Jufeng Yang

Lishen Qu, Yao Liu, Jie Liang et al.

This paper presents NTIRE 2026, the 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) challenge on multi-exposure image fusion in dynamic scenes. We introduce a benchmark that targets a practical yet difficult HDR imaging setting, where exposure bracketing must be fused under scene motion, illumination variation, and handheld camera jitter. The challenge data contains 100 training sequences with 7 exposure levels and 100 test sequences with 5 exposure levels, reflecting real-world scenarios that frequently cause misalignment and ghosting artefacts. We evaluate submissions with a leaderboard score derived from PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS, while also considering perceptual quality, efficiency, and reproducibility during the final review. This track attracted 114 participating teams and received 987 submissions. The winning methods significantly improved the ability to remove artifacts from multi-exposure fusion and recover fine details. The dataset and the code of each team can be found at the repository: https://github.com/qulishen/RAIM-HDR.

Lishen Qu, Shihao Zhou, Jie Liang et al.

Flicker artifacts, arising from unstable illumination and row-wise exposure inconsistencies, pose a significant challenge in short-exposure photography, severely degrading image quality. Unlike typical artifacts, e.g., noise and low-light, flicker is a structured degradation with specific spatial-temporal patterns, which are not accounted for in current generic restoration frameworks, leading to suboptimal flicker suppression and ghosting artifacts. In this work, we reveal that flicker artifacts exhibit two intrinsic characteristics, periodicity and directionality, and propose Flickerformer, a transformer-based architecture that effectively removes flicker without introducing ghosting. Specifically, Flickerformer comprises three key components: a phase-based fusion module (PFM), an autocorrelation feed-forward network (AFFN), and a wavelet-based directional attention module (WDAM). Based on the periodicity, PFM performs inter-frame phase correlation to adaptively aggregate burst features, while AFFN exploits intra-frame structural regularities through autocorrelation, jointly enhancing the network's ability to perceive spatially recurring patterns. Moreover, motivated by the directionality of flicker artifacts, WDAM leverages high-frequency variations in the wavelet domain to guide the restoration of low-frequency dark regions, yielding precise localization of flicker artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flickerformer outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/qulishen/Flickerformer.

Chenxi Zhao, Chen Zhu, Xiaokun Feng et al.

Few-step generation has been a long-standing goal, with recent one-step generation methods exemplified by MeanFlow achieving remarkable results. Existing research on MeanFlow primarily focuses on class-to-image generation. However, an intuitive yet unexplored direction is to extend the condition from fixed class labels to flexible text inputs, enabling richer content creation. Compared to the limited class labels, text conditions pose greater challenges to the model's understanding capability, necessitating the effective integration of powerful text encoders into the MeanFlow framework. Surprisingly, although incorporating text conditions appears straightforward, we find that integrating powerful LLM-based text encoders using conventional training strategies results in unsatisfactory performance. To uncover the underlying cause, we conduct detailed analyses and reveal that, due to the extremely limited number of refinement steps in the MeanFlow generation, such as only one step, the text feature representations are required to possess sufficiently high discriminability. This also explains why discrete and easily distinguishable class features perform well within the MeanFlow framework. Guided by these insights, we leverage a powerful LLM-based text encoder validated to possess the required semantic properties and adapt the MeanFlow generation process to this framework, resulting in efficient text-conditioned synthesis for the first time. Furthermore, we validate our approach on the widely used diffusion model, demonstrating significant generation performance improvements. We hope this work provides a general and practical reference for future research on text-conditioned MeanFlow generation. The code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/EMF.

Hao Shao, Quansheng Zeng, Qibin Hou et al.

Efficiently capturing multi-scale information and building long-range dependencies among pixels are essential for medical image segmentation because of the various sizes and shapes of the lesion regions or organs. In this paper, we present Multi-scale Cross-axis Attention (MCA) to solve the above challenging issues based on the efficient axial attention. Instead of simply connecting axial attention along the horizontal and vertical directions sequentially, we propose to calculate dual cross attentions between two parallel axial attentions to capture global information better. To process the significant variations of lesion regions or organs in individual sizes and shapes, we also use multiple convolutions of strip-shape kernels with different kernel sizes in each axial attention path to improve the efficiency of the proposed MCA in encoding spatial information. We build the proposed MCA upon the MSCAN backbone, yielding our network, termed MCANet. Our MCANet with only 4M+ parameters performs even better than most previous works with heavy backbones (e.g., Swin Transformer) on four challenging tasks, including skin lesion segmentation, nuclei segmentation, abdominal multi-organ segmentation, and polyp segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/haoshao-nku/medical_seg.

