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The annotation of blind image quality assessment (BIQA) is labor-intensive and time-consuming, especially for authentic images. Training on synthetic data is expected to be beneficial, but synthetically trained models often suffer from poor generalization in real domains due to domain gaps. In this work, we make a key observation that introducing more distortion types in the synthetic dataset may not improve or even be harmful to generalizing authentic image quality assessment. To solve this challenge, we propose distortion-guided unsupervised domain adaptation for BIQA (DGQA), a novel framework that leverages adaptive multi-domain selection via prior knowledge from distortion to match the data distribution between the source domains and the target domain, thereby reducing negative transfer from the outlier source domains. Extensive experiments on two cross-domain settings (synthetic distortion to authentic distortion and synthetic distortion to algorithmic distortion) have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed DGQA. Besides, DGQA is orthogonal to existing model-based BIQA methods, and can be used in combination with such models to improve performance with less training data., Comment: Accepted by CVPR2024

This paper tackles the problem of passive gaze estimation using both event and frame data. Considering the inherently different physiological structures, it is intractable to accurately estimate gaze purely based on a given state. Thus, we reformulate gaze estimation as the quantification of the state shifting from the current state to several prior registered anchor states. Specifically, we propose a two-stage learning-based gaze estimation framework that divides the whole gaze estimation process into a coarse-to-fine approach involving anchor state selection and final gaze location. Moreover, to improve the generalization ability, instead of learning a large gaze estimation network directly, we align a group of local experts with a student network, where a novel denoising distillation algorithm is introduced to utilize denoising diffusion techniques to iteratively remove inherent noise in event data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which surpasses state-of-the-art methods by a large margin of 15$\%$. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/jdjdli/Denoise_distill_EF_gazetracker.

Previous deep learning-based event denoising methods mostly suffer from poor interpretability and difficulty in real-time processing due to their complex architecture designs. In this paper, we propose window-based event denoising, which simultaneously deals with a stack of events while existing element-based denoising focuses on one event each time. Besides, we give the theoretical analysis based on probability distributions in both temporal and spatial domains to improve interpretability. In temporal domain, we use timestamp deviations between processing events and central event to judge the temporal correlation and filter out temporal-irrelevant events. In spatial domain, we choose maximum a posteriori (MAP) to discriminate real-world event and noise, and use the learned convolutional sparse coding to optimize the objective function. Based on the theoretical analysis, we build Temporal Window (TW) module and Soft Spatial Feature Embedding (SSFE) module to process temporal and spatial information separately, and construct a novel multi-scale window-based event denoising network, named MSDNet. The high denoising accuracy and fast running speed of our MSDNet enables us to achieve real-time denoising in complex scenes. Extensive experimental results verify the effectiveness and robustness of our MSDNet. Our algorithm can remove event noise effectively and efficiently and improve the performance of downstream tasks.

This paper introduces a novel self-supervised learning framework for enhancing 3D perception in autonomous driving scenes. Specifically, our approach, named NCLR, focuses on 2D-3D neural calibration, a novel pretext task that estimates the rigid transformation aligning camera and LiDAR coordinate systems. First, we propose the learnable transformation alignment to bridge the domain gap between image and point cloud data, converting features into a unified representation space for effective comparison and matching. Second, we identify the overlapping area between the image and point cloud with the fused features. Third, we establish dense 2D-3D correspondences to estimate the rigid transformation. The framework not only learns fine-grained matching from points to pixels but also achieves alignment of the image and point cloud at a holistic level, understanding their relative pose. We demonstrate NCLR's efficacy by applying the pre-trained backbone to downstream tasks, such as LiDAR-based 3D semantic segmentation, object detection, and panoptic segmentation. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets illustrate the superiority of NCLR over existing self-supervised methods. The results confirm that joint learning from different modalities significantly enhances the network's understanding abilities and effectiveness of learned representation. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Eaphan/NCLR}., Comment: Under review

