Yingjie Zhou

Zicheng Zhang, Wei Sun, Yingjie Zhou et al.

Digital humans have witnessed extensive applications in various domains, necessitating related quality assessment studies. However, there is a lack of comprehensive digital human quality assessment (DHQA) databases. To address this gap, we propose SJTU-H3D, a subjective quality assessment database specifically designed for full-body digital humans. It comprises 40 high-quality reference digital humans and 1,120 labeled distorted counterparts generated with seven types of distortions. The SJTU-H3D database can serve as a benchmark for DHQA research, allowing evaluation and refinement of processing algorithms. Further, we propose a zero-shot DHQA approach that focuses on no-reference (NR) scenarios to ensure generalization capabilities while mitigating database bias. Our method leverages semantic and distortion features extracted from projections, as well as geometry features derived from the mesh structure of digital humans. Specifically, we employ the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to measure semantic affinity and incorporate the Naturalness Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) model to capture low-level distortion information. Additionally, we utilize dihedral angles as geometry descriptors to extract mesh features. By aggregating these measures, we introduce the Digital Human Quality Index (DHQI), which demonstrates significant improvements in zero-shot performance. The DHQI can also serve as a robust baseline for DHQA tasks, facilitating advancements in the field. The database and the code are available at https://github.com/zzc-1998/SJTU-H3D.

Ya Liu, Yingjie Zhou, Kai Yang et al.

IoT time series analysis has found numerous applications in a wide variety of areas, ranging from health informatics to network security. Nevertheless, the complex spatial temporal dynamics and high dimensionality of IoT time series make the analysis increasingly challenging. In recent years, the powerful feature extraction and representation learning capabilities of deep learning (DL) have provided an effective means for IoT time series analysis. However, few existing surveys on time series have systematically discussed unsupervised DL-based methods. To fill this void, we investigate unsupervised deep learning for IoT time series, i.e., unsupervised anomaly detection and clustering, under a unified framework. We also discuss the application scenarios, public datasets, existing challenges, and future research directions in this area.

Fanxing Liu, Cheng Zeng, Le Zhang et al.

Time series anomaly detection strives to uncover potential abnormal behaviors and patterns from temporal data, and has fundamental significance in diverse application scenarios. Constructing an effective detection model usually requires adequate training data stored in a centralized manner, however, this requirement sometimes could not be satisfied in realistic scenarios. As a prevailing approach to address the above problem, federated learning has demonstrated its power to cooperate with the distributed data available while protecting the privacy of data providers. However, it is still unclear that how existing time series anomaly detection algorithms perform with decentralized data storage and privacy protection through federated learning. To study this, we conduct a federated time series anomaly detection benchmark, named FedTADBench, which involves five representative time series anomaly detection algorithms and four popular federated learning methods. We would like to answer the following questions: (1)How is the performance of time series anomaly detection algorithms when meeting federated learning? (2) Which federated learning method is the most appropriate one for time series anomaly detection? (3) How do federated time series anomaly detection approaches perform on different partitions of data in clients? Numbers of results as well as corresponding analysis are provided from extensive experiments with various settings. The source code of our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/fanxingliu2020/FedTADBench.

Xinyu Lin, Yingjie Zhou, Yipeng Liu et al.

An image line segment is a fundamental low-level visual feature that delineates straight, slender, and uninterrupted portions of objects and scenarios within images. Detection and description of line segments lay the basis for numerous vision tasks. Although many studies have aimed to detect and describe line segments, a comprehensive review is lacking, obstructing their progress. This study fills the gap by comprehensively reviewing related studies on detecting and describing two-dimensional image line segments to provide researchers with an overall picture and deep understanding. Based on their mechanisms, two taxonomies for line segment detection and description are presented to introduce, analyze, and summarize these studies, facilitating researchers to learn about them quickly and extensively. The key issues, core ideas, advantages and disadvantages of existing methods, and their potential applications for each category are analyzed and summarized, including previously unknown findings. The challenges in existing methods and corresponding insights for potentially solving them are also provided to inspire researchers. In addition, some state-of-the-art line segment detection and description algorithms are evaluated without bias, and the evaluation code will be publicly available. The theoretical analysis, coupled with the experimental results, can guide researchers in selecting the best method for their intended vision applications. Finally, this study provides insights for potentially interesting future research directions to attract more attention from researchers to this field.

