new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Aug 20

VQA-Diff: Exploiting VQA and Diffusion for Zero-Shot Image-to-3D Vehicle Asset Generation in Autonomous Driving

Generating 3D vehicle assets from in-the-wild observations is crucial to autonomous driving. Existing image-to-3D methods cannot well address this problem because they learn generation merely from image RGB information without a deeper understanding of in-the-wild vehicles (such as car models, manufacturers, etc.). This leads to their poor zero-shot prediction capability to handle real-world observations with occlusion or tricky viewing angles. To solve this problem, in this work, we propose VQA-Diff, a novel framework that leverages in-the-wild vehicle images to create photorealistic 3D vehicle assets for autonomous driving. VQA-Diff exploits the real-world knowledge inherited from the Large Language Model in the Visual Question Answering (VQA) model for robust zero-shot prediction and the rich image prior knowledge in the Diffusion model for structure and appearance generation. In particular, we utilize a multi-expert Diffusion Models strategy to generate the structure information and employ a subject-driven structure-controlled generation mechanism to model appearance information. As a result, without the necessity to learn from a large-scale image-to-3D vehicle dataset collected from the real world, VQA-Diff still has a robust zero-shot image-to-novel-view generation ability. We conduct experiments on various datasets, including Pascal 3D+, Waymo, and Objaverse, to demonstrate that VQA-Diff outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Dual Mutual Learning Network with Global-local Awareness for RGB-D Salient Object Detection

RGB-D salient object detection (SOD), aiming to highlight prominent regions of a given scene by jointly modeling RGB and depth information, is one of the challenging pixel-level prediction tasks. Recently, the dual-attention mechanism has been devoted to this area due to its ability to strengthen the detection process. However, most existing methods directly fuse attentional cross-modality features under a manual-mandatory fusion paradigm without considering the inherent discrepancy between the RGB and depth, which may lead to a reduction in performance. Moreover, the long-range dependencies derived from global and local information make it difficult to leverage a unified efficient fusion strategy. Hence, in this paper, we propose the GL-DMNet, a novel dual mutual learning network with global-local awareness. Specifically, we present a position mutual fusion module and a channel mutual fusion module to exploit the interdependencies among different modalities in spatial and channel dimensions. Besides, we adopt an efficient decoder based on cascade transformer-infused reconstruction to integrate multi-level fusion features jointly. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed GL-DMNet performs better than 24 RGB-D SOD methods, achieving an average improvement of ~3% across four evaluation metrics compared to the second-best model (S3Net). Codes and results are available at https://github.com/kingkung2016/GL-DMNet.

Exploring the Collaborative Advantage of Low-level Information on Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection

Existing state-of-the-art AI-Generated image detection methods mostly consider extracting low-level information from RGB images to help improve the generalization of AI-Generated image detection, such as noise patterns. However, these methods often consider only a single type of low-level information, which may lead to suboptimal generalization. Through empirical analysis, we have discovered a key insight: different low-level information often exhibits generalization capabilities for different types of forgeries. Furthermore, we found that simple fusion strategies are insufficient to leverage the detection advantages of each low-level and high-level information for various forgery types. Therefore, we propose the Adaptive Low-level Experts Injection (ALEI) framework. Our approach introduces Lora Experts, enabling the backbone network, which is trained with high-level semantic RGB images, to accept and learn knowledge from different low-level information. We utilize a cross-attention method to adaptively fuse these features at intermediate layers. To prevent the backbone network from losing the modeling capabilities of different low-level features during the later stages of modeling, we developed a Low-level Information Adapter that interacts with the features extracted by the backbone network. Finally, we propose Dynamic Feature Selection, which dynamically selects the most suitable features for detecting the current image to maximize generalization detection capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, finetuned on only four categories of mainstream ProGAN data, performs excellently and achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets containing unseen GAN and Diffusion methods.

Cross-Modal Collaborative Representation Learning and a Large-Scale RGBT Benchmark for Crowd Counting

Crowd counting is a fundamental yet challenging task, which desires rich information to generate pixel-wise crowd density maps. However, most previous methods only used the limited information of RGB images and cannot well discover potential pedestrians in unconstrained scenarios. In this work, we find that incorporating optical and thermal information can greatly help to recognize pedestrians. To promote future researches in this field, we introduce a large-scale RGBT Crowd Counting (RGBT-CC) benchmark, which contains 2,030 pairs of RGB-thermal images with 138,389 annotated people. Furthermore, to facilitate the multimodal crowd counting, we propose a cross-modal collaborative representation learning framework, which consists of multiple modality-specific branches, a modality-shared branch, and an Information Aggregation-Distribution Module (IADM) to capture the complementary information of different modalities fully. Specifically, our IADM incorporates two collaborative information transfers to dynamically enhance the modality-shared and modality-specific representations with a dual information propagation mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on the RGBT-CC benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for RGBT crowd counting. Moreover, the proposed approach is universal for multimodal crowd counting and is also capable to achieve superior performance on the ShanghaiTechRGBD dataset. Finally, our source code and benchmark are released at {http://lingboliu.com/RGBT_Crowd_Counting.html}.

Cross-modal feature fusion for robust point cloud registration with ambiguous geometry

Point cloud registration has seen significant advancements with the application of deep learning techniques. However, existing approaches often overlook the potential of integrating radiometric information from RGB images. This limitation reduces their effectiveness in aligning point clouds pairs, especially in regions where geometric data alone is insufficient. When used effectively, radiometric information can enhance the registration process by providing context that is missing from purely geometric data. In this paper, we propose CoFF, a novel Cross-modal Feature Fusion method that utilizes both point cloud geometry and RGB images for pairwise point cloud registration. Assuming that the co-registration between point clouds and RGB images is available, CoFF explicitly addresses the challenges where geometric information alone is unclear, such as in regions with symmetric similarity or planar structures, through a two-stage fusion of 3D point cloud features and 2D image features. It incorporates a cross-modal feature fusion module that assigns pixel-wise image features to 3D input point clouds to enhance learned 3D point features, and integrates patch-wise image features with superpoint features to improve the quality of coarse matching. This is followed by a coarse-to-fine matching module that accurately establishes correspondences using the fused features. We extensively evaluate CoFF on four common datasets: 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, IndoorLRS, and the recently released ScanNet++ datasets. In addition, we assess CoFF on specific subset datasets containing geometrically ambiguous cases. Our experimental results demonstrate that CoFF achieves state-of-the-art registration performance across all benchmarks, including remarkable registration recalls of 95.9% and 81.6% on the widely-used 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch datasets, respectively...(Truncated to fit arXiv abstract length)

MultiMAE: Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoders

We propose a pre-training strategy called Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoders (MultiMAE). It differs from standard Masked Autoencoding in two key aspects: I) it can optionally accept additional modalities of information in the input besides the RGB image (hence "multi-modal"), and II) its training objective accordingly includes predicting multiple outputs besides the RGB image (hence "multi-task"). We make use of masking (across image patches and input modalities) to make training MultiMAE tractable as well as to ensure cross-modality predictive coding is indeed learned by the network. We show this pre-training strategy leads to a flexible, simple, and efficient framework with improved transfer results to downstream tasks. In particular, the same exact pre-trained network can be flexibly used when additional information besides RGB images is available or when no information other than RGB is available - in all configurations yielding competitive to or significantly better results than the baselines. To avoid needing training datasets with multiple modalities and tasks, we train MultiMAE entirely using pseudo labeling, which makes the framework widely applicable to any RGB dataset. The experiments are performed on multiple transfer tasks (image classification, semantic segmentation, depth estimation) and datasets (ImageNet, ADE20K, Taskonomy, Hypersim, NYUv2). The results show an intriguingly impressive capability by the model in cross-modal/task predictive coding and transfer.

UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase

Point-, voxel-, and range-views are three representative forms of point clouds. All of them have accurate 3D measurements but lack color and texture information. RGB images are a natural complement to these point cloud views and fully utilizing the comprehensive information of them benefits more robust perceptions. In this paper, we present a unified multi-modal LiDAR segmentation network, termed UniSeg, which leverages the information of RGB images and three views of the point cloud, and accomplishes semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation simultaneously. Specifically, we first design the Learnable cross-Modal Association (LMA) module to automatically fuse voxel-view and range-view features with image features, which fully utilize the rich semantic information of images and are robust to calibration errors. Then, the enhanced voxel-view and range-view features are transformed to the point space,where three views of point cloud features are further fused adaptively by the Learnable cross-View Association module (LVA). Notably, UniSeg achieves promising results in three public benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD); it ranks 1st on two challenges of two benchmarks, including the LiDAR semantic segmentation challenge of nuScenes and panoptic segmentation challenges of SemanticKITTI. Besides, we construct the OpenPCSeg codebase, which is the largest and most comprehensive outdoor LiDAR segmentation codebase. It contains most of the popular outdoor LiDAR segmentation algorithms and provides reproducible implementations. The OpenPCSeg codebase will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSeg.

FlexEvent: Event Camera Object Detection at Arbitrary Frequencies

Event cameras offer unparalleled advantages for real-time perception in dynamic environments, thanks to their microsecond-level temporal resolution and asynchronous operation. Existing event-based object detection methods, however, are limited by fixed-frequency paradigms and fail to fully exploit the high-temporal resolution and adaptability of event cameras. To address these limitations, we propose FlexEvent, a novel event camera object detection framework that enables detection at arbitrary frequencies. Our approach consists of two key components: FlexFuser, an adaptive event-frame fusion module that integrates high-frequency event data with rich semantic information from RGB frames, and FAL, a frequency-adaptive learning mechanism that generates frequency-adjusted labels to enhance model generalization across varying operational frequencies. This combination allows our method to detect objects with high accuracy in both fast-moving and static scenarios, while adapting to dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on large-scale event camera datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant improvements in both standard and high-frequency settings. Notably, our method maintains robust performance when scaling from 20 Hz to 90 Hz and delivers accurate detection up to 180 Hz, proving its effectiveness in extreme conditions. Our framework sets a new benchmark for event-based object detection and paves the way for more adaptable, real-time vision systems.