Quality assessment of images and videos emphasizes both local details and global semantics, whereas general data sampling methods (e.g., resizing, cropping or grid-based fragment) fail to catch them simultaneously. To address the deficiency, current approaches have to adopt multi-branch models and take as input the multi-resolution data, which burdens the model complexity. In this work, instead of stacking up models, a more elegant data sampling method (named as SAMA, scaling and masking) is explored, which compacts both the local and global content in a regular input size. The basic idea is to scale the data into a pyramid first, and reduce the pyramid into a regular data dimension with a masking strategy. Benefiting from the spatial and temporal redundancy in images and videos, the processed data maintains the multi-scale characteristics with a regular input size, thus can be processed by a single-branch model. We verify the sampling method in image and video quality assessment. Experiments show that our sampling method can improve the performance of current single-branch models significantly, and achieves competitive performance to the multi-branch models without extra model complexity. The source code will be available at https://github.com/Sissuire/SAMA., Comment: Accepted by AAAI2024. Code has been released at https://github.com/Sissuire/SAMA

In this paper, we delve into the nuanced challenge of tailoring the Segment Anything Models (SAMs) for integration with event data, with the overarching objective of attaining robust and universal object segmentation within the event-centric domain. One pivotal issue at the heart of this endeavor is the precise alignment and calibration of embeddings derived from event-centric data such that they harmoniously coincide with those originating from RGB imagery. Capitalizing on the vast repositories of datasets with paired events and RGB images, our proposition is to harness and extrapolate the profound knowledge encapsulated within the pre-trained SAM framework. As a cornerstone to achieving this, we introduce a multi-scale feature distillation methodology. This methodology rigorously optimizes the alignment of token embeddings originating from event data with their RGB image counterparts, thereby preserving and enhancing the robustness of the overall architecture. Considering the distinct significance that token embeddings from intermediate layers hold for higher-level embeddings, our strategy is centered on accurately calibrating the pivotal token embeddings. This targeted calibration is aimed at effectively managing the discrepancies in high-level embeddings originating from both the event and image domains. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distillation method. Code in http://github.com/happychenpipi/EventSAM.

Resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) is increasingly employed in multi-site research to aid neurological disorder analysis. Existing studies usually suffer from significant cross-site/domain data heterogeneity caused by site effects such as differences in scanners/protocols. Many methods have been proposed to reduce fMRI heterogeneity between source and target domains, heavily relying on the availability of source data. But acquiring source data is challenging due to privacy concerns and/or data storage burdens in multi-site studies. To this end, we design a source-free collaborative domain adaptation (SCDA) framework for fMRI analysis, where only a pretrained source model and unlabeled target data are accessible. Specifically, a multi-perspective feature enrichment method (MFE) is developed for target fMRI analysis, consisting of multiple collaborative branches to dynamically capture fMRI features of unlabeled target data from multiple views. Each branch has a data-feeding module, a spatiotemporal feature encoder, and a class predictor. A mutual-consistency constraint is designed to encourage pair-wise consistency of latent features of the same input generated from these branches for robust representation learning. To facilitate efficient cross-domain knowledge transfer without source data, we initialize MFE using parameters of a pretrained source model. We also introduce an unsupervised pretraining strategy using 3,806 unlabeled fMRIs from three large-scale auxiliary databases, aiming to obtain a general feature encoder. Experimental results on three public datasets and one private dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our method in cross-scanner and cross-study prediction tasks. The model pretrained on large-scale rs-fMRI data has been released to the public., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures

Brain structural MRI has been widely used to assess the future progression of cognitive impairment (CI). Previous learning-based studies usually suffer from the issue of small-sized labeled training data, while there exist a huge amount of structural MRIs in large-scale public databases. Intuitively, brain anatomical structures derived from these public MRIs (even without task-specific label information) can be used to boost CI progression trajectory prediction. However, previous studies seldom take advantage of such brain anatomy prior. To this end, this paper proposes a brain anatomy prior modeling (BAPM) framework to forecast the clinical progression of cognitive impairment with small-sized target MRIs by exploring anatomical brain structures. Specifically, the BAPM consists of a pretext model and a downstream model, with a shared brain anatomy-guided encoder to model brain anatomy prior explicitly. Besides the encoder, the pretext model also contains two decoders for two auxiliary tasks (i.e., MRI reconstruction and brain tissue segmentation), while the downstream model relies on a predictor for classification. The brain anatomy-guided encoder is pre-trained with the pretext model on 9,344 auxiliary MRIs without diagnostic labels for anatomy prior modeling. With this encoder frozen, the downstream model is then fine-tuned on limited target MRIs for prediction. We validate the BAPM on two CI-related studies with T1-weighted MRIs from 448 subjects. Experimental results suggest the effectiveness of BAPM in (1) four CI progression prediction tasks, (2) MR image reconstruction, and (3) brain tissue segmentation, compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

Automatic segmentation of brain MR images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is critical for tissue volumetric analysis and cortical surface reconstruction. Due to dramatic structural and appearance changes associated with developmental and aging processes, existing brain tissue segmentation methods are only viable for specific age groups. Consequently, methods developed for one age group may fail for another. In this paper, we make the first attempt to segment brain tissues across the entire human lifespan (0-100 years of age) using a unified deep learning model. To overcome the challenges related to structural variability underpinned by biological processes, intensity inhomogeneity, motion artifacts, scanner-induced differences, and acquisition protocols, we propose to use contrastive learning to improve the quality of feature representations in a latent space for effective lifespan tissue segmentation. We compared our approach with commonly used segmentation methods on a large-scale dataset of 2,464 MR images. Experimental results show that our model accurately segments brain tissues across the lifespan and outperforms existing methods.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of hyperspectral (HS) image spatial super-resolution via deep learning. Particularly, we focus on how to embed the high-dimensional spatial-spectral information of HS images efficiently and effectively. Specifically, in contrast to existing methods adopting empirically-designed network modules, we formulate HS embedding as an approximation of the posterior distribution of a set of carefully-defined HS embedding events, including layer-wise spatial-spectral feature extraction and network-level feature aggregation. Then, we incorporate the proposed feature embedding scheme into a source-consistent super-resolution framework that is physically-interpretable, producing lightweight PDE-Net, in which high-resolution (HR) HS images are iteratively refined from the residuals between input low-resolution (LR) HS images and pseudo-LR-HS images degenerated from reconstructed HR-HS images via probability-inspired HS embedding. Extensive experiments over three common benchmark datasets demonstrate that PDE-Net achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. Besides, the probabilistic characteristic of this kind of networks can provide the epistemic uncertainty of the network outputs, which may bring additional benefits when used for other HS image-based applications. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/jinnh/PDE-Net., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

Recovering a dense depth image from sparse LiDAR scans is a challenging task. Despite the popularity of color-guided methods for sparse-to-dense depth completion, they treated pixels equally during optimization, ignoring the uneven distribution characteristics in the sparse depth map and the accumulated outliers in the synthesized ground truth. In this work, we introduce uncertainty-driven loss functions to improve the robustness of depth completion and handle the uncertainty in depth completion. Specifically, we propose an explicit uncertainty formulation for robust depth completion with Jeffrey's prior. A parametric uncertain-driven loss is introduced and translated to new loss functions that are robust to noisy or missing data. Meanwhile, we propose a multiscale joint prediction model that can simultaneously predict depth and uncertainty maps. The estimated uncertainty map is also used to perform adaptive prediction on the pixels with high uncertainty, leading to a residual map for refining the completion results. Our method has been tested on KITTI Depth Completion Benchmark and achieved the state-of-the-art robustness performance in terms of MAE, IMAE, and IRMSE metrics., Comment: accepted by AAAI2022

