Chengyang Li

Shuai Wang, Chengyang Li, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng et al.

Realizing human-like perception is a challenge in open driving scenarios due to corner cases and visual occlusions. To gather knowledge of rare and occluded instances, federated learning assisted connected autonomous vehicle (FLCAV) has been proposed, which leverages vehicular networks to establish federated deep neural networks (DNNs) from distributed data captured by vehicles and road sensors. Without the need of data aggregation, FLCAV preserves privacy while reducing communication costs compared with conventional centralized learning. However, it is challenging to determine the network resources and road sensor placements for multi-stage training with multi-modal datasets in multi-variant scenarios. This article presents networking and training frameworks for FLCAV perception. Multi-layer graph resource allocation and vehicle-road contrastive sensor placement are proposed to address the network management and sensor deployment problems, respectively. We also develop CarlaFLCAV, a software platform that implements the above system and methods. Experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed techniques compared with various benchmarks.

Heng Zhou, Chunna Tian, Zhenxi Zhang et al.

RGB-Thermal salient object detection (SOD) combines two spectra to segment visually conspicuous regions in images. Most existing methods use boundary maps to learn the sharp boundary. These methods ignore the interactions between isolated boundary pixels and other confident pixels, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this problem,we propose a position-aware relation learning network (PRLNet) for RGB-T SOD based on swin transformer. PRLNet explores the distance and direction relationships between pixels to strengthen intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, generating salient object masks with clear boundaries and homogeneous regions. Specifically, we develop a novel signed distance map auxiliary module (SDMAM) to improve encoder feature representation, which takes into account the distance relation of different pixels in boundary neighborhoods. Then, we design a feature refinement approach with directional field (FRDF), which rectifies features of boundary neighborhood by exploiting the features inside salient objects. FRDF utilizes the directional information between object pixels to effectively enhance the intra-class compactness of salient regions. In addition, we constitute a pure transformer encoder-decoder network to enhance multispectral feature representation for RGB-T SOD. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on three public benchmark datasets.The results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Heng Zhou, Xiaoxiong Liu, Zhenxi Zhang et al.

Remote sensing images (RSIs) are frequently degraded by haze, fog, and thin clouds, which obscure surface reflectance and hinder downstream applications. This study presents the first systematic and unified survey of RSIs dehazing, integrating methodological evolution, benchmark assessment, and physical consistency analysis. We categorize existing approaches into a three-stage progression: from handcrafted physical priors, to data-driven deep restoration, and finally to hybrid physical-intelligent generation, and summarize more than 30 representative methods across CNNs, GANs, Transformers, and diffusion models. To provide a reliable empirical reference, we conduct large-scale quantitative experiments on five public datasets using 12 metrics, including PSNR, SSIM, CIEDE, LPIPS, FID, SAM, ERGAS, UIQI, QNR, NIQE, and HIST. Cross-domain comparison reveals that recent Transformer- and diffusion-based models improve SSIM by 12%~18% and reduce perceptual errors by 20%~35% on average, while hybrid physics-guided designs achieve higher radiometric stability. A dedicated physical radiometric consistency experiment further demonstrates that models with explicit transmission or airlight constraints reduce color bias by up to 27%. Based on these findings, we summarize open challenges: dynamic atmospheric modeling, multimodal fusion, lightweight deployment, data scarcity, and joint degradations, and outline promising research directions for future development of trustworthy, controllable, and efficient (TCE) dehazing systems. All reviewed resources, including source code, benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and reproduction configurations are publicly available at https://github.com/VisionVerse/RemoteSensing-Restoration-Survey.

Heng Zhou, Chunna Tian, Zhenxi Zhang et al.