Reduce Information Loss in Transformers for Pluralistic Image Inpainting

Transformers have achieved great success in pluralistic image inpainting recently. However, we find existing transformer based solutions regard each pixel as a token, thus suffer from information loss issue from two aspects: 1) They downsample the input image into much lower resolutions for efficiency consideration, incurring information loss and extra misalignment for the boundaries of masked regions. 2) They quantize 256^3 RGB pixels to a small number (such as 512) of quantized pixels. The indices of quantized pixels are used as tokens for the inputs and prediction targets of transformer. Although an extra CNN network is used to upsample and refine the low-resolution results, it is difficult to retrieve the lost information back.To keep input information as much as possible, we propose a new transformer based framework "PUT". Specifically, to avoid input downsampling while maintaining the computation efficiency, we design a patch-based auto-encoder P-VQVAE, where the encoder converts the masked image into non-overlapped patch tokens and the decoder recovers the masked regions from inpainted tokens while keeping the unmasked regions unchanged. To eliminate the information loss caused by quantization, an Un-Quantized Transformer (UQ-Transformer) is applied, which directly takes the features from P-VQVAE encoder as input without quantization and regards the quantized tokens only as prediction targets. Extensive experiments show that PUT greatly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on image fidelity, especially for large masked regions and complex large-scale datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/liuqk3/PUT

3D Reconstruction and Information Fusion between Dormant and Canopy Seasons in Commercial Orchards Using Deep Learning and Fast GICP

In orchard automation, dense foliage during the canopy season severely occludes tree structures, minimizing visibility to various canopy parts such as trunks and branches, which limits the ability of a machine vision system. However, canopy structure is more open and visible during the dormant season when trees are defoliated. In this work, we present an information fusion framework that integrates multi-seasonal structural data to support robotic and automated crop load management during the entire growing season. The framework combines high-resolution RGB-D imagery from both dormant and canopy periods using YOLOv9-Seg for instance segmentation, Kinect Fusion for 3D reconstruction, and Fast Generalized Iterative Closest Point (Fast GICP) for model alignment. Segmentation outputs from YOLOv9-Seg were used to extract depth-informed masks, which enabled accurate 3D point cloud reconstruction via Kinect Fusion; these reconstructed models from each season were subsequently aligned using Fast GICP to achieve spatially coherent multi-season fusion. The YOLOv9-Seg model, trained on manually annotated images, achieved a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.0047 and segmentation mAP@50 scores up to 0.78 for trunks in dormant season dataset. Kinect Fusion enabled accurate reconstruction of tree geometry, validated with field measurements resulting in root mean square errors (RMSE) of 5.23 mm for trunk diameter, 4.50 mm for branch diameter, and 13.72 mm for branch spacing. Fast GICP achieved precise cross-seasonal registration with a minimum fitness score of 0.00197, allowing integrated, comprehensive tree structure modeling despite heavy occlusions during the growing season. This fused structural representation enables robotic systems to access otherwise obscured architectural information, improving the precision of pruning, thinning, and other automated orchard operations.

CAST: Component-Aligned 3D Scene Reconstruction from an RGB Image

Recovering high-quality 3D scenes from a single RGB image is a challenging task in computer graphics. Current methods often struggle with domain-specific limitations or low-quality object generation. To address these, we propose CAST (Component-Aligned 3D Scene Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image), a novel method for 3D scene reconstruction and recovery. CAST starts by extracting object-level 2D segmentation and relative depth information from the input image, followed by using a GPT-based model to analyze inter-object spatial relationships. This enables the understanding of how objects relate to each other within the scene, ensuring more coherent reconstruction. CAST then employs an occlusion-aware large-scale 3D generation model to independently generate each object's full geometry, using MAE and point cloud conditioning to mitigate the effects of occlusions and partial object information, ensuring accurate alignment with the source image's geometry and texture. To align each object with the scene, the alignment generation model computes the necessary transformations, allowing the generated meshes to be accurately placed and integrated into the scene's point cloud. Finally, CAST incorporates a physics-aware correction step that leverages a fine-grained relation graph to generate a constraint graph. This graph guides the optimization of object poses, ensuring physical consistency and spatial coherence. By utilizing Signed Distance Fields (SDF), the model effectively addresses issues such as occlusions, object penetration, and floating objects, ensuring that the generated scene accurately reflects real-world physical interactions. CAST can be leveraged in robotics, enabling efficient real-to-simulation workflows and providing realistic, scalable simulation environments for robotic systems.

DOEI: Dual Optimization of Embedding Information for Attention-Enhanced Class Activation Maps

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) typically utilizes limited semantic annotations to obtain initial Class Activation Maps (CAMs). However, due to the inadequate coupling between class activation responses and semantic information in high-dimensional space, the CAM is prone to object co-occurrence or under-activation, resulting in inferior recognition accuracy. To tackle this issue, we propose DOEI, Dual Optimization of Embedding Information, a novel approach that reconstructs embedding representations through semantic-aware attention weight matrices to optimize the expression capability of embedding information. Specifically, DOEI amplifies tokens with high confidence and suppresses those with low confidence during the class-to-patch interaction. This alignment of activation responses with semantic information strengthens the propagation and decoupling of target features, enabling the generated embeddings to more accurately represent target features in high-level semantic space. In addition, we propose a hybrid-feature alignment module in DOEI that combines RGB values, embedding-guided features, and self-attention weights to increase the reliability of candidate tokens. Comprehensive experiments show that DOEI is an effective plug-and-play module that empowers state-of-the-art visual transformer-based WSSS models to significantly improve the quality of CAMs and segmentation performance on popular benchmarks, including PASCAL VOC (+3.6%, +1.5%, +1.2% mIoU) and MS COCO (+1.2%, +1.6% mIoU). Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/DOEI.

FusionVision: A comprehensive approach of 3D object reconstruction and segmentation from RGB-D cameras using YOLO and fast segment anything

In the realm of computer vision, the integration of advanced techniques into the processing of RGB-D camera inputs poses a significant challenge, given the inherent complexities arising from diverse environmental conditions and varying object appearances. Therefore, this paper introduces FusionVision, an exhaustive pipeline adapted for the robust 3D segmentation of objects in RGB-D imagery. Traditional computer vision systems face limitations in simultaneously capturing precise object boundaries and achieving high-precision object detection on depth map as they are mainly proposed for RGB cameras. To address this challenge, FusionVision adopts an integrated approach by merging state-of-the-art object detection techniques, with advanced instance segmentation methods. The integration of these components enables a holistic (unified analysis of information obtained from both color RGB and depth D channels) interpretation of RGB-D data, facilitating the extraction of comprehensive and accurate object information. The proposed FusionVision pipeline employs YOLO for identifying objects within the RGB image domain. Subsequently, FastSAM, an innovative semantic segmentation model, is applied to delineate object boundaries, yielding refined segmentation masks. The synergy between these components and their integration into 3D scene understanding ensures a cohesive fusion of object detection and segmentation, enhancing overall precision in 3D object segmentation. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/safouaneelg/FusionVision/.

Modality Mixer Exploiting Complementary Information for Multi-modal Action Recognition

Due to the distinctive characteristics of sensors, each modality exhibits unique physical properties. For this reason, in the context of multi-modal action recognition, it is important to consider not only the overall action content but also the complementary nature of different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel network, named Modality Mixer (M-Mixer) network, which effectively leverages and incorporates the complementary information across modalities with the temporal context of actions for action recognition. A key component of our proposed M-Mixer is the Multi-modal Contextualization Unit (MCU), a simple yet effective recurrent unit. Our MCU is responsible for temporally encoding a sequence of one modality (e.g., RGB) with action content features of other modalities (e.g., depth and infrared modalities). This process encourages M-Mixer network to exploit global action content and also to supplement complementary information of other modalities. Furthermore, to extract appropriate complementary information regarding to the given modality settings, we introduce a new module, named Complementary Feature Extraction Module (CFEM). CFEM incorporates sepearte learnable query embeddings for each modality, which guide CFEM to extract complementary information and global action content from the other modalities. As a result, our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA datasets. Moreover, through comprehensive ablation studies, we further validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Particle-Grid Neural Dynamics for Learning Deformable Object Models from RGB-D Videos

Modeling the dynamics of deformable objects is challenging due to their diverse physical properties and the difficulty of estimating states from limited visual information. We address these challenges with a neural dynamics framework that combines object particles and spatial grids in a hybrid representation. Our particle-grid model captures global shape and motion information while predicting dense particle movements, enabling the modeling of objects with varied shapes and materials. Particles represent object shapes, while the spatial grid discretizes the 3D space to ensure spatial continuity and enhance learning efficiency. Coupled with Gaussian Splattings for visual rendering, our framework achieves a fully learning-based digital twin of deformable objects and generates 3D action-conditioned videos. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model learns the dynamics of diverse objects -- such as ropes, cloths, stuffed animals, and paper bags -- from sparse-view RGB-D recordings of robot-object interactions, while also generalizing at the category level to unseen instances. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based and physics-based simulators, particularly in scenarios with limited camera views. Furthermore, we showcase the utility of our learned models in model-based planning, enabling goal-conditioned object manipulation across a range of tasks. The project page is available at https://kywind.github.io/pgnd .

Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning

Drone-based vehicle detection aims at finding the vehicle locations and categories in an aerial image. It empowers smart city traffic management and disaster rescue. Researchers have made mount of efforts in this area and achieved considerable progress. Nevertheless, it is still a challenge when the objects are hard to distinguish, especially in low light conditions. To tackle this problem, we construct a large-scale drone-based RGB-Infrared vehicle detection dataset, termed DroneVehicle. Our DroneVehicle collects 28, 439 RGB-Infrared image pairs, covering urban roads, residential areas, parking lots, and other scenarios from day to night. Due to the great gap between RGB and infrared images, cross-modal images provide both effective information and redundant information. To address this dilemma, we further propose an uncertainty-aware cross-modality vehicle detection (UA-CMDet) framework to extract complementary information from cross-modal images, which can significantly improve the detection performance in low light conditions. An uncertainty-aware module (UAM) is designed to quantify the uncertainty weights of each modality, which is calculated by the cross-modal Intersection over Union (IoU) and the RGB illumination value. Furthermore, we design an illumination-aware cross-modal non-maximum suppression algorithm to better integrate the modal-specific information in the inference phase. Extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle dataset demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed method for crossmodality vehicle detection. The dataset can be download from https://github.com/VisDrone/DroneVehicle.

