Xu Wei

Muhammad Azeem Aslam, Xu Wei, Hassan Khalid et al.

BIQA (Blind Image Quality Assessment) is an important field of study that evaluates images automatically. Although significant progress has been made, blind image quality assessment remains a difficult task since images vary in content and distortions. Most algorithms generate quality without emphasizing the important region of interest. In order to solve this, a multi-stream spatial and channel attention-based algorithm is being proposed. This algorithm generates more accurate predictions with a high correlation to human perceptual assessment by combining hybrid features from two different backbones, followed by spatial and channel attention to provide high weights to the region of interest. Four legacy image quality assessment datasets are used to validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Authentic and synthetic distortion image databases are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and we show that it has excellent generalization properties with a particular focus on the perceptual foreground information.

Wenhui Lei, Xu Wei, Xiaofan Zhang et al.

Recent advancements in foundation models have shown significant potential in medical image analysis. However, there is still a gap in models specifically designed for medical image localization. To address this, we introduce MedLAM, a 3D medical foundation localization model that accurately identifies any anatomical part within the body using only a few template scans. MedLAM employs two self-supervision tasks: unified anatomical mapping (UAM) and multi-scale similarity (MSS) across a comprehensive dataset of 14,012 CT scans. Furthermore, we developed MedLSAM by integrating MedLAM with the Segment Anything Model (SAM). This innovative framework requires extreme point annotations across three directions on several templates to enable MedLAM to locate the target anatomical structure in the image, with SAM performing the segmentation. It significantly reduces the amount of manual annotation required by SAM in 3D medical imaging scenarios. We conducted extensive experiments on two 3D datasets covering 38 distinct organs. Our findings are twofold: 1) MedLAM can directly localize anatomical structures using just a few template scans, achieving performance comparable to fully supervised models; 2) MedLSAM closely matches the performance of SAM and its specialized medical adaptations with manual prompts, while minimizing the need for extensive point annotations across the entire dataset. Moreover, MedLAM has the potential to be seamlessly integrated with future 3D SAM models, paving the way for enhanced segmentation performance. Our code is public at \href{https://github.com/openmedlab/MedLSAM}

Youming Qin, Yihang Li, Xu Wei et al.

Exploiting contacts with environment structures provides extra force support to a UAV, often reducing the power consumption and hence extending the mission time. This paper investigates one such way to exploit flat surfaces in the environment by a novel aerial-ground hybrid locomotion. Our design is a single passive wheel integrated at the UAV bottom, serving a minimal design to date. We present the principle and implementation of such a simple design as well as its control. Flight experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility and the power saving caused by the ground locomotion. Results show that our minimal design allows successful aerial-ground hybrid locomotion even with a less-controllable bi-copter UAV. The ground locomotion saves up to 77% battery without much tuning effort.

Yan Wang, Xu Wei, Fengze Liu et al.

Tubular structure segmentation in medical images, e.g., segmenting vessels in CT scans, serves as a vital step in the use of computers to aid in screening early stages of related diseases. But automatic tubular structure segmentation in CT scans is a challenging problem, due to issues such as poor contrast, noise and complicated background. A tubular structure usually has a cylinder-like shape which can be well represented by its skeleton and cross-sectional radii (scales). Inspired by this, we propose a geometry-aware tubular structure segmentation method, Deep Distance Transform (DDT), which combines intuitions from the classical distance transform for skeletonization and modern deep segmentation networks. DDT first learns a multi-task network to predict a segmentation mask for a tubular structure and a distance map. Each value in the map represents the distance from each tubular structure voxel to the tubular structure surface. Then the segmentation mask is refined by leveraging the shape prior reconstructed from the distance map. We apply our DDT on six medical image datasets. The experiments show that (1) DDT can boost tubular structure segmentation performance significantly (e.g., over 13% improvement measured by DSC for pancreatic duct segmentation), and (2) DDT additionally provides a geometrical measurement for a tubular structure, which is important for clinical diagnosis (e.g., the cross-sectional scale of a pancreatic duct can be an indicator for pancreatic cancer).

Atul Nautiyal, Killian McCabe, Murhaf Hossari et al.

With the rapid proliferation of multimedia data in the internet, there has been a fast rise in the creation of videos for the viewers. This enables the viewers to skip the advertisement breaks in the videos, using ad blockers and 'skip ad' buttons -- bringing online marketing and publicity to a stall. In this paper, we demonstrate a system that can effectively integrate a new advertisement into a video sequence. We use state-of-the-art techniques from deep learning and computational photogrammetry, for effective detection of existing adverts, and seamless integration of new adverts into video sequences. This is helpful for targeted advertisement, paving the path for next-gen publicity.

Kairan Sun, Xu Wei, Gengtao Jia et al.

Faced with continuously increasing scale of data, original back-propagation neural network based machine learning algorithm presents two non-trivial challenges: huge amount of data makes it difficult to maintain both efficiency and accuracy; redundant data aggravates the system workload. This project is mainly focused on the solution to the issues above, combining deep learning algorithm with cloud computing platform to deal with large-scale data. A MapReduce-based handwriting character recognizer will be designed in this project to verify the efficiency improvement this mechanism will achieve on training and practical large-scale data. Careful discussion and experiment will be developed to illustrate how deep learning algorithm works to train handwritten digits data, how MapReduce is implemented on deep learning neural network, and why this combination accelerates computation. Besides performance, the scalability and robustness will be mentioned in this report as well. Our system comes with two demonstration software that visually illustrates our handwritten digit recognition/encoding application.