Single Image Reflection Removal via inter-layer Complementarity

Although dual-stream architectures have achieved remarkable success in single image reflection removal, they fail to fully exploit inter-layer complementarity in their physical modeling and network design, which limits the quality of image separation. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose two targeted improvements to enhance dual-stream architectures: First, we introduce a novel inter-layer complementarity model where low-frequency components extracted from the residual layer interact with the transmission layer through dual-stream architecture to enhance inter-layer complementarity. Meanwhile, high-frequency components from the residual layer provide inverse modulation to both streams, improving the detail quality of the transmission layer. Second, we propose an efficient inter-layer complementarity attention mechanism which first cross-reorganizes dual streams at the channel level to obtain reorganized streams with inter-layer complementary structures, then performs attention computation on the reorganized streams to achieve better inter-layer separation, and finally restores the original stream structure for output. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art separation quality on multiple public datasets while significantly reducing both computational cost and model complexity.

Lightweight Contrastive Distilled Hashing for Online Cross-modal Retrieval

Deep online cross-modal hashing has gained much attention from researchers recently, as its promising applications with low storage requirement, fast retrieval efficiency and cross modality adaptive, etc. However, there still exists some technical hurdles that hinder its applications, e.g., 1) how to extract the coexistent semantic relevance of cross-modal data, 2) how to achieve competitive performance when handling the real time data streams, 3) how to transfer the knowledge learned from offline to online training in a lightweight manner. To address these problems, this paper proposes a lightweight contrastive distilled hashing (LCDH) for cross-modal retrieval, by innovatively bridging the offline and online cross-modal hashing by similarity matrix approximation in a knowledge distillation framework. Specifically, in the teacher network, LCDH first extracts the cross-modal features by the contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP), which are further fed into an attention module for representation enhancement after feature fusion. Then, the output of the attention module is fed into a FC layer to obtain hash codes for aligning the sizes of similarity matrices for online and offline training. In the student network, LCDH extracts the visual and textual features by lightweight models, and then the features are fed into a FC layer to generate binary codes. Finally, by approximating the similarity matrices, the performance of online hashing in the lightweight student network can be enhanced by the supervision of coexistent semantic relevance that is distilled from the teacher network. Experimental results on three widely used datasets demonstrate that LCDH outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.