream severe-session rebuffering. These results show that combining risk-calibrated policy learning with decision-aware safe throughput forecasting can move learned ABR toward a safer QoE--severe-risk operating point under volatile Starlink networks.

Yajun Liu, Zenghui Zhang, Jiang Yue et al.

Data augmentation methods inspired by CutMix have demonstrated significant potential in recent semi-supervised medical image segmentation tasks. However, these approaches often apply CutMix operations in a rigid and inflexible manner, while paying insufficient attention to feature-level consistency constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Mutual Mask Mix with High-Low level feature consistency (M$^3$HL) to address the aforementioned challenges, which consists of two key components: 1) M$^3$: An enhanced data augmentation operation inspired by the masking strategy from Masked Image Modeling (MIM), which advances conventional CutMix through dynamically adjustable masks to generate spatially complementary image pairs for collaborative training, thereby enabling effective information fusion between labeled and unlabeled images. 2) HL: A hierarchical consistency regularization framework that enforces high-level and low-level feature consistency between unlabeled and mixed images, enabling the model to better capture discriminative feature representations.Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely adopted medical image segmentation benchmarks including the ACDC and LA datasets. Source code is available at https://github.com/PHPJava666/M3HL

Hongjun Xie, Chao Zhang, Pengcheng Luo et al.

As a representative low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband system, Starlink exhibits highly variable access throughput, making short-term forecasting essential for network resource management. Existing forecasting methods mainly optimize symmetric point-prediction metrics such as MAE and RMSE, but they do not explicitly control the asymmetric risk of overestimating future throughput, which can cause over-admission, bandwidth overbooking, and service violations. This paper formulates Starlink throughput prediction as a risk-budgeted safe forecasting problem, where the predictor must satisfy a prescribed overestimation budget while maintaining competitive accuracy. We propose Budget-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Quantile Selection (BG-CFQS), a data-driven framework that trains a family of lower-quantile predictors, locates the quantile boundary satisfying the risk budget, and refines the boundary region to select the most accurate feasible predictor. Experiments on three real-world Starlink throughput datasets show that BG-CFQS satisfies the risk budget on all datasets and achieves the lowest average MAE, mean positive error, and tail positive error among budget-feasible methods. In high-risk and severe-risk low-throughput regimes, BG-CFQS reduces harmful positive errors by 11.0% and 12.6%, respectively. An admission-control evaluation further shows that the proposed safe forecasts reduce dropped sessions, demonstrating that risk-aware forecasting can translate prediction safety into application-level benefits.

Xiaochen Wei, Weiwei Guo, Zenghui Zhang et al.

It is highly challenging to register large-scale, heterogeneous SAR and optical images, particularly across platforms, due to significant geometric, radiometric, and temporal differences, which most existing methods struggle to address. To overcome these challenges, we propose Grid-Reg, a grid-based multimodal registration framework comprising a domain-robust descriptor extraction network, Hybrid Siamese Correlation Metric Learning Network (HSCMLNet), and a grid-based solver (Grid-Solver) for transformation parameter estimation. In heterogeneous imagery with large modality gaps and geometric differences, obtaining accurate correspondences is inherently difficult. To robustly measure similarity between gridded patches, HSCMLNet integrates a hybrid Siamese module with a correlation metric learning module (CMLModule) based on equiangular unit basis vectors (EUBVs), together with a manifold consistency loss to promote modality-invariant, discriminative feature learning. The Grid-Solver estimates transformation parameters by minimizing a global grid matching loss through a progressive dual-loop search strategy to reliably find patch correspondences across entire images. Furthermore, we curate a challenging benchmark dataset for SAR-to-optical registration using real-world UAV MiniSAR data and Google Earth optical imagery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

Lintong Du, Huazhen Liu, Yijia Zhang et al.

Spatial phase unwrapping is a key technique for extracting phase information to obtain 3D morphology and other features. Modern industrial measurement scenarios demand high precision, large image sizes, and high speed. However, conventional methods struggle with noise resistance and processing speed. Current deep learning methods are limited by the receptive field size and sparse semantic information, making them ineffective for large size images. To address this issue, we propose a mutual self-distillation (MSD) mechanism and adaptive boosting ensemble segmenters to construct a universal multi-size phase unwrapping network (UMSPU). MSD performs hierarchical attention refinement and achieves cross-layer collaborative learning through bidirectional distillation, ensuring fine-grained semantic representation across image sizes. The adaptive boosting ensemble segmenters combine weak segmenters with different receptive fields into a strong one, ensuring stable segmentation across spatial frequencies. Experimental results show that UMSPU overcomes image size limitations, achieving high precision across image sizes ranging from 256*256 to 2048*2048 (an 8 times increase). It also outperforms existing methods in speed, robustness, and generalization. Its practicality is further validated in structured light imaging and InSAR. We believe that UMSPU offers a universal solution for phase unwrapping, with broad potential for industrial applications.

Ziteng Cui, Yingying Zhu, Lin Gu et al.

Image restoration algorithms such as super resolution (SR) are indispensable pre-processing modules for object detection in degraded images. However, most of these algorithms assume the degradation is fixed and known a priori. When the real degradation is unknown or differs from assumption, both the pre-processing module and the consequent high-level task such as object detection would fail. Here, we propose a novel framework, RestoreDet, to detect objects in degraded low resolution images. RestoreDet utilizes the downsampling degradation as a kind of transformation for self-supervised signals to explore the equivariant representation against various resolutions and other degradation conditions. Specifically, we learn this intrinsic visual structure by encoding and decoding the degradation transformation from a pair of original and randomly degraded images. The framework could further take the advantage of advanced SR architectures with an arbitrary resolution restoring decoder to reconstruct the original correspondence from the degraded input image. Both the representation learning and object detection are optimized jointly in an end-to-end training fashion. RestoreDet is a generic framework that could be implemented on any mainstream object detection architectures. The extensive experiment shows that our framework based on CenterNet has achieved superior performance compared with existing methods when facing variant degradation situations. Our code would be released soon.