E4C: Enhance Editability for Text-Based Image Editing by Harnessing Efficient CLIP Guidance

Diffusion-based image editing is a composite process of preserving the source image content and generating new content or applying modifications. While current editing approaches have made improvements under text guidance, most of them have only focused on preserving the information of the input image, disregarding the importance of editability and alignment to the target prompt. In this paper, we prioritize the editability by proposing a zero-shot image editing method, named \textbf{E}nhance \textbf{E}ditability for text-based image \textbf{E}diting via \textbf{E}fficient \textbf{C}LIP guidance (\textbf{E4C}), which only requires inference-stage optimization to explicitly enhance the edibility and text alignment. Specifically, we develop a unified dual-branch feature-sharing pipeline that enables the preservation of the structure or texture of the source image while allowing the other to be adapted based on the editing task. We further integrate CLIP guidance into our pipeline by utilizing our novel random-gateway optimization mechanism to efficiently enhance the semantic alignment with the target prompt. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method effectively resolves the text alignment issues prevalent in existing methods while maintaining the fidelity to the source image, and performs well across a wide range of editing tasks.

Augmenting Prototype Network with TransMix for Few-shot Hyperspectral Image Classification

Few-shot hyperspectral image classification aims to identify the classes of each pixel in the images by only marking few of these pixels. And in order to obtain the spatial-spectral joint features of each pixel, the fixed-size patches centering around each pixel are often used for classification. However, observing the classification results of existing methods, we found that boundary patches corresponding to the pixels which are located at the boundary of the objects in the hyperspectral images, are hard to classify. These boundary patchs are mixed with multi-class spectral information. Inspired by this, we propose to augment the prototype network with TransMix for few-shot hyperspectrial image classification(APNT). While taking the prototype network as the backbone, it adopts the transformer as feature extractor to learn the pixel-to-pixel relation and pay different attentions to different pixels. At the same time, instead of directly using the patches which are cut from the hyperspectral images for training, it randomly mixs up two patches to imitate the boundary patches and uses the synthetic patches to train the model, with the aim to enlarge the number of hard training samples and enhance their diversity. And by following the data agumentation technique TransMix, the attention returned by the transformer is also used to mix up the labels of two patches to generate better labels for synthetic patches. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method has demonstrated sate of the art performance and better robustness for few-shot hyperspectral image classification in our experiments.

Iterative missing value imputation based on feature importance

Many datasets suffer from missing values due to various reasons,which not only increases the processing difficulty of related tasks but also reduces the accuracy of classification. To address this problem, the mainstream approach is to use missing value imputation to complete the dataset. Existing imputation methods estimate the missing parts based on the observed values in the original feature space, and they treat all features as equally important during data completion, while in fact different features have different importance. Therefore, we have designed an imputation method that considers feature importance. This algorithm iteratively performs matrix completion and feature importance learning, and specifically, matrix completion is based on a filling loss that incorporates feature importance. Our experimental analysis involves three types of datasets: synthetic datasets with different noisy features and missing values, real-world datasets with artificially generated missing values, and real-world datasets originally containing missing values. The results on these datasets consistently show that the proposed method outperforms the existing five imputation algorithms.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers feature importance in the imputation model.

Multi-view Relation Learning for Cross-domain Few-shot Hyperspectral Image Classification

Cross-domain few-shot hyperspectral image classification focuses on learning prior knowledge from a large number of labeled samples from source domain and then transferring the knowledge to the tasks which contain only few labeled samples in target domains. Following the metric-based manner, many current methods first extract the features of the query and support samples, and then directly predict the classes of query samples according to their distance to the support samples or prototypes. The relations between samples have not been fully explored and utilized. Different from current works, this paper proposes to learn sample relations from different views and take them into the model learning process, to improve the cross-domain few-shot hyperspectral image classification. Building on current DCFSL method which adopts a domain discriminator to deal with domain-level distribution difference, the proposed method applys contrastive learning to learn the class-level sample relations to obtain more discriminable sample features. In addition, it adopts a transformer based cross-attention learning module to learn the set-level sample relations and acquire the attentions from query samples to support samples. Our experimental results have demonstrated the contribution of the multi-view relation learning mechanism for few-shot hyperspectral image classification when compared with the state of the art methods.