Yingjie Zhou, Xilei Zhu, Siyu Ren et al.

Speech-driven Talking Human (TH) generation, commonly known as "Talker," currently faces limitations in multi-subject driving capabilities. Extending this paradigm to "Multi-Talker," capable of animating multiple subjects simultaneously, introduces richer interactivity and stronger immersion in audiovisual communication. However, current Multi-Talkers still exhibit noticeable quality degradation caused by technical limitations, resulting in suboptimal user experiences. To address this challenge, we construct THQA-MT, the first large-scale Multi-Talker-generated Talking Human Quality Assessment dataset, consisting of 5,492 Multi-Talker-generated THs (MTHs) from 15 representative Multi-Talkers using 400 real portraits collected online. Through subjective experiments, we analyze perceptual discrepancies among different Multi-Talkers and identify 12 common types of distortion. Furthermore, we introduce EvalTalker, a novel TH quality assessment framework. This framework possesses the ability to perceive global quality, human characteristics, and identity consistency, while integrating Qwen-Sync to perceive multimodal synchrony. Experimental results demonstrate that EvalTalker achieves superior correlation with subjective scores, providing a robust foundation for future research on high-quality Multi-Talker generation and evaluation.

Feng Qian, Yuehua Yue, Yu He et al.

Seismic acquisition footprints appear as stably faint and dim structures and emerge fully spatially coherent, causing inevitable damage to useful signals during the suppression process. Various footprint removal methods, including filtering and sparse representation (SR), have been reported to attain promising results for surmounting this challenge. However, these methods, e.g., SR, rely solely on the handcrafted image priors of useful signals, which is sometimes an unreasonable demand if complex geological structures are contained in the given seismic data. As an alternative, this article proposes a footprint removal network (dubbed FR-Net) for the unsupervised suppression of acquired footprints without any assumptions regarding valuable signals. The key to the FR-Net is to design a unidirectional total variation (UTV) model for footprint acquisition according to the intrinsically directional property of noise. By strongly regularizing a deep convolutional autoencoder (DCAE) using the UTV model, our FR-Net transforms the DCAE from an entirely data-driven model to a \textcolor{black}{prior-augmented} approach, inheriting the superiority of the DCAE and our footprint model. Subsequently, the complete separation of the footprint noise and useful signals is projected in an unsupervised manner, specifically by optimizing the FR-Net via the backpropagation (BP) algorithm. We provide qualitative and quantitative evaluations conducted on three synthetic and field datasets, demonstrating that our FR-Net surpasses the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

Wei Sun, Weixia Zhang, Yanwei Jiang et al.

Portrait images typically consist of a salient person against diverse backgrounds. With the development of mobile devices and image processing techniques, users can conveniently capture portrait images anytime and anywhere. However, the quality of these portraits may suffer from the degradation caused by unfavorable environmental conditions, subpar photography techniques, and inferior capturing devices. In this paper, we introduce a dual-branch network for portrait image quality assessment (PIQA), which can effectively address how the salient person and the background of a portrait image influence its visual quality. Specifically, we utilize two backbone networks (\textit{i.e.,} Swin Transformer-B) to extract the quality-aware features from the entire portrait image and the facial image cropped from it. To enhance the quality-aware feature representation of the backbones, we pre-train them on the large-scale video quality assessment dataset LSVQ and the large-scale facial image quality assessment dataset GFIQA. Additionally, we leverage LIQE, an image scene classification and quality assessment model, to capture the quality-aware and scene-specific features as the auxiliary features. Finally, we concatenate these features and regress them into quality scores via a multi-perception layer (MLP). We employ the fidelity loss to train the model via a learning-to-rank manner to mitigate inconsistencies in quality scores in the portrait image quality assessment dataset PIQ. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior performance in the PIQ dataset, validating its effectiveness. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/sunwei925/DN-PIQA.git}.

Hongyi Miao, Jun Jia, Yankun Cao et al.