GIVEPose: Gradual Intra-class Variation Elimination for RGB-based Category-Level Object Pose Estimation

Recent advances in RGBD-based category-level object pose estimation have been limited by their reliance on precise depth information, restricting their broader applicability. In response, RGB-based methods have been developed. Among these methods, geometry-guided pose regression that originated from instance-level tasks has demonstrated strong performance. However, we argue that the NOCS map is an inadequate intermediate representation for geometry-guided pose regression method, as its many-to-one correspondence with category-level pose introduces redundant instance-specific information, resulting in suboptimal results. This paper identifies the intra-class variation problem inherent in pose regression based solely on the NOCS map and proposes the Intra-class Variation-Free Consensus (IVFC) map, a novel coordinate representation generated from the category-level consensus model. By leveraging the complementary strengths of the NOCS map and the IVFC map, we introduce GIVEPose, a framework that implements Gradual Intra-class Variation Elimination for category-level object pose estimation. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that GIVEPose significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art RGB-based approaches, achieving substantial improvements in category-level object pose estimation. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziqin-h/GIVEPose.

Decoupled Iterative Refinement Framework for Interacting Hands Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image

Reconstructing interacting hands from a single RGB image is a very challenging task. On the one hand, severe mutual occlusion and similar local appearance between two hands confuse the extraction of visual features, resulting in the misalignment of estimated hand meshes and the image. On the other hand, there are complex spatial relationship between interacting hands, which significantly increases the solution space of hand poses and increases the difficulty of network learning. In this paper, we propose a decoupled iterative refinement framework to achieve pixel-alignment hand reconstruction while efficiently modeling the spatial relationship between hands. Specifically, we define two feature spaces with different characteristics, namely 2D visual feature space and 3D joint feature space. First, we obtain joint-wise features from the visual feature map and utilize a graph convolution network and a transformer to perform intra- and inter-hand information interaction in the 3D joint feature space, respectively. Then, we project the joint features with global information back into the 2D visual feature space in an obfuscation-free manner and utilize the 2D convolution for pixel-wise enhancement. By performing multiple alternate enhancements in the two feature spaces, our method can achieve an accurate and robust reconstruction of interacting hands. Our method outperforms all existing two-hand reconstruction methods by a large margin on the InterHand2.6M dataset.

Text-to-Remote-Sensing-Image Retrieval beyond RGB Sources

Retrieving relevant imagery from vast satellite archives is crucial for applications like disaster response and long-term climate monitoring. However, most text-to-image retrieval systems are limited to RGB data, failing to exploit the unique physical information captured by other sensors, such as the all-weather structural sensitivity of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) or the spectral signatures in optical multispectral data. To bridge this gap, we introduce CrisisLandMark, a new large-scale corpus of over 647,000 Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 multispectral images paired with structured textual annotations for land cover, land use, and crisis events harmonized from authoritative land cover systems (CORINE and Dynamic World) and crisis-specific sources. We then present CLOSP (Contrastive Language Optical SAR Pretraining), a novel framework that uses text as a bridge to align unpaired optical and SAR images into a unified embedding space. Our experiments show that CLOSP achieves a new state-of-the-art, improving retrieval nDGC by 54% over existing models. Additionally, we find that the unified training strategy overcomes the inherent difficulty of interpreting SAR imagery by transferring rich semantic knowledge from the optical domain with indirect interaction. Furthermore, GeoCLOSP, which integrates geographic coordinates into our framework, creates a powerful trade-off between generality and specificity: while the CLOSP excels at general semantic tasks, the GeoCLOSP becomes a specialized expert for retrieving location-dependent crisis events and rare geographic features. This work highlights that the integration of diverse sensor data and geographic context is essential for unlocking the full potential of remote sensing archives.

ANIM: Accurate Neural Implicit Model for Human Reconstruction from a single RGB-D image

Recent progress in human shape learning, shows that neural implicit models are effective in generating 3D human surfaces from limited number of views, and even from a single RGB image. However, existing monocular approaches still struggle to recover fine geometric details such as face, hands or cloth wrinkles. They are also easily prone to depth ambiguities that result in distorted geometries along the camera optical axis. In this paper, we explore the benefits of incorporating depth observations in the reconstruction process by introducing ANIM, a novel method that reconstructs arbitrary 3D human shapes from single-view RGB-D images with an unprecedented level of accuracy. Our model learns geometric details from both multi-resolution pixel-aligned and voxel-aligned features to leverage depth information and enable spatial relationships, mitigating depth ambiguities. We further enhance the quality of the reconstructed shape by introducing a depth-supervision strategy, which improves the accuracy of the signed distance field estimation of points that lie on the reconstructed surface. Experiments demonstrate that ANIM outperforms state-of-the-art works that use RGB, surface normals, point cloud or RGB-D data as input. In addition, we introduce ANIM-Real, a new multi-modal dataset comprising high-quality scans paired with consumer-grade RGB-D camera, and our protocol to fine-tune ANIM, enabling high-quality reconstruction from real-world human capture.

Dense 3D Displacement Estimation for Landslide Monitoring via Fusion of TLS Point Clouds and Embedded RGB Images

Landslide monitoring is essential for understanding geohazards and mitigating associated risks. However, existing point cloud-based methods typically rely on either geometric or radiometric information and often yield sparse or non-3D displacement estimates. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical partition-based coarse-to-fine approach that fuses 3D point clouds and co-registered RGB images to estimate dense 3D displacement vector fields. We construct patch-level matches using both 3D geometry and 2D image features. These matches are refined via geometric consistency checks, followed by rigid transformation estimation per match. Experimental results on two real-world landslide datasets demonstrate that our method produces 3D displacement estimates with high spatial coverage (79% and 97%) and high accuracy. Deviations in displacement magnitude with respect to external measurements (total station or GNSS observations) are 0.15 m and 0.25 m on the two datasets, respectively, and only 0.07 m and 0.20 m compared to manually derived references. These values are below the average scan resolutions (0.08 m and 0.30 m). Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method F2S3 in spatial coverage while maintaining comparable accuracy. Our approach offers a practical and adaptable solution for TLS-based landslide monitoring and is extensible to other types of point clouds and monitoring tasks. Our example data and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/zhaoyiww/fusion4landslide.

Unveiling the Potential of Segment Anything Model 2 for RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation with Language Guidance

The perception capability of robotic systems relies on the richness of the dataset. Although Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), trained on large datasets, demonstrates strong perception potential in perception tasks, its inherent training paradigm prevents it from being suitable for RGB-T tasks. To address these challenges, we propose SHIFNet, a novel SAM2-driven Hybrid Interaction Paradigm that unlocks the potential of SAM2 with linguistic guidance for efficient RGB-Thermal perception. Our framework consists of two key components: (1) Semantic-Aware Cross-modal Fusion (SACF) module that dynamically balances modality contributions through text-guided affinity learning, overcoming SAM2's inherent RGB bias; (2) Heterogeneous Prompting Decoder (HPD) that enhances global semantic information through a semantic enhancement module and then combined with category embeddings to amplify cross-modal semantic consistency. With 32.27M trainable parameters, SHIFNet achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance on public benchmarks, reaching 89.8% on PST900 and 67.8% on FMB, respectively. The framework facilitates the adaptation of pre-trained large models to RGB-T segmentation tasks, effectively mitigating the high costs associated with data collection while endowing robotic systems with comprehensive perception capabilities. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/iAsakiT3T/SHIFNet.

XNect: Real-time Multi-Person 3D Motion Capture with a Single RGB Camera

We present a real-time approach for multi-person 3D motion capture at over 30 fps using a single RGB camera. It operates successfully in generic scenes which may contain occlusions by objects and by other people. Our method operates in subsequent stages. The first stage is a convolutional neural network (CNN) that estimates 2D and 3D pose features along with identity assignments for all visible joints of all individuals.We contribute a new architecture for this CNN, called SelecSLS Net, that uses novel selective long and short range skip connections to improve the information flow allowing for a drastically faster network without compromising accuracy. In the second stage, a fully connected neural network turns the possibly partial (on account of occlusion) 2Dpose and 3Dpose features for each subject into a complete 3Dpose estimate per individual. The third stage applies space-time skeletal model fitting to the predicted 2D and 3D pose per subject to further reconcile the 2D and 3D pose, and enforce temporal coherence. Our method returns the full skeletal pose in joint angles for each subject. This is a further key distinction from previous work that do not produce joint angle results of a coherent skeleton in real time for multi-person scenes. The proposed system runs on consumer hardware at a previously unseen speed of more than 30 fps given 512x320 images as input while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy, which we will demonstrate on a range of challenging real-world scenes.

ChildPlay-Hand: A Dataset of Hand Manipulations in the Wild

Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) is gaining significant attention, particularly with the creation of numerous egocentric datasets driven by AR/VR applications. However, third-person view HOI has received less attention, especially in terms of datasets. Most third-person view datasets are curated for action recognition tasks and feature pre-segmented clips of high-level daily activities, leaving a gap for in-the-wild datasets. To address this gap, we propose ChildPlay-Hand, a novel dataset that includes person and object bounding boxes, as well as manipulation actions. ChildPlay-Hand is unique in: (1) providing per-hand annotations; (2) featuring videos in uncontrolled settings with natural interactions, involving both adults and children; (3) including gaze labels from the ChildPlay-Gaze dataset for joint modeling of manipulations and gaze. The manipulation actions cover the main stages of an HOI cycle, such as grasping, holding or operating, and different types of releasing. To illustrate the interest of the dataset, we study two tasks: object in hand detection (OiH), i.e. if a person has an object in their hand, and manipulation stages (ManiS), which is more fine-grained and targets the main stages of manipulation. We benchmark various spatio-temporal and segmentation networks, exploring body vs. hand-region information and comparing pose and RGB modalities. Our findings suggest that ChildPlay-Hand is a challenging new benchmark for modeling HOI in the wild.

DEYOLO: Dual-Feature-Enhancement YOLO for Cross-Modality Object Detection

Object detection in poor-illumination environments is a challenging task as objects are usually not clearly visible in RGB images. As infrared images provide additional clear edge information that complements RGB images, fusing RGB and infrared images has potential to enhance the detection ability in poor-illumination environments. However, existing works involving both visible and infrared images only focus on image fusion, instead of object detection. Moreover, they directly fuse the two kinds of image modalities, which ignores the mutual interference between them. To fuse the two modalities to maximize the advantages of cross-modality, we design a dual-enhancement-based cross-modality object detection network DEYOLO, in which semantic-spatial cross modality and novel bi-directional decoupled focus modules are designed to achieve the detection-centered mutual enhancement of RGB-infrared (RGB-IR). Specifically, a dual semantic enhancing channel weight assignment module (DECA) and a dual spatial enhancing pixel weight assignment module (DEPA) are firstly proposed to aggregate cross-modality information in the feature space to improve the feature representation ability, such that feature fusion can aim at the object detection task. Meanwhile, a dual-enhancement mechanism, including enhancements for two-modality fusion and single modality, is designed in both DECAand DEPAto reduce interference between the two kinds of image modalities. Then, a novel bi-directional decoupled focus is developed to enlarge the receptive field of the backbone network in different directions, which improves the representation quality of DEYOLO. Extensive experiments on M3FD and LLVIP show that our approach outperforms SOTA object detection algorithms by a clear margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/chips96/DEYOLO.