Zhicheng Zhang, Weicheng Wang, Yongjie Zhu et al.

Understanding and predicting emotion from videos has gathered significant attention in recent studies, driven by advancements in video large language models (VideoLLMs). While advanced methods have made progress in video emotion analysis, the intrinsic nature of emotions poses significant challenges. Emotions are characterized by dynamic and cues-dependent properties, making it difficult to understand complex and evolving emotional states with reasonable rationale. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel affective cues-guided reasoning framework that unifies fundamental attribute perception, expression analysis, and high-level emotional understanding in a stage-wise manner. At the core of our approach is a family of video emotion foundation models (VidEmo), specifically designed for emotion reasoning and instruction-following. These models undergo a two-stage tuning process: first, curriculum emotion learning for injecting emotion knowledge, followed by affective-tree reinforcement learning for emotion reasoning. Moreover, we establish a foundational data infrastructure and introduce a emotion-centric fine-grained dataset (Emo-CFG) consisting of 2.1M diverse instruction-based samples. Emo-CFG includes explainable emotional question-answering, fine-grained captions, and associated rationales, providing essential resources for advancing emotion understanding tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance, setting a new milestone across 15 face perception tasks.

Shihao Zhou, Jinshan Pan, Jinglei Shi et al.

How to explore useful features from images as prompts to guide the deep image restoration models is an effective way to solve image restoration. In contrast to mining spatial relations within images as prompt, which leads to characteristics of different frequencies being neglected and further remaining subtle or undetectable artifacts in the restored image, we develop a Frequency Prompting image restoration method, dubbed FPro, which can effectively provide prompt components from a frequency perspective to guild the restoration model address these differences. Specifically, we first decompose input features into separate frequency parts via dynamically learned filters, where we introduce a gating mechanism for suppressing the less informative elements within the kernels. To propagate useful frequency information as prompt, we then propose a dual prompt block, consisting of a low-frequency prompt modulator (LPM) and a high-frequency prompt modulator (HPM), to handle signals from different bands respectively. Each modulator contains a generation process to incorporate prompting components into the extracted frequency maps, and a modulation part that modifies the prompt feature with the guidance of the decoder features. Experimental results on commonly used benchmarks have demonstrated the favorable performance of our pipeline against SOTA methods on 5 image restoration tasks, including deraining, deraindrop, demoiréing, deblurring, and dehazing. The source code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/joshyZhou/FPro.

Weicheng Wang, Zhicheng Zhang, Zhongqi Zhang et al.

Video editing aims to modify input videos according to user intent. Recently, end-to-end training methods have garnered widespread attention, constructing paired video editing data through video generation or editing models. However, compared to image editing, the high annotation costs of video data severely constrain the scale, quality, and task diversity of video editing datasets when relying on video generative models or manual annotation. To bridge this gap, we propose LIVE, a joint training framework that leverages large-scale, high-quality image editing data alongside video datasets to bolster editing capabilities. To mitigate the domain discrepancy between static images and dynamic videos, we introduce a frame-wise token noise strategy, which treats the latents of specific frames as reasoning tokens, leveraging large pretrained video generative models to create plausible temporal transformations. Moreover, through cleaning public datasets and constructing an automated data pipeline, we adopt a two-stage training strategy to anneal video editing capabilities. Furthermore, we curate a comprehensive evaluation benchmark encompassing over 60 challenging tasks that are prevalent in image editing but scarce in existing video datasets. Extensive comparative and ablation experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code will be publicly available.

Shihao Zhou, Duosheng Chen, Jinshan Pan et al.

