C-DiffSET: Leveraging Latent Diffusion for SAR-to-EO Image Translation with Confidence-Guided Reliable Object Generation

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery provides robust environmental and temporal coverage (e.g., during clouds, seasons, day-night cycles), yet its noise and unique structural patterns pose interpretation challenges, especially for non-experts. SAR-to-EO (Electro-Optical) image translation (SET) has emerged to make SAR images more perceptually interpretable. However, traditional approaches trained from scratch on limited SAR-EO datasets are prone to overfitting. To address these challenges, we introduce Confidence Diffusion for SAR-to-EO Translation, called C-DiffSET, a framework leveraging pretrained Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) extensively trained on natural images, thus enabling effective adaptation to the EO domain. Remarkably, we find that the pretrained VAE encoder aligns SAR and EO images in the same latent space, even with varying noise levels in SAR inputs. To further improve pixel-wise fidelity for SET, we propose a confidence-guided diffusion (C-Diff) loss that mitigates artifacts from temporal discrepancies, such as appearing or disappearing objects, thereby enhancing structural accuracy. C-DiffSET achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on multiple datasets, significantly outperforming the very recent image-to-image translation methods and SET methods with large margins.

TDSM: Triplet Diffusion for Skeleton-Text Matching in Zero-Shot Action Recognition

We firstly present a diffusion-based action recognition with zero-shot learning for skeleton inputs. In zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition, aligning skeleton features with the text features of action labels is essential for accurately predicting unseen actions. Previous methods focus on direct alignment between skeleton and text latent spaces, but the modality gaps between these spaces hinder robust generalization learning. Motivated from the remarkable performance of text-to-image diffusion models, we leverage their alignment capabilities between different modalities mostly by focusing on the training process during reverse diffusion rather than using their generative power. Based on this, our framework is designed as a Triplet Diffusion for Skeleton-Text Matching (TDSM) method which aligns skeleton features with text prompts through reverse diffusion, embedding the prompts into the unified skeleton-text latent space to achieve robust matching. To enhance discriminative power, we introduce a novel triplet diffusion (TD) loss that encourages our TDSM to correct skeleton-text matches while pushing apart incorrect ones. Our TDSM significantly outperforms the very recent state-of-the-art methods with large margins of 2.36%-point to 13.05%-point, demonstrating superior accuracy and scalability in zero-shot settings through effective skeleton-text matching.

SkateFormer: Skeletal-Temporal Transformer for Human Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition, which classifies human actions based on the coordinates of joints and their connectivity within skeleton data, is widely utilized in various scenarios. While Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been proposed for skeleton data represented as graphs, they suffer from limited receptive fields constrained by joint connectivity. To address this limitation, recent advancements have introduced transformer-based methods. However, capturing correlations between all joints in all frames requires substantial memory resources. To alleviate this, we propose a novel approach called Skeletal-Temporal Transformer (SkateFormer) that partitions joints and frames based on different types of skeletal-temporal relation (Skate-Type) and performs skeletal-temporal self-attention (Skate-MSA) within each partition. We categorize the key skeletal-temporal relations for action recognition into a total of four distinct types. These types combine (i) two skeletal relation types based on physically neighboring and distant joints, and (ii) two temporal relation types based on neighboring and distant frames. Through this partition-specific attention strategy, our SkateFormer can selectively focus on key joints and frames crucial for action recognition in an action-adaptive manner with efficient computation. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets validate that our SkateFormer outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods.

NTIRE 2020 Challenge on NonHomogeneous Dehazing

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 Challenge on NonHomogeneous Dehazing of images (restoration of rich details in hazy image). We focus on the proposed solutions and their results evaluated on NH-Haze, a novel dataset consisting of 55 pairs of real haze free and nonhomogeneous hazy images recorded outdoor. NH-Haze is the first realistic nonhomogeneous haze dataset that provides ground truth images. The nonhomogeneous haze has been produced using a professional haze generator that imitates the real conditions of haze scenes. 168 participants registered in the challenge and 27 teams competed in the final testing phase. The proposed solutions gauge the state-of-the-art in image dehazing.