A key challenge of infrared small target segmentation (ISTS) is to balance false negative pixels (FNs) and false positive pixels (FPs). Traditional methods combine FNs and FPs into a single objective by weighted sum, and the optimization process is decided by one actor. Minimizing FNs and FPs with the same strategy leads to antagonistic decisions. To address this problem, we propose a competitive game framework (pixelGame) from a novel perspective for ISTS. In pixelGame, FNs and FPs are controlled by different player whose goal is to minimize their own utility function. FNs-player and FPs-player are designed with different strategies: One is to minimize FNs and the other is to minimize FPs. The utility function drives the evolution of the two participants in competition. We consider the Nash equilibrium of pixelGame as the optimal solution. In addition, we propose maximum information modulation (MIM) to highlight the tar-get information. MIM effectively focuses on the salient region including small targets. Extensive experiments on two standard public datasets prove the effectiveness of our method. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves better performance in terms of F1-measure (F1) and the intersection of union (IoU).

Chengyang Li, Shuai Wang, Kejiang Ye et al.

This paper considers multi-agent embodied question answering (MA-EQA), which aims to query robot teams on what they have seen over a long horizon. In contrast to existing edge resource management methods that emphasize sensing, communication, or computation performance metrics, MA-EQA emphasizes the memory qualities. To cope with this paradigm shift, we propose a quality of memory (QoM) model based on generative adversarial exam (GAE), which leverages forward simulation to assess memory retrieval and uses the resulting exam scores to compute QoM values. Then we propose memory centric power allocation (MCPA), which maximizes the QoM function under communication resource constraints. Through asymptotic analysis, it is found that the transmit powers are proportional to the GAE error probability, thus prioritizing towards high-QoM robots. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MCPA achieves significant improvements over extensive benchmarks in terms of diverse metrics in various scenarios.

Yawen Xiang, Heng Zhou, Chengyang Li et al.

Motion deblurring is one of the fundamental problems of computer vision and has received continuous attention. The variability in blur, both within and across images, imposes limitations on non-blind deblurring techniques that rely on estimating the blur kernel. As a response, blind motion deblurring has emerged, aiming to restore clear and detailed images without prior knowledge of the blur type, fueled by the advancements in deep learning methodologies. Despite strides in this field, a comprehensive synthesis of recent progress in deep learning-based blind motion deblurring is notably absent. This paper fills that gap by providing an exhaustive overview of the role of deep learning in blind motion deblurring, encompassing datasets, evaluation metrics, and methods developed over the last six years. Specifically, we first introduce the types of motion blur and the fundamental principles of deblurring. Next, we outline the shortcomings of traditional non-blind deblurring algorithms, emphasizing the advantages of employing deep learning techniques for deblurring tasks. Following this, we categorize and summarize existing blind motion deblurring methods based on different backbone networks, including convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial networks, recurrent neural networks, and Transformer networks. Subsequently, we elaborate not only on the fundamental principles of these different categories but also provide a comprehensive summary and comparison of their advantages and limitations. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results conducted on four widely used datasets further compare the performance of SOTA methods. Finally, an analysis of present challenges and future pathways. All collected models, benchmark datasets, source code links, and codes for evaluation have been made publicly available at https://github.com/VisionVerse/Blind-Motion-Deblurring-Survey

Wei Zuo, Zeyi Ren, Chengyang Li et al.

Existing motion planning methods often struggle with rapid-motion obstacles due to an insufficient understanding of environmental changes. To address this, we propose integrating motion planners with Doppler LiDARs, which provide not only ranging measurements but also instantaneous point velocities. However, this integration is nontrivial due to the requirements of high accuracy and high frequency. To this end, we introduce Doppler Planning Network (DPNet), which tracks and reacts to rapid obstacles via Doppler model-based learning. We first propose a Doppler Kalman neural network (D-KalmanNet) to track obstacle states under a partially observable Gaussian state space model. We then leverage the predicted motions of obstacles to construct a Doppler-tuned model predictive control (DT-MPC) framework for ego-motion planning, enabling runtime auto-tuning of controller parameters. These two modules allow DPNet to learn fast environmental changes from minimal data while remaining lightweight, achieving high frequency and high accuracy in both tracking and planning. Experiments on high-fidelity simulator and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of DPNet over extensive benchmark schemes.

Bonan Liu, Guoyang Zhao, Jianhao Jiao et al.