Multimodal Deep Models for Predicting Affective Responses Evoked by Movies

The goal of this study is to develop and analyze multimodal models for predicting experienced affective responses of viewers watching movie clips. We develop hybrid multimodal prediction models based on both the video and audio of the clips. For the video content, we hypothesize that both image content and motion are crucial features for evoked emotion prediction. To capture such information, we extract features from RGB frames and optical flow using pre-trained neural networks. For the audio model, we compute an enhanced set of low-level descriptors including intensity, loudness, cepstrum, linear predictor coefficients, pitch and voice quality. Both visual and audio features are then concatenated to create audio-visual features, which are used to predict the evoked emotion. To classify the movie clips into the corresponding affective response categories, we propose two approaches based on deep neural network models. The first one is based on fully connected layers without memory on the time component, the second incorporates the sequential dependency with a long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM). We perform a thorough analysis of the importance of each feature set. Our experiments reveal that in our set-up, predicting emotions at each time step independently gives slightly better accuracy performance than with the LSTM. Interestingly, we also observe that the optical flow is more informative than the RGB in videos, and overall, models using audio features are more accurate than those based on video features when making the final prediction of evoked emotions.

4D-VLA: Spatiotemporal Vision-Language-Action Pretraining with Cross-Scene Calibration

Leveraging diverse robotic data for pretraining remains a critical challenge. Existing methods typically model the dataset's action distribution using simple observations as inputs. However, these inputs are often incomplete, resulting in a dispersed conditional action distribution-an issue we refer to as coordinate system chaos and state chaos. This inconsistency significantly hampers pretraining efficiency. To address this, we propose 4D-VLA, a novel approach that effectively integrates 4D information into the input to mitigate these sources of chaos. Our model introduces depth and temporal information into visual features with sequential RGB-D inputs, aligning the coordinate systems of the robot and the scene. This alignment endows the model with strong spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities while minimizing training overhead. Additionally, we introduce memory bank sampling, a frame sampling strategy designed to extract informative frames from historical images, further improving effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our pretraining method and architectural components substantially enhance model performance. In both simulated and real-world experiments, our model achieves a significant increase in success rate over OpenVLA. To further assess spatial perception and generalization to novel views, we introduce MV-Bench, a multi-view simulation benchmark. Our model consistently outperforms existing methods, demonstrating stronger spatial understanding and adaptability.

Colors See Colors Ignore: Clothes Changing ReID with Color Disentanglement

Clothes-Changing Re-Identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals across different locations and times, irrespective of clothing. Existing methods often rely on additional models or annotations to learn robust, clothing-invariant features, making them resource-intensive. In contrast, we explore the use of color - specifically foreground and background colors - as a lightweight, annotation-free proxy for mitigating appearance bias in ReID models. We propose Colors See, Colors Ignore (CSCI), an RGB-only method that leverages color information directly from raw images or video frames. CSCI efficiently captures color-related appearance bias ('Color See') while disentangling it from identity-relevant ReID features ('Color Ignore'). To achieve this, we introduce S2A self-attention, a novel self-attention to prevent information leak between color and identity cues within the feature space. Our analysis shows a strong correspondence between learned color embeddings and clothing attributes, validating color as an effective proxy when explicit clothing labels are unavailable. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CSCI on both image and video ReID with extensive experiments on four CC-ReID datasets. We improve the baseline by Top-1 2.9% on LTCC and 5.0% on PRCC for image-based ReID, and 1.0% on CCVID and 2.5% on MeVID for video-based ReID without relying on additional supervision. Our results highlight the potential of color as a cost-effective solution for addressing appearance bias in CC-ReID. Github: https://github.com/ppriyank/ICCV-CSCI-Person-ReID.

RoboMIND: Benchmark on Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulation

Developing robust and general-purpose robotic manipulation policies is a key goal in the field of robotics. To achieve effective generalization, it is essential to construct comprehensive datasets that encompass a large number of demonstration trajectories and diverse tasks. Unlike vision or language data that can be collected from the Internet, robotic datasets require detailed observations and manipulation actions, necessitating significant investment in hardware-software infrastructure and human labor. While existing works have focused on assembling various individual robot datasets, there remains a lack of a unified data collection standard and insufficient diversity in tasks, scenarios, and robot types. In this paper, we introduce RoboMIND (Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot manipulation), featuring 55k real-world demonstration trajectories across 279 diverse tasks involving 61 different object classes. RoboMIND is collected through human teleoperation and encompasses comprehensive robotic-related information, including multi-view RGB-D images, proprioceptive robot state information, end effector details, and linguistic task descriptions. To ensure dataset consistency and reliability during policy learning, RoboMIND is built on a unified data collection platform and standardized protocol, covering four distinct robotic embodiments. We provide a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of RoboMIND across multiple dimensions, offering detailed insights into the diversity of our datasets. In our experiments, we conduct extensive real-world testing with four state-of-the-art imitation learning methods, demonstrating that training with RoboMIND data results in a high manipulation success rate and strong generalization. Our project is at https://x-humanoid-robomind.github.io/.

SpikMamba: When SNN meets Mamba in Event-based Human Action Recognition

Human action recognition (HAR) plays a key role in various applications such as video analysis, surveillance, autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. Most HAR algorithms are developed from RGB images, which capture detailed visual information. However, these algorithms raise concerns in privacy-sensitive environments due to the recording of identifiable features. Event cameras offer a promising solution by capturing scene brightness changes sparsely at the pixel level, without capturing full images. Moreover, event cameras have high dynamic ranges that can effectively handle scenarios with complex lighting conditions, such as low light or high contrast environments. However, using event cameras introduces challenges in modeling the spatially sparse and high temporal resolution event data for HAR. To address these issues, we propose the SpikMamba framework, which combines the energy efficiency of spiking neural networks and the long sequence modeling capability of Mamba to efficiently capture global features from spatially sparse and high a temporal resolution event data. Additionally, to improve the locality of modeling, a spiking window-based linear attention mechanism is used. Extensive experiments show that SpikMamba achieves remarkable recognition performance, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 1.45%, 7.22%, 0.15%, and 3.92% on the PAF, HARDVS, DVS128, and E-FAction datasets, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/Typistchen/SpikMamba.

SpectralGPT: Spectral Foundation Model

The foundation model has recently garnered significant attention due to its potential to revolutionize the field of visual representation learning in a self-supervised manner. While most foundation models are tailored to effectively process RGB images for various visual tasks, there is a noticeable gap in research focused on spectral data, which offers valuable information for scene understanding, especially in remote sensing (RS) applications. To fill this gap, we created for the first time a universal RS foundation model, named SpectralGPT, which is purpose-built to handle spectral RS images using a novel 3D generative pretrained transformer (GPT). Compared to existing foundation models, SpectralGPT 1) accommodates input images with varying sizes, resolutions, time series, and regions in a progressive training fashion, enabling full utilization of extensive RS big data; 2) leverages 3D token generation for spatial-spectral coupling; 3) captures spectrally sequential patterns via multi-target reconstruction; 4) trains on one million spectral RS images, yielding models with over 600 million parameters. Our evaluation highlights significant performance improvements with pretrained SpectralGPT models, signifying substantial potential in advancing spectral RS big data applications within the field of geoscience across four downstream tasks: single/multi-label scene classification, semantic segmentation, and change detection.

Treating Motion as Option with Output Selection for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation

Unsupervised video object segmentation (VOS) is a task that aims to detect the most salient object in a video without external guidance about the object. To leverage the property that salient objects usually have distinctive movements compared to the background, recent methods collaboratively use motion cues extracted from optical flow maps with appearance cues extracted from RGB images. However, as optical flow maps are usually very relevant to segmentation masks, the network is easy to be learned overly dependent on the motion cues during network training. As a result, such two-stream approaches are vulnerable to confusing motion cues, making their prediction unstable. To relieve this issue, we design a novel motion-as-option network by treating motion cues as optional. During network training, RGB images are randomly provided to the motion encoder instead of optical flow maps, to implicitly reduce motion dependency of the network. As the learned motion encoder can deal with both RGB images and optical flow maps, two different predictions can be generated depending on which source information is used as motion input. In order to fully exploit this property, we also propose an adaptive output selection algorithm to adopt optimal prediction result at test time. Our proposed approach affords state-of-the-art performance on all public benchmark datasets, even maintaining real-time inference speed.

Masked Attribute Description Embedding for Cloth-Changing Person Re-identification

Cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to match persons who change clothes over long periods. The key challenge in CC-ReID is to extract clothing-independent features, such as face, hairstyle, body shape, and gait. Current research mainly focuses on modeling body shape using multi-modal biological features (such as silhouettes and sketches). However, it does not fully leverage the personal description information hidden in the original RGB image. Considering that there are certain attribute descriptions which remain unchanged after the changing of cloth, we propose a Masked Attribute Description Embedding (MADE) method that unifies personal visual appearance and attribute description for CC-ReID. Specifically, handling variable clothing-sensitive information, such as color and type, is challenging for effective modeling. To address this, we mask the clothing and color information in the personal attribute description extracted through an attribute detection model. The masked attribute description is then connected and embedded into Transformer blocks at various levels, fusing it with the low-level to high-level features of the image. This approach compels the model to discard clothing information. Experiments are conducted on several CC-ReID benchmarks, including PRCC, LTCC, Celeb-reID-light, and LaST. Results demonstrate that MADE effectively utilizes attribute description, enhancing cloth-changing person re-identification performance, and compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/moon-wh/MADE.

