Unsupervised Image Fusion Method based on Feature Mutual Mapping

Deep learning-based image fusion approaches have obtained wide attention in recent years, achieving promising performance in terms of visual perception. However, the fusion module in the current deep learning-based methods suffers from two limitations, \textit{i.e.}, manually designed fusion function, and input-independent network learning. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised adaptive image fusion method to address the above issues. We propose a feature mutual mapping fusion module and dual-branch multi-scale autoencoder. More specifically, we construct a global map to measure the connections of pixels between the input source images. % The found mapping relationship guides the image fusion. Besides, we design a dual-branch multi-scale network through sampling transformation to extract discriminative image features. We further enrich feature representations of different scales through feature aggregation in the decoding process. Finally, we propose a modified loss function to train the network with efficient convergence property. Through sufficient training on infrared and visible image data sets, our method also shows excellent generalized performance in multi-focus and medical image fusion. Our method achieves superior performance in both visual perception and objective evaluation. Experiments prove that the performance of our proposed method on a variety of image fusion tasks surpasses other state-of-the-art methods, proving the effectiveness and versatility of our approach.

TGFuse: An Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Approach Based on Transformer and Generative Adversarial Network

The end-to-end image fusion framework has achieved promising performance, with dedicated convolutional networks aggregating the multi-modal local appearance. However, long-range dependencies are directly neglected in existing CNN fusion approaches, impeding balancing the entire image-level perception for complex scenario fusion. In this paper, therefore, we propose an infrared and visible image fusion algorithm based on a lightweight transformer module and adversarial learning. Inspired by the global interaction power, we use the transformer technique to learn the effective global fusion relations. In particular, shallow features extracted by CNN are interacted in the proposed transformer fusion module to refine the fusion relationship within the spatial scope and across channels simultaneously. Besides, adversarial learning is designed in the training process to improve the output discrimination via imposing competitive consistency from the inputs, reflecting the specific characteristics in infrared and visible images. The experimental performance demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed modules, with superior improvement against the state-of-the-art, generalising a novel paradigm via transformer and adversarial learning in the fusion task.

MSNet: A Deep Multi-scale Submanifold Network for Visual Classification

The Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrix has received wide attention as a tool for visual data representation in computer vision. Although there are many different attempts to develop effective deep architectures for data processing on the Riemannian manifold of SPD matrices, a very few solutions explicitly mine the local geometrical information in deep SPD feature representations. While CNNs have demonstrated the potential of hierarchical local pattern extraction even for SPD represented data, we argue that it is of utmost importance to ensure the preservation of local geometric information in the SPD networks. Accordingly, in this work we propose an SPD network designed with this objective in mind. In particular, we propose an architecture, referred to as MSNet, which fuses geometrical multi-scale information. We first analyse the convolution operator commonly used for mapping the local information in Euclidean deep networks from the perspective of a higher level of abstraction afforded by the Category Theory. Based on this analysis, we postulate a submanifold selection principle to guide the design of our MSNet. In particular, we use it to design a submanifold fusion block to take advantage of the rich local geometry encoded in the network layers. The experiments involving multiple visual tasks show that our algorithm outperforms most Riemannian SOTA competitors.

A Survey for Deep RGBT Tracking

Visual object tracking with the visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (TIR) electromagnetic waves, shorted in RGBT tracking, recently draws increasing attention in the tracking community. Considering the rapid development of deep learning, a survey for the recent deep neural network based RGBT trackers is presented in this paper. Firstly, we give brief introduction for the RGBT trackers concluded into this category. Then, a comparison among the existing RGBT trackers on several challenging benchmarks is given statistically. Specifically, MDNet and Siamese architectures are the two mainstream frameworks in the RGBT community, especially the former. Trackers based on MDNet achieve higher performance while Siamese-based trackers satisfy the real-time requirement. In summary, since the large-scale dataset LasHeR is published, the integration of end-to-end framework, e.g., Siamese and Transformer, should be further considered to fulfil the real-time as well as more robust performance. Furthermore, the mathematical meaning should be more considered during designing the network. This survey can be treated as a look-up-table for researchers who are concerned about RGBT tracking.

Face recognition via compact second order image gradient orientations

Conventional subspace learning approaches based on image gradient orientations only employ the first-order gradient information. However, recent researches on human vision system (HVS) uncover that the neural image is a landscape or a surface whose geometric properties can be captured through the second order gradient information. The second order image gradient orientations (SOIGO) can mitigate the adverse effect of noises in face images. To reduce the redundancy of SOIGO, we propose compact SOIGO (CSOIGO) by applying linear complex principal component analysis (PCA) in SOIGO. Combined with collaborative representation based classification (CRC) algorithm, the classification performance of CSOIGO is further enhanced. CSOIGO is evaluated under real-world disguise, synthesized occlusion and mixed variations. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is superior to its competing approaches with few training samples, and even outperforms some prevailing deep neural network based approaches. The source code of CSOIGO is available at https://github.com/yinhefeng/SOIGO.