A Colored point cloud, as a simple and efficient 3D representation, has many advantages in various fields, including robotic navigation and scene reconstruction. This representation is now commonly used in 3D reconstruction tasks relying on cameras and LiDARs. However, fusing data from these two types of sensors is poorly performed in many existing frameworks, leading to unsatisfactory mapping results, mainly due to inaccurate camera poses. This paper presents OmniColor, a novel and efficient algorithm to colorize point clouds using an independent 360-degree camera. Given a LiDAR-based point cloud and a sequence of panorama images with initial coarse camera poses, our objective is to jointly optimize the poses of all frames for mapping images onto geometric reconstructions. Our pipeline works in an off-the-shelf manner that does not require any feature extraction or matching process. Instead, we find optimal poses by directly maximizing the photometric consistency of LiDAR maps. In experiments, we show that our method can overcome the severe visual distortion of omnidirectional images and greatly benefit from the wide field of view (FOV) of 360-degree cameras to reconstruct various scenarios with accuracy and stability. The code will be released at https://github.com/liubonan123/OmniColor/.

Yuchen Dong, Heng Zhou, Chengyang Li et al.

Camouflage object detection (COD) poses a significant challenge due to the high resemblance between camouflaged objects and their surroundings. Although current deep learning methods have made significant progress in detecting camouflaged objects, many of them heavily rely on additional prior information. However, acquiring such additional prior information is both expensive and impractical in real-world scenarios. Therefore, there is a need to develop a network for camouflage object detection that does not depend on additional priors. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive feature aggregation method that effectively combines multi-layer feature information to generate guidance information. In contrast to previous approaches that rely on edge or ranking priors, our method directly leverages information extracted from image features to guide model training. Through extensive experimental results, we demonstrate that our proposed method achieves comparable or superior performance when compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Chen Min, Chengyang Li, Fanjie Kong et al.

This paper presents GenDet, a novel framework that redefines object detection as an image generation task. In contrast to traditional approaches, GenDet adopts a pioneering approach by leveraging generative modeling: it conditions on the input image and directly generates bounding boxes with semantic annotations in the original image space. GenDet establishes a conditional generation architecture built upon the large-scale pre-trained Stable Diffusion model, formulating the detection task as semantic constraints within the latent space. It enables precise control over bounding box positions and category attributes, while preserving the flexibility of the generative model. This novel methodology effectively bridges the gap between generative models and discriminative tasks, providing a fresh perspective for constructing unified visual understanding systems. Systematic experiments demonstrate that GenDet achieves competitive accuracy compared to discriminative detectors, while retaining the flexibility characteristic of generative methods.

Chao Li, Dasha Hu, Chengyang Li et al.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation transfers knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Directly deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with prompt tuning in downstream UDA tasks faces the signifi cant challenge of mitigating domain discrepancies. Existing prompt-tuning strategies primarily align marginal distribu tion, but neglect conditional distribution discrepancies, lead ing to critical issues such as class prototype misalignment and degraded semantic discriminability. To address these lim itations, the work proposes C-DGPA: Class-Centric Dual Alignment Generative Prompt Adaptation. C-DGPA syner gistically optimizes marginal distribution alignment and con ditional distribution alignment through a novel dual-branch architecture. The marginal distribution alignment branch em ploys a dynamic adversarial training framework to bridge marginal distribution discrepancies. Simultaneously, the con ditional distribution alignment branch introduces a Class Mapping Mechanism (CMM) to align conditional distribu tion discrepancies by standardizing semantic prompt under standing and preventing source domain over-reliance. This dual alignment strategy effectively integrates domain knowl edge into prompt learning via synergistic optimization, ensur ing domain-invariant and semantically discriminative repre sentations. Extensive experiments on OfficeHome, Office31, and VisDA-2017 validate the superiority of C-DGPA. It achieves new state-of-the-art results on all benchmarks.

Xuan Cheng, Jiahao Rao, Chengyang Li et al.