LPA3D: 3D Room-Level Scene Generation from In-the-Wild Images

Generating realistic, room-level indoor scenes with semantically plausible and detailed appearances from in-the-wild images is crucial for various applications in VR, AR, and robotics. The success of NeRF-based generative methods indicates a promising direction to address this challenge. However, unlike their success at the object level, existing scene-level generative methods require additional information, such as multiple views, depth images, or semantic guidance, rather than relying solely on RGB images. This is because NeRF-based methods necessitate prior knowledge of camera poses, which is challenging to approximate for indoor scenes due to the complexity of defining alignment and the difficulty of globally estimating poses from a single image, given the unseen parts behind the camera. To address this challenge, we redefine global poses within the framework of Local-Pose-Alignment (LPA) -- an anchor-based multi-local-coordinate system that uses a selected number of anchors as the roots of these coordinates. Building on this foundation, we introduce LPA-GAN, a novel NeRF-based generative approach that incorporates specific modifications to estimate the priors of camera poses under LPA. It also co-optimizes the pose predictor and scene generation processes. Our ablation study and comparisons with straightforward extensions of NeRF-based object generative methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, visual comparisons with other techniques reveal that our method achieves superior view-to-view consistency and semantic normality.

NeRF in the Palm of Your Hand: Corrective Augmentation for Robotics via Novel-View Synthesis

Expert demonstrations are a rich source of supervision for training visual robotic manipulation policies, but imitation learning methods often require either a large number of demonstrations or expensive online expert supervision to learn reactive closed-loop behaviors. In this work, we introduce SPARTN (Synthetic Perturbations for Augmenting Robot Trajectories via NeRF): a fully-offline data augmentation scheme for improving robot policies that use eye-in-hand cameras. Our approach leverages neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to synthetically inject corrective noise into visual demonstrations, using NeRFs to generate perturbed viewpoints while simultaneously calculating the corrective actions. This requires no additional expert supervision or environment interaction, and distills the geometric information in NeRFs into a real-time reactive RGB-only policy. In a simulated 6-DoF visual grasping benchmark, SPARTN improves success rates by 2.8times over imitation learning without the corrective augmentations and even outperforms some methods that use online supervision. It additionally closes the gap between RGB-only and RGB-D success rates, eliminating the previous need for depth sensors. In real-world 6-DoF robotic grasping experiments from limited human demonstrations, our method improves absolute success rates by 22.5% on average, including objects that are traditionally challenging for depth-based methods. See video results at https://bland.website/spartn.

Occlusion-Aware Self-Supervised Monocular 6D Object Pose Estimation

6D object pose estimation is a fundamental yet challenging problem in computer vision. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently proven to be capable of predicting reliable 6D pose estimates even under monocular settings. Nonetheless, CNNs are identified as being extremely data-driven, and acquiring adequate annotations is oftentimes very time-consuming and labor intensive. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel monocular 6D pose estimation approach by means of self-supervised learning, removing the need for real annotations. After training our proposed network fully supervised with synthetic RGB data, we leverage current trends in noisy student training and differentiable rendering to further self-supervise the model on these unsupervised real RGB(-D) samples, seeking for a visually and geometrically optimal alignment. Moreover, employing both visible and amodal mask information, our self-supervision becomes very robust towards challenging scenarios such as occlusion. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our proposed self-supervision outperforms all other methods relying on synthetic data or employing elaborate techniques from the domain adaptation realm. Noteworthy, our self-supervised approach consistently improves over its synthetically trained baseline and often almost closes the gap towards its fully supervised counterpart. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/THU-DA-6D-Pose-Group/self6dpp.git.

ODIN: A Single Model for 2D and 3D Perception

State-of-the-art models on contemporary 3D perception benchmarks like ScanNet consume and label dataset-provided 3D point clouds, obtained through post processing of sensed multiview RGB-D images. They are typically trained in-domain, forego large-scale 2D pre-training and outperform alternatives that featurize the posed RGB-D multiview images instead. The gap in performance between methods that consume posed images versus post-processed 3D point clouds has fueled the belief that 2D and 3D perception require distinct model architectures. In this paper, we challenge this view and propose ODIN (Omni-Dimensional INstance segmentation), a model that can segment and label both 2D RGB images and 3D point clouds, using a transformer architecture that alternates between 2D within-view and 3D cross-view information fusion. Our model differentiates 2D and 3D feature operations through the positional encodings of the tokens involved, which capture pixel coordinates for 2D patch tokens and 3D coordinates for 3D feature tokens. ODIN achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet200, Matterport3D and AI2THOR 3D instance segmentation benchmarks, and competitive performance on ScanNet, S3DIS and COCO. It outperforms all previous works by a wide margin when the sensed 3D point cloud is used in place of the point cloud sampled from 3D mesh. When used as the 3D perception engine in an instructable embodied agent architecture, it sets a new state-of-the-art on the TEACh action-from-dialogue benchmark. Our code and checkpoints can be found at the project website: https://odin-seg.github.io.

ChAda-ViT : Channel Adaptive Attention for Joint Representation Learning of Heterogeneous Microscopy Images

Unlike color photography images, which are consistently encoded into RGB channels, biological images encompass various modalities, where the type of microscopy and the meaning of each channel varies with each experiment. Importantly, the number of channels can range from one to a dozen and their correlation is often comparatively much lower than RGB, as each of them brings specific information content. This aspect is largely overlooked by methods designed out of the bioimage field, and current solutions mostly focus on intra-channel spatial attention, often ignoring the relationship between channels, yet crucial in most biological applications. Importantly, the variable channel type and count prevent the projection of several experiments to a unified representation for large scale pre-training. In this study, we propose ChAda-ViT, a novel Channel Adaptive Vision Transformer architecture employing an Inter-Channel Attention mechanism on images with an arbitrary number, order and type of channels. We also introduce IDRCell100k, a bioimage dataset with a rich set of 79 experiments covering 7 microscope modalities, with a multitude of channel types, and channel counts varying from 1 to 10 per experiment. Our proposed architecture, trained in a self-supervised manner, outperforms existing approaches in several biologically relevant downstream tasks. Additionally, it can be used to bridge the gap for the first time between assays with different microscopes, channel numbers or types by embedding various image and experimental modalities into a unified biological image representation. The latter should facilitate interdisciplinary studies and pave the way for better adoption of deep learning in biological image-based analyses. Code and Data to be released soon.

Spherical Space Feature Decomposition for Guided Depth Map Super-Resolution

Guided depth map super-resolution (GDSR), as a hot topic in multi-modal image processing, aims to upsample low-resolution (LR) depth maps with additional information involved in high-resolution (HR) RGB images from the same scene. The critical step of this task is to effectively extract domain-shared and domain-private RGB/depth features. In addition, three detailed issues, namely blurry edges, noisy surfaces, and over-transferred RGB texture, need to be addressed. In this paper, we propose the Spherical Space feature Decomposition Network (SSDNet) to solve the above issues. To better model cross-modality features, Restormer block-based RGB/depth encoders are employed for extracting local-global features. Then, the extracted features are mapped to the spherical space to complete the separation of private features and the alignment of shared features. Shared features of RGB are fused with the depth features to complete the GDSR task. Subsequently, a spherical contrast refinement (SCR) module is proposed to further address the detail issues. Patches that are classified according to imperfect categories are input into the SCR module, where the patch features are pulled closer to the ground truth and pushed away from the corresponding imperfect samples in the spherical feature space via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results on four test datasets, as well as successfully generalize to real-world scenes. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhaozixiang1228/GDSR-SSDNet.

Visual Speech-Aware Perceptual 3D Facial Expression Reconstruction from Videos

The recent state of the art on monocular 3D face reconstruction from image data has made some impressive advancements, thanks to the advent of Deep Learning. However, it has mostly focused on input coming from a single RGB image, overlooking the following important factors: a) Nowadays, the vast majority of facial image data of interest do not originate from single images but rather from videos, which contain rich dynamic information. b) Furthermore, these videos typically capture individuals in some form of verbal communication (public talks, teleconferences, audiovisual human-computer interactions, interviews, monologues/dialogues in movies, etc). When existing 3D face reconstruction methods are applied in such videos, the artifacts in the reconstruction of the shape and motion of the mouth area are often severe, since they do not match well with the speech audio. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we present the first method for visual speech-aware perceptual reconstruction of 3D mouth expressions. We do this by proposing a "lipread" loss, which guides the fitting process so that the elicited perception from the 3D reconstructed talking head resembles that of the original video footage. We demonstrate that, interestingly, the lipread loss is better suited for 3D reconstruction of mouth movements compared to traditional landmark losses, and even direct 3D supervision. Furthermore, the devised method does not rely on any text transcriptions or corresponding audio, rendering it ideal for training in unlabeled datasets. We verify the efficiency of our method through exhaustive objective evaluations on three large-scale datasets, as well as subjective evaluation with two web-based user studies.

Name Your Colour For the Task: Artificially Discover Colour Naming via Colour Quantisation Transformer

The long-standing theory that a colour-naming system evolves under dual pressure of efficient communication and perceptual mechanism is supported by more and more linguistic studies, including analysing four decades of diachronic data from the Nafaanra language. This inspires us to explore whether machine learning could evolve and discover a similar colour-naming system via optimising the communication efficiency represented by high-level recognition performance. Here, we propose a novel colour quantisation transformer, CQFormer, that quantises colour space while maintaining the accuracy of machine recognition on the quantised images. Given an RGB image, Annotation Branch maps it into an index map before generating the quantised image with a colour palette; meanwhile the Palette Branch utilises a key-point detection way to find proper colours in the palette among the whole colour space. By interacting with colour annotation, CQFormer is able to balance both the machine vision accuracy and colour perceptual structure such as distinct and stable colour distribution for discovered colour system. Very interestingly, we even observe the consistent evolution pattern between our artificial colour system and basic colour terms across human languages. Besides, our colour quantisation method also offers an efficient quantisation method that effectively compresses the image storage while maintaining high performance in high-level recognition tasks such as classification and detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method with extremely low bit-rate colours, showing potential to integrate into quantisation network to quantities from image to network activation. The source code is available at https://github.com/ryeocthiv/CQFormer

ColorBench: Can VLMs See and Understand the Colorful World? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Color Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness

Color plays an important role in human perception and usually provides critical clues in visual reasoning. However, it is unclear whether and how vision-language models (VLMs) can perceive, understand, and leverage color as humans. This paper introduces ColorBench, an innovative benchmark meticulously crafted to assess the capabilities of VLMs in color understanding, including color perception, reasoning, and robustness. By curating a suite of diverse test scenarios, with grounding in real applications, ColorBench evaluates how these models perceive colors, infer meanings from color-based cues, and maintain consistent performance under varying color transformations. Through an extensive evaluation of 32 VLMs with varying language models and vision encoders, our paper reveals some undiscovered findings: (i) The scaling law (larger models are better) still holds on ColorBench, while the language model plays a more important role than the vision encoder. (ii) However, the performance gaps across models are relatively small, indicating that color understanding has been largely neglected by existing VLMs. (iii) CoT reasoning improves color understanding accuracies and robustness, though they are vision-centric tasks. (iv) Color clues are indeed leveraged by VLMs on ColorBench but they can also mislead models in some tasks. These findings highlight the critical limitations of current VLMs and underscore the need to enhance color comprehension. Our ColorBenchcan serve as a foundational tool for advancing the study of human-level color understanding of multimodal AI.

