Shan An

Junjie Ye, Changhong Fu, Ziang Cao et al.

Most previous progress in object tracking is realized in daytime scenes with favorable illumination. State-of-the-arts can hardly carry on their superiority at night so far, thereby considerably blocking the broadening of visual tracking-related unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications. To realize reliable UAV tracking at night, a spatial-channel Transformer-based low-light enhancer (namely SCT), which is trained in a novel task-inspired manner, is proposed and plugged prior to tracking approaches. To achieve semantic-level low-light enhancement targeting the high-level task, the novel spatial-channel attention module is proposed to model global information while preserving local context. In the enhancement process, SCT denoises and illuminates nighttime images simultaneously through a robust non-linear curve projection. Moreover, to provide a comprehensive evaluation, we construct a challenging nighttime tracking benchmark, namely DarkTrack2021, which contains 110 challenging sequences with over 100 K frames in total. Evaluations on both the public UAVDark135 benchmark and the newly constructed DarkTrack2021 benchmark show that the task-inspired design enables SCT with significant performance gains for nighttime UAV tracking compared with other top-ranked low-light enhancers. Real-world tests on a typical UAV platform further verify the practicability of the proposed approach. The DarkTrack2021 benchmark and the code of the proposed approach are publicly available at https://github.com/vision4robotics/SCT.

Xuri Ge, Junchen Fu, Fuhai Chen et al.

Facial action units (AUs), as defined in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), have received significant research interest owing to their diverse range of applications in facial state analysis. Current mainstream FAU recognition models have a notable limitation, i.e., focusing only on the accuracy of AU recognition and overlooking explanations of corresponding AU states. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Vision-Language joint learning network for explainable FAU recognition (termed VL-FAU), which aims to reinforce AU representation capability and language interpretability through the integration of joint multimodal tasks. Specifically, VL-FAU brings together language models to generate fine-grained local muscle descriptions and distinguishable global face description when optimising FAU recognition. Through this, the global facial representation and its local AU representations will achieve higher distinguishability among different AUs and different subjects. In addition, multi-level AU representation learning is utilised to improve AU individual attention-aware representation capabilities based on multi-scale combined facial stem feature. Extensive experiments on DISFA and BP4D AU datasets show that the proposed approach achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on most of the metrics. In addition, compared with mainstream FAU recognition methods, VL-FAU can provide local- and global-level interpretability language descriptions with the AUs' predictions.

Dingfeng Shi, Qiong Cao, Yujie Zhong et al.

Temporal action detection (TAD) aims to detect all action boundaries and their corresponding categories in an untrimmed video. The unclear boundaries of actions in videos often result in imprecise predictions of action boundaries by existing methods. To resolve this issue, we propose a one-stage framework named TriDet. First, we propose a Trident-head to model the action boundary via an estimated relative probability distribution around the boundary. Then, we analyze the rank-loss problem (i.e. instant discriminability deterioration) in transformer-based methods and propose an efficient scalable-granularity perception (SGP) layer to mitigate this issue. To further push the limit of instant discriminability in the video backbone, we leverage the strong representation capability of pretrained large models and investigate their performance on TAD. Last, considering the adequate spatial-temporal context for classification, we design a decoupled feature pyramid network with separate feature pyramids to incorporate rich spatial context from the large model for localization. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of TriDet and its state-of-the-art performance on multiple TAD datasets, including hierarchical (multilabel) TAD datasets.

Xuri Ge, Songpei Xu, Fuhai Chen et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel visual Semantic-Spatial Self-Highlighting Network (termed 3SHNet) for high-precision, high-efficiency and high-generalization image-sentence retrieval. 3SHNet highlights the salient identification of prominent objects and their spatial locations within the visual modality, thus allowing the integration of visual semantics-spatial interactions and maintaining independence between two modalities. This integration effectively combines object regions with the corresponding semantic and position layouts derived from segmentation to enhance the visual representation. And the modality-independence guarantees efficiency and generalization. Additionally, 3SHNet utilizes the structured contextual visual scene information from segmentation to conduct the local (region-based) or global (grid-based) guidance and achieve accurate hybrid-level retrieval. Extensive experiments conducted on MS-COCO and Flickr30K benchmarks substantiate the superior performances, inference efficiency and generalization of the proposed 3SHNet when juxtaposed with contemporary state-of-the-art methodologies. Specifically, on the larger MS-COCO 5K test set, we achieve 16.3%, 24.8%, and 18.3% improvements in terms of rSum score, respectively, compared with the state-of-the-art methods using different image representations, while maintaining optimal retrieval efficiency. Moreover, our performance on cross-dataset generalization improves by 18.6%. Data and code are available at https://github.com/XuriGe1995/3SHNet.

Shan An, Guangfu Che, Fangru Zhou et al.