With the dramatic upsurge in the volume of ultrasound examinations, low-quality ultrasound imaging has gradually increased due to variations in operator proficiency and imaging circumstances, imposing a severe burden on diagnosis accuracy and even entailing the risk of restarting the diagnosis in critical cases. To assist clinicians in selecting high-quality ultrasound images and ensuring accurate diagnoses, we introduce Ultrasound-QBench, a comprehensive benchmark that systematically evaluates multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on quality assessment tasks of ultrasound images. Ultrasound-QBench establishes two datasets collected from diverse sources: IVUSQA, consisting of 7,709 images, and CardiacUltraQA, containing 3,863 images. These images encompassing common ultrasound imaging artifacts are annotated by professional ultrasound experts and classified into three quality levels: high, medium, and low. To better evaluate MLLMs, we decompose the quality assessment task into three dimensionalities: qualitative classification, quantitative scoring, and comparative assessment. The evaluation of 7 open-source MLLMs as well as 1 proprietary MLLMs demonstrates that MLLMs possess preliminary capabilities for low-level visual tasks in ultrasound image quality classification. We hope this benchmark will inspire the research community to delve deeper into uncovering and enhancing the untapped potential of MLLMs for medical imaging tasks.

Wenjie Du, Jun Wang, Linglong Qian et al.

Effective imputation is a crucial preprocessing step for time series analysis. Despite the development of numerous deep learning algorithms for time series imputation, the community lacks standardized and comprehensive benchmark platforms to effectively evaluate imputation performance across different settings. Moreover, although many deep learning forecasting algorithms have demonstrated excellent performance, whether their modelling achievements can be transferred to time series imputation tasks remains unexplored. To bridge these gaps, we develop TSI-Bench, the first (to our knowledge) comprehensive benchmark suite for time series imputation utilizing deep learning techniques. The TSI-Bench pipeline standardizes experimental settings to enable fair evaluation of imputation algorithms and identification of meaningful insights into the influence of domain-appropriate missing rates and patterns on model performance. Furthermore, TSI-Bench innovatively provides a systematic paradigm to tailor time series forecasting algorithms for imputation purposes. Our extensive study across 34,804 experiments, 28 algorithms, and 8 datasets with diverse missingness scenarios demonstrates TSI-Bench's effectiveness in diverse downstream tasks and potential to unlock future directions in time series imputation research and analysis. All source code and experiment logs are released at https://github.com/WenjieDu/AwesomeImputation.

Zhendong Liu, Le Zhang, Bing Li et al.

We address the challenge of WiFi-based temporal activity detection and propose an efficient Dual Pyramid Network that integrates Temporal Signal Semantic Encoders and Local Sensitive Response Encoders. The Temporal Signal Semantic Encoder splits feature learning into high and low-frequency components, using a novel Signed Mask-Attention mechanism to emphasize important areas and downplay unimportant ones, with the features fused using ContraNorm. The Local Sensitive Response Encoder captures fluctuations without learning. These feature pyramids are then combined using a new cross-attention fusion mechanism. We also introduce a dataset with over 2,114 activity segments across 553 WiFi CSI samples, each lasting around 85 seconds. Extensive experiments show our method outperforms challenging baselines.

Farong Wen, Yijin Guo, Junying Wang et al.

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) has led to a wide range of MLLM applications, and a number of benchmark datasets have sprung up in order to assess MLLM abilities. However, full-coverage Q&A testing on large-scale data is resource-intensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, we propose the MLLM Interview (MITV) strategy, which aims to quickly obtain MLLM performance metrics by quizzing fewer question. First, First, we constructed the interview dataset, which was built on an existing MLLM assessment dataset, by adding difficulty labels based on the performance of some typical MLLMs in this dataset. Second, we propose an MLLM Interview strategy, which obtains an initial performance situation of the large model by quizzing a small number of topics and then continuously tries to test the model's limits. Through extensive experiments, the result shows that the MITV strategy proposed in this paper performs well on MLLM benchmark datasets, and it is able to obtain the model evaluation capability faster through a small number of questions and answers.

Xin Cao, Qinghua Tao, Yingjie Zhou et al.

