Generative Model-Assisted Demosaicing for Cross-multispectral Cameras

As a crucial part of the spectral filter array (SFA)-based multispectral imaging process, spectral demosaicing has exploded with the proliferation of deep learning techniques. However, (1) bothering by the difficulty of capturing corresponding labels for real data or simulating the practical spectral imaging process, end-to-end networks trained in a supervised manner using simulated data often perform poorly on real data. (2) cross-camera spectral discrepancies make it difficult to apply pre-trained models to new cameras. (3) existing demosaicing networks are prone to introducing visual artifacts on hard cases due to the interpolation of unknown values. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid supervised training method with the assistance of the self-supervised generative model, which performs well on real data across different spectral cameras. Specifically, our approach consists of three steps: (1) Pre-Training step: training the end-to-end neural network on a large amount of simulated data; (2) Pseudo-Pairing step: generating pseudo-labels of real target data using the self-supervised generative model; (3) Fine-Tuning step: fine-tuning the pre-trained model on the pseudo data pairs obtained in (2). To alleviate artifacts, we propose a frequency-domain hard patch selection method that identifies artifact-prone regions by analyzing spectral discrepancies using Fourier transform and filtering techniques, allowing targeted fine-tuning to enhance demosaicing performance. Finally, we propose UniSpecTest, a real-world multispectral mosaic image dataset for testing. Ablation experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of each training step, and extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that our method achieves significant performance gains compared to state-of-the-art techniques.

InsQABench: Benchmarking Chinese Insurance Domain Question Answering with Large Language Models

The application of large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success in various fields, but their effectiveness in specialized domains like the Chinese insurance industry remains underexplored. The complexity of insurance knowledge, encompassing specialized terminology and diverse data types, poses significant challenges for both models and users. To address this, we introduce InsQABench, a benchmark dataset for the Chinese insurance sector, structured into three categories: Insurance Commonsense Knowledge, Insurance Structured Database, and Insurance Unstructured Documents, reflecting real-world insurance question-answering tasks.We also propose two methods, SQL-ReAct and RAG-ReAct, to tackle challenges in structured and unstructured data tasks. Evaluations show that while LLMs struggle with domain-specific terminology and nuanced clause texts, fine-tuning on InsQABench significantly improves performance. Our benchmark establishes a solid foundation for advancing LLM applications in the insurance domain, with data and code available at https://github.com/HaileyFamo/InsQABench.git.

Exploring Stronger Transformer Representation Learning for Occluded Person Re-Identificatio

Due to some complex factors (e.g., occlusion, pose variation and diverse camera perspectives), extracting stronger feature representation in person re-identification remains a challenging task. In this paper, we proposed a novel self-supervision and supervision combining transformer-based person re-identification framework, namely SSSC-TransReID. Different from the general transformer-based person re-identification models, we designed a self-supervised contrastive learning branch, which can enhance the feature representation for person re-identification without negative samples or additional pre-training. In order to train the contrastive learning branch, we also proposed a novel random rectangle mask strategy to simulate the occlusion in real scenes, so as to enhance the feature representation for occlusion. Finally, we utilized the joint-training loss function to integrate the advantages of supervised learning with ID tags and self-supervised contrastive learning without negative samples, which can reinforce the ability of our model to excavate stronger discriminative features, especially for occlusion. Extensive experimental results on several benchmark datasets show our proposed model obtains superior Re-ID performance consistently and outperforms the state-of-the-art ReID methods by large margins on the mean average accuracy (mAP) and Rank-1 accuracy.

MIPI 2024 Challenge on Demosaic for HybridEVS Camera: Methods and Results

The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Nighttime Flare Removal track on MIPI 2024. In total, 170 participants were successfully registered, and 14 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Nighttime Flare Removal. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipi-challenge.org/MIPI2024/.

Statistical Inference of Optimal Allocations I: Regularities and their Implications

In this paper, we develop a functional differentiability approach for solving statistical optimal allocation problems. We first derive Hadamard differentiability of the value function through a detailed analysis of the general properties of the sorting operator. Central to our framework are the concept of Hausdorff measure and the area and coarea integration formulas from geometric measure theory. Building on our Hadamard differentiability results, we demonstrate how the functional delta method can be used to directly derive the asymptotic properties of the value function process for binary constrained optimal allocation problems, as well as the two-step ROC curve estimator. Moreover, leveraging profound insights from geometric functional analysis on convex and local Lipschitz functionals, we obtain additional generic Fr\'echet differentiability results for the value functions of optimal allocation problems. These compelling findings motivate us to study carefully the first order approximation of the optimal social welfare. In this paper, we then present a double / debiased estimator for the value functions. Importantly, the conditions outlined in the Hadamard differentiability section validate the margin assumption from the statistical classification literature employing plug-in methods that justifies a faster convergence rate.

