Shengyong Chen

Kaiqi Chen, Junhao Xiao, Jialing Liu et al.

Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) has achieved great progress in the computer vision and robotics communities, and has been successfully used in many fields such as autonomous robot navigation and AR/VR. However, vSLAM cannot achieve good localization in dynamic and complex environments. Numerous publications have reported that, by combining with the semantic information with vSLAM, the semantic vSLAM systems have the capability of solving the above problems in recent years. Nevertheless, there is no comprehensive survey about semantic vSLAM. To fill the gap, this paper first reviews the development of semantic vSLAM, explicitly focusing on its strengths and differences. Secondly, we explore three main issues of semantic vSLAM: the extraction and association of semantic information, the application of semantic information, and the advantages of semantic vSLAM. Then, we collect and analyze the current state-of-the-art SLAM datasets which have been widely used in semantic vSLAM systems. Finally, we discuss future directions that will provide a blueprint for the future development of semantic vSLAM.

Xuhong Ren, Jianlang Chen, Felix Juefei-Xu et al.

Network architecture search (NAS), in particular the differentiable architecture search (DARTS) method, has shown a great power to learn excellent model architectures on the specific dataset of interest. In contrast to using a fixed dataset, in this work, we focus on a different but important scenario for NAS: how to refine a deployed network's model architecture to enhance its robustness with the guidance of a few collected and misclassified examples that are degraded by some real-world unknown corruptions having a specific pattern (e.g., noise, blur, etc.). To this end, we first conduct an empirical study to validate that the model architectures can be definitely related to the corruption patterns. Surprisingly, by just adding a few corrupted and misclassified examples (e.g., $10^3$ examples) to the clean training dataset (e.g., $5.0 \times 10^4$ examples), we can refine the model architecture and enhance the robustness significantly. To make it more practical, the key problem, i.e., how to select the proper failure examples for the effective NAS guidance, should be carefully investigated. Then, we propose a novel core-failure-set guided DARTS that embeds a K-center-greedy algorithm for DARTS to select suitable corrupted failure examples to refine the model architecture. We use our method for DARTS-refined DNNs on the clean as well as 15 corruptions with the guidance of four specific real-world corruptions. Compared with the state-of-the-art NAS as well as data-augmentation-based enhancement methods, our final method can achieve higher accuracy on both corrupted datasets and the original clean dataset. On some of the corruption patterns, we can achieve as high as over 45% absolute accuracy improvements.

Yifan Yin, Xu Cheng, Fan Shi et al.

Accurate and reliable optical remote sensing image-based small-ship detection is crucial for maritime surveillance systems, but existing methods often struggle with balancing detection performance and computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight framework called \textit{HSI-ShipDetectionNet} that is based on high-order spatial interactions and is suitable for deployment on resource-limited platforms, such as satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. HSI-ShipDetectionNet includes a prediction branch specifically for tiny ships and a lightweight hybrid attention block for reduced complexity. Additionally, the use of a high-order spatial interactions module improves advanced feature understanding and modeling ability. Our model is evaluated using the public Kaggle marine ship detection dataset and compared with multiple state-of-the-art models including small object detection models, lightweight detection models, and ship detection models. The results show that HSI-ShipDetectionNet outperforms the other models in terms of recall, and mean average precision (mAP) while being lightweight and suitable for deployment on resource-limited platforms.

Hanxu Zhang, Chen Jia, Hui Liu et al.

Achieving pixel-level accurate segmentation of structural cracks across diverse scenarios remains a formidable challenge. Existing methods face significant bottlenecks in balancing crack topology modeling with computational efficiency, often failing to reconcile high segmentation quality with low resource demands. To address these limitations, we propose the Ultra-Compact Structure-Calibrated Vision RWKV (SCRWKV), a network that achieves high-precision modeling via a novel Structure-Field Encoder (SFE) backbone while maintaining linear complexity. The SFE integrates the Adaptive Multi-scale Cascaded Modulator (AMCM) to enhance texture representation and utilizes the Structure-Calibrated Insight Unit (SCIU) as its core engine. Specifically, the SCIU employs the Geometry-guided Bidirectional Structure Transformation (GBST) to capture topological correlations and integrates the Dynamic Self-Calibrating Decay (DSCD) into Dy-WKV to suppress noise propagation. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight Cross-Scale Harmonic Fusion (CSHF) decoder to achieve precise feature aggregation. Systematic evaluations on multiple benchmarks characterized by complex textures and severe interference demonstrate that SCRWKV, with only 1.22M parameters, significantly outperforms SOTA methods. Achieving an F1 score of 0.8428 and mIoU of 0.8512 on the TUT dataset, the model confirms its robust potential for efficient real-world deployment. The code is available at https://github.com/zhxhzy/SCRWKV.