Neural architecture search (NAS) has recently reshaped our understanding on various vision tasks. Similar to the success of NAS in high-level vision tasks, it is possible to find a memory and computationally efficient solution via NAS with highly competent denoising performance. However, the optimization gap between the super-network and the sub-architectures has remained an open issue in both low-level and high-level vision. In this paper, we present a novel approach to filling in this gap by connecting model-guided design with NAS (MoD-NAS) and demonstrate its application into image denoising. Specifically, we propose to construct a new search space under model-guided framework and develop more stable and efficient differential search strategies. MoD-NAS employs a highly reusable width search strategy and a densely connected search block to automatically select the operations of each layer as well as network width and depth via gradient descent. During the search process, the proposed MoG-NAS is capable of avoiding mode collapse due to the smoother search space designed under the model-guided framework. Experimental results on several popular datasets show that our MoD-NAS has achieved even better PSNR performance than current state-of-the-art methods with fewer parameters, lower number of flops, and less amount of testing time., Comment: 15 pages

In coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging (CASSI) system, the real-world hyperspectral image (HSI) can be reconstructed from the captured compressive image in a snapshot. Model-based HSI reconstruction methods employed hand-crafted priors to solve the reconstruction problem, but most of which achieved limited success due to the poor representation capability of these hand-crafted priors. Deep learning based methods learning the mappings between the compressive images and the HSIs directly achieved much better results. Yet, it is nontrivial to design a powerful deep network heuristically for achieving satisfied results. In this paper, we propose a novel HSI reconstruction method based on the Maximum a Posterior (MAP) estimation framework using learned Gaussian Scale Mixture (GSM) prior. Different from existing GSM models using hand-crafted scale priors (e.g., the Jeffrey's prior), we propose to learn the scale prior through a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). Furthermore, we also propose to estimate the local means of the GSM models by the DCNN. All the parameters of the MAP estimation algorithm and the DCNN parameters are jointly optimized through end-to-end training. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://see.xidian.edu.cn/faculty/wsdong/Projects/DGSM-SCI.htm., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, CVPR 2021

Recently, increasing interest has been drawn in exploiting deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). Despite of the notable success achieved, there is a broad consensus that training DCNNs heavily relies on massive annotated data. Unfortunately, IQA is a typical small sample problem. Therefore, most of the existing DCNN-based IQA metrics operate based on pre-trained networks. However, these pre-trained networks are not designed for IQA task, leading to generalization problem when evaluating different types of distortions. With this motivation, this paper presents a no-reference IQA metric based on deep meta-learning. The underlying idea is to learn the meta-knowledge shared by human when evaluating the quality of images with various distortions, which can then be adapted to unknown distortions easily. Specifically, we first collect a number of NR-IQA tasks for different distortions. Then meta-learning is adopted to learn the prior knowledge shared by diversified distortions. Finally, the quality prior model is fine-tuned on a target NR-IQA task for quickly obtaining the quality model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed metric outperforms the state-of-the-arts by a large margin. Furthermore, the meta-model learned from synthetic distortions can also be easily generalized to authentic distortions, which is highly desired in real-world applications of IQA metrics.

Small objects detection is a challenging task in computer vision due to its limited resolution and information. In order to solve this problem, the majority of existing methods sacrifice speed for improvement in accuracy. In this paper, we aim to detect small objects at a fast speed, using the best object detector Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD) with respect to accuracy-vs-speed trade-off as base architecture. We propose a multi-level feature fusion method for introducing contextual information in SSD, in order to improve the accuracy for small objects. In detailed fusion operation, we design two feature fusion modules, concatenation module and element-sum module, different in the way of adding contextual information. Experimental results show that these two fusion modules obtain higher mAP on PASCALVOC2007 than baseline SSD by 1.6 and 1.7 points respectively, especially with 2-3 points improvement on some smallobjects categories. The testing speed of them is 43 and 40 FPS respectively, superior to the state of the art Deconvolutional single shot detector (DSSD) by 29.4 and 26.4 FPS. Code is available at https://github.com/wnzhyee/Feature-Fused-SSD. Keywords: small object detection, feature fusion, real-time, single shot multi-box detector, Comment: Artificial Intelligence;8 pages,8 figures