VisionFM: a Multi-Modal Multi-Task Vision Foundation Model for Generalist Ophthalmic Artificial Intelligence

We present VisionFM, a foundation model pre-trained with 3.4 million ophthalmic images from 560,457 individuals, covering a broad range of ophthalmic diseases, modalities, imaging devices, and demography. After pre-training, VisionFM provides a foundation to foster multiple ophthalmic artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as disease screening and diagnosis, disease prognosis, subclassification of disease phenotype, and systemic biomarker and disease prediction, with each application enhanced with expert-level intelligence and accuracy. The generalist intelligence of VisionFM outperformed ophthalmologists with basic and intermediate levels in jointly diagnosing 12 common ophthalmic diseases. Evaluated on a new large-scale ophthalmic disease diagnosis benchmark database, as well as a new large-scale segmentation and detection benchmark database, VisionFM outperformed strong baseline deep neural networks. The ophthalmic image representations learned by VisionFM exhibited noteworthy explainability, and demonstrated strong generalizability to new ophthalmic modalities, disease spectrum, and imaging devices. As a foundation model, VisionFM has a large capacity to learn from diverse ophthalmic imaging data and disparate datasets. To be commensurate with this capacity, in addition to the real data used for pre-training, we also generated and leveraged synthetic ophthalmic imaging data. Experimental results revealed that synthetic data that passed visual Turing tests, can also enhance the representation learning capability of VisionFM, leading to substantial performance gains on downstream ophthalmic AI tasks. Beyond the ophthalmic AI applications developed, validated, and demonstrated in this work, substantial further applications can be achieved in an efficient and cost-effective manner using VisionFM as the foundation.

BotanicGarden: A high-quality and large-scale robot navigation dataset in challenging natural environments

The rapid developments of mobile robotics and autonomous navigation over the years are largely empowered by public datasets for testing and upgrading, such as SLAM and localization tasks. Impressive demos and benchmark results have arisen, indicating the establishment of a mature technical framework. However, from the view point of real-world deployments, there are still critical defects of robustness in challenging environments, especially in large-scale, GNSS-denied, textural-monotonous, and unstructured scenarios. To meet the pressing validation demands in such scope, we build a novel challenging robot navigation dataset in a large botanic garden of more than 48000m2. Comprehensive sensors are employed, including high-res/rate stereo Gray&RGB cameras, rotational and forward 3D LiDARs, and low-cost and industrial-grade IMUs, all of which are well calibrated and accurately hardware-synchronized. An all-terrain wheeled robot is configured to mount the sensor suite and provide odometry data. A total of 32 long and short sequences of 2.3 million images are collected, covering scenes of thick woods, riversides, narrow paths, bridges, and grasslands that rarely appeared in previous resources. Excitedly, both highly-accurate ego-motions and 3D map ground truth are provided, along with fine-annotated vision semantics. Our goal is to contribute a high-quality dataset to advance robot navigation and sensor fusion research to a higher level.

Multi-level Cross-modal Feature Alignment via Contrastive Learning towards Zero-shot Classification of Remote Sensing Image Scenes