We introduce GaussianSwap, a novel video face swapping framework that constructs a 3D Gaussian Splatting based face avatar from a target video while transferring identity from a source image to the avatar. Conventional video swapping frameworks are limited to generating facial representations in pixel-based formats. The resulting swapped faces exist merely as a set of unstructured pixels without any capacity for animation or interactive manipulation. Our work introduces a paradigm shift from conventional pixel-based video generation to the creation of high-fidelity avatar with swapped faces. The framework first preprocesses target video to extract FLAME parameters, camera poses and segmentation masks, and then rigs 3D Gaussian splats to the FLAME model across frames, enabling dynamic facial control. To ensure identity preserving, we propose an compound identity embedding constructed from three state-of-the-art face recognition models for avatar finetuning. Finally, we render the face-swapped avatar on the background frames to obtain the face-swapped video. Experimental results demonstrate that GaussianSwap achieves superior identity preservation, visual clarity and temporal consistency, while enabling previously unattainable interactive applications.

Chengyang Li, Baoping Cheng, Yao Cheng et al.

Recent facial texture generation methods prefer to use deep networks to synthesize image content and then fill in the UV map, thus generating a compelling full texture from a single image. Nevertheless, the synthesized texture UV map usually comes from a space constructed by the training data or the 2D face generator, which limits the methods' generalization ability for in-the-wild input images. Consequently, their facial details, structures and identity may not be consistent with the input. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a style transfer-based facial texture refinement method named FaceRefiner. FaceRefiner treats the 3D sampled texture as style and the output of a texture generation method as content. The photo-realistic style is then expected to be transferred from the style image to the content image. Different from current style transfer methods that only transfer high and middle level information to the result, our style transfer method integrates differentiable rendering to also transfer low level (or pixel level) information in the visible face regions. The main benefit of such multi-level information transfer is that, the details, structures and semantics in the input can thus be well preserved. The extensive experiments on Multi-PIE, CelebA and FFHQ datasets demonstrate that our refinement method can improve the texture quality and the face identity preserving ability, compared with state-of-the-arts.

Ni Yao, Xiangyu Liu, Danyang Sun et al.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains a leading cause of mortality worldwide, requiring accurate segmentation and stenosis detection using Coronary Computed Tomography angiography (CCTA). Existing methods struggle with challenges such as low contrast, morphological variability and small vessel segmentation. To address these limitations, we propose the Myocardial Region-guided Feature Aggregation Net, a novel U-shaped dual-encoder architecture that integrates anatomical prior knowledge to enhance robustness in coronary artery segmentation. Our framework incorporates three key innovations: (1) a Myocardial Region-guided Module that directs attention to coronary regions via myocardial contour expansion and multi-scale feature fusion, (2) a Residual Feature Extraction Encoding Module that combines parallel spatial channel attention with residual blocks to enhance local-global feature discrimination, and (3) a Multi-scale Feature Fusion Module for adaptive aggregation of hierarchical vascular features. Additionally, Monte Carlo dropout f quantifies prediction uncertainty, supporting clinical interpretability. For stenosis detection, a morphology-based centerline extraction algorithm separates the vascular tree into anatomical branches, enabling cross-sectional area quantification and stenosis grading. The superiority of MGFA-Net was demonstrated by achieving an Dice score of 85.04%, an accuracy of 84.24%, an HD95 of 6.1294 mm, and an improvement of 5.46% in true positive rate for stenosis detection compared to3D U-Net. The integrated segmentation-to-stenosis pipeline provides automated, clinically interpretable CAD assessment, bridging deep learning with anatomical prior knowledge for precision medicine. Our code is publicly available at http://github.com/chenzhao2023/MGFA_CCTA

Renshuai Liu, Chengyang Li, Haitao Cao et al.

Although remarkable progress has been made in recent years, current multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) research is still bounded by the lack of real ground truth, objective evaluation function, and robust fusion strategy. In this paper, we study the MEF problem from a new perspective. We don't utilize any synthesized ground truth, design any loss function, or develop any fusion strategy. Our proposed method EMEF takes advantage of the wisdom of multiple imperfect MEF contributors including both conventional and deep learning-based methods. Specifically, EMEF consists of two main stages: pre-train an imitator network and tune the imitator in the runtime. In the first stage, we make a unified network imitate different MEF targets in a style modulation way. In the second stage, we tune the imitator network by optimizing the style code, in order to find an optimal fusion result for each input pair. In the experiment, we construct EMEF from four state-of-the-art MEF methods and then make comparisons with the individuals and several other competitive methods on the latest released MEF benchmark dataset. The promising experimental results demonstrate that our ensemble framework can "get the best of all worlds". The code is available at https://github.com/medalwill/EMEF.