Transformer-based approaches have achieved superior performance in image restoration, since they can model long-term dependencies well. However, the limitation in capturing local information restricts their capacity to remove degradations. While existing approaches attempt to mitigate this issue by incorporating convolutional operations, the core component in Transformer, i.e., self-attention, which serves as a low-pass filter, could unintentionally dilute or even eliminate the acquired local patterns. In this paper, we propose HIT, a simple yet effective High-frequency Injected Transformer for image restoration. Specifically, we design a window-wise injection module (WIM), which incorporates abundant high-frequency details into the feature map, to provide reliable references for restoring high-quality images. We also develop a bidirectional interaction module (BIM) to aggregate features at different scales using a mutually reinforced paradigm, resulting in spatially and contextually improved representations. In addition, we introduce a spatial enhancement unit (SEU) to preserve essential spatial relationships that may be lost due to the computations carried out across channel dimensions in the BIM. Extensive experiments on 9 tasks (real noise, real rain streak, raindrop, motion blur, moiré, shadow, snow, haze, and low-light condition) demonstrate that HIT with linear computational complexity performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. The source code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/joshyZhou/HIT.

Shihao Zhou, Dayu Li, Jinshan Pan et al.

Transformer-based approaches have gained significant attention in image restoration, where the core component, i.e, Multi-Head Attention (MHA), plays a crucial role in capturing diverse features and recovering high-quality results. In MHA, heads perform attention calculation independently from uniform split subspaces, and a redundancy issue is triggered to hinder the model from achieving satisfactory outputs. In this paper, we propose to improve MHA by exploring diverse learners and introducing various interactions between heads, which results in a Hierarchical multI-head atteNtion driven Transformer model, termed HINT, for image restoration. HINT contains two modules, i.e., the Hierarchical Multi-Head Attention (HMHA) and the Query-Key Cache Updating (QKCU) module, to address the redundancy problem that is rooted in vanilla MHA. Specifically, HMHA extracts diverse contextual features by employing heads to learn from subspaces of varying sizes and containing different information. Moreover, QKCU, comprising intra- and inter-layer schemes, further reduces the redundancy problem by facilitating enhanced interactions between attention heads within and across layers. Extensive experiments are conducted on 12 benchmarks across 5 image restoration tasks, including low-light enhancement, dehazing, desnowing, denoising, and deraining, to demonstrate the superiority of HINT. The source code is available in the supplementary materials.

Xin Zhang, Teodor Boyadzhiev, Jinglei Shi et al.

In this paper, we leverage image complexity as a prior for refining segmentation features to achieve accurate real-time semantic segmentation. The design philosophy is based on the observation that different pixel regions within an image exhibit varying levels of complexity, with higher complexities posing a greater challenge for accurate segmentation. We thus introduce image complexity as prior guidance and propose the Image Complexity prior-guided Feature Refinement Network (ICFRNet). This network aggregates both complexity and segmentation features to produce an attention map for refining segmentation features within an Image Complexity Guided Attention (ICGA) module. We optimize the network in terms of both segmentation and image complexity prediction tasks with a combined loss function. Experimental results on the Cityscapes and CamViD datasets have shown that our ICFRNet achieves higher accuracy with a competitive efficiency for real-time segmentation.

Sicheng Zhao, Yang Xiao, Jiang Guo et al.

Sentiment analysis of user-generated reviews or comments on products and services in social networks can help enterprises to analyze the feedback from customers and take corresponding actions for improvement. To mitigate large-scale annotations on the target domain, domain adaptation (DA) provides an alternate solution by learning a transferable model from other labeled source domains. Existing multi-source domain adaptation (MDA) methods either fail to extract some discriminative features in the target domain that are related to sentiment, neglect the correlations of different sources and the distribution difference among different sub-domains even in the same source, or cannot reflect the varying optimal weighting during different training stages. In this paper, we propose a novel instance-level MDA framework, named curriculum cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (C-CycleGAN), to address the above issues. Specifically, C-CycleGAN consists of three components: (1) pre-trained text encoder which encodes textual input from different domains into a continuous representation space, (2) intermediate domain generator with curriculum instance-level adaptation which bridges the gap across source and target domains, and (3) task classifier trained on the intermediate domain for final sentiment classification. C-CycleGAN transfers source samples at instance-level to an intermediate domain that is closer to the target domain with sentiment semantics preserved and without losing discriminative features. Further, our dynamic instance-level weighting mechanisms can assign the optimal weights to different source samples in each training stage. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and achieve substantial gains over state-of-the-art DA approaches. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/WArushrush/Curriculum-CycleGAN.

Sicheng Zhao, Yunsheng Ma, Yang Gu et al.