Visual loop closure detection, which can be considered as an image retrieval task, is an important problem in SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) systems. The frequently used bag-of-words (BoW) models can achieve high precision and moderate recall. However, the requirement for lower time costs and fewer memory costs for mobile robot applications is not well satisfied. In this paper, we propose a novel loop closure detection framework titled `FILD' (Fast and Incremental Loop closure Detection), which focuses on an on-line and incremental graph vocabulary construction for fast loop closure detection. The global and local features of frames are extracted using the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and SURF on the GPU, which guarantee extremely fast extraction speeds. The graph vocabulary construction is based on one type of proximity graph, named Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graphs, which is modified to adapt to this specific application. In addition, this process is coupled with a novel strategy for real-time geometrical verification, which only keeps binary hash codes and significantly saves on memory usage. Extensive experiments on several publicly available datasets show that the proposed approach can achieve fairly good recall at 100\% precision compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The source code can be downloaded at https://github.com/AnshanTJU/FILD for further studies.

Dimitrios Psychogyios, Emanuele Colleoni, Beatrice Van Amsterdam et al.

Surgical tool segmentation and action recognition are fundamental building blocks in many computer-assisted intervention applications, ranging from surgical skills assessment to decision support systems. Nowadays, learning-based action recognition and segmentation approaches outperform classical methods, relying, however, on large, annotated datasets. Furthermore, action recognition and tool segmentation algorithms are often trained and make predictions in isolation from each other, without exploiting potential cross-task relationships. With the EndoVis 2022 SAR-RARP50 challenge, we release the first multimodal, publicly available, in-vivo, dataset for surgical action recognition and semantic instrumentation segmentation, containing 50 suturing video segments of Robotic Assisted Radical Prostatectomy (RARP). The aim of the challenge is twofold. First, to enable researchers to leverage the scale of the provided dataset and develop robust and highly accurate single-task action recognition and tool segmentation approaches in the surgical domain. Second, to further explore the potential of multitask-based learning approaches and determine their comparative advantage against their single-task counterparts. A total of 12 teams participated in the challenge, contributing 7 action recognition methods, 9 instrument segmentation techniques, and 4 multitask approaches that integrated both action recognition and instrument segmentation. The complete SAR-RARP50 dataset is available at: https://rdr.ucl.ac.uk/projects/SARRARP50_Segmentation_of_surgical_instrumentation_and_Action_Recognition_on_Robot-Assisted_Radical_Prostatectomy_Challenge/191091

Guoxin Wang, Xuyang Cao, Shan An et al.

Deep learning approaches, together with neuroimaging techniques, play an important role in psychiatric disorders classification. Previous studies on psychiatric disorders diagnosis mainly focus on using functional connectivity matrices of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) as input, which still needs to fully utilize the rich temporal information of the time series of rs-fMRI data. In this work, we proposed a multi-dimension-embedding-aware modality fusion transformer (MFFormer) for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder classification using rs-fMRI and T1 weighted structural MRI (T1w sMRI). Concretely, to fully utilize the temporal information of rs-fMRI and spatial information of sMRI, we constructed a deep learning architecture that takes as input 2D time series of rs-fMRI and 3D volumes T1w. Furthermore, to promote intra-modality attention and information fusion across different modalities, a fusion transformer module (FTM) is designed through extensive self-attention of hybrid feature maps of multi-modality. In addition, a dimension-up and dimension-down strategy is suggested to properly align feature maps of multi-dimensional from different modalities. Experimental results on our private and public OpenfMRI datasets show that our proposed MFFormer performs better than that using a single modality or multi-modality MRI on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder diagnosis.

Shan An, Ziyu Meng, Chao Tang et al.

Dexterous manipulation, which refers to the ability of a robotic hand or multi-fingered end-effector to skillfully control, reorient, and manipulate objects through precise, coordinated finger movements and adaptive force modulation, enables complex interactions similar to human hand dexterity. With recent advances in robotics and machine learning, there is a growing demand for these systems to operate in complex and unstructured environments. Traditional model-based approaches struggle to generalize across tasks and object variations due to the high dimensionality and complex contact dynamics of dexterous manipulation. Although model-free methods such as reinforcement learning (RL) show promise, they require extensive training, large-scale interaction data, and carefully designed rewards for stability and effectiveness. Imitation learning (IL) offers an alternative by allowing robots to acquire dexterous manipulation skills directly from expert demonstrations, capturing fine-grained coordination and contact dynamics while bypassing the need for explicit modeling and large-scale trial-and-error. This survey provides an overview of dexterous manipulation methods based on imitation learning, details recent advances, and addresses key challenges in the field. Additionally, it explores potential research directions to enhance IL-driven dexterous manipulation. Our goal is to offer researchers and practitioners a comprehensive introduction to this rapidly evolving domain.

Guoxin Wang, Sheng Shi, Shan An et al.