3DRealCar: An In-the-wild RGB-D Car Dataset with 360-degree Views

3D cars are commonly used in self-driving systems, virtual/augmented reality, and games. However, existing 3D car datasets are either synthetic or low-quality, presenting a significant gap toward the high-quality real-world 3D car datasets and limiting their applications in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose the first large-scale 3D real car dataset, termed 3DRealCar, offering three distinctive features. (1) High-Volume: 2,500 cars are meticulously scanned by 3D scanners, obtaining car images and point clouds with real-world dimensions; (2) High-Quality: Each car is captured in an average of 200 dense, high-resolution 360-degree RGB-D views, enabling high-fidelity 3D reconstruction; (3) High-Diversity: The dataset contains various cars from over 100 brands, collected under three distinct lighting conditions, including reflective, standard, and dark. Additionally, we offer detailed car parsing maps for each instance to promote research in car parsing tasks. Moreover, we remove background point clouds and standardize the car orientation to a unified axis for the reconstruction only on cars without background and controllable rendering. We benchmark 3D reconstruction results with state-of-the-art methods across each lighting condition in 3DRealCar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the standard lighting condition part of 3DRealCar can be used to produce a large number of high-quality 3D cars, improving various 2D and 3D tasks related to cars. Notably, our dataset brings insight into the fact that recent 3D reconstruction methods face challenges in reconstructing high-quality 3D cars under reflective and dark lighting conditions. red{https://xiaobiaodu.github.io/3drealcar/{Our dataset is available here.}}

ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data

Scene understanding is an active research area. Commercial depth sensors, such as Kinect, have enabled the release of several RGB-D datasets over the past few years which spawned novel methods in 3D scene understanding. More recently with the launch of the LiDAR sensor in Apple's iPads and iPhones, high quality RGB-D data is accessible to millions of people on a device they commonly use. This opens a whole new era in scene understanding for the Computer Vision community as well as app developers. The fundamental research in scene understanding together with the advances in machine learning can now impact people's everyday experiences. However, transforming these scene understanding methods to real-world experiences requires additional innovation and development. In this paper we introduce ARKitScenes. It is not only the first RGB-D dataset that is captured with a now widely available depth sensor, but to our best knowledge, it also is the largest indoor scene understanding data released. In addition to the raw and processed data from the mobile device, ARKitScenes includes high resolution depth maps captured using a stationary laser scanner, as well as manually labeled 3D oriented bounding boxes for a large taxonomy of furniture. We further analyze the usefulness of the data for two downstream tasks: 3D object detection and color-guided depth upsampling. We demonstrate that our dataset can help push the boundaries of existing state-of-the-art methods and it introduces new challenges that better represent real-world scenarios.

UniRGB-IR: A Unified Framework for RGB-Infrared Semantic Tasks via Adapter Tuning

Semantic analysis on visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) images has gained attention for its ability to be more accurate and robust under low-illumination and complex weather conditions. Due to the lack of pre-trained foundation models on the large-scale infrared image datasets, existing methods prefer to design task-specific frameworks and directly fine-tune them with pre-trained foundation models on their RGB-IR semantic relevance datasets, which results in poor scalability and limited generalization. In this work, we propose a general and efficient framework called UniRGB-IR to unify RGB-IR semantic tasks, in which a novel adapter is developed to efficiently introduce richer RGB-IR features into the pre-trained RGB-based foundation model. Specifically, our framework consists of a RGB-based foundation model, a Multi-modal Feature Pool (MFP) module and a Supplementary Feature Injector (SFI) module. The MFP and SFI modules cooperate with each other as an adapter to effectively complement the RGB-based features with the rich RGB-IR features. During training process, we freeze the entire foundation model to inherit prior knowledge and only optimize the proposed adapter. Furthermore, to verify the effectiveness of our framework, we utilize the vanilla vision transformer (ViT-Base) as the pre-trained foundation model to perform extensive experiments. Experimental results on various RGB-IR downstream tasks demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance. The source code and results are available at https://github.com/PoTsui99/UniRGB-IR.git.

Fast Training Data Acquisition for Object Detection and Segmentation using Black Screen Luminance Keying

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) require large amounts of annotated training data for a good performance. Often this data is generated using manual labeling (error-prone and time-consuming) or rendering (requiring geometry and material information). Both approaches make it difficult or uneconomic to apply them to many small-scale applications. A fast and straightforward approach of acquiring the necessary training data would allow the adoption of deep learning to even the smallest of applications. Chroma keying is the process of replacing a color (usually blue or green) with another background. Instead of chroma keying, we propose luminance keying for fast and straightforward training image acquisition. We deploy a black screen with high light absorption (99.99\%) to record roughly 1-minute long videos of our target objects, circumventing typical problems of chroma keying, such as color bleeding or color overlap between background color and object color. Next we automatically mask our objects using simple brightness thresholding, saving the need for manual annotation. Finally, we automatically place the objects on random backgrounds and train a 2D object detector. We do extensive evaluation of the performance on the widely-used YCB-V object set and compare favourably to other conventional techniques such as rendering, without needing 3D meshes, materials or any other information of our target objects and in a fraction of the time needed for other approaches. Our work demonstrates highly accurate training data acquisition allowing to start training state-of-the-art networks within minutes.

Paint Bucket Colorization Using Anime Character Color Design Sheets

Line art colorization plays a crucial role in hand-drawn animation production, where digital artists manually colorize segments using a paint bucket tool, guided by RGB values from character color design sheets. This process, often called paint bucket colorization, involves two main tasks: keyframe colorization, where colors are applied according to the character's color design sheet, and consecutive frame colorization, where these colors are replicated across adjacent frames. Current automated colorization methods primarily focus on reference-based and segment-matching approaches. However, reference-based methods often fail to accurately assign specific colors to each region, while matching-based methods are limited to consecutive frame colorization and struggle with issues like significant deformation and occlusion. In this work, we introduce inclusion matching, which allows the network to understand the inclusion relationships between segments, rather than relying solely on direct visual correspondences. By integrating this approach with segment parsing and color warping modules, our inclusion matching pipeline significantly improves performance in both keyframe colorization and consecutive frame colorization. To support our network's training, we have developed a unique dataset named PaintBucket-Character, which includes rendered line arts alongside their colorized versions and shading annotations for various 3D characters. To replicate industry animation data formats, we also created color design sheets for each character, with semantic information for each color and standard pose reference images. Experiments highlight the superiority of our method, demonstrating accurate and consistent colorization across both our proposed benchmarks and hand-drawn animations.

Color Matching Using Hypernetwork-Based Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

We present cmKAN, a versatile framework for color matching. Given an input image with colors from a source color distribution, our method effectively and accurately maps these colors to match a target color distribution in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Our framework leverages the spline capabilities of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to model the color matching between source and target distributions. Specifically, we developed a hypernetwork that generates spatially varying weight maps to control the nonlinear splines of a KAN, enabling accurate color matching. As part of this work, we introduce a first large-scale dataset of paired images captured by two distinct cameras and evaluate the efficacy of our and existing methods in matching colors. We evaluated our approach across various color-matching tasks, including: (1) raw-to-raw mapping, where the source color distribution is in one camera's raw color space and the target in another camera's raw space; (2) raw-to-sRGB mapping, where the source color distribution is in a camera's raw space and the target is in the display sRGB space, emulating the color rendering of a camera ISP; and (3) sRGB-to-sRGB mapping, where the goal is to transfer colors from a source sRGB space (e.g., produced by a source camera ISP) to a target sRGB space (e.g., from a different camera ISP). The results show that our method outperforms existing approaches by 37.3% on average for supervised and unsupervised cases while remaining lightweight compared to other methods. The codes, dataset, and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/gosha20777/cmKAN

Grounding Task Assistance with Multimodal Cues from a Single Demonstration

A person's demonstration often serves as a key reference for others learning the same task. However, RGB video, the dominant medium for representing these demonstrations, often fails to capture fine-grained contextual cues such as intent, safety-critical environmental factors, and subtle preferences embedded in human behavior. This sensory gap fundamentally limits the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to reason about why actions occur and how they should adapt to individual users. To address this, we introduce MICA (Multimodal Interactive Contextualized Assistance), a framework that improves conversational agents for task assistance by integrating eye gaze and speech cues. MICA segments demonstrations into meaningful sub-tasks and extracts keyframes and captions that capture fine-grained intent and user-specific cues, enabling richer contextual grounding for visual question answering. Evaluations on questions derived from real-time chat-assisted task replication show that multimodal cues significantly improve response quality over frame-based retrieval. Notably, gaze cues alone achieves 93% of speech performance, and their combination yields the highest accuracy. Task type determines the effectiveness of implicit (gaze) vs. explicit (speech) cues, underscoring the need for adaptable multimodal models. These results highlight the limitations of frame-based context and demonstrate the value of multimodal signals for real-world AI task assistance.