Emotion recognition in user-generated videos plays an important role in human-centered computing. Existing methods mainly employ traditional two-stage shallow pipeline, i.e. extracting visual and/or audio features and training classifiers. In this paper, we propose to recognize video emotions in an end-to-end manner based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we develop a deep Visual-Audio Attention Network (VAANet), a novel architecture that integrates spatial, channel-wise, and temporal attentions into a visual 3D CNN and temporal attentions into an audio 2D CNN. Further, we design a special classification loss, i.e. polarity-consistent cross-entropy loss, based on the polarity-emotion hierarchy constraint to guide the attention generation. Extensive experiments conducted on the challenging VideoEmotion-8 and Ekman-6 datasets demonstrate that the proposed VAANet outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for video emotion recognition. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/maysonma/VAANet.

Jia-Xing Zhao, Jiangjiang Liu, Den-Ping Fan et al.

Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown their advantages in the salient object detection task. However, most existing FCNs-based methods still suffer from coarse object boundaries. In this paper, to solve this problem, we focus on the complementarity between salient edge information and salient object information. Accordingly, we present an edge guidance network (EGNet) for salient object detection with three steps to simultaneously model these two kinds of complementary information in a single network. In the first step, we extract the salient object features by a progressive fusion way. In the second step, we integrate the local edge information and global location information to obtain the salient edge features. Finally, to sufficiently leverage these complementary features, we couple the same salient edge features with salient object features at various resolutions. Benefiting from the rich edge information and location information in salient edge features, the fused features can help locate salient objects, especially their boundaries more accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on six widely used datasets without any pre-processing and post-processing. The source code is available at http: //mmcheng.net/egnet/.

Chenglizhao Chen, Boze Li, Mengke Song et al.

Depression is a severe global mental health issue that impairs daily functioning and overall quality of life. Although recent audio-visual approaches have improved automatic depression detection, methods that ignore emotional cues often fail to capture subtle depressive signals hidden within emotional expressions. Conversely, those incorporating emotions frequently confuse transient emotional expressions with stable depressive symptoms in feature representations, a phenomenon termed \emph{Emotional Ambiguity}, thereby leading to detection errors. To address this critical issue, we propose READ-Net, the first audio-visual depression detection framework explicitly designed to resolve Emotional Ambiguity through Adaptive Feature Recalibration (AFR). The core insight of AFR is to dynamically adjust the weights of emotional features to enhance depression-related signals. Rather than merely overlooking or naively combining emotional information, READ-Net innovatively identifies and preserves depressive-relevant cues within emotional features, while adaptively filtering out irrelevant emotional noise. This recalibration strategy significantly clarifies feature representations, and effectively mitigates the persistent challenge of emotional interference. Additionally, READ-Net can be easily integrated into existing frameworks for improved performance. Extensive evaluations on three publicly available datasets show that READ-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with average gains of 4.55\% in accuracy and 1.26\% in F1-score, demonstrating its robustness to emotional disturbances and improving audio-visual depression detection.

Pancheng Zhao, Peng Xu, Pengda Qin et al.

Camouflaged vision perception is an important vision task with numerous practical applications. Due to the expensive collection and labeling costs, this community struggles with a major bottleneck that the species category of its datasets is limited to a small number of object species. However, the existing camouflaged generation methods require specifying the background manually, thus failing to extend the camouflaged sample diversity in a low-cost manner. In this paper, we propose a Latent Background Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion (LAKE-RED) for camouflaged image generation. To our knowledge, our contributions mainly include: (1) For the first time, we propose a camouflaged generation paradigm that does not need to receive any background inputs. (2) Our LAKE-RED is the first knowledge retrieval-augmented method with interpretability for camouflaged generation, in which we propose an idea that knowledge retrieval and reasoning enhancement are separated explicitly, to alleviate the task-specific challenges. Moreover, our method is not restricted to specific foreground targets or backgrounds, offering a potential for extending camouflaged vision perception to more diverse domains. (3) Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing approaches, generating more realistic camouflage images.

Zhicheng Zhang, Wentao Gu, Weicheng Wang et al.

