Jin-Hui Jiang

Jie Cai, Kangning Yang, Zhiyuan Li et al.

In this paper, we review the NTIRE 2026 challenge on single-image reflection removal (SIRR) in the wild. SIRR is a fundamental task in image restoration. Despite progress in academic research, most methods are tested on synthetic images or limited real-world images, creating a gap in real-world applications. In this challenge, we provide participants with the OpenRR-5k dataset. This dataset requires participants to process real-world images covering a range of reflection scenarios and intensities, aiming to generate clean images without reflections. The challenge attracted more than 100 registrations, with eleven of them participating in the final testing phase. The top-ranked methods advanced the state-of-the-art reflection removal performance and earned unanimous recognition from five experts in the field. The proposed OpenRR-5k dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/qiuzhangTiTi/OpenRR-5k, and the homepage of this challenge is at https://github.com/caijie0620/OpenRR-5k.

Chia-Ming Lee, Yu-Fan Lin, Yu-Jou Hsiao et al.

Shadow removal under diverse lighting conditions requires disentangling illumination from intrinsic reflectance, a challenge compounded when physical priors are not properly aligned. We propose PhaSR (Physically Aligned Shadow Removal), addressing this through dual-level prior alignment to enable robust performance from single-light shadows to multi-source ambient lighting. First, Physically Aligned Normalization (PAN) performs closed-form illumination correction via Gray-world normalization, log-domain Retinex decomposition, and dynamic range recombination, suppressing chromatic bias. Second, Geometric-Semantic Rectification Attention (GSRA) extends differential attention to cross-modal alignment, harmonizing depth-derived geometry with DINO-v2 semantic embeddings to resolve modal conflicts under varying illumination. Experiments show competitive performance in shadow removal with lower complexity and generalization to ambient lighting where traditional methods fail under multi-source illumination. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ming053l/PhaSR.

Kailash A. Hambarde, Hugo Proença, Md Rashidunnabi et al.

Person re-identification (ReID) across aerial and ground views at extreme far distances introduces a distinct operating regime where severe resolution degradation, extreme viewpoint changes, unstable motion cues, and clothing variation jointly undermine the appearance-based assumptions of existing ReID systems. To study this regime, we introduce VReID-XFD, a video-based benchmark and community challenge for extreme far-distance (XFD) aerial-to-ground person re-identification. VReID-XFD is derived from the DetReIDX dataset and comprises 371 identities, 11,288 tracklets, and 11.75 million frames, captured across altitudes from 5.8 m to 120 m, viewing angles from oblique (30 degrees) to nadir (90 degrees), and horizontal distances up to 120 m. The benchmark supports aerial-to-aerial, aerial-to-ground, and ground-to-aerial evaluation under strict identity-disjoint splits, with rich physical metadata. The VReID-XFD-25 Challenge attracted 10 teams with hundreds of submissions. Systematic analysis reveals monotonic performance degradation with altitude and distance, a universal disadvantage of nadir views, and a trade-off between peak performance and robustness. Even the best-performing SAS-PReID method achieves only 43.93 percent mAP in the aerial-to-ground setting. The dataset, annotations, and official evaluation protocols are publicly available at https://www.it.ubi.pt/DetReIDX/ .

Chih-Chung Hsu, I-Hsuan Wu, Wen-Hai Tseng et al.

This report presents our semantic segmentation framework developed by team ACVLAB for the ICRA 2025 GOOSE 2D Semantic Segmentation Challenge, which focuses on parsing outdoor scenes into nine semantic categories under real-world conditions. Our method integrates a Swin Transformer backbone enhanced with Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) for improved spatial generalization, alongside a Color Shift Estimation-and-Correction module designed to compensate for illumination inconsistencies in natural environments. To further improve training stability, we adopt a quantile-based denoising strategy that downweights the top 2.5\% of highest-error pixels, treating them as noise and suppressing their influence during optimization. Evaluated on the official GOOSE test set, our approach achieved a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 0.848, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining color correction, positional encoding, and error-aware denoising in robust semantic segmentation.