Hui Liu, Chen Jia, Fan Shi et al.

Accurately segmenting structural cracks at the pixel level remains a major hurdle, as existing methods fail to integrate local textures with pixel dependencies, often leading to fragmented and incomplete predictions. Moreover, their high parameter counts and substantial computational demands hinder practical deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose CrackSCF, a Lightweight Cascaded Fusion Crack Segmentation Network designed to achieve robust crack segmentation with exceptional computational efficiency. We design a lightweight convolutional block (LRDS) to replace all standard convolutions. This approach efficiently captures local patterns while operating with a minimal computational footprint. For a holistic perception of crack structures, a lightweight Long-range Dependency Extractor (LDE) captures global dependencies. These are then intelligently unified with local patterns by our Staircase Cascaded Fusion Module (SCFM), ensuring the final segmentation maps are both seamless in continuity and rich in fine-grained detail. To comprehensively evaluate our method, this paper created the challenging TUT benchmark dataset and evaluated it alongside five other public datasets. The experimental results show that the CrackSCF method consistently outperforms the existing methods, and it demonstrates greater robustness in dealing with complex background noise. On the TUT dataset, CrackSCF achieved 0.8382 on F1 score and 0.8473 on mIoU, and it only required 4.79M parameters.

Pengshuai Yao, Mengna Liu, Xu Cheng et al.

Time series classification with missing data is a prevalent issue in time series analysis, as temporal data often contain missing values in practical applications. The traditional two-stage approach, which handles imputation and classification separately, can result in sub-optimal performance as label information is not utilized in the imputation process. On the other hand, a one-stage approach can learn features under missing information, but feature representation is limited as imputed errors are propagated in the classification process. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes an end-to-end neural network that unifies data imputation and representation learning within a single framework, allowing the imputation process to take advantage of label information. Differing from previous methods, our approach places less emphasis on the accuracy of imputation data and instead prioritizes classification performance. A specifically designed multi-scale feature learning module is implemented to extract useful information from the noise-imputation data. The proposed model is evaluated on 68 univariate time series datasets from the UCR archive, as well as a multivariate time series dataset with various missing data ratios and 4 real-world datasets with missing information. The results indicate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for incomplete time series classification, particularly in scenarios with high levels of missing data.

Yuan Feng, Yaojun Hu, Pengfei Fang et al.

This work studies the joint rain and haze removal problem. In real-life scenarios, rain and haze, two often co-occurring common weather phenomena, can greatly degrade the clarity and quality of the scene images, leading to a performance drop in the visual applications, such as autonomous driving. However, jointly removing the rain and haze in scene images is ill-posed and challenging, where the existence of haze and rain and the change of atmosphere light, can both degrade the scene information. Current methods focus on the contamination removal part, thus ignoring the restoration of the scene information affected by the change of atmospheric light. We propose a novel deep neural network, named Asymmetric Dual-decoder U-Net (ADU-Net), to address the aforementioned challenge. The ADU-Net produces both the contamination residual and the scene residual to efficiently remove the rain and haze while preserving the fidelity of the scene information. Extensive experiments show our work outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by a considerable margin in both synthetic data and real-world data benchmarks, including RainCityscapes, BID Rain, and SPA-Data. For instance, we improve the state-of-the-art PSNR value by 2.26/4.57 on the RainCityscapes/SPA-Data, respectively. Codes will be made available freely to the research community.

Yaning Zhang, Tianyi Wang, Zitong Yu et al.

The rapid development of photo-realistic face generation methods has raised significant concerns in society and academia, highlighting the urgent need for robust and generalizable face forgery detection (FFD) techniques. Although existing approaches mainly capture face forgery patterns using image modality, other modalities like fine-grained noises and texts are not fully explored, which limits the generalization capability of the model. In addition, most FFD methods tend to identify facial images generated by GAN, but struggle to detect unseen diffusion-synthesized ones. To address the limitations, we aim to leverage the cutting-edge foundation model, contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP), to achieve generalizable diffusion face forgery detection (DFFD). In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal fine-grained CLIP (MFCLIP) model, which mines comprehensive and fine-grained forgery traces across image-noise modalities via language-guided face forgery representation learning, to facilitate the advancement of DFFD. Specifically, we devise a fine-grained language encoder (FLE) that extracts fine global language features from hierarchical text prompts. We design a multi-modal vision encoder (MVE) to capture global image forgery embeddings as well as fine-grained noise forgery patterns extracted from the richest patch, and integrate them to mine general visual forgery traces. Moreover, we build an innovative plug-and-play sample pair attention (SPA) method to emphasize relevant negative pairs and suppress irrelevant ones, allowing cross-modality sample pairs to conduct more flexible alignment. Extensive experiments and visualizations show that our model outperforms the state of the arts on different settings like cross-generator, cross-forgery, and cross-dataset evaluations.

