GRA: Detecting Oriented Objects through Group-wise Rotating and Attention

Oriented object detection, an emerging task in recent years, aims to identify and locate objects across varied orientations. This requires the detector to accurately capture the orientation information, which varies significantly within and across images. Despite the existing substantial efforts, simultaneously ensuring model effectiveness and parameter efficiency remains challenging in this scenario. In this paper, we propose a lightweight yet effective Group-wise Rotating and Attention (GRA) module to replace the convolution operations in backbone networks for oriented object detection. GRA can adaptively capture fine-grained features of objects with diverse orientations, comprising two key components: Group-wise Rotating and Group-wise Attention. Group-wise Rotating first divides the convolution kernel into groups, where each group extracts different object features by rotating at a specific angle according to the object orientation. Subsequently, Group-wise Attention is employed to adaptively enhance the object-related regions in the feature. The collaborative effort of these components enables GRA to effectively capture the various orientation information while maintaining parameter efficiency. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method. For example, GRA achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the DOTA-v2.0 benchmark, while saving the parameters by nearly 50% compared to the previous SOTA method. Code will be released.

Masked Co-attentional Transformer reconstructs 100x ultra-fast/low-dose whole-body PET from longitudinal images and anatomically guided MRI

Despite its tremendous value for the diagnosis, treatment monitoring and surveillance of children with cancer, whole body staging with positron emission tomography (PET) is time consuming and associated with considerable radiation exposure. 100x (1% of the standard clinical dosage) ultra-low-dose/ultra-fast whole-body PET reconstruction has the potential for cancer imaging with unprecedented speed and improved safety, but it cannot be achieved by the naive use of machine learning techniques. In this study, we utilize the global similarity between baseline and follow-up PET and magnetic resonance (MR) images to develop Masked-LMCTrans, a longitudinal multi-modality co-attentional CNN-Transformer that provides interaction and joint reasoning between serial PET/MRs of the same patient. We mask the tumor area in the referenced baseline PET and reconstruct the follow-up PET scans. In this manner, Masked-LMCTrans reconstructs 100x almost-zero radio-exposure whole-body PET that was not possible before. The technique also opens a new pathway for longitudinal radiology imaging reconstruction, a significantly under-explored area to date. Our model was trained and tested with Stanford PET/MRI scans of pediatric lymphoma patients and evaluated externally on PET/MRI images from T\"ubingen University. The high image quality of the reconstructed 100x whole-body PET images resulting from the application of Masked-LMCTrans will substantially advance the development of safer imaging approaches and shorter exam-durations for pediatric patients, as well as expand the possibilities for frequent longitudinal monitoring of these patients by PET.

Assessing a Single Image in Reference-Guided Image Synthesis

Assessing the performance of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has been an important topic due to its practical significance. Although several evaluation metrics have been proposed, they generally assess the quality of the whole generated image distribution. For Reference-guided Image Synthesis (RIS) tasks, i.e., rendering a source image in the style of another reference image, where assessing the quality of a single generated image is crucial, these metrics are not applicable. In this paper, we propose a general learning-based framework, Reference-guided Image Synthesis Assessment (RISA) to quantitatively evaluate the quality of a single generated image. Notably, the training of RISA does not require human annotations. In specific, the training data for RISA are acquired by the intermediate models from the training procedure in RIS, and weakly annotated by the number of models' iterations, based on the positive correlation between image quality and iterations. As this annotation is too coarse as a supervision signal, we introduce two techniques: 1) a pixel-wise interpolation scheme to refine the coarse labels, and 2) multiple binary classifiers to replace a na\"ive regressor. In addition, an unsupervised contrastive loss is introduced to effectively capture the style similarity between a generated image and its reference image. Empirical results on various datasets demonstrate that RISA is highly consistent with human preference and transfers well across models.