3D Brainformer: 3D Fusion Transformer for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critically important for brain mapping in both scientific research and clinical studies. Precise segmentation of brain tumors facilitates clinical diagnosis, evaluations, and surgical planning. Deep learning has recently emerged to improve brain tumor segmentation and achieved impressive results. Convolutional architectures are widely used to implement those neural networks. By the nature of limited receptive fields, however, those architectures are subject to representing long-range spatial dependencies of the voxel intensities in MRI images. Transformers have been leveraged recently to address the above limitations of convolutional networks. Unfortunately, the majority of current Transformers-based methods in segmentation are performed with 2D MRI slices, instead of 3D volumes. Moreover, it is difficult to incorporate the structures between layers because each head is calculated independently in the Multi-Head Self-Attention mechanism (MHSA). In this work, we proposed a 3D Transformer-based segmentation approach. We developed a Fusion-Head Self-Attention mechanism (FHSA) to combine each attention head through attention logic and weight mapping, for the exploration of the long-range spatial dependencies in 3D MRI images. We implemented a plug-and-play self-attention module, named the Infinite Deformable Fusion Transformer Module (IDFTM), to extract features on any deformable feature maps. We applied our approach to the task of brain tumor segmentation, and assessed it on the public BRATS datasets. The experimental results demonstrated that our proposed approach achieved superior performance, in comparison to several state-of-the-art segmentation methods.

In Defense of Subspace Tracker: Orthogonal Embedding for Visual Tracking

The paper focuses on a classical tracking model, subspace learning, grounded on the fact that the targets in successive frames are considered to reside in a low-dimensional subspace or manifold due to the similarity in their appearances. In recent years, a number of subspace trackers have been proposed and obtained impressive results. Inspired by the most recent results that the tracking performance is boosted by the subspace with discrimination capability learned over the recently localized targets and their immediately surrounding background, this work aims at solving such a problem: how to learn a robust low-dimensional subspace to accurately and discriminatively represent these target and background samples. To this end, a discriminative approach, which reliably separates the target from its surrounding background, is injected into the subspace learning by means of joint learning, achieving a dimension-adaptive subspace with superior discrimination capability. The proposed approach is extensively evaluated and compared with the state-of-the-art trackers on four popular tracking benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracker performs competitively against its counterparts. In particular, it achieves more than 9% performance increase compared with the state-of-the-art subspace trackers.

Vision-based Real-Time Aerial Object Localization and Tracking for UAV Sensing System

The paper focuses on the problem of vision-based obstacle detection and tracking for unmanned aerial vehicle navigation. A real-time object localization and tracking strategy from monocular image sequences is developed by effectively integrating the object detection and tracking into a dynamic Kalman model. At the detection stage, the object of interest is automatically detected and localized from a saliency map computed via the image background connectivity cue at each frame; at the tracking stage, a Kalman filter is employed to provide a coarse prediction of the object state, which is further refined via a local detector incorporating the saliency map and the temporal information between two consecutive frames. Compared to existing methods, the proposed approach does not require any manual initialization for tracking, runs much faster than the state-of-the-art trackers of its kind, and achieves competitive tracking performance on a large number of image sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed approach.

Real-Time Visual Tracking: Promoting the Robustness of Correlation Filter Learning

Correlation filtering based tracking model has received lots of attention and achieved great success in real-time tracking, however, the lost function in current correlation filtering paradigm could not reliably response to the appearance changes caused by occlusion and illumination variations. This study intends to promote the robustness of the correlation filter learning. By exploiting the anisotropy of the filter response, three sparsity related loss functions are proposed to alleviate the overfitting issue of previous methods and improve the overall tracking performance. As a result, three real-time trackers are implemented. Extensive experiments in various challenging situations demonstrate that the robustness of the learned correlation filter has been greatly improved via the designed loss functions. In addition, the study reveals, from an experimental perspective, how different loss functions essentially influence the tracking performance. An important conclusion is that the sensitivity of the peak values of the filter in successive frames is consistent with the tracking performance. This is a useful reference criterion in designing a robust correlation filter for visual tracking.

Tracking Completion

A fundamental component of modern trackers is an online learned tracking model, which is typically modeled either globally or locally. The two kinds of models perform differently in terms of effectiveness and robustness under different challenging situations. This work exploits the advantages of both models. A subspace model, from a global perspective, is learned from previously obtained targets via rank-minimization to address the tracking, and a pixel-level local observation is leveraged si- multaneously, from a local point of view, to augment the subspace model. A matrix completion method is employed to integrate the two models. Unlike previous tracking methods, which locate the target among all fully observed target candidates, the proposed approach first estimates an expected target via the matrix completion through partially observed target candidates, and then, identifies the target according to the estimation accuracy with respect to the target candidates. Specifically, the tracking is formulated as a problem of target appearance estimation. Extensive experiments on various challenging video sequences verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach and demonstrate that the proposed tracker outperforms other popular state-of-the-art trackers.