Hui Liu, Chen Jia, Fan Shi et al.

Pixel-level segmentation of structural cracks across various scenarios remains a considerable challenge. Current methods encounter challenges in effectively modeling crack morphology and texture, facing challenges in balancing segmentation quality with low computational resource usage. To overcome these limitations, we propose a lightweight Structure-Aware Vision Mamba Network (SCSegamba), capable of generating high-quality pixel-level segmentation maps by leveraging both the morphological information and texture cues of crack pixels with minimal computational cost. Specifically, we developed a Structure-Aware Visual State Space module (SAVSS), which incorporates a lightweight Gated Bottleneck Convolution (GBC) and a Structure-Aware Scanning Strategy (SASS). The key insight of GBC lies in its effectiveness in modeling the morphological information of cracks, while the SASS enhances the perception of crack topology and texture by strengthening the continuity of semantic information between crack pixels. Experiments on crack benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving the highest performance with only 2.8M parameters. On the multi-scenario dataset, our method reached 0.8390 in F1 score and 0.8479 in mIoU. The code is available at https://github.com/Karl1109/SCSegamba.

Zhe Zhang, Jing Li, Wanli Xue et al.

Assuming that neither source data nor the source model is accessible, black box domain adaptation represents a highly practical yet extremely challenging setting, as transferable information is restricted to the predictions of the black box source model, which can only be queried using target samples. Existing approaches attempt to extract transferable knowledge through pseudo label refinement or by leveraging external vision language models (ViLs), but they often suffer from noisy supervision or insufficient utilization of the semantic priors provided by ViLs, which ultimately hinder adaptation performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose a dual teacher distillation with subnetwork rectification (DDSR) model that jointly exploits the specific knowledge embedded in black box source models and the general semantic information of a ViL. DDSR adaptively integrates their complementary predictions to generate reliable pseudo labels for the target domain and introduces a subnetwork driven regularization strategy to mitigate overfitting caused by noisy supervision. Furthermore, the refined target predictions iteratively enhance both the pseudo labels and ViL prompts, enabling more accurate and semantically consistent adaptation. Finally, the target model is further optimized through self training with classwise prototypes. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating consistent improvements over state of the art methods, including those using source data or models.

Jianhua Zhang, Yi Gao, Ruyu Liu et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a model compression technique that transfers knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model to enhance its performance. Existing methods often assume that the student model is inherently inferior to the teacher model. However, we identify that the fundamental issue affecting student performance is the bias transferred by the teacher. Current KD frameworks transmit both right and wrong knowledge, introducing bias that misleads the student model. To address this issue, we propose a novel strategy to rectify bias and greatly improve the student model's performance. Our strategy involves three steps: First, we differentiate knowledge and design a bias elimination method to filter out biases, retaining only the right knowledge for the student model to learn. Next, we propose a bias rectification method to rectify the teacher model's wrong predictions, fundamentally addressing bias interference. The student model learns from both the right knowledge and the rectified biases, greatly improving its prediction accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic learning approach with a loss function that updates weights dynamically, allowing the student model to quickly learn right knowledge-based easy tasks initially and tackle hard tasks corresponding to biases later, greatly enhancing the student model's learning efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first strategy enabling the student model to surpass the teacher model. Experiments demonstrate that our strategy, as a plug-and-play module, is versatile across various mainstream KD frameworks. We will release our code after the paper is accepted.

Hui Liu, Chen Jia, Fan Shi et al.