Omnimodal understanding entails a massive, highly redundant search space of cross-modal interactions, demanding focused and deliberative reasoning. Current reasoning paradigms rely on either sequential step-by-step generation or parallel sample-by-sample rollouts, leading to isolated reasoning trajectories. This inability to share promising intermediate paths severely limits exploration efficiency and causes compounding errors in complex audio-visual tasks. To break this bottleneck, we introduce Omni-o3, a novel framework driven by a deep nested deduction policy. By formulating reasoning as a dynamic recursive search, Omni-o3 inherently shares reasoning prefixes across branches, enabling the iterative execution of four atomic cognitive actions: expansion, selection, simulation, and backpropagation. To empower this framework, we propose a robust two-stage training paradigm: (1) cold-start supervised fine-tuning on 101K high-quality, long-chain trajectories distilled from 3.5M diverse omnimodal samples, enabling necessary recursive search patterns; and (2) nested group rollout-driven exploratory reinforcement learning on 18K complex multi-turn samples, explicitly guided by a novel multi-step reward model to stimulate deep nested reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Omni-o3 achieves competitive performance across 11 benchmarks, unlocking advanced capabilities in comprehensive audio-visual, visual-centric, and audio-centric reasoning tasks.

Zhicheng Zhang, Wuyou Xia, Chenxi Zhao et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) recently showed strong capacity in integrating data among multiple modalities, empowered by a generalizable attention architecture. Advanced methods predominantly focus on language-centric tuning while less exploring multimodal tokens mixed through attention, posing challenges in high-level tasks that require fine-grained cognition and emotion understanding. In this work, we identify the attention deficit disorder problem in multimodal learning, caused by inconsistent cross-modal attention and layer-by-layer decayed attention activation. To address this, we propose a novel attention mechanism, termed MOdular Duplex Attention (MODA), simultaneously conducting the inner-modal refinement and inter-modal interaction. MODA employs a correct-after-align strategy to effectively decouple modality alignment from cross-layer token mixing. In the alignment phase, tokens are mapped to duplex modality spaces based on the basis vectors, enabling the interaction between visual and language modality. Further, the correctness of attention scores is ensured through adaptive masked attention, which enhances the model's flexibility by allowing customizable masking patterns for different modalities. Extensive experiments on 21 benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of MODA in perception, cognition, and emotion tasks. Source code and demo are available in https://zzcheng.top/MODA.

Lishen Qu, Shihao Zhou, Jinshan Pan et al.

Intense light sources often produce flares in captured images at night, which deteriorates the visual quality and negatively affects downstream applications. In order to train an effective flare removal network, a reliable dataset is essential. The mainstream flare removal datasets are semi-synthetic to reduce human labour, but these datasets do not cover typical scenarios involving multiple scattering flares. To tackle this issue, we synthesize a prior-guided dataset named Flare7K*, which contains multi-flare images where the brightness of flares adheres to the laws of illumination. Besides, flares tend to occupy localized regions of the image but existing networks perform flare removal on the entire image and sometimes modify clean areas incorrectly. Therefore, we propose a plug-and-play Adaptive Focus Module (AFM) that can adaptively mask the clean background areas and assist models in focusing on the regions severely affected by flares. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our data synthesis method can better simulate real-world scenes and several models equipped with AFM achieve state-of-the-art performance on the real-world test dataset.

George Ciubotariu, Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu, Zhuyun Zhou et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the AIM 2025 High FPS Non-Uniform Motion Deblurring Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and final results. The objective of this challenge is to identify effective networks capable of producing clearer and visually compelling images in diverse and challenging conditions, by learning representative visual cues for complex aggregations of motion types. A total of 68 participants registered for the competition, and 9 teams ultimately submitted valid entries. This paper thoroughly evaluates the state-of-the-art advances in high-FPS single image motion deblurring, showcasing the significant progress in the field, while leveraging samples of the novel dataset, MIORe, that introduces challenging examples of movement patterns.

Pancheng Zhao, Deng-Ping Fan, Shupeng Cheng et al.