Ruihua Han, Shuai Wang, Shuaijun Wang et al.

Navigating a nonholonomic robot in a cluttered, unknown environment requires accurate perception and precise motion control for real-time collision avoidance. This paper presents NeuPAN: a real-time, highly accurate, map-free, easy-to-deploy, and environment-invariant robot motion planner. Leveraging a tightly coupled perception-to-control framework, NeuPAN has two key innovations compared to existing approaches: 1) it directly maps raw point cloud data to a latent distance feature space for collision-free motion generation, avoiding error propagation from the perception to control pipeline; 2) it is interpretable from an end-to-end model-based learning perspective. The crux of NeuPAN is solving an end-to-end mathematical model with numerous point-level constraints using a plug-and-play (PnP) proximal alternating-minimization network (PAN), incorporating neurons in the loop. This allows NeuPAN to generate real-time, physically interpretable motions. It seamlessly integrates data and knowledge engines, and its network parameters can be fine-tuned via backpropagation. We evaluate NeuPAN on a ground mobile robot, a wheel-legged robot, and an autonomous vehicle, in extensive simulated and real-world environments. Results demonstrate that NeuPAN outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and generalization capabilities across various environments, including the cluttered sandbox, office, corridor, and parking lot. We show that NeuPAN works well in unknown and unstructured environments with arbitrarily shaped objects, transforming impassable paths into passable ones.

Ni Yao, Xiangyu Liu, Shaojie Tang et al.

Clinical fusion of Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography Myocardial Perfusion Imaging (SPECT MPI) and Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) remains limited by cross-modality misregistration and reliance on manual landmarks, which can hinder accurate ischemia localization and lesion-level functional assessment. To address this issue, we propose a registration and fusion framework for SPECT MPI and CTA that integrates functional and structural information for comprehensive cardiac evaluation. The proposed pipeline performs U-Net-based segmentation on both modalities. On SPECT MPI, only the left ventricle (LV) is extracted, and anatomical landmarks are automatically derived from characteristic LV structures. On CTA, both ventricles are segmented, and their spatial relationship is used to automatically define landmarks at the interventricular septal junction. Scale-space consistency preprocessing and landmark-driven coarse registration are applied to mitigate initial misalignment. Based on this initialization, multiple fine registration methods are evaluated on LV epicardial surface point clouds, including ICP, SICP, CPD, CluReg, FFD, and BCPD-plus-plus. The resulting transformations are then propagated to voxel-level resampling for high-precision SPECT-CTA fusion. In a retrospective cohort of 60 patients, the proposed framework preserved sub-millimeter coronary detail from CTA while accurately overlaying quantitative SPECT perfusion. Among the evaluated methods, BCPD-plus-plus achieved the highest accuracy with a mean point cloud distance of 1.7 mm. By combining robust initialization, comparative fine registration, and voxel-level fusion, the proposed approach provides a practical solution for myocardial ischemia localization and functional evaluation of coronary lesions, while remaining independent of any specific fine registration algorithm.

Yixiang Zhuang, Baoping Cheng, Yao Cheng et al.

Speech-driven facial animation methods usually contain two main classes, 3D and 2D talking face, both of which attract considerable research attention in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, the research on 3D talking face does not go deeper as 2D talking face, in the aspect of lip-synchronization (lip-sync) and speech perception. To mind the gap between the two sub-fields, we propose a learning framework named Learn2Talk, which can construct a better 3D talking face network by exploiting two expertise points from the field of 2D talking face. Firstly, inspired by the audio-video sync network, a 3D sync-lip expert model is devised for the pursuit of lip-sync between audio and 3D facial motion. Secondly, a teacher model selected from 2D talking face methods is used to guide the training of the audio-to-3D motions regression network to yield more 3D vertex accuracy. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed framework in terms of lip-sync, vertex accuracy and speech perception, compared with state-of-the-arts. Finally, we show two applications of the proposed framework: audio-visual speech recognition and speech-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting based avatar animation.