Achieving pixel-level segmentation with low computational cost using multimodal data remains a key challenge in crack segmentation tasks. Existing methods lack the capability for adaptive perception and efficient interactive fusion of cross-modal features. To address these challenges, we propose a Lightweight Adaptive Cue-Aware Vision Mamba network (LIDAR), which efficiently perceives and integrates morphological and textural cues from different modalities under multimodal crack scenarios, generating clear pixel-level crack segmentation maps. Specifically, LIDAR is composed of a Lightweight Adaptive Cue-Aware Visual State Space module (LacaVSS) and a Lightweight Dual Domain Dynamic Collaborative Fusion module (LD3CF). LacaVSS adaptively models crack cues through the proposed mask-guided Efficient Dynamic Guided Scanning Strategy (EDG-SS), while LD3CF leverages an Adaptive Frequency Domain Perceptron (AFDP) and a dual-pooling fusion strategy to effectively capture spatial and frequency-domain cues across modalities. Moreover, we design a Lightweight Dynamically Modulated Multi-Kernel convolution (LDMK) to perceive complex morphological structures with minimal computational overhead, replacing most convolutional operations in LIDAR. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. On the light-field depth dataset, our method achieves 0.8204 in F1 and 0.8465 in mIoU with only 5.35M parameters. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Karl1109/LIDAR-Mamba.

Haigen Hu, Aizhu Liu, Qiu Guan et al.

To enhance the nonlinearity of neural networks and increase their mapping abilities between the inputs and response variables, activation functions play a crucial role to model more complex relationships and patterns in the data. In this work, a novel methodology is proposed to adaptively customize activation functions only by adding very few parameters to the traditional activation functions such as Sigmoid, Tanh, and ReLU. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, some theoretical and experimental analysis on accelerating the convergence and improving the performance is presented, and a series of experiments are conducted based on various network models (such as AlexNet, VGGNet, GoogLeNet, ResNet and DenseNet), and various datasets (such as CIFAR10, CIFAR100, miniImageNet, PASCAL VOC and COCO) . To further verify the validity and suitability in various optimization strategies and usage scenarios, some comparison experiments are also implemented among different optimization strategies (such as SGD, Momentum, AdaGrad, AdaDelta and ADAM) and different recognition tasks like classification and detection. The results show that the proposed methodology is very simple but with significant performance in convergence speed, precision and generalization, and it can surpass other popular methods like ReLU and adaptive functions like Swish in almost all experiments in terms of overall performance.The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HuHaigen/Adaptively-Customizing-Activation-Functions. The package includes the proposed three adaptive activation functions for reproducibility purposes.

Guoqing Zhang, Yu Ge, Zhicheng Dong et al.

Person re-identification (re-ID) tackles the problem of matching person images with the same identity from different cameras. In practical applications, due to the differences in camera performance and distance between cameras and persons of interest, captured person images usually have various resolutions. We name this problem as Cross-Resolution Person Re-identification which brings a great challenge for matching correctly. In this paper, we propose a Deep High-Resolution Pseudo-Siamese Framework (PS-HRNet) to solve the above problem. Specifically, in order to restore the resolution of low-resolution images and make reasonable use of different channel information of feature maps, we introduce and innovate VDSR module with channel attention (CA) mechanism, named as VDSR-CA. Then we reform the HRNet by designing a novel representation head to extract discriminating features, named as HRNet-ReID. In addition, a pseudo-siamese framework is constructed to reduce the difference of feature distributions between low-resolution images and high-resolution images. The experimental results on five cross-resolution person datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our proposed PS-HRNet improves 3.4\%, 6.2\%, 2.5\%,1.1\% and 4.2\% at Rank-1 on MLR-Market-1501, MLR-CUHK03, MLR-VIPeR, MLR-DukeMTMC-reID, and CAVIAR datasets, respectively. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhguoqing}.

Guoqing Zhang, Junchuan Yang, Yuhui Zheng et al.

Extracting effective and discriminative features is very important for addressing the challenging person re-identification (re-ID) task. Prevailing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) usually use high-level features for identifying pedestrian. However, some essential spatial information resided in low-level features such as shape, texture and color will be lost when learning the high-level features, due to extensive padding and pooling operations in the training stage. In addition, most existing person re-ID methods are mainly based on hand-craft bounding boxes where images are precisely aligned. It is unrealistic in practical applications, since the exploited object detection algorithms often produce inaccurate bounding boxes. This will inevitably degrade the performance of existing algorithms. To address these problems, we put forward a novel person re-ID model that fuses high- and low-level embeddings to reduce the information loss caused in learning high-level features. Then we divide the fused embedding into several parts and reconnect them to obtain the global feature and more significant local features, so as to alleviate the affect caused by the inaccurate bounding boxes. In addition, we also introduce the spatial and channel attention mechanisms in our model, which aims to mine more discriminative features related to the target. Finally, we reconstruct the feature extractor to ensure that our model can obtain more richer and robust features. Extensive experiments display the superiority of our approach compared with existing approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/libraflower/MutipleFeature-for-PRID.

Jiancheng Pan, Muyuan Ma, Qing Ma et al.