Visual Object Tracking on Multi-modal RGB-D Videos: A Review

The development of visual object tracking has continued for decades. Recent years, as the wide accessibility of the low-cost RGBD sensors, the task of visual object tracking on RGB-D videos has drawn much attention. Compared to conventional RGB-only tracking, the RGB-D videos can provide more information that facilitates objecting tracking in some complicated scenarios. The goal of this review is to summarize the relative knowledge of the research filed of RGB-D tracking. To be specific, we will generalize the related RGB-D tracking benchmarking datasets as well as the corresponding performance measurements. Besides, the existing RGB-D tracking methods are summarized in the paper. Moreover, we discuss the possible future direction in the field of RGB-D tracking.

Collaborative Representation for SPD Matrices with Application to Image-Set Classification

Collaborative representation-based classification (CRC) has demonstrated remarkable progress in the past few years because of its closed-form analytical solutions. However, the existing CRC methods are incapable of processing the nonlinear variational information directly. Recent advances illustrate that how to effectively model these nonlinear variational information and learn invariant representations is an open challenge in the community of computer vision and pattern recognition To this end, we try to design a new algorithm to handle this problem. Firstly, the second-order statistic, i.e., covariance matrix is applied to model the original image sets. Due to the space formed by a set of nonsingular covariance matrices is a well-known Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold, generalising the Euclidean collaborative representation to the SPD manifold is not an easy task. Then, we devise two strategies to cope with this issue. One attempts to embed the SPD manifold-valued data representations into an associated tangent space via the matrix logarithm map. Another is to embed them into a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) by utilizing the Riemannian kernel function. After these two treatments, CRC is applicable to the SPD manifold-valued features. The evaluations on four banchmarking datasets justify its effectiveness.

Temporal Aggregation for Adaptive RGBT Tracking

Visual object tracking with RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) spectra available, shorted in RGBT tracking, is a novel and challenging research topic which draws increasing attention nowadays. In this paper, we propose an RGBT tracker which takes spatio-temporal clues into account for robust appearance model learning, and simultaneously, constructs an adaptive fusion sub-network for cross-modal interactions. Unlike most existing RGBT trackers that implement object tracking tasks with only spatial information included, temporal information is further considered in this method. Specifically, different from traditional Siamese trackers, which only obtain one search image during the process of picking up template-search image pairs, an extra search sample adjacent to the original one is selected to predict the temporal transformation, resulting in improved robustness of tracking performance.As for multi-modal tracking, constrained to the limited RGBT datasets, the adaptive fusion sub-network is appended to our method at the decision level to reflect the complementary characteristics contained in two modalities. To design a thermal infrared assisted RGB tracker, the outputs of the classification head from the TIR modality are taken into consideration before the residual connection from the RGB modality. Extensive experimental results on three challenging datasets, i.e. VOT-RGBT2019, GTOT and RGBT210, verify the effectiveness of our method. Code will be shared at \textcolor{blue}{\emph{https://github.com/Zhangyong-Tang/TAAT}}.

Exploring Fusion Strategies for Accurate RGBT Visual Object Tracking

We address the problem of multi-modal object tracking in video and explore various options of fusing the complementary information conveyed by the visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (TIR) modalities including pixel-level, feature-level and decision-level fusion. Specifically, different from the existing methods, paradigm of image fusion task is heeded for fusion at pixel level. Feature-level fusion is fulfilled by attention mechanism with channels excited optionally. Besides, at decision level, a novel fusion strategy is put forward since an effortless averaging configuration has shown the superiority. The effectiveness of the proposed decision-level fusion strategy owes to a number of innovative contributions, including a dynamic weighting of the RGB and TIR contributions and a linear template update operation. A variant of which produced the winning tracker at the Visual Object Tracking Challenge 2020 (VOT-RGBT2020). The concurrent exploration of innovative pixel- and feature-level fusion strategies highlights the advantages of the proposed decision-level fusion method. Extensive experimental results on three challenging datasets, \textit{i.e.}, GTOT, VOT-RGBT2019, and VOT-RGBT2020, demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. Code will be shared at \textcolor{blue}{\emph{https://github.com/Zhangyong-Tang/DFAT}.

Res2NetFuse: A Fusion Method for Infrared and Visible Images

This paper presents a novel Res2Net-based fusion framework for infrared and visible images. The proposed fusion model has three parts: an encoder, a fusion layer and a decoder, respectively. The Res2Net-based encoder is used to extract multi-scale features of source images, the paper introducing a new training strategy for training a Res2Net-based encoder that uses only a single image. Then, a new fusion strategy is developed based on the attention model. Finally, the fused image is reconstructed by the decoder. The proposed approach is also analyzed in detail. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art fusion performance in objective and subjective assessment by comparing with the existing methods.