Residential load forecasting (RLF) is crucial for resource scheduling in power systems. Most existing methods utilize all given load records (dense data) to indiscriminately extract the dependencies between historical and future time series. However, there exist important regular patterns residing in the event-related associations among different appliances (sparse knowledge), which have yet been ignored. In this paper, we propose an Event-Response Knowledge Guided approach (ERKG) for RLF by incorporating the estimation of electricity usage events for different appliances, mining event-related sparse knowledge from the load series. With ERKG, the event-response estimation enables portraying the electricity consumption behaviors of residents, revealing regular variations in appliance operational states. To be specific, ERKG consists of knowledge extraction and guidance: i) a forecasting model is designed for the electricity usage events by estimating appliance operational states, aiming to extract the event-related sparse knowledge; ii) a novel knowledge-guided mechanism is established by fusing such state estimates of the appliance events into the RLF model, which can give particular focuses on the patterns of users' electricity consumption behaviors. Notably, ERKG can flexibly serve as a plug-in module to boost the capability of existing forecasting models by leveraging event response. In numerical experiments, extensive comparisons and ablation studies have verified the effectiveness of our ERKG, e.g., over 8% MAE can be reduced on the tested state-of-the-art forecasting models.

Xinyu Lin, Yingjie Zhou, Xun Zhang et al.

Binary feature descriptors have been widely used in various visual measurement tasks, particularly those with limited computing resources and storage capacities. Existing binary descriptors may not perform well for long-term visual measurement tasks due to their sensitivity to illumination variations. It can be observed that when image illumination changes dramatically, the relative relationship among local patches mostly remains intact. Based on the observation, consequently, this study presents an illumination-insensitive binary (IIB) descriptor by leveraging the local inter-patch invariance exhibited in multiple spatial granularities to deal with unfavorable illumination variations. By taking advantage of integral images for local patch feature computation, a highly efficient IIB descriptor is achieved. It can encode scalable features in multiple spatial granularities, thus facilitating a computationally efficient hierarchical matching from coarse to fine. Moreover, the IIB descriptor can also apply to other types of image data, such as depth maps and semantic segmentation results, when available in some applications. Numerical experiments on both natural and synthetic datasets reveal that the proposed IIB descriptor outperforms state-of-the-art binary descriptors and some testing float descriptors. The proposed IIB descriptor has also been successfully employed in a demo system for long-term visual localization. The code of the IIB descriptor will be publicly available.

Xinyu Lin, Yingjie Zhou, Yipeng Liu et al.

Line segment detection plays a cornerstone role in computer vision tasks. Among numerous detection methods that have been recently proposed, the ones based on edge drawing attract increasing attention owing to their excellent detection efficiency. However, the existing methods are not robust enough due to the inadequate usage of image gradients for edge drawing and line segment fitting. Based on the observation that the line segments should locate on the edge points with both consistent coordinates and level-line information, i.e., the unit vector perpendicular to the gradient orientation, this paper proposes a level-line guided edge drawing for robust line segment detection (GEDRLSD). The level-line information provides potential directions for edge tracking, which could be served as a guideline for accurate edge drawing. Additionally, the level-line information is fused in line segment fitting to improve the robustness. Numerical experiments show the superiority of the proposed GEDRLSD algorithm compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Yingjie Zhou, Xucheng Song, Yanru Zhang et al.

Weakly-supervised anomaly detection aims at learning an anomaly detector from a limited amount of labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. Recent works build deep neural networks for anomaly detection by discriminatively mapping the normal samples and abnormal samples to different regions in the feature space or fitting different distributions. However, due to the limited number of annotated anomaly samples, directly training networks with the discriminative loss may not be sufficient. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a novel strategy to transform the input data into a more meaningful representation that could be used for anomaly detection. Specifically, we leverage an autoencoder to encode the input data and utilize three factors, hidden representation, reconstruction residual vector, and reconstruction error, as the new representation for the input data. This representation amounts to encode a test sample with its projection on the training data manifold, its direction to its projection and its distance to its projection. In addition to this encoding, we also propose a novel network architecture to seamlessly incorporate those three factors. From our extensive experiments, the benefits of the proposed strategy are clearly demonstrated by its superior performance over the competitive methods.