Remote sensing image-text retrieval plays a crucial role in remote sensing interpretation, yet remains challenging under both closed-domain and open-domain scenarios due to semantic noise and domain shifts. To address these issues, we propose a visual prior-guided vision-language model, PriorCLIP, which leverages visual priors for unbiased representation learning and adaptive vision-language alignment. In the closed-domain setting, PriorCLIP introduces two Progressive Attention Encoder (PAE) structures: Spatial-PAE constructs a belief matrix with instruction embeddings to filter key features and mitigate semantic bias. At the same time, Temporal-PAE exploits cyclic activation across time steps to enhance text representation. For the open-domain setting, we design a two-stage prior representation learning strategy, consisting of large-scale pre-training on coarse-grained image-text pairs, followed by fine-tuning on fine-grained pairs using vision-instruction, which enables robust retrieval across long-tail concepts and vocabulary shifts. Furthermore, a cluster-based symmetric contrastive Attribution Loss is proposed to constrain inter-class relations and alleviate semantic confusion in the shared embedding space. Extensive experiments on RSICD and RSITMD benchmarks demonstrate that PriorCLIP achieves substantial improvements, outperforming existing methods by 4.9% and 4.0% in closed-domain retrieval, and by 7.3% and 9.4% in open-domain retrieval, respectively.

Shengxun Wei, Zan Gao, Chunjie Ma et al.

Cloth-changing person re-identification is a subject closer to the real world, which focuses on solving the problem of person re-identification after pedestrians change clothes. The primary challenge in this field is to overcome the complex interplay between intra-class and inter-class variations and to identify features that remain unaffected by changes in appearance. Sufficient data collection for model training would significantly aid in addressing this problem. However, it is challenging to gather diverse datasets in practice. Current methods focus on implicitly learning identity information from the original image or introducing additional auxiliary models, which are largely limited by the quality of the image and the performance of the additional model. To address these issues, inspired by prompt learning, we propose a novel multiple information prompt learning (MIPL) scheme for cloth-changing person ReID, which learns identity robust features through the common prompt guidance of multiple messages. Specifically, the clothing information stripping (CIS) module is designed to decouple the clothing information from the original RGB image features to counteract the influence of clothing appearance. The Bio-guided attention (BGA) module is proposed to increase the learning intensity of the model for key information. A dual-length hybrid patch (DHP) module is employed to make the features have diverse coverage to minimize the impact of feature bias. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on the LTCC, Celeb-reID, Celeb-reID-light, and CSCC datasets, achieving rank-1 scores of 74.8%, 73.3%, 66.0%, and 88.1%, respectively. When compared to AIM (CVPR23), ACID (TIP23), and SCNet (MM23), MIPL achieves rank-1 improvements of 11.3%, 13.8%, and 7.9%, respectively, on the PRCC dataset.

Lele Qi, Mengna Liu, Xu Cheng et al.

Wind farms, typically in high-latitude regions, face a high risk of blade icing. Traditional centralized training methods raise serious privacy concerns. To enhance data privacy in detecting wind turbine blade icing, traditional federated learning (FL) is employed. However, data heterogeneity, resulting from collections across wind farms in varying environmental conditions, impacts the model's optimization capabilities. Moreover, imbalances in wind turbine data lead to models that tend to favor recognizing majority classes, thus neglecting critical icing anomalies. To tackle these challenges, we propose a federated prototype learning model for class-imbalanced data in heterogeneous environments to detect wind turbine blade icing. We also propose a contrastive supervised loss function to address the class imbalance problem. Experiments on real data from 20 turbines across two wind farms show our method outperforms five FL models and five class imbalance methods, with an average improvement of 19.64\% in \( mF_β \) and 5.73\% in \( m \)BA compared to the second-best method, BiFL.

Mianzhao Wang, Fan Shi, Xu Cheng et al.

High-quality 4D light field representation with efficient angular feature modeling is crucial for scene perception, as it can provide discriminative spatial-angular cues to identify moving targets. However, recent developments still struggle to deliver reliable angular modeling in the temporal domain, particularly in complex low-light scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel light field epipolar-plane structure image (ESI) representation that explicitly defines the geometric structure within the light field. By capitalizing on the abrupt changes in the angles of light rays within the epipolar plane, this representation can enhance visual expression in low-light scenes and reduce redundancy in high-dimensional light fields. We further propose an angular-temporal interaction network (ATINet) for light field object tracking that learns angular-aware representations from the geometric structural cues and angular-temporal interaction cues of light fields. Furthermore, ATINet can also be optimized in a self-supervised manner to enhance the geometric feature interaction across the temporal domain. Finally, we introduce a large-scale light field low-light dataset for object tracking. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that ATINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in single object tracking. Furthermore, we extend the proposed method to multiple object tracking, which also shows the effectiveness of high-quality light field angular-temporal modeling.