Deep learning is developing rapidly and handling common computer vision tasks well. It is time to pay attention to more complex vision tasks, as model size, knowledge, and reasoning capabilities continue to improve. In this paper, we introduce and review a family of complex tasks, termed Concealed Dense Prediction (CDP), which has great value in agriculture, industry, etc. CDP's intrinsic trait is that the targets are concealed in their surroundings, thus fully perceiving them requires fine-grained representations, prior knowledge, auxiliary reasoning, etc. The contributions of this review are three-fold: (i) We introduce the scope, characteristics, and challenges specific to CDP tasks and emphasize their essential differences from generic vision tasks. (ii) We develop a taxonomy based on concealment counteracting to summarize deep learning efforts in CDP through experiments on three tasks. We compare 25 state-of-the-art methods across 12 widely used concealed datasets. (iii) We discuss the potential applications of CDP in the large model era and summarize 6 potential research directions. We offer perspectives for the future development of CDP by constructing a large-scale multimodal instruction fine-tuning dataset, CvpINST, and a concealed visual perception agent, CvpAgent.

Lishen Qu, Zhihao Liu, Shihao Zhou et al.

Flicker artifacts in short-exposure images are caused by the interplay between the row-wise exposure mechanism of rolling shutter cameras and the temporal intensity variations of alternating current (AC)-powered lighting. These artifacts typically appear as uneven brightness distribution across the image, forming noticeable dark bands. Beyond compromising image quality, this structured noise also affects high-level tasks, such as object detection and tracking, where reliable lighting is crucial. Despite the prevalence of flicker, the lack of a large-scale, realistic dataset has been a significant barrier to advancing research in flicker removal. To address this issue, we present BurstDeflicker, a scalable benchmark constructed using three complementary data acquisition strategies. First, we develop a Retinex-based synthesis pipeline that redefines the goal of flicker removal and enables controllable manipulation of key flicker-related attributes (e.g., intensity, area, and frequency), thereby facilitating the generation of diverse flicker patterns. Second, we capture 4,000 real-world flicker images from different scenes, which help the model better understand the spatial and temporal characteristics of real flicker artifacts and generalize more effectively to wild scenarios. Finally, due to the non-repeatable nature of dynamic scenes, we propose a green-screen method to incorporate motion into image pairs while preserving real flicker degradation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset and its potential to advance research in flicker removal.

Lishen Qu, Zhihao Liu, Jinshan Pan et al.

Lens flare occurs when shooting towards strong light sources, significantly degrading the visual quality of images. Due to the difficulty in capturing flare-corrupted and flare-free image pairs in the real world, existing datasets are typically synthesized in 2D by overlaying artificial flare templates onto background images. However, the lack of flare diversity in templates and the neglect of physical principles in the synthesis process hinder models trained on these datasets from generalizing well to real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a new physics-informed method for flare data generation, which consists of three stages: parameterized template creation, the laws of illumination-aware 2D synthesis, and physical engine-based 3D rendering, which finally gives us a mixed flare dataset that incorporates both 2D and 3D perspectives, namely FlareX. This dataset offers 9,500 2D templates derived from 95 flare patterns and 3,000 flare image pairs rendered from 60 3D scenes. Furthermore, we design a masking approach to obtain real-world flare-free images from their corrupted counterparts to measure the performance of the model on real-world images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and dataset.

Duosheng Chen, Shihao Zhou, Jinshan Pan et al.

Exploring motion information is important for the motion deblurring task. Recent the window-based transformer approaches have achieved decent performance in image deblurring. Note that the motion causing blurry results is usually composed of translation and rotation movements and the window-shift operation in the Cartesian coordinate system by the window-based transformer approaches only directly explores translation motion in orthogonal directions. Thus, these methods have the limitation of modeling the rotation part. To alleviate this problem, we introduce the polar coordinate-based transformer, which has the angles and distance to explore rotation motion and translation information together. In this paper, we propose a Radial Strip Transformer (RST), which is a transformer-based architecture that restores the blur images in a polar coordinate system instead of a Cartesian one. RST contains a dynamic radial embedding module (DRE) to extract the shallow feature by a radial deformable convolution. We design a polar mask layer to generate the offsets for the deformable convolution, which can reshape the convolution kernel along the radius to better capture the rotation motion information. Furthermore, we proposed a radial strip attention solver (RSAS) as deep feature extraction, where the relationship of windows is organized by azimuth and radius. This attention module contains radial strip windows to reweight image features in the polar coordinate, which preserves more useful information in rotation and translation motion together for better recovering the sharp images. Experimental results on six synthesis and real-world datasets prove that our method performs favorably against other SOTA methods for the image deblurring task.

Sicheng Zhao, Guoli Jia, Jufeng Yang et al.

