Wuyang Liu

Xilai Li, Xiaosong Li, Tao Ye et al.

Multi-modal image fusion (MMIF) integrates valuable information from different modality images into a fused one. However, the fusion of multiple visible images with different focal regions and infrared images is a unprecedented challenge in real MMIF applications. This is because of the limited depth of the focus of visible optical lenses, which impedes the simultaneous capture of the focal information within the same scene. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a MMIF framework for joint focused integration and modalities information extraction. Specifically, a semi-sparsity-based smoothing filter is introduced to decompose the images into structure and texture components. Subsequently, a novel multi-scale operator is proposed to fuse the texture components, capable of detecting significant information by considering the pixel focus attributes and relevant data from various modal images. Additionally, to achieve an effective capture of scene luminance and reasonable contrast maintenance, we consider the distribution of energy information in the structural components in terms of multi-directional frequency variance and information entropy. Extensive experiments on existing MMIF datasets, as well as the object detection and depth estimation tasks, consistently demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can surpass the state-of-the-art methods in visual perception and quantitative evaluation. The code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/MFIF-MMIF.

Xilai Li, Wuyang Liu, Xiaosong Li et al.

Multi-modality image fusion (MMIF) combines complementary information from different image modalities to provide a more comprehensive and objective interpretation of scenes. However, existing MMIF methods lack the ability to resist different weather interferences in real-world scenes, preventing them from being useful in practical applications such as autonomous driving. To bridge this research gap, we proposed an all-weather MMIF model. Achieving effective multi-tasking in this context is particularly challenging due to the complex and diverse nature of weather conditions. A key obstacle lies in the 'black box' nature of current deep learning architectures, which restricts their multi-tasking capabilities. To overcome this, we decompose the network into two modules: a fusion module and a restoration module. For the fusion module, we introduce a learnable low-rank representation model to decompose images into low-rank and sparse components. This interpretable feature separation allows us to better observe and understand images. For the restoration module, we propose a physically-aware clear feature prediction module based on an atmospheric scattering model that can deduce variations in light transmittance from both scene illumination and reflectance. We also construct a large-scale multi-modality dataset with 100,000 image pairs across rain, haze, and snow conditions, covering various degradation levels and diverse scenes to thoroughly evaluate image fusion methods in adverse weather. Experimental results in both real-world and synthetic scenes show that the proposed algorithm excels in detail recovery and multi-modality feature extraction. The code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/AWFusion.

Wuyang Liu, Yi Chai, Yongpeng Yan et al.

Audio-visual event localization (AVEL) plays a critical role in multimodal scene understanding. While existing datasets for AVEL predominantly comprise landscape-oriented long videos with clean and simple audio context, short videos have become the primary format of online video content due to the the proliferation of smartphones. Short videos are characterized by portrait-oriented framing and layered audio compositions (e.g., overlapping sound effects, voiceovers, and music), which brings unique challenges unaddressed by conventional methods. To this end, we introduce AVE-PM, the first AVEL dataset specifically designed for portrait mode short videos, comprising 25,335 clips that span 86 fine-grained categories with frame-level annotations. Beyond dataset creation, our empirical analysis shows that state-of-the-art AVEL methods suffer an average 18.66% performance drop during cross-mode evaluation. Further analysis reveals two key challenges of different video formats: 1) spatial bias from portrait-oriented framing introduces distinct domain priors, and 2) noisy audio composition compromise the reliability of audio modality. To address these issues, we investigate optimal preprocessing recipes and the impact of background music for AVEL on portrait mode videos. Experiments show that these methods can still benefit from tailored preprocessing and specialized model design, thus achieving improved performance. This work provides both a foundational benchmark and actionable insights for advancing AVEL research in the era of mobile-centric video content. Dataset and code will be released.

Yihuan Huang, Jiajun Liu, Yanzhen Ren et al.

Recent talking head synthesis works typically adopt speech features extracted from large-scale pre-trained acoustic models. However, the intrinsic many-to-many relationship between speech and lip motion causes phoneme-viseme alignment ambiguity, leading to inaccurate and unstable lips. To further improve lip sync accuracy, we propose PASE (Phoneme-Aware Speech Encoder), a novel speech representation model that bridges the gap between phonemes and visemes. PASE explicitly introduces phoneme embeddings as alignment anchors and employs a contrastive alignment module to enhance the discriminability between corresponding audio-visual pairs. In addition, a prediction and reconstruction task is designed to improve robustness under noise and partial modality absence. Experimental results show PASE significantly improves lip sync accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art performance across both NeRF- and 3DGS-based rendering frameworks, outperforming conventional methods based on acoustic features by 13.7 % and 14.2 %, respectively. Importantly, PASE can be seamlessly integrated into diverse talking head pipelines to improve the lip sync accuracy without architectural modifications.