Kexin Wang, Mengna Liu, Xu Cheng et al.

Accurate sea state estimation is crucial for the real-time control and future state prediction of autonomous vessels. However, traditional methods struggle with challenges such as data imbalance and feature redundancy in ship motion data, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose the Temporal-Graph Contrastive Clustering Sea State Estimator (TGC-SSE), a novel deep learning model that combines three key components: a time dimension factorization module to reduce data redundancy, a dynamic graph-like learning module to capture complex variable interactions, and a contrastive clustering loss function to effectively manage class imbalance. Our experiments demonstrate that TGC-SSE significantly outperforms existing methods across 14 public datasets, achieving the highest accuracy in 9 datasets, with a 20.79% improvement over EDI. Furthermore, in the field of sea state estimation, TGC-SSE surpasses five benchmark methods and seven deep learning models. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each module, demonstrating their respective roles in enhancing overall model performance. Overall, TGC-SSE not only improves the accuracy of sea state estimation but also exhibits strong generalization capabilities, providing reliable support for autonomous vessel operations.

Shuhao Mei, Xin Li, Yuxi Zhou et al.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a chronic lung condition characterized by airflow obstruction. Current diagnostic methods primarily rely on identifying prominent features in spirometry (Volume-Flow time series) to detect COPD, but they are not adept at predicting future COPD risk based on subtle data patterns. In this study, we introduce a novel deep learning-based approach, DeepSpiro, aimed at the early prediction of future COPD risk. DeepSpiro consists of four key components: SpiroSmoother for stabilizing the Volume-Flow curve, SpiroEncoder for capturing volume variability-pattern through key patches of varying lengths, SpiroExplainer for integrating heterogeneous data and explaining predictions through volume attention, and SpiroPredictor for predicting the disease risk of undiagnosed high-risk patients based on key patch concavity, with prediction horizons of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, or even longer. Evaluated on the UK Biobank dataset, DeepSpiro achieved an AUC of 0.8328 for COPD detection and demonstrated strong predictive performance for future COPD risk (p-value < 0.001). In summary, DeepSpiro can effectively predicts the long-term progression of the COPD disease.

Mengna Liu, Dong Xiang, Xu Cheng et al.

The popularity and diffusion of wearable devices provides new opportunities for sensor-based human activity recognition that leverages deep learning-based algorithms. Although impressive advances have been made, two major challenges remain. First, sensor data is often incomplete or noisy due to sensor placement and other issues as well as data transmission failure, calling for imputation of missing values, which also introduces noise. Second, human activity has multi-scale characteristics. Thus, different groups of people and even the same person may behave differently under different circumstances. To address these challenges, we propose a multilevel heterogeneous neural network, called MHNN, for sensor data analysis. We utilize multilevel discrete wavelet decomposition to extract multi-resolution features from sensor data. This enables distinguishing signals with different frequencies, thereby suppressing noise. As the components resulting from the decomposition are heterogeneous, we equip the proposed model with heterogeneous feature extractors that enable the learning of multi-scale features. Due to the complementarity of these features, we also include a cross aggregation module for enhancing their interactions. An experimental study using seven publicly available datasets offers evidence that MHNN can outperform other cutting-edge models and offers evidence of robustness to missing values and noise. An ablation study confirms the importance of each module.

Leming Guo, Wanli Xue, Shengyong Chen

Continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) aims to recognize signs in untrimmed sign language videos to textual glosses. A key challenge of CSLR is achieving effective cross-modality alignment between video and gloss sequences to enhance video representation. However, current cross-modality alignment paradigms often neglect the role of textual grammar to guide the video representation in learning global temporal context, which adversely affects recognition performance. To tackle this limitation, we propose a Denoising-Contrastive Alignment (DCA) paradigm. DCA creatively leverages textual grammar to enhance video representations through two complementary approaches: modeling the instance correspondence between signs and glosses from a discrimination perspective and aligning their global context from a generative perspective. Specifically, DCA accomplishes flexible instance-level correspondence between signs and glosses using a contrastive loss. Building on this, DCA models global context alignment between the video and gloss sequences by denoising the gloss representation from noise, guided by video representation. Additionally, DCA introduces gradient modulation to optimize the alignment and recognition gradients, ensuring a more effective learning process. By integrating gloss-wise and global context knowledge, DCA significantly enhances video representations for CSLR tasks. Experimental results across public benchmarks validate the effectiveness of DCA and confirm its video representation enhancement feasibility.

