Ling Luo

Ling Luo, Dingyu Xue, Xinglong Feng et al.

Modern approaches for semantic segmention usually pay too much attention to the accuracy of the model, and therefore it is strongly recommended to introduce cumbersome backbones, which brings heavy computation burden and memory footprint. To alleviate this problem, we propose an efficient segmentation method based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for the task of hair and facial skin segmentation, which achieving remarkable trade-off between speed and performance on three benchmark datasets. As far as we know, the accuracy of skin tones classification is usually unsatisfactory due to the influence of external environmental factors such as illumination and background noise. Therefore, we use the segmentated face to obtain a specific face area, and further exploit the color moment algorithm to extract its color features. Specifically, for a 224 x 224 standard input, using our high-resolution spatial detail information and low-resolution contextual information fusion network (HLNet), we achieve 90.73% Pixel Accuracy on Figaro1k dataset at over 16 FPS in the case of CPU environment. Additional experiments on CamVid dataset further confirm the universality of the proposed model. We further use masked color moment for skin tones grade evaluation and approximate 80% classification accuracy demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.Code is available at https://github.com/JACKYLUO1991/Face-skin-hair-segmentaiton-and-skin-color-evaluation.

Yuxiang Lin, Ling Luo, Ying Chen et al.

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) provides high-resolution pathological images and whole-transcriptomic expression profiles at individual spots across whole-slide scales. This setting makes it an ideal data source to develop multimodal foundation models. Although recent studies attempted to fine-tune visual encoders with trainable gene encoders based on spot-level, the absence of a wider slide perspective and spatial intrinsic relationships limits their ability to capture ST-specific insights effectively. Here, we introduce ST-Align, the first foundation model designed for ST that deeply aligns image-gene pairs by incorporating spatial context, effectively bridging pathological imaging with genomic features. We design a novel pretraining framework with a three-target alignment strategy for ST-Align, enabling (1) multi-scale alignment across image-gene pairs, capturing both spot- and niche-level contexts for a comprehensive perspective, and (2) cross-level alignment of multimodal insights, connecting localized cellular characteristics and broader tissue architecture. Additionally, ST-Align employs specialized encoders tailored to distinct ST contexts, followed by an Attention-Based Fusion Network (ABFN) for enhanced multimodal fusion, effectively merging domain-shared knowledge with ST-specific insights from both pathological and genomic data. We pre-trained ST-Align on 1.3 million spot-niche pairs and evaluated its performance through two downstream tasks across six datasets, demonstrating superior zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. ST-Align highlights the potential for reducing the cost of ST and providing valuable insights into the distinction of critical compositions within human tissue.

Chuang Wang, Haitao Zhou, Ling Luo et al.

3D vector graphics play a crucial role in various applications including 3D shape retrieval, conceptual design, and virtual reality interactions due to their ability to capture essential structural information with minimal representation. While recent approaches have shown promise in generating 3D vector graphics, they often suffer from lengthy processing times and struggle to maintain view consistency. To address these limitations, we propose ViewCraft3D (VC3D), an efficient method that leverages 3D priors to generate 3D vector graphics. Specifically, our approach begins with 3D object analysis, employs a geometric extraction algorithm to fit 3D vector graphics to the underlying structure, and applies view-consistent refinement process to enhance visual quality. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that VC3D outperforms previous methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, while significantly reducing computational overhead. The resulting 3D sketches maintain view consistency and effectively capture the essential characteristics of the original objects.

Ling Luo, Dingyu Xue, Xinglong Feng

A large number of retinal vessel analysis methods based on image segmentation have emerged in recent years. However, existing methods depend on cumbersome backbones, such as VGG16 and ResNet-50, benefiting from their powerful feature extraction capabilities but suffering from high computational costs. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network (HybridNetSeg) dedicated to solving this drawback while further improving overall performance. Considering deformable convolution can extract complex and variable structural information, and larger kernel in mixed depthwise convolution makes contribution to higher accuracy. We have integrated these two modules and propose a Hybrid Convolution Block (HCB) using the idea of heuristic learning. Inspired by the U-Net, we use HCB to replace a part of the common convolution of the U-Net encoder, drastically reducing the parameter count to 0.71M while accelerating the inference process. Not only that, we also propose a multi-scale mixed loss mechanism. Extensive experiments on three major benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method