Humans are emotional creatures. Multiple modalities are often involved when we express emotions, whether we do so explicitly (e.g., facial expression, speech) or implicitly (e.g., text, image). Enabling machines to have emotional intelligence, i.e., recognizing, interpreting, processing, and simulating emotions, is becoming increasingly important. In this tutorial, we discuss several key aspects of multi-modal emotion recognition (MER). We begin with a brief introduction on widely used emotion representation models and affective modalities. We then summarize existing emotion annotation strategies and corresponding computational tasks, followed by the description of main challenges in MER. Furthermore, we present some representative approaches on representation learning of each affective modality, feature fusion of different affective modalities, classifier optimization for MER, and domain adaptation for MER. Finally, we outline several real-world applications and discuss some future directions.

Sicheng Zhao, Xingxu Yao, Jufeng Yang et al.

Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.

Xingxu Yao, Sicheng Zhao, Pengfei Xu et al.

To reduce annotation labor associated with object detection, an increasing number of studies focus on transferring the learned knowledge from a labeled source domain to another unlabeled target domain. However, existing methods assume that the labeled data are sampled from a single source domain, which ignores a more generalized scenario, where labeled data are from multiple source domains. For the more challenging task, we propose a unified Faster R-CNN based framework, termed Divide-and-Merge Spindle Network (DMSN), which can simultaneously enhance domain invariance and preserve discriminative power. Specifically, the framework contains multiple source subnets and a pseudo target subnet. First, we propose a hierarchical feature alignment strategy to conduct strong and weak alignments for low- and high-level features, respectively, considering their different effects for object detection. Second, we develop a novel pseudo subnet learning algorithm to approximate optimal parameters of pseudo target subset by weighted combination of parameters in different source subnets. Finally, a consistency regularization for region proposal network is proposed to facilitate each subnet to learn more abstract invariances. Extensive experiments on different adaptation scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Sicheng Zhao, Quanwei Huang, Youbao Tang et al.

Emotions are usually evoked in humans by images. Recently, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to understanding the emotions of images. In this chapter, we aim to introduce image emotion analysis (IEA) from a computational perspective with the focus on summarizing recent advances and suggesting future directions. We begin with commonly used emotion representation models from psychology. We then define the key computational problems that the researchers have been trying to solve and provide supervised frameworks that are generally used for different IEA tasks. After the introduction of major challenges in IEA, we present some representative methods on emotion feature extraction, supervised classifier learning, and domain adaptation. Furthermore, we introduce available datasets for evaluation and summarize some main results. Finally, we discuss some open questions and future directions that researchers can pursue.

Sicheng Zhao, Xuanbai Chen, Xiangyu Yue et al.

Thanks to large-scale labeled training data, deep neural networks (DNNs) have obtained remarkable success in many vision and multimedia tasks. However, because of the presence of domain shift, the learned knowledge of the well-trained DNNs cannot be well generalized to new domains or datasets that have few labels. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) studies the problem of transferring models trained on one labeled source domain to another unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we focus on UDA in visual emotion analysis for both emotion distribution learning and dominant emotion classification. Specifically, we design a novel end-to-end cycle-consistent adversarial model, termed CycleEmotionGAN++. First, we generate an adapted domain to align the source and target domains on the pixel-level by improving CycleGAN with a multi-scale structured cycle-consistency loss. During the image translation, we propose a dynamic emotional semantic consistency loss to preserve the emotion labels of the source images. Second, we train a transferable task classifier on the adapted domain with feature-level alignment between the adapted and target domains. We conduct extensive UDA experiments on the Flickr-LDL & Twitter-LDL datasets for distribution learning and ArtPhoto & FI datasets for emotion classification. The results demonstrate the significant improvements yielded by the proposed CycleEmotionGAN++ as compared to state-of-the-art UDA approaches.

Sicheng Zhao, Yaxian Li, Xingxu Yao et al.