Previous research on the diagnosis of Bipolar disorder has mainly focused on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. However, their accuracy can not meet the requirements of clinical diagnosis. Efficient multimodal fusion strategies have great potential for applications in multimodal data and can further improve the performance of medical diagnosis models. In this work, we utilize both sMRI and fMRI data and propose a novel multimodal diagnosis model for bipolar disorder. The proposed Patch Pyramid Feature Extraction Module extracts sMRI features, and the spatio-temporal pyramid structure extracts the fMRI features. Finally, they are fused by a fusion module to output diagnosis results with a classifier. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method outperforms others in balanced accuracy from 0.657 to 0.732 on the OpenfMRI dataset, and achieves the state of the art.

Shufang Zhang, Tao Jiang, Jiazheng Wu et al.

3D point cloud mapping plays a essential role in localization and autonomous navigation. However, dynamic objects often leave residual traces during the map construction process, which undermine the performance of subsequent tasks. Therefore, dynamic object removal has become a critical challenge in point cloud based map construction within dynamic scenarios. Existing approaches, however, often incur significant computational overhead, making it difficult to meet the real-time processing requirements. To address this issue, we introduce the Height Interval Filtering (HIF) method. This approach constructs pillar-based height interval representations to probabilistically model the vertical dimension, with interval probabilities updated through Bayesian inference. It ensures real-time performance while achieving high accuracy and improving robustness in complex environments. Additionally, we propose a low-height preservation strategy that enhances the detection of unknown spaces, reducing misclassification in areas blocked by obstacles (occluded regions). Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that HIF delivers a 7.7 times improvement in time efficiency with comparable accuracy to existing SOTA methods. The code will be publicly available.

Shan An, Guangfu Che, Jinghao Guo et al.

Virtual try-on technology enables users to try various fashion items using augmented reality and provides a convenient online shopping experience. However, most previous works focus on the virtual try-on for clothes while neglecting that for shoes, which is also a promising task. To this concern, this work proposes a real-time augmented reality virtual shoe try-on system for smartphones, namely ARShoe. Specifically, ARShoe adopts a novel multi-branch network to realize pose estimation and segmentation simultaneously. A solution to generate realistic 3D shoe model occlusion during the try-on process is presented. To achieve a smooth and stable try-on effect, this work further develop a novel stabilization method. Moreover, for training and evaluation, we construct the very first large-scale foot benchmark with multiple virtual shoe try-on task-related labels annotated. Exhaustive experiments on our newly constructed benchmark demonstrate the satisfying performance of ARShoe. Practical tests on common smartphones validate the real-time performance and stabilization of the proposed approach.

Shan An, Fangru Zhou, Mei Yang et al.

Estimating a scene's depth to achieve collision avoidance against moving pedestrians is a crucial and fundamental problem in the robotic field. This paper proposes a novel, low complexity network architecture for fast and accurate human depth estimation and segmentation in indoor environments, aiming to applications for resource-constrained platforms (including battery-powered aerial, micro-aerial, and ground vehicles) with a monocular camera being the primary perception module. Following the encoder-decoder structure, the proposed framework consists of two branches, one for depth prediction and another for semantic segmentation. Moreover, network structure optimization is employed to improve its forward inference speed. Exhaustive experiments on three self-generated datasets prove our pipeline's capability to execute in real-time, achieving higher frame rates than contemporary state-of-the-art frameworks (114.6 frames per second on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano GPU with TensorRT) while maintaining comparable accuracy.

Shan An, Xiajie Zhang, Dong Wei et al.

Hand pose estimation is a fundamental task in many human-robot interaction-related applications. However, previous approaches suffer from unsatisfying hand landmark predictions in real-world scenes and high computation burden. This paper proposes a fast and accurate framework for hand pose estimation, dubbed as "FastHand". Using a lightweight encoder-decoder network architecture, FastHand fulfills the requirements of practical applications running on embedded devices. The encoder consists of deep layers with a small number of parameters, while the decoder makes use of spatial location information to obtain more accurate results. The evaluation took place on two publicly available datasets demonstrating the improved performance of the proposed pipeline compared to other state-of-the-art approaches. FastHand offers high accuracy scores while reaching a speed of 25 frames per second on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 graphics processing unit.

Shan An, Haogang Zhu, Dong Wei et al.

In recent years, the robotics community has extensively examined methods concerning the place recognition task within the scope of simultaneous localization and mapping applications.This article proposes an appearance-based loop closure detection pipeline named ``FILD++" (Fast and Incremental Loop closure Detection).First, the system is fed by consecutive images and, via passing them twice through a single convolutional neural network, global and local deep features are extracted.Subsequently, a hierarchical navigable small-world graph incrementally constructs a visual database representing the robot's traversed path based on the computed global features.Finally, a query image, grabbed each time step, is set to retrieve similar locations on the traversed route.An image-to-image pairing follows, which exploits local features to evaluate the spatial information. Thus, in the proposed article, we propose a single network for global and local feature extraction in contrast to our previous work (FILD), while an exhaustive search for the verification process is adopted over the generated deep local features avoiding the utilization of hash codes. Exhaustive experiments on eleven publicly available datasets exhibit the system's high performance (achieving the highest recall score on eight of them) and low execution times (22.05 ms on average in New College, which is the largest one containing 52480 images) compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.