Bin Yang

Jing Li, Lu Bai, Bin Yang et al.

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to extract complementary features to synthesize a single fused image. Many methods employ convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract local features due to its translation invariance and locality. However, CNNs fail to consider the image's non-local self-similarity (NLss), though it can expand the receptive field by pooling operations, it still inevitably leads to information loss. In addition, the transformer structure extracts long-range dependence by considering the correlativity among all image patches, leading to information redundancy of such transformer-based methods. However, graph representation is more flexible than grid (CNN) or sequence (transformer structure) representation to address irregular objects, and graph can also construct the relationships among the spatially repeatable details or texture with far-space distance. Therefore, to address the above issues, it is significant to convert images into the graph space and thus adopt graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to extract NLss. This is because the graph can provide a fine structure to aggregate features and propagate information across the nearest vertices without introducing redundant information. Concretely, we implement a cascaded NLss extraction pattern to extract NLss of intra- and inter-modal by exploring interactions of different image pixels in intra- and inter-image positional distance. We commence by preforming GCNs on each intra-modal to aggregate features and propagate information to extract independent intra-modal NLss. Then, GCNs are performed on the concatenate intra-modal NLss features of infrared and visible images, which can explore the cross-domain NLss of inter-modal to reconstruct the fused image. Ablation studies and extensive experiments illustrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method on three datasets.

Bin Yang, Patrick Pfreundschuh, Roland Siegwart et al.

LiDAR Upsampling is a challenging task for the perception systems of robots and autonomous vehicles, due to the sparse and irregular structure of large-scale scene contexts. Recent works propose to solve this problem by converting LiDAR data from 3D Euclidean space into an image super-resolution problem in 2D image space. Although their methods can generate high-resolution range images with fine-grained details, the resulting 3D point clouds often blur out details and predict invalid points. In this paper, we propose TULIP, a new method to reconstruct high-resolution LiDAR point clouds from low-resolution LiDAR input. We also follow a range image-based approach but specifically modify the patch and window geometries of a Swin-Transformer-based network to better fit the characteristics of range images. We conducted several experiments on three public real-world and simulated datasets. TULIP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in all relevant metrics and generates robust and more realistic point clouds than prior works.

Jing Li, Lu Bai, Bin Yang et al.

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVF) plays an important role in intelligent transportation system (ITS). The early works predominantly focus on boosting the visual appeal of the fused result, and only several recent approaches have tried to combine the high-level vision task with IVF. However, they prioritize the design of cascaded structure to seek unified suitable features and fit different tasks. Thus, they tend to typically bias toward to reconstructing raw pixels without considering the significance of semantic features. Therefore, we propose a novel prior semantic guided image fusion method based on the dual-modality strategy, improving the performance of IVF in ITS. Specifically, to explore the independent significant semantic of each modality, we first design two parallel semantic segmentation branches with a refined feature adaptive-modulation (RFaM) mechanism. RFaM can perceive the features that are semantically distinct enough in each semantic segmentation branch. Then, two pilot experiments based on the two branches are conducted to capture the significant prior semantic of two images, which then is applied to guide the fusion task in the integration of semantic segmentation branches and fusion branches. In addition, to aggregate both high-level semantics and impressive visual effects, we further investigate the frequency response of the prior semantics, and propose a multi-level representation-adaptive fusion (MRaF) module to explicitly integrate the low-frequent prior semantic with the high-frequent details. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art image fusion approaches, in terms of either the visual appeal or the high-level semantics.