Zero-shot classification of image scenes which can recognize the image scenes that are not seen in the training stage holds great promise of lowering the dependence on large numbers of labeled samples. To address the zero-shot image scene classification, the cross-modal feature alignment methods have been proposed in recent years. These methods mainly focus on matching the visual features of each image scene with their corresponding semantic descriptors in the latent space. Less attention has been paid to the contrastive relationships between different image scenes and different semantic descriptors. In light of the challenge of large intra-class difference and inter-class similarity among image scenes and the potential noisy samples, these methods are susceptible to the influence of the instances which are far from these of the same classes and close to these of other classes. In this work, we propose a multi-level cross-modal feature alignment method via contrastive learning for zero-shot classification of remote sensing image scenes. While promoting the single-instance level positive alignment between each image scene with their corresponding semantic descriptors, the proposed method takes the cross-instance contrastive relationships into consideration,and learns to keep the visual and semantic features of different classes in the latent space apart from each other. Extensive experiments have been done to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that our proposed method outperforms state of the art methods for zero-shot remote sensing image scene classification. All the code and data are available at github https://github.com/masuqiang/MCFA-Pytorch

CoT-MISR:Marrying Convolution and Transformer for Multi-Image Super-Resolution

As a method of image restoration, image super-resolution has been extensively studied at first. How to transform a low-resolution image to restore its high-resolution image information is a problem that researchers have been exploring. In the early physical transformation methods, the high-resolution pictures generated by these methods always have a serious problem of missing information, and the edges and details can not be well recovered. With the development of hardware technology and mathematics, people begin to use in-depth learning methods for image super-resolution tasks, from direct in-depth learning models, residual channel attention networks, bi-directional suppression networks, to tr networks with transformer network modules, which have gradually achieved good results. In the research of multi-graph super-resolution, thanks to the establishment of multi-graph super-resolution dataset, we have experienced the evolution from convolution model to transformer model, and the quality of super-resolution has been continuously improved. However, we find that neither pure convolution nor pure tr network can make good use of low-resolution image information. Based on this, we propose a new end-to-end CoT-MISR network. CoT-MISR network makes up for local and global information by using the advantages of convolution and tr. The validation of dataset under equal parameters shows that our CoT-MISR network has reached the optimal score index.

Faster Learning of Temporal Action Proposal via Sparse Multilevel Boundary Generator

Temporal action localization in videos presents significant challenges in the field of computer vision. While the boundary-sensitive method has been widely adopted, its limitations include incomplete use of intermediate and global information, as well as an inefficient proposal feature generator. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, Sparse Multilevel Boundary Generator (SMBG), which enhances the boundary-sensitive method with boundary classification and action completeness regression. SMBG features a multi-level boundary module that enables faster processing by gathering boundary information at different lengths. Additionally, we introduce a sparse extraction confidence head that distinguishes information inside and outside the action, further optimizing the proposal feature generator. To improve the synergy between multiple branches and balance positive and negative samples, we propose a global guidance loss. Our method is evaluated on two popular benchmarks, ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS14, and is shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance, with a better inference speed (2.47xBSN++, 2.12xDBG). These results demonstrate that SMBG provides a more efficient and simple solution for generating temporal action proposals. Our proposed framework has the potential to advance the field of computer vision and enhance the accuracy and speed of temporal action localization in video analysis.The code and models are made available at \url{https://github.com/zhouyang-001/SMBG-for-temporal-action-proposal}.

UV R-CNN: Stable and Efficient Dense Human Pose Estimation

Dense pose estimation is a dense 3D prediction task for instance-level human analysis, aiming to map human pixels from an RGB image to a 3D surface of the human body. Due to a large amount of surface point regression, the training process appears to be easy to collapse compared to other region-based human instance analyzing tasks. By analyzing the loss formulation of the existing dense pose estimation model, we introduce a novel point regression loss function, named Dense Points} loss to stable the training progress, and a new balanced loss weighting strategy to handle the multi-task losses. With the above novelties, we propose a brand new architecture, named UV R-CNN. Without auxiliary supervision and external knowledge from other tasks, UV R-CNN can handle many complicated issues in dense pose model training progress, achieving 65.0% $AP_{gps}$ and 66.1% $AP_{gpsm}$ on the DensePose-COCO validation subset with ResNet-50-FPN feature extractor, competitive among the state-of-the-art dense human pose estimation methods.