Chengyang Li, Kaiyi Xiong, Yuan Xu et al.

Embodied foundation models have achieved significant breakthroughs in robotic manipulation, yet they still depend heavily on large-scale robot demonstrations. Although recent works have explored leveraging human data to alleviate this dependency, effectively extracting transferable knowledge remains a significant challenge due to the inherent embodiment gap between human and robot. We argue that the intention underlying human actions can serve as a powerful intermediate representation for bridging this gap. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explicitly learns and transfers human intention to facilitate robotic manipulation. Specifically, we model intention through gaze, as it naturally precedes physical actions and serves as an observable proxy for human intent. Our model is first pretrained on a large-scale egocentric human dataset to capture human intention and its synergy with action, followed by finetuning on a small set of robot and human data. During inference, the model adopts a Chain-of-Thought reasoning paradigm, sequentially predicting intention before executing the action. Extensive evaluations in simulation and real-world settings, across long-horizon and fine-grained tasks, and under few-shot and robustness benchmarks, show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, generalizes better, and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Hongdi Yang, Chengyang Li, Zhenxuan Wu et al.

Soccer is a globally renowned sport with significant applications in video games and VR/AR. However, generating realistic soccer motions remains challenging due to the intricate interactions between the human player and the ball. In this paper, we introduce SMGDiff, a novel two-stage framework for generating real-time and user-controllable soccer motions. Our key idea is to integrate real-time character control with a powerful diffusion-based generative model, ensuring high-quality and diverse output motion. In the first stage, we instantly transform coarse user controls into diverse global trajectories of the character. In the second stage, we employ a transformer-based autoregressive diffusion model to generate soccer motions based on trajectory conditioning. We further incorporate a contact guidance module during inference to optimize the contact details for realistic ball-foot interactions. Moreover, we contribute a large-scale soccer motion dataset consisting of over 1.08 million frames of diverse soccer motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SMGDiff significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of motion quality and condition alignment.

Wanli Ni, Hui Tian, Shuai Wang et al.

Federated split learning (FedSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling collaborative intelligence in industrial Internet of Things (IoT) systems, particularly in smart factories where data privacy, communication efficiency, and device heterogeneity are critical concerns. In this article, we present a comprehensive study of FedSL frameworks tailored for resource-constrained robots in industrial scenarios. We compare synchronous, asynchronous, hierarchical, and heterogeneous FedSL frameworks in terms of workflow, scalability, adaptability, and limitations under dynamic industrial conditions. Furthermore, we systematically categorize token fusion strategies into three paradigms: input-level (pre-fusion), intermediate-level (intra-fusion), and output-level (post-fusion), and summarize their respective strengths in industrial applications. We also provide adaptive optimization techniques to enhance the efficiency and feasibility of FedSL implementation, including model compression, split layer selection, computing frequency allocation, and wireless resource management. Simulation results validate the performance of these frameworks under industrial detection scenarios. Finally, we outline open issues and research directions of FedSL in future smart manufacturing systems.

Yawen Xiang, Heng Zhou, Chengyang Li et al.

Image deblurring is an essential image preprocessing technique, aiming to recover clear and detailed images form blurry ones. However, existing algorithms often fail to effectively integrate multi-scale feature extraction with frequency enhancement, limiting their ability to reconstruct fine textures. Additionally, non-uniform blur in images also restricts the effectiveness of image restoration. To address these issues, we propose a multi-scale frequency enhancement network (MFENet) for blind image deblurring. To capture the multi-scale spatial and channel information of blurred images, we introduce a multi-scale feature extraction module (MS-FE) based on depthwise separable convolutions, which provides rich target features for deblurring. We propose a frequency enhanced blur perception module (FEBP) that employs wavelet transforms to extract high-frequency details and utilizes multi-strip pooling to perceive non-uniform blur, combining multi-scale information with frequency enhancement to improve the restoration of image texture details. Experimental results on the GoPro and HIDE datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior deblurring performance in both visual quality and objective evaluation metrics. Furthermore, in downstream object detection tasks, the proposed blind image deblurring algorithm significantly improves detection accuracy, further validating its effectiveness androbustness in the field of image deblurring.