Unsupervised Spectral Demosaicing with Lightweight Spectral Attention Networks

This paper presents a deep learning-based spectral demosaicing technique trained in an unsupervised manner. Many existing deep learning-based techniques relying on supervised learning with synthetic images, often underperform on real-world images especially when the number of spectral bands increases. According to the characteristics of the spectral mosaic image, this paper proposes a mosaic loss function, the corresponding model structure, a transformation strategy, and an early stopping strategy, which form a complete unsupervised spectral demosaicing framework. A challenge in real-world spectral demosaicing is inconsistency between the model parameters and the computational resources of the imager. We reduce the complexity and parameters of the spectral attention module by dividing the spectral attention tensor into spectral attention matrices in the spatial dimension and spectral attention vector in the channel dimension, which is more suitable for unsupervised framework. This paper also presents Mosaic25, a real 25-band hyperspectral mosaic image dataset of various objects, illuminations, and materials for benchmarking. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional unsupervised methods in terms of spatial distortion suppression, spectral fidelity, robustness, and computational cost.

Statistical Tests for Replacing Human Decision Makers with Algorithms

This paper proposes a statistical framework with which artificial intelligence can improve human decision making. The performance of each human decision maker is first benchmarked against machine predictions; we then replace the decisions made by a subset of the decision makers with the recommendation from the proposed artificial intelligence algorithm. Using a large nationwide dataset of pregnancy outcomes and doctor diagnoses from prepregnancy checkups of reproductive age couples, we experimented with both a heuristic frequentist approach and a Bayesian posterior loss function approach with an application to abnormal birth detection. We find that our algorithm on a test dataset results in a higher overall true positive rate and a lower false positive rate than the diagnoses made by doctors only. We also find that the diagnoses of doctors from rural areas are more frequently replaceable, suggesting that artificial intelligence assisted decision making tends to improve precision more in less developed regions.

Degradation-Noise-Aware Deep Unfolding Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Hyperspectral imaging (HI) has emerged as a powerful tool in diverse fields such as medical diagnosis, industrial inspection, and agriculture, owing to its ability to detect subtle differences in physical properties through high spectral resolution. However, hyperspectral images (HSIs) are often quite noisy because of narrow band spectral filtering. To reduce the noise in HSI data cubes, both model-driven and learning-based denoising algorithms have been proposed. However, model-based approaches rely on hand-crafted priors and hyperparameters, while learning-based methods are incapable of estimating the inherent degradation patterns and noise distributions in the imaging procedure, which could inform supervised learning. Secondly, learning-based algorithms predominantly rely on CNN and fail to capture long-range dependencies, resulting in limited interpretability. This paper proposes a Degradation-Noise-Aware Unfolding Network (DNA-Net) that addresses these issues. Firstly, DNA-Net models sparse noise, Gaussian noise, and explicitly represent image prior using transformer. Then the model is unfolded into an end-to-end network, the hyperparameters within the model are estimated from the noisy HSI and degradation model and utilizes them to control each iteration. Additionally, we introduce a novel U-Shaped Local-Non-local-Spectral Transformer (U-LNSA) that captures spectral correlation, local contents, and non-local dependencies simultaneously. By integrating U-LNSA into DNA-Net, we present the first Transformer-based deep unfolding HSI denoising method. Experimental results show that DNA-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and the modeling of noise distributions helps in cases with heavy noise.

Inheriting Bayer's Legacy-Joint Remosaicing and Denoising for Quad Bayer Image Sensor

Pixel binning based Quad sensors have emerged as a promising solution to overcome the hardware limitations of compact cameras in low-light imaging. However, binning results in lower spatial resolution and non-Bayer CFA artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose a dual-head joint remosaicing and denoising network (DJRD), which enables the conversion of noisy Quad Bayer and standard noise-free Bayer pattern without any resolution loss. DJRD includes a newly designed Quad Bayer remosaicing (QB-Re) block, integrated denoising modules based on Swin-transformer and multi-scale wavelet transform. The QB-Re block constructs the convolution kernel based on the CFA pattern to achieve a periodic color distribution in the perceptual field, which is used to extract exact spectral information and reduce color misalignment. The integrated Swin-Transformer and multi-scale wavelet transform capture non-local dependencies, frequency and location information to effectively reduce practical noise. By identifying challenging patches utilizing Moire and zipper detection metrics, we enable our model to concentrate on difficult patches during the post-training phase, which enhances the model's performance in hard cases. Our proposed model outperforms competing models by approximately 3dB, without additional complexity in hardware or software.

MSFA-Frequency-Aware Transformer for Hyperspectral Images Demosaicing

Hyperspectral imaging systems that use multispectral filter arrays (MSFA) capture only one spectral component in each pixel. Hyperspectral demosaicing is used to recover the non-measured components. While deep learning methods have shown promise in this area, they still suffer from several challenges, including limited modeling of non-local dependencies, lack of consideration of the periodic MSFA pattern that could be linked to periodic artifacts, and difficulty in recovering high-frequency details. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel de-mosaicing framework, the MSFA-frequency-aware Transformer network (FDM-Net). FDM-Net integrates a novel MSFA-frequency-aware multi-head self-attention mechanism (MaFormer) and a filter-based Fourier zero-padding method to reconstruct high pass components with greater difficulty and low pass components with relative ease, separately. The advantage of Maformer is that it can leverage the MSFA information and non-local dependencies present in the data. Additionally, we introduce a joint spatial and frequency loss to transfer MSFA information and enhance training on frequency components that are hard to recover. Our experimental results demonstrate that FDM-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods with 6dB PSNR, and reconstructs high-fidelity details successfully.