Zan Gao, Yuxiang Shao, Weili Guan et al.

Recently, many view-based 3D model retrieval methods have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art performance. Most of these methods focus on extracting more discriminative view-level features and effectively aggregating the multi-view images of a 3D model, but the latent relationship among these multi-view images is not fully explored. Thus, we tackle this problem from the perspective of exploiting the relationships between patch features to capture long-range associations among multi-view images. To capture associations among views, in this work, we propose a novel patch convolutional neural network (PCNN) for view-based 3D model retrieval. Specifically, we first employ a CNN to extract patch features of each view image separately. Secondly, a novel neural network module named PatchConv is designed to exploit intrinsic relationships between neighboring patches in the feature space to capture long-range associations among multi-view images. Then, an adaptive weighted view layer is further embedded into PCNN to automatically assign a weight to each view according to the similarity between each view feature and the view-pooling feature. Finally, a discrimination loss function is employed to extract the discriminative 3D model feature, which consists of softmax loss values generated by the fusion lassifier and the specific classifier. Extensive experimental results on two public 3D model retrieval benchmarks, namely, the ModelNet40, and ModelNet10, demonstrate that our proposed PCNN can outperform state-of-the-art approaches, with mAP alues of 93.67%, and 96.23%, respectively.

Chengwei Zhang, Shan Jin, Wanli Xue et al.

The adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) problem can be modeled as a multiagent cooperative game among urban intersections, where intersections cooperate to optimize their common goal. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved marked successes in managing sequential decision making problems, which motivates us to apply RL in the ASTC problem. Here we use independent reinforcement learning (IRL) to solve a complex traffic cooperative control problem in this study. One of the largest challenges of this problem is that the observation information of intersection is typically partially observable, which limits the learning performance of IRL algorithms. To this, we model the traffic control problem as a partially observable weak cooperative traffic model (PO-WCTM) to optimize the overall traffic situation of a group of intersections. Different from a traditional IRL task that averages the returns of all agents in fully cooperative games, the learning goal of each intersection in PO-WCTM is to reduce the cooperative difficulty of learning, which is also consistent with the traffic environment hypothesis. We also propose an IRL algorithm called Cooperative Important Lenient Double DQN (CIL-DDQN), which extends Double DQN (DDQN) algorithm using two mechanisms: the forgetful experience mechanism and the lenient weight training mechanism. The former mechanism decreases the importance of experiences stored in the experience reply buffer, which deals with the problem of experience failure caused by the strategy change of other agents. The latter mechanism increases the weight experiences with high estimation and `leniently' trains the DDQN neural network, which improves the probability of the selection of cooperative joint strategies. Experimental results show that CIL-DDQN outperforms other methods in almost all performance indicators of the traffic control problem.

Zhenhua Wang, Jiajun Meng, Dongyan Guo et al.

Compared with the progress made on human activity classification, much less success has been achieved on human interaction understanding (HIU). Apart from the latter task is much more challenging, the main cause is that recent approaches learn human interactive relations via shallow graphical models, which is inadequate to model complicated human interactions. In this paper, we propose a consistency-aware graph network, which combines the representative ability of graph network and the consistency-aware reasoning to facilitate the HIU task. Our network consists of three components, a backbone CNN to extract image features, a factor graph network to learn third-order interactive relations among participants, and a consistency-aware reasoning module to enforce labeling and grouping consistencies. Our key observation is that the consistency-aware-reasoning bias for HIU can be embedded into an energy function, minimizing which delivers consistent predictions. An efficient mean-field inference algorithm is proposed, such that all modules of our network could be trained jointly in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that our approach achieves leading performance on three benchmarks.

Miao Tian, Dongyan Guo, Ying Cui et al.

Novelty detection is a important research area which mainly solves the classification problem of inliers which usually consists of normal samples and outliers composed of abnormal samples. Auto-encoder is often used for novelty detection. However, the generalization ability of the auto-encoder may cause the undesirable reconstruction of abnormal elements and reduce the identification ability of the model. To solve the problem, we focus on the perspective of better reconstructing the normal samples as well as retaining the unique information of normal samples to improve the performance of auto-encoder for novelty detection. Firstly, we introduce attention mechanism into the task. Under the action of attention mechanism, auto-encoder can pay more attention to the representation of inlier samples through adversarial training. Secondly, we apply the information entropy into the latent layer to make it sparse and constrain the expression of diversity. Experimental results on three public datasets show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance compared with previous popular approaches.