Both images and music can convey rich semantics and are widely used to induce specific emotions. Matching images and music with similar emotions might help to make emotion perceptions more vivid and stronger. Existing emotion-based image and music matching methods either employ limited categorical emotion states which cannot well reflect the complexity and subtlety of emotions, or train the matching model using an impractical multi-stage pipeline. In this paper, we study end-to-end matching between image and music based on emotions in the continuous valence-arousal (VA) space. First, we construct a large-scale dataset, termed Image-Music-Emotion-Matching-Net (IMEMNet), with over 140K image-music pairs. Second, we propose cross-modal deep continuous metric learning (CDCML) to learn a shared latent embedding space which preserves the cross-modal similarity relationship in the continuous matching space. Finally, we refine the embedding space by further preserving the single-modal emotion relationship in the VA spaces of both images and music. The metric learning in the embedding space and task regression in the label space are jointly optimized for both cross-modal matching and single-modal VA prediction. The extensive experiments conducted on IMEMNet demonstrate the superiority of CDCML for emotion-based image and music matching as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Yingjie Zhai, Deng-Ping Fan, Jufeng Yang et al.

Multi-level feature fusion is a fundamental topic in computer vision. It has been exploited to detect, segment and classify objects at various scales. When multi-level features meet multi-modal cues, the optimal feature aggregation and multi-modal learning strategy become a hot potato. In this paper, we leverage the inherent multi-modal and multi-level nature of RGB-D salient object detection to devise a novel cascaded refinement network. In particular, first, we propose to regroup the multi-level features into teacher and student features using a bifurcated backbone strategy (BBS). Second, we introduce a depth-enhanced module (DEM) to excavate informative depth cues from the channel and spatial views. Then, RGB and depth modalities are fused in a complementary way. Our architecture, named Bifurcated Backbone Strategy Network (BBS-Net), is simple, efficient, and backbone-independent. Extensive experiments show that BBS-Net significantly outperforms eighteen SOTA models on eight challenging datasets under five evaluation measures, demonstrating the superiority of our approach ($\sim 4 \%$ improvement in S-measure $vs.$ the top-ranked model: DMRA-iccv2019). In addition, we provide a comprehensive analysis on the generalization ability of different RGB-D datasets and provide a powerful training set for future research.

Jie Liang, Jufeng Yang, Ming-Ming Cheng et al.

In this paper we propose a unified framework to simultaneously discover the number of clusters and group the data points into them using subspace clustering. Real data distributed in a high-dimensional space can be disentangled into a union of low-dimensional subspaces, which can benefit various applications. To explore such intrinsic structure, state-of-the-art subspace clustering approaches often optimize a self-representation problem among all samples, to construct a pairwise affinity graph for spectral clustering. However, a graph with pairwise similarities lacks robustness for segmentation, especially for samples which lie on the intersection of two subspaces. To address this problem, we design a hyper-correlation based data structure termed as the \textit{triplet relationship}, which reveals high relevance and local compactness among three samples. The triplet relationship can be derived from the self-representation matrix, and be utilized to iteratively assign the data points to clusters. Three samples in each triplet are encouraged to be highly correlated and are considered as a meta-element during clustering, which show more robustness than pairwise relationships when segmenting two densely distributed subspaces. Based on the triplet relationship, we propose a unified optimizing scheme to automatically calculate clustering assignments. Specifically, we optimize a model selection reward and a fusion reward by simultaneously maximizing the similarity of triplets from different clusters while minimizing the correlation of triplets from same cluster. The proposed algorithm also automatically reveals the number of clusters and fuses groups to avoid over-segmentation. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

Xiaoxiao Sun, Liang Zheng, Yu-Kun Lai et al.

Annotating a large number of training images is very time-consuming. In this background, this paper focuses on learning from easy-to-acquire web data and utilizes the learned model for fine-grained image classification in labeled datasets. Currently, the performance gain from training with web data is incremental, like a common saying "better than nothing, but not by much". Conventionally, the community looks to correcting the noisy web labels to select informative samples. In this work, we first systematically study the built-in gap between the web and standard datasets, i.e. different data distributions between the two kinds of data. Then, in addition to using web labels, we present an unsupervised object localization method, which provides critical insights into the object density and scale in web images. Specifically, we design two constraints on web data to substantially reduce the difference of data distributions for the web and standard datasets. First, we present a method to control the scale, localization and number of objects in the detected region. Second, we propose to select the regions containing objects that are consistent with the web tag. Based on the two constraints, we are able to process web images to reduce the gap, and the processed web data is used to better assist the standard dataset to train CNNs. Experiments on several fine-grained image classification datasets confirm that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.