The Audio-Visual BatVision Dataset for Research on Sight and Sound

Vision research showed remarkable success in understanding our world, propelled by datasets of images and videos. Sensor data from radar, LiDAR and cameras supports research in robotics and autonomous driving for at least a decade. However, while visual sensors may fail in some conditions, sound has recently shown potential to complement sensor data. Simulated room impulse responses (RIR) in 3D apartment-models became a benchmark dataset for the community, fostering a range of audiovisual research. In simulation, depth is predictable from sound, by learning bat-like perception with a neural network. Concurrently, the same was achieved in reality by using RGB-D images and echoes of chirping sounds. Biomimicking bat perception is an exciting new direction but needs dedicated datasets to explore the potential. Therefore, we collected the BatVision dataset to provide large-scale echoes in complex real-world scenes to the community. We equipped a robot with a speaker to emit chirps and a binaural microphone to record their echoes. Synchronized RGB-D images from the same perspective provide visual labels of traversed spaces. We sampled modern US office spaces to historic French university grounds, indoor and outdoor with large architectural variety. This dataset will allow research on robot echolocation, general audio-visual tasks and sound ph{\ae}nomena unavailable in simulated data. We show promising results for audio-only depth prediction and show how state-of-the-art work developed for simulated data can also succeed on our dataset. Project page: https://amandinebtto.github.io/Batvision-Dataset/

PCB-Vision: A Multiscene RGB-Hyperspectral Benchmark Dataset of Printed Circuit Boards

Addressing the critical theme of recycling electronic waste (E-waste), this contribution is dedicated to developing advanced automated data processing pipelines as a basis for decision-making and process control. Aligning with the broader goals of the circular economy and the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), our work leverages non-invasive analysis methods utilizing RGB and hyperspectral imaging data to provide both quantitative and qualitative insights into the E-waste stream composition for optimizing recycling efficiency. In this paper, we introduce 'PCB-Vision'; a pioneering RGB-hyperspectral printed circuit board (PCB) benchmark dataset, comprising 53 RGB images of high spatial resolution paired with their corresponding high spectral resolution hyperspectral data cubes in the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) range. Grounded in open science principles, our dataset provides a comprehensive resource for researchers through high-quality ground truths, focusing on three primary PCB components: integrated circuits (IC), capacitors, and connectors. We provide extensive statistical investigations on the proposed dataset together with the performance of several state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, including U-Net, Attention U-Net, Residual U-Net, LinkNet, and DeepLabv3+. By openly sharing this multi-scene benchmark dataset along with the baseline codes, we hope to foster transparent, traceable, and comparable developments of advanced data processing across various scientific communities, including, but not limited to, computer vision and remote sensing. Emphasizing our commitment to supporting a collaborative and inclusive scientific community, all materials, including code, data, ground truth, and masks, will be accessible at https://github.com/hifexplo/PCBVision.

Robotic Visual Instruction

Recently, natural language has been the primary medium for human-robot interaction. However, its inherent lack of spatial precision introduces challenges for robotic task definition such as ambiguity and verbosity. Moreover, in some public settings where quiet is required, such as libraries or hospitals, verbal communication with robots is inappropriate. To address these limitations, we introduce the Robotic Visual Instruction (RoVI), a novel paradigm to guide robotic tasks through an object-centric, hand-drawn symbolic representation. RoVI effectively encodes spatial-temporal information into human-interpretable visual instructions through 2D sketches, utilizing arrows, circles, colors, and numbers to direct 3D robotic manipulation. To enable robots to understand RoVI better and generate precise actions based on RoVI, we present Visual Instruction Embodied Workflow (VIEW), a pipeline formulated for RoVI-conditioned policies. This approach leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interpret RoVI inputs, decode spatial and temporal constraints from 2D pixel space via keypoint extraction, and then transform them into executable 3D action sequences. We additionally curate a specialized dataset of 15K instances to fine-tune small VLMs for edge deployment,enabling them to effectively learn RoVI capabilities. Our approach is rigorously validated across 11 novel tasks in both real and simulated environments, demonstrating significant generalization capability. Notably, VIEW achieves an 87.5% success rate in real-world scenarios involving unseen tasks that feature multi-step actions, with disturbances, and trajectory-following requirements. Project website: https://robotic-visual-instruction.github.io/

Beyond the Pixel: a Photometrically Calibrated HDR Dataset for Luminance and Color Prediction

Light plays an important role in human well-being. However, most computer vision tasks treat pixels without considering their relationship to physical luminance. To address this shortcoming, we introduce the Laval Photometric Indoor HDR Dataset, the first large-scale photometrically calibrated dataset of high dynamic range 360{\deg} panoramas. Our key contribution is the calibration of an existing, uncalibrated HDR Dataset. We do so by accurately capturing RAW bracketed exposures simultaneously with a professional photometric measurement device (chroma meter) for multiple scenes across a variety of lighting conditions. Using the resulting measurements, we establish the calibration coefficients to be applied to the HDR images. The resulting dataset is a rich representation of indoor scenes which displays a wide range of illuminance and color, and varied types of light sources. We exploit the dataset to introduce three novel tasks, where: per-pixel luminance, per-pixel color and planar illuminance can be predicted from a single input image. Finally, we also capture another smaller photometric dataset with a commercial 360{\deg} camera, to experiment on generalization across cameras. We are optimistic that the release of our datasets and associated code will spark interest in physically accurate light estimation within the community. Dataset and code are available at https://lvsn.github.io/beyondthepixel/.

ColorFlow: Retrieval-Augmented Image Sequence Colorization

Automatic black-and-white image sequence colorization while preserving character and object identity (ID) is a complex task with significant market demand, such as in cartoon or comic series colorization. Despite advancements in visual colorization using large-scale generative models like diffusion models, challenges with controllability and identity consistency persist, making current solutions unsuitable for industrial application.To address this, we propose ColorFlow, a three-stage diffusion-based framework tailored for image sequence colorization in industrial applications. Unlike existing methods that require per-ID finetuning or explicit ID embedding extraction, we propose a novel robust and generalizable Retrieval Augmented Colorization pipeline for colorizing images with relevant color references. Our pipeline also features a dual-branch design: one branch for color identity extraction and the other for colorization, leveraging the strengths of diffusion models. We utilize the self-attention mechanism in diffusion models for strong in-context learning and color identity matching. To evaluate our model, we introduce ColorFlow-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for reference-based colorization. Results show that ColorFlow outperforms existing models across multiple metrics, setting a new standard in sequential image colorization and potentially benefiting the art industry. We release our codes and models on our project page: https://zhuang2002.github.io/ColorFlow/.

Model-Based Image Signal Processors via Learnable Dictionaries

Digital cameras transform sensor RAW readings into RGB images by means of their Image Signal Processor (ISP). Computational photography tasks such as image denoising and colour constancy are commonly performed in the RAW domain, in part due to the inherent hardware design, but also due to the appealing simplicity of noise statistics that result from the direct sensor readings. Despite this, the availability of RAW images is limited in comparison with the abundance and diversity of available RGB data. Recent approaches have attempted to bridge this gap by estimating the RGB to RAW mapping: handcrafted model-based methods that are interpretable and controllable usually require manual parameter fine-tuning, while end-to-end learnable neural networks require large amounts of training data, at times with complex training procedures, and generally lack interpretability and parametric control. Towards addressing these existing limitations, we present a novel hybrid model-based and data-driven ISP that builds on canonical ISP operations and is both learnable and interpretable. Our proposed invertible model, capable of bidirectional mapping between RAW and RGB domains, employs end-to-end learning of rich parameter representations, i.e. dictionaries, that are free from direct parametric supervision and additionally enable simple and plausible data augmentation. We evidence the value of our data generation process by extensive experiments under both RAW image reconstruction and RAW image denoising tasks, obtaining state-of-the-art performance in both. Additionally, we show that our ISP can learn meaningful mappings from few data samples, and that denoising models trained with our dictionary-based data augmentation are competitive despite having only few or zero ground-truth labels.

ColorizeDiffusion v2: Enhancing Reference-based Sketch Colorization Through Separating Utilities

Reference-based sketch colorization methods have garnered significant attention due to their potential applications in the animation production industry. However, most existing methods are trained with image triplets of sketch, reference, and ground truth that are semantically and spatially well-aligned, while real-world references and sketches often exhibit substantial misalignment. This mismatch in data distribution between training and inference leads to overfitting, consequently resulting in spatial artifacts and significant degradation in overall colorization quality, limiting potential applications of current methods for general purposes. To address this limitation, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the carrier, defined as the latent representation facilitating information transfer from reference to sketch. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel workflow that dynamically adapts the carrier to optimize distinct aspects of colorization. Specifically, for spatially misaligned artifacts, we introduce a split cross-attention mechanism with spatial masks, enabling region-specific reference injection within the diffusion process. To mitigate semantic neglect of sketches, we employ dedicated background and style encoders to transfer detailed reference information in the latent feature space, achieving enhanced spatial control and richer detail synthesis. Furthermore, we propose character-mask merging and background bleaching as preprocessing steps to improve foreground-background integration and background generation. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, including a user study, demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to existing approaches. An ablation study further validates the efficacy of each proposed component.

GalleryGPT: Analyzing Paintings with Large Multimodal Models

Artwork analysis is important and fundamental skill for art appreciation, which could enrich personal aesthetic sensibility and facilitate the critical thinking ability. Understanding artworks is challenging due to its subjective nature, diverse interpretations, and complex visual elements, requiring expertise in art history, cultural background, and aesthetic theory. However, limited by the data collection and model ability, previous works for automatically analyzing artworks mainly focus on classification, retrieval, and other simple tasks, which is far from the goal of AI. To facilitate the research progress, in this paper, we step further to compose comprehensive analysis inspired by the remarkable perception and generation ability of large multimodal models. Specifically, we first propose a task of composing paragraph analysis for artworks, i.e., painting in this paper, only focusing on visual characteristics to formulate more comprehensive understanding of artworks. To support the research on formal analysis, we collect a large dataset PaintingForm, with about 19k painting images and 50k analysis paragraphs. We further introduce a superior large multimodal model for painting analysis composing, dubbed GalleryGPT, which is slightly modified and fine-tuned based on LLaVA architecture leveraging our collected data. We conduct formal analysis generation and zero-shot experiments across several datasets to assess the capacity of our model. The results show remarkable performance improvements comparing with powerful baseline LMMs, demonstrating its superb ability of art analysis and generalization. blue{The codes and model are available at: https://github.com/steven640pixel/GalleryGPT.

Towards Content-based Pixel Retrieval in Revisited Oxford and Paris

This paper introduces the first two pixel retrieval benchmarks. Pixel retrieval is segmented instance retrieval. Like semantic segmentation extends classification to the pixel level, pixel retrieval is an extension of image retrieval and offers information about which pixels are related to the query object. In addition to retrieving images for the given query, it helps users quickly identify the query object in true positive images and exclude false positive images by denoting the correlated pixels. Our user study results show pixel-level annotation can significantly improve the user experience. Compared with semantic and instance segmentation, pixel retrieval requires a fine-grained recognition capability for variable-granularity targets. To this end, we propose pixel retrieval benchmarks named PROxford and PRParis, which are based on the widely used image retrieval datasets, ROxford and RParis. Three professional annotators label 5,942 images with two rounds of double-checking and refinement. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis on the SOTA methods in image search, image matching, detection, segmentation, and dense matching using our pixel retrieval benchmarks. Results show that the pixel retrieval task is challenging to these approaches and distinctive from existing problems, suggesting that further research can advance the content-based pixel-retrieval and thus user search experience. The datasets can be downloaded from https://github.com/anguoyuan/Pixel_retrieval-Segmented_instance_retrieval{this link}.

CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers

Scene understanding based on image segmentation is a crucial component of autonomous vehicles. Pixel-wise semantic segmentation of RGB images can be advanced by exploiting complementary features from the supplementary modality (X-modality). However, covering a wide variety of sensors with a modality-agnostic model remains an unresolved problem due to variations in sensor characteristics among different modalities. Unlike previous modality-specific methods, in this work, we propose a unified fusion framework, CMX, for RGB-X semantic segmentation. To generalize well across different modalities, that often include supplements as well as uncertainties, a unified cross-modal interaction is crucial for modality fusion. Specifically, we design a Cross-Modal Feature Rectification Module (CM-FRM) to calibrate bi-modal features by leveraging the features from one modality to rectify the features of the other modality. With rectified feature pairs, we deploy a Feature Fusion Module (FFM) to perform sufficient exchange of long-range contexts before mixing. To verify CMX, for the first time, we unify five modalities complementary to RGB, i.e., depth, thermal, polarization, event, and LiDAR. Extensive experiments show that CMX generalizes well to diverse multi-modal fusion, achieving state-of-the-art performances on five RGB-Depth benchmarks, as well as RGB-Thermal, RGB-Polarization, and RGB-LiDAR datasets. Besides, to investigate the generalizability to dense-sparse data fusion, we establish an RGB-Event semantic segmentation benchmark based on the EventScape dataset, on which CMX sets the new state-of-the-art. The source code of CMX is publicly available at https://github.com/huaaaliu/RGBX_Semantic_Segmentation.

Modality Translation for Object Detection Adaptation Without Forgetting Prior Knowledge

A common practice in deep learning involves training large neural networks on massive datasets to achieve high accuracy across various domains and tasks. While this approach works well in many application areas, it often fails drastically when processing data from a new modality with a significant distribution shift from the data used to pre-train the model. This paper focuses on adapting a large object detection model trained on RGB images to new data extracted from IR images with a substantial modality shift. We propose Modality Translator (ModTr) as an alternative to the common approach of fine-tuning a large model to the new modality. ModTr adapts the IR input image with a small transformation network trained to directly minimize the detection loss. The original RGB model can then work on the translated inputs without any further changes or fine-tuning to its parameters. Experimental results on translating from IR to RGB images on two well-known datasets show that our simple approach provides detectors that perform comparably or better than standard fine-tuning, without forgetting the knowledge of the original model. This opens the door to a more flexible and efficient service-based detection pipeline, where a unique and unaltered server, such as an RGB detector, runs constantly while being queried by different modalities, such as IR with the corresponding translations model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/heitorrapela/ModTr.

Can Large Language Models Understand Symbolic Graphics Programs?

Assessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is often challenging, in part, because it is hard to find tasks to which they have not been exposed during training. We take one step to address this challenge by turning to a new task: focusing on symbolic graphics programs, which are a popular representation for graphics content that procedurally generates visual data. LLMs have shown exciting promise towards program synthesis, but do they understand symbolic graphics programs? Unlike conventional programs, symbolic graphics programs can be translated to graphics content. Here, we characterize an LLM's understanding of symbolic programs in terms of their ability to answer questions related to the graphics content. This task is challenging as the questions are difficult to answer from the symbolic programs alone -- yet, they would be easy to answer from the corresponding graphics content as we verify through a human experiment. To understand symbolic programs, LLMs may need to possess the ability to imagine how the corresponding graphics content would look without directly accessing the rendered visual content. We use this task to evaluate LLMs by creating a large benchmark for the semantic understanding of symbolic graphics programs. This benchmark is built via program-graphics correspondence, hence requiring minimal human efforts. We evaluate current LLMs on our benchmark to elucidate a preliminary assessment of their ability to reason about visual scenes from programs. We find that this task distinguishes existing LLMs and models considered good at reasoning perform better. Lastly, we introduce Symbolic Instruction Tuning (SIT) to improve this ability. Specifically, we query GPT4-o with questions and images generated by symbolic programs. Such data are then used to finetune an LLM. We also find that SIT data can improve the general instruction following ability of LLMs.

iColoriT: Towards Propagating Local Hint to the Right Region in Interactive Colorization by Leveraging Vision Transformer

Point-interactive image colorization aims to colorize grayscale images when a user provides the colors for specific locations. It is essential for point-interactive colorization methods to appropriately propagate user-provided colors (i.e., user hints) in the entire image to obtain a reasonably colorized image with minimal user effort. However, existing approaches often produce partially colorized results due to the inefficient design of stacking convolutional layers to propagate hints to distant relevant regions. To address this problem, we present iColoriT, a novel point-interactive colorization Vision Transformer capable of propagating user hints to relevant regions, leveraging the global receptive field of Transformers. The self-attention mechanism of Transformers enables iColoriT to selectively colorize relevant regions with only a few local hints. Our approach colorizes images in real-time by utilizing pixel shuffling, an efficient upsampling technique that replaces the decoder architecture. Also, in order to mitigate the artifacts caused by pixel shuffling with large upsampling ratios, we present the local stabilizing layer. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our approach highly outperforms existing methods for point-interactive colorization, producing accurately colorized images with a user's minimal effort. Official codes are available at https://pmh9960.github.io/research/iColoriT

Alfie: Democratising RGBA Image Generation With No $$$

Designs and artworks are ubiquitous across various creative fields, requiring graphic design skills and dedicated software to create compositions that include many graphical elements, such as logos, icons, symbols, and art scenes, which are integral to visual storytelling. Automating the generation of such visual elements improves graphic designers' productivity, democratizes and innovates the creative industry, and helps generate more realistic synthetic data for related tasks. These illustration elements are mostly RGBA images with irregular shapes and cutouts, facilitating blending and scene composition. However, most image generation models are incapable of generating such images and achieving this capability requires expensive computational resources, specific training recipes, or post-processing solutions. In this work, we propose a fully-automated approach for obtaining RGBA illustrations by modifying the inference-time behavior of a pre-trained Diffusion Transformer model, exploiting the prompt-guided controllability and visual quality offered by such models with no additional computational cost. We force the generation of entire subjects without sharp croppings, whose background is easily removed for seamless integration into design projects or artistic scenes. We show with a user study that, in most cases, users prefer our solution over generating and then matting an image, and we show that our generated illustrations yield good results when used as inputs for composite scene generation pipelines. We release the code at https://github.com/aimagelab/Alfie.

Better May Not Be Fairer: A Study on Subgroup Discrepancy in Image Classification

In this paper, we provide 20,000 non-trivial human annotations on popular datasets as a first step to bridge gap to studying how natural semantic spurious features affect image classification, as prior works often study datasets mixing low-level features due to limitations in accessing realistic datasets. We investigate how natural background colors play a role as spurious features by annotating the test sets of CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 into subgroups based on the background color of each image. We name our datasets CIFAR10-B and CIFAR100-B and integrate them with CIFAR-Cs. We find that overall human-level accuracy does not guarantee consistent subgroup performances, and the phenomenon remains even on models pre-trained on ImageNet or after data augmentation (DA). To alleviate this issue, we propose FlowAug, a semantic DA that leverages decoupled semantic representations captured by a pre-trained generative flow. Experimental results show that FlowAug achieves more consistent subgroup results than other types of DA methods on CIFAR10/100 and on CIFAR10/100-C. Additionally, it shows better generalization performance. Furthermore, we propose a generic metric, MacroStd, for studying model robustness to spurious correlations, where we take a macro average on the weighted standard deviations across different classes. We show MacroStd being more predictive of better performances; per our metric, FlowAug demonstrates improvements on subgroup discrepancy. Although this metric is proposed to study our curated datasets, it applies to all datasets that have subgroups or subclasses. Lastly, we also show superior out-of-distribution results on CIFAR10.1.

REVIVE: Regional Visual Representation Matters in Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering

This paper revisits visual representation in knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) and demonstrates that using regional information in a better way can significantly improve the performance. While visual representation is extensively studied in traditional VQA, it is under-explored in knowledge-based VQA even though these two tasks share the common spirit, i.e., rely on visual input to answer the question. Specifically, we observe that in most state-of-the-art knowledge-based VQA methods: 1) visual features are extracted either from the whole image or in a sliding window manner for retrieving knowledge, and the important relationship within/among object regions is neglected; 2) visual features are not well utilized in the final answering model, which is counter-intuitive to some extent. Based on these observations, we propose a new knowledge-based VQA method REVIVE, which tries to utilize the explicit information of object regions not only in the knowledge retrieval stage but also in the answering model. The key motivation is that object regions and inherent relationship are important for knowledge-based VQA. We perform extensive experiments on the standard OK-VQA dataset and achieve new state-of-the-art performance, i.e., 58.0% accuracy, surpassing previous state-of-the-art method by a large margin (+3.6%). We also conduct detailed analysis and show the necessity of regional information in different framework components for knowledge-based VQA. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/yzleroy/REVIVE.

GPT4RoI: Instruction Tuning Large Language Model on Region-of-Interest

Instruction tuning large language model (LLM) on image-text pairs has achieved unprecedented vision-language multimodal abilities. However, their vision-language alignments are only built on image-level, the lack of region-level alignment limits their advancements to fine-grained multimodal understanding. In this paper, we propose instruction tuning on region-of-interest. The key design is to reformulate the bounding box as the format of spatial instruction. The interleaved sequences of visual features extracted by the spatial instruction and the language embedding are input to LLM, and trained on the transformed region-text data in instruction tuning format. Our region-level vision-language model, termed as GPT4RoI, brings brand new conversational and interactive experience beyond image-level understanding. (1) Controllability: Users can interact with our model by both language and spatial instructions to flexibly adjust the detail level of the question. (2) Capacities: Our model supports not only single-region spatial instruction but also multi-region. This unlocks more region-level multimodal capacities such as detailed region caption and complex region reasoning. (3) Composition: Any off-the-shelf object detector can be a spatial instruction provider so as to mine informative object attributes from our model, like color, shape, material, action, relation to other objects, etc. The code, data, and demo can be found at https://github.com/jshilong/GPT4RoI.