Xuesong Liu

Ge Teng, Ting Mao, Chen Shen et al.

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) aims to cluster multi-view data that are only partially available. This poses two main challenges: effectively leveraging multi-view information and mitigating the impact of missing views. Prevailing solutions employ cross-view contrastive learning and missing view recovery techniques. However, they either neglect valuable complementary information by focusing only on consensus between views or provide unreliable recovered views due to the absence of supervision. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Unified and Robust Representation Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering (URRL-IMVC). URRL-IMVC directly learns a unified embedding that is robust to view missing conditions by integrating information from multiple views and neighboring samples. Firstly, to overcome the limitations of cross-view contrastive learning, URRL-IMVC incorporates an attention-based auto-encoder framework to fuse multi-view information and generate unified embeddings. Secondly, URRL-IMVC directly enhances the robustness of the unified embedding against view-missing conditions through KNN imputation and data augmentation techniques, eliminating the need for explicit missing view recovery. Finally, incremental improvements are introduced to further enhance the overall performance, such as the Clustering Module and the customization of the Encoder. We extensively evaluate the proposed URRL-IMVC framework on various benchmark datasets, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies are performed to validate the effectiveness of our design.

Runze Cheng, Yao Sun, Ahmad Taha et al.

Semantic communication (SemCom) emerges as a transformative paradigm for traffic-intensive visual data transmission, shifting focus from raw data to meaningful content transmission and relieving the increasing pressure on communication resources. However, to achieve SemCom, challenges are faced in accurate semantic quantization for visual data, robust semantic extraction and reconstruction under diverse tasks and goals, transceiver coordination with effective knowledge utilization, and adaptation to unpredictable wireless communication environments. In this paper, we present a systematic review of SemCom for visual data transmission (SemCom-Vision), wherein an interdisciplinary analysis integrating computer vision (CV) and communication engineering is conducted to provide comprehensive guidelines for the machine learning (ML)-empowered SemCom-Vision design. Specifically, this survey first elucidates the basics and key concepts of SemCom. Then, we introduce a novel classification perspective to categorize existing SemCom-Vision approaches as semantic preservation communication (SPC), semantic expansion communication (SEC), and semantic refinement communication (SRC) based on communication goals interpreted through semantic quantization schemes. Moreover, this survey articulates the ML-based encoder-decoder models and training algorithms for each SemCom-Vision category, followed by knowledge structure and utilization strategies. Finally, we discuss potential SemCom-Vision applications.

Xuesong Liu, Tianyu Hao, Emmett J. Ientilucci

In controlled blasting operations, accurately detecting densely distributed tiny boreholes from far-view imagery is critical for operational safety and efficiency. However, existing detection methods often struggle due to small object scales, highly dense arrangements, and limited distinctive visual features of boreholes. To address these challenges, we propose an adaptive detection approach that builds upon existing architectures (e.g., YOLO) by explicitly leveraging consistent embedding representations derived through exponential moving average (EMA)-based statistical updates. Our method introduces three synergistic components: (1) adaptive augmentation utilizing dynamically updated image statistics to robustly handle illumination and texture variations; (2) embedding stabilization to ensure consistent and reliable feature extraction; and (3) contextual refinement leveraging spatial context for improved detection accuracy. The pervasive use of EMA in our method is particularly advantageous given the limited visual complexity and small scale of boreholes, allowing stable and robust representation learning even under challenging visual conditions. Experiments on a challenging proprietary quarry-site dataset demonstrate substantial improvements over baseline YOLO-based architectures, highlighting our method's effectiveness in realistic and complex industrial scenarios.

Xuesong Liu, Emmett J. Ientilucci

Efficient segmentation of smoke plumes is crucial for environmental monitoring and industrial safety, enabling the detection and mitigation of harmful emissions from activities like quarry blasts and wildfires. Accurate segmentation facilitates environmental impact assessments, timely interventions, and compliance with safety standards. However, existing models often face high computational demands and limited adaptability to diverse smoke appearances, restricting their deployment in resource-constrained environments. To address these issues, we introduce SmokeNet, a novel deep learning architecture that leverages multiscale convolutions and multiview linear attention mechanisms combined with layer-specific loss functions to handle the complex dynamics of diverse smoke plumes, ensuring efficient and accurate segmentation across varied environments. Additionally, we evaluate SmokeNet's performance and versatility using four datasets, including our quarry blast smoke dataset made available to the community. The results demonstrate that SmokeNet maintains a favorable balance between computational efficiency and segmentation accuracy, making it suitable for deployment in environmental monitoring and safety management systems. By contributing a new dataset and offering an efficient segmentation model, SmokeNet advances smoke segmentation capabilities in diverse and challenging environments.

Bolun Zheng, Yaowu Chen, Xiang Tian et al.

Several dual-domain convolutional neural network-based methods show outstanding performance in reducing image compression artifacts. However, they suffer from handling color images because the compression processes for gray-scale and color images are completely different. Moreover, these methods train a specific model for each compression quality and require multiple models to achieve different compression qualities. To address these problems, we proposed an implicit dual-domain convolutional network (IDCN) with the pixel position labeling map and the quantization tables as inputs. Specifically, we proposed an extractor-corrector framework-based dual-domain correction unit (DCU) as the basic component to formulate the IDCN. A dense block was introduced to improve the performance of extractor in DRU. The implicit dual-domain translation allows the IDCN to handle color images with the discrete cosine transform (DCT)-domain priors. A flexible version of IDCN (IDCN-f) was developed to handle a wide range of compression qualities. Experiments for both objective and subjective evaluations on benchmark datasets show that IDCN is superior to the state-of-the-art methods and IDCN-f exhibits excellent abilities to handle a wide range of compression qualities with little performance sacrifice and demonstrates great potential for practical applications.