MiM-ISTD: Mamba-in-Mamba for Efficient Infrared Small Target Detection

Recently, infrared small target detection (ISTD) has made significant progress, thanks to the development of basic models. Specifically, the structures combining convolutional networks with transformers can successfully extract both local and global features. However, the disadvantage of the transformer is also inherited, i.e., the quadratic computational complexity to the length of the sequence. Inspired by the recent basic model with linear complexity for long-distance modeling, called Mamba, we explore the potential of this state space model for ISTD task in terms of effectiveness and efficiency in the paper. However, directly applying Mamba achieves poor performance since local features, which are critical to detecting small targets, cannot be fully exploited. Instead, we tailor a Mamba-in-Mamba (MiM-ISTD) structure for efficient ISTD. Specifically, we treat the local patches as "visual sentences" and use the Outer Mamba to explore the global information. We then decompose each visual sentence into sub-patches as "visual words" and use the Inner Mamba to further explore the local information among words in the visual sentence with negligible computational costs. By aggregating the word and sentence features, the MiM-ISTD can effectively explore both global and local information. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST and IRSTD-1k show the superior accuracy and efficiency of our method. Specifically, MiM-ISTD is $10 \times$ faster than the SOTA method and reduces GPU memory usage by 73.4$\%$ when testing on $2048 \times 2048$ image, overcoming the computation and memory constraints on high-resolution infrared images. Source code is available at https://github.com/txchen-USTC/MiM-ISTD.

P-Mamba: Marrying Perona Malik Diffusion with Mamba for Efficient Pediatric Echocardiographic Left Ventricular Segmentation

In pediatric cardiology, the accurate and immediate assessment of cardiac function through echocardiography is important since it can determine whether urgent intervention is required in many emergencies. However, echocardiography is characterized by ambiguity and heavy background noise interference, bringing more difficulty to accurate segmentation. Present methods lack efficiency and are also prone to mistakenly segmenting some background noise areas as the left ventricular area due to noise disturbance. To relieve the two issues, we introduce P-Mamba for efficient pediatric echocardiographic left ventricular segmentation. Specifically, we turn to the recently proposed vision mamba layers in our vision mamba encoder branch to improve the computing and memory efficiency of our model while modeling global dependencies. In the other DWT-based PMD encoder branch, we devise DWT-based Perona-Malik Diffusion (PMD) Blocks that utilize PMD for noise suppression, while simultaneously preserving the local shape cues of the left ventricle. Leveraging the strengths of both the two encoder branches, P-Mamba achieves superior accuracy and efficiency to established models, such as vision transformers with quadratic and linear computational complexity. This innovative approach promises significant advancements in pediatric cardiac imaging and beyond.

Bootstrapping Audio-Visual Segmentation by Strengthening Audio Cues

How to effectively interact audio with vision has garnered considerable interest within the multi-modality research field. Recently, a novel audio-visual segmentation (AVS) task has been proposed, aiming to segment the sounding objects in video frames under the guidance of audio cues. However, most existing AVS methods are hindered by a modality imbalance where the visual features tend to dominate those of the audio modality, due to a unidirectional and insufficient integration of audio cues. This imbalance skews the feature representation towards the visual aspect, impeding the learning of joint audio-visual representations and potentially causing segmentation inaccuracies. To address this issue, we propose AVSAC. Our approach features a Bidirectional Audio-Visual Decoder (BAVD) with integrated bidirectional bridges, enhancing audio cues and fostering continuous interplay between audio and visual modalities. This bidirectional interaction narrows the modality imbalance, facilitating more effective learning of integrated audio-visual representations. Additionally, we present a strategy for audio-visual frame-wise synchrony as fine-grained guidance of BAVD. This strategy enhances the share of auditory components in visual features, contributing to a more balanced audio-visual representation learning. Extensive experiments show that our method attains new benchmarks in AVS performance.

TCI-Former: Thermal Conduction-Inspired Transformer for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is critical to national security and has been extensively applied in military areas. ISTD aims to segment small target pixels from background. Most ISTD networks focus on designing feature extraction blocks or feature fusion modules, but rarely describe the ISTD process from the feature map evolution perspective. In the ISTD process, the network attention gradually shifts towards target areas. We abstract this process as the directional movement of feature map pixels to target areas through convolution, pooling and interactions with surrounding pixels, which can be analogous to the movement of thermal particles constrained by surrounding variables and particles. In light of this analogy, we propose Thermal Conduction-Inspired Transformer (TCI-Former) based on the theoretical principles of thermal conduction. According to thermal conduction differential equation in heat dynamics, we derive the pixel movement differential equation (PMDE) in the image domain and further develop two modules: Thermal Conduction-Inspired Attention (TCIA) and Thermal Conduction Boundary Module (TCBM). TCIA incorporates finite difference method with PMDE to reach a numerical approximation so that target body features can be extracted. To further remove errors in boundary areas, TCBM is designed and supervised by boundary masks to refine target body features with fine boundary details. Experiments on IRSTD-1k and NUAA-SIRST demonstrate the superiority of our method.

SMAP: A Joint Dimensionality Reduction Scheme for Secure Multi-Party Visualization

Nowadays, as data becomes increasingly complex and distributed, data analyses often involve several related datasets that are stored on different servers and probably owned by different stakeholders. While there is an emerging need to provide these stakeholders with a full picture of their data under a global context, conventional visual analytical methods, such as dimensionality reduction, could expose data privacy when multi-party datasets are fused into a single site to build point-level relationships. In this paper, we reformulate the conventional t-SNE method from the single-site mode into a secure distributed infrastructure. We present a secure multi-party scheme for joint t-SNE computation, which can minimize the risk of data leakage. Aggregated visualization can be optionally employed to hide disclosure of point-level relationships. We build a prototype system based on our method, SMAP, to support the organization, computation, and exploration of secure joint embedding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with three case studies, one of which is based on the deployment of our system in real-world applications.