Yi Hou, Chengyang Li, Yuheng Lu et al.

In this article, we propose a simulated crowd counting dataset CrowdX, which has a large scale, accurate labeling, parameterized realization, and high fidelity. The experimental results of using this dataset as data enhancement show that the performance of the proposed streamlined and efficient benchmark network ESA-Net can be improved by 8.4\%. The other two classic heterogeneous architectures MCNN and CSRNet pre-trained on CrowdX also show significant performance improvements. Considering many influencing factors determine performance, such as background, camera angle, human density, and resolution. Although these factors are important, there is still a lack of research on how they affect crowd counting. Thanks to the CrowdX dataset with rich annotation information, we conduct a large number of data-driven comparative experiments to analyze these factors. Our research provides a reference for a deeper understanding of the crowd counting problem and puts forward some useful suggestions in the actual deployment of the algorithm.

Yi Hou, Chengyang Li, Fan Yang et al.

In the field of crowd counting, the current mainstream CNN-based regression methods simply extract the density information of pedestrians without finding the position of each person. This makes the output of the network often found to contain incorrect responses, which may erroneously estimate the total number and not conducive to the interpretation of the algorithm. To this end, we propose a Bi-Branch Attention Network (BBA-NET) for crowd counting, which has three innovation points. i) A two-branch architecture is used to estimate the density information and location information separately. ii) Attention mechanism is used to facilitate feature extraction, which can reduce false responses. iii) A new density map generation method combining geometric adaptation and Voronoi split is introduced. Our method can integrate the pedestrian's head and body information to enhance the feature expression ability of the density map. Extensive experiments performed on two public datasets show that our method achieves a lower crowd counting error compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Shivendra Bhardwaj, Abbas Ghaddar, Ahmad Rashid et al.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is extensively used to compress and deploy large pre-trained language models on edge devices for real-world applications. However, one neglected area of research is the impact of noisy (corrupted) labels on KD. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first study on KD with noisy labels in Natural Language Understanding (NLU). We document the scope of the problem and present two methods to mitigate the impact of label noise. Experiments on the GLUE benchmark show that our methods are effective even under high noise levels. Nevertheless, our results indicate that more research is necessary to cope with label noise under the KD.

Chengyang Li, Dan Song, Ruofeng Tong et al.

Multispectral pedestrian detection has attracted increasing attention from the research community due to its crucial competence for many around-the-clock applications (e.g., video surveillance and autonomous driving), especially under insufficient illumination conditions. We create a human baseline over the KAIST dataset and reveal that there is still a large gap between current top detectors and human performance. To narrow this gap, we propose a network fusion architecture, which consists of a multispectral proposal network to generate pedestrian proposals, and a subsequent multispectral classification network to distinguish pedestrian instances from hard negatives. The unified network is learned by jointly optimizing pedestrian detection and semantic segmentation tasks. The final detections are obtained by integrating the outputs from different modalities as well as the two stages. The approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the KAIST dataset while remain fast. Additionally, we contribute a sanitized version of training annotations for the KAIST dataset, and examine the effects caused by different kinds of annotation errors. Future research of this problem will benefit from the sanitized version which eliminates the interference of annotation errors.

Chengyang Li, Dan Song, Ruofeng Tong et al.

Multispectral images of color-thermal pairs have shown more effective than a single color channel for pedestrian detection, especially under challenging illumination conditions. However, there is still a lack of studies on how to fuse the two modalities effectively. In this paper, we deeply compare six different convolutional network fusion architectures and analyse their adaptations, enabling a vanilla architecture to obtain detection performances comparable to the state-of-the-art results. Further, we discover that pedestrian detection confidences from color or thermal images are correlated with illumination conditions. With this in mind, we propose an Illumination-aware Faster R-CNN (IAF RCNN). Specifically, an Illumination-aware Network is introduced to give an illumination measure of the input image. Then we adaptively merge color and thermal sub-networks via a gate function defined over the illumination value. The experimental results on KAIST Multispectral Pedestrian Benchmark validate the effectiveness of the proposed IAF R-CNN.