Generating and Weighting Semantically Consistent Sample Pairs for Ultrasound Contrastive LearningYixiong Chen, Chunhui Zhang, Chris H. Q. Ding et al.
Well-annotated medical datasets enable deep neural networks (DNNs) to gain strong power in extracting lesion-related features. Building such large and well-designed medical datasets is costly due to the need for high-level expertise. Model pre-training based on ImageNet is a common practice to gain better generalization when the data amount is limited. However, it suffers from the domain gap between natural and medical images. In this work, we pre-train DNNs on ultrasound (US) domains instead of ImageNet to reduce the domain gap in medical US applications. To learn US image representations based on unlabeled US videos, we propose a novel meta-learning-based contrastive learning method, namely Meta Ultrasound Contrastive Learning (Meta-USCL). To tackle the key challenge of obtaining semantically consistent sample pairs for contrastive learning, we present a positive pair generation module along with an automatic sample weighting module based on meta-learning. Experimental results on multiple computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) problems, including pneumonia detection, breast cancer classification, and breast tumor segmentation, show that the proposed self-supervised method reaches state-of-the-art (SOTA). The codes are available at https://github.com/Schuture/Meta-USCL.
Underwater Camouflaged Object Tracking Meets Vision-Language SAM2Chunhui Zhang, Li Liu, Guanjie Huang et al.
Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in visual object tracking, largely due to the availability of large-scale datasets. However, these datasets have primarily focused on open-air scenarios and have largely overlooked underwater animal tracking-especially the complex challenges posed by camouflaged marine animals. To bridge this gap, we take a step forward by proposing the first large-scale multi-modal underwater camouflaged object tracking dataset, namely UW-COT220. Based on the proposed dataset, this work first comprehensively evaluates current advanced visual object tracking methods, including SAM- and SAM2-based trackers, in challenging underwater environments, \eg, coral reefs. Our findings highlight the improvements of SAM2 over SAM, demonstrating its enhanced ability to handle the complexities of underwater camouflaged objects. Furthermore, we propose a novel vision-language tracking framework called VL-SAM2, based on the video foundation model SAM2. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed VL-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across underwater and open-air object tracking datasets. The dataset and codes are available at~{\color{magenta}{https://github.com/983632847/Awesome-Multimodal-Object-Tracking}}.
WebUAV-3M: A Benchmark for Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep UAV TrackingChunhui Zhang, Guanjie Huang, Li Liu et al.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is of great significance for a wide range of applications, such as delivery and agriculture. Previous benchmarks in this area mainly focused on small-scale tracking problems while ignoring the amounts of data, types of data modalities, diversities of target categories and scenarios, and evaluation protocols involved, greatly hiding the massive power of deep UAV tracking. In this work, we propose WebUAV-3M, the largest public UAV tracking benchmark to date, to facilitate both the development and evaluation of deep UAV trackers. WebUAV-3M contains over 3.3 million frames across 4,500 videos and offers 223 highly diverse target categories. Each video is densely annotated with bounding boxes by an efficient and scalable semiautomatic target annotation (SATA) pipeline. Importantly, to take advantage of the complementary superiority of language and audio, we enrich WebUAV-3M by innovatively providing both natural language specifications and audio descriptions. We believe that such additions will greatly boost future research in terms of exploring language features and audio cues for multimodal UAV tracking. In addition, a fine-grained UAV tracking-under-scenario constraint (UTUSC) evaluation protocol and seven challenging scenario subtest sets are constructed to enable the community to develop, adapt and evaluate various types of advanced trackers. We provide extensive evaluations and detailed analyses of 43 representative trackers and envision future research directions in the field of deep UAV tracking and beyond. The dataset, toolkits and baseline results are available at \url{https://github.com/983632847/WebUAV-3M}.