Long Chen

Fuxiang Tan, YuTing Kong, Yingying Fan et al.

Rain streaks degrade the image quality and seriously affect the performance of subsequent computer vision tasks, such as autonomous driving, social security, etc. Therefore, removing rain streaks from a given rainy images is of great significance. Convolutional neural networks(CNN) have been widely used in image deraining tasks, however, the local computational characteristics of convolutional operations limit the development of image deraining tasks. Recently, the popular transformer has global computational features that can further facilitate the development of image deraining tasks. In this paper, we introduce Swin-transformer into the field of image deraining for the first time to study the performance and potential of Swin-transformer in the field of image deraining. Specifically, we improve the basic module of Swin-transformer and design a three-branch model to implement single-image rain removal. The former implements the basic rain pattern feature extraction, while the latter fuses different features to further extract and process the image features. In addition, we employ a jump connection to fuse deep features and shallow features. In terms of experiments, the existing public dataset suffers from image duplication and relatively homogeneous background. So we propose a new dataset Rain3000 to validate our model. Therefore, we propose a new dataset Rain3000 for validating our model. Experimental results on the publicly available datasets Rain100L, Rain100H and our dataset Rain3000 show that our proposed method has performance and inference speed advantages over the current mainstream single-image rain streaks removal models.The source code will be available at https://github.com/H-tfx/SDNet.

Long Chen, Zheheng Jiang, Lei Tong et al.

Underwater image enhancement, as a pre-processing step to improve the accuracy of the following object detection task, has drawn considerable attention in the field of underwater navigation and ocean exploration. However, most of the existing underwater image enhancement strategies tend to consider enhancement and detection as two independent modules with no interaction, and the practice of separate optimization does not always help the underwater object detection task. In this paper, we propose two perceptual enhancement models, each of which uses a deep enhancement model with a detection perceptor. The detection perceptor provides coherent information in the form of gradients to the enhancement model, guiding the enhancement model to generate patch level visually pleasing images or detection favourable images. In addition, due to the lack of training data, a hybrid underwater image synthesis model, which fuses physical priors and data-driven cues, is proposed to synthesize training data and generalise our enhancement model for real-world underwater images. Experimental results show the superiority of our proposed method over several state-of-the-art methods on both real-world and synthetic underwater datasets.

Long Chen, Lei Tong, Feixiang Zhou et al.

Underwater image enhancement is such an important vision task due to its significance in marine engineering and aquatic robot. It is usually work as a pre-processing step to improve the performance of high level vision tasks such as underwater object detection. Even though many previous works show the underwater image enhancement algorithms can boost the detection accuracy of the detectors, no work specially focus on investigating the relationship between these two tasks. This is mainly because existing underwater datasets lack either bounding box annotations or high quality reference images, based on which detection accuracy or image quality assessment metrics are calculated. To investigate how the underwater image enhancement methods influence the following underwater object detection tasks, in this paper, we provide a large-scale underwater object detection dataset with both bounding box annotations and high quality reference images, namely OUC dataset. The OUC dataset provides a platform for researchers to comprehensive study the influence of underwater image enhancement algorithms on the underwater object detection task.

Long Chen, Thomas Day, Wen Tang et al.

Mixed Reality (MR) is of increasing interest within technology-driven modern medicine but is not yet used in everyday practice. This situation is changing rapidly, however, and this paper explores the emergence of MR technology and the importance of its utility within medical applications. A classification of medical MR has been obtained by applying an unbiased text mining method to a database of 1,403 relevant research papers published over the last two decades. The classification results reveal a taxonomy for the development of medical MR research during this period as well as suggesting future trends. We then use the classification to analyse the technology and applications developed in the last five years. Our objective is to aid researchers to focus on the areas where technology advancements in medical MR are most needed, as well as providing medical practitioners with a useful source of reference.

Long Chen, Wen Tang, Nigel W. John et al.

One of the major challenges in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) such as laparoscopy is the lack of depth perception. In recent years, laparoscopic scene tracking and surface reconstruction has been a focus of investigation to provide rich additional information to aid the surgical process and compensate for the depth perception issue. However, robust 3D surface reconstruction and augmented reality with depth perception on the reconstructed scene are yet to be reported. This paper presents our work in this area. First, we adopt a state-of-the-art visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework - ORB-SLAM - and extend the algorithm for use in MIS scenes for reliable endoscopic camera tracking and salient point mapping. We then develop a robust global 3D surface reconstruction frame- work based on the sparse point clouds extracted from the SLAM framework. Our approach is to combine an outlier removal filter within a Moving Least Squares smoothing algorithm and then employ Poisson surface reconstruction to obtain smooth surfaces from the unstructured sparse point cloud. Our proposed method has been quantitatively evaluated compared with ground-truth camera trajectories and the organ model surface we used to render the synthetic simulation videos. In vivo laparoscopic videos used in the tests have demonstrated the robustness and accuracy of our proposed framework on both camera tracking and surface reconstruction, illustrating the potential of our algorithm for depth augmentation and depth-corrected augmented reality in MIS with monocular endoscopes.