Qianwei Zhou, Peng Tao, Xiaoxin Li et al.

Shape illustration images (SIIs) are common and important in describing the cross-sections of industrial products. Same as MNIST, the handwritten digit images, SIIs are gray or binary and containing shapes that are surrounded by large areas of blanks. In this work, Residual-Recursion Autoencoder (RRAE) has been proposed to extract low-dimensional features from SIIs while maintaining reconstruction accuracy as high as possible. RRAE will try to reconstruct the original image several times and recursively fill the latest residual image to the reserved channel of the encoder's input before the next trial of reconstruction. As a kind of neural network training framework, RRAE can wrap over other autoencoders and increase their performance. From experiment results, the reconstruction loss is decreased by 86.47% for convolutional autoencoder with high-resolution SIIs, 10.77% for variational autoencoder and 8.06% for conditional variational autoencoder with MNIST.

Dongyan Guo, Jun Wang, Ying Cui et al.

By decomposing the visual tracking task into two subproblems as classification for pixel category and regression for object bounding box at this pixel, we propose a novel fully convolutional Siamese network to solve visual tracking end-to-end in a per-pixel manner. The proposed framework SiamCAR consists of two simple subnetworks: one Siamese subnetwork for feature extraction and one classification-regression subnetwork for bounding box prediction. Our framework takes ResNet-50 as backbone. Different from state-of-the-art trackers like Siamese-RPN, SiamRPN++ and SPM, which are based on region proposal, the proposed framework is both proposal and anchor free. Consequently, we are able to avoid the tricky hyper-parameter tuning of anchors and reduce human intervention. The proposed framework is simple, neat and effective. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art trackers are conducted on many challenging benchmarks like GOT-10K, LaSOT, UAV123 and OTB-50. Without bells and whistles, our SiamCAR achieves the leading performance with a considerable real-time speed.

Qianwei Zhou, Chen Zhou, Haigen Hu et al.

Single image inverse problem is a notoriously challenging ill-posed problem that aims to restore the original image from one of its corrupted versions. Recently, this field has been immensely influenced by the emergence of deep-learning techniques. Deep Image Prior (DIP) offers a new approach that forces the recovered image to be synthesized from a given deep architecture. While DIP is quite an effective unsupervised approach, it is deprecated in real-world applications because of the requirement of human assistance. In this work, we aim to find the best-recovered image without the assistance of humans by adding a stopping criterion, which will reach maximum when the iteration no longer improves the image quality. More specifically, we propose to add a pseudo noise to the corrupted image and measure the pseudo-noise component in the recovered image by the orthogonality between signal and noise. The accuracy of the orthogonal stopping criterion has been demonstrated for several tested problems such as denoising, super-resolution, and inpainting, in which 38 out of 40 experiments are higher than 95%.

Dongyan Guo, Jun Wang, Weixuan Zhao et al.

According to observations, different visual objects have different salient features in different scenarios. Even for the same object, its salient shape and appearance features may change greatly from time to time in a long-term tracking task. Motivated by them, we proposed an end-to-end feature fusion framework based on Siamese network, named FF-Siam, which can effectively fuse different features for adaptive visual tracking. The framework consists of four layers. A feature extraction layer is designed to extract the different features of the target region and search region. The extracted features are then put into a weight generation layer to obtain the channel weights, which indicate the importance of different feature channels. Both features and the channel weights are utilized in a template generation layer to generate a discriminative template. Finally, the corresponding response maps created by the convolution of the search region features and the template are applied with a fusion layer to obtain the final response map for locating the target. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the popular Temple-Color, OTB50 and UAV123 benchmarks.

Yang Li, Guangcan Liu, Shengyong Chen

Due to its efficiency and stability, Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) has been emerging as a promising tool for moving object detection. Unfortunately, existing RPCA based methods assume static or quasi-static background, and thereby they may have trouble in coping with the background scenes that exhibit a persistent dynamic behavior. In this work, we shall introduce two techniques to fill in the gap. First, instead of using the raw pixel-value as features that are brittle in the presence of dynamic background, we devise a so-called Gaussian max-pooling operator to estimate a "stable-value" for each pixel. Those stable-values are robust to various background changes and can therefore distinguish effectively the foreground objects from the background. Then, to obtain more accurate results, we further propose a Segmentation Constrained RPCA (SC-RPCA) model, which incorporates the temporal and spatial continuity in images into RPCA. The inference process of SC-RPCA is a group sparsity constrained nuclear norm minimization problem, which is convex and easy to solve. Experimental results on seven videos from the CDCNET 2014 database show the superior performance of the proposed method.