TF-SSD: A Strong Pipeline via Synergic Mask Filter for Training-free Co-salient Object Detection

Co-salient Object Detection (CoSOD) aims to segment salient objects that consistently appear across a group of related images. Despite the notable progress achieved by recent training-based approaches, they still remain constrained by the closed-set datasets and exhibit limited generalization. However, few studies explore the potential of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to address CoSOD, which demonstrate a strong generalized ability and robust saliency understanding. In this paper, we investigate and leverage VFMs for CoSOD, and further propose a novel training-free method, TF-SSD, through the synergy between SAM and DINO. Specifically, we first utilize SAM to generate comprehensive raw proposals, which serve as a candidate mask pool. Then, we introduce a quality mask generator to filter out redundant masks, thereby acquiring a refined mask set. Since this generator is built upon SAM, it inherently lacks semantic understanding of saliency. To this end, we adopt an intra-image saliency filter that employs DINO's attention maps to identify visually salient masks within individual images. Moreover, to extend saliency understanding across group images, we propose an inter-image prototype selector, which computes similarity scores among cross-image prototypes to select masks with the highest score. These selected masks serve as final predictions for CoSOD. Extensive experiments show that our TF-SSD outperforms existing methods (e.g., 13.7\% gains over the recent training-free method). Codes are available at https://github.com/hzz-yy/TF-SSD.

Comparative Evaluation of Radiomics and Deep Learning Models for Disease Detection in Chest Radiography

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical imaging has revolutionized diagnostic practices, enabling advanced analysis and interpretation of radiological data. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of radiomics-based and deep learning-based approaches for disease detection in chest radiography, focusing on COVID-19, lung opacity, and viral pneumonia. While deep learning models, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs), learn directly from image data, radiomics-based models extract and analyze quantitative features, potentially providing advantages in data-limited scenarios. This study systematically compares the diagnostic accuracy and robustness of various AI models, including Decision Trees, Gradient Boosting, Random Forests, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) for radiomics, against state-of-the-art computer vision deep learning architectures. Performance metrics across varying sample sizes reveal insights into each model's efficacy, highlighting the contexts in which specific AI approaches may offer enhanced diagnostic capabilities. The results aim to inform the integration of AI-driven diagnostic tools in clinical practice, particularly in automated and high-throughput environments where timely, reliable diagnosis is critical. This comparative study addresses an essential gap, establishing guidance for the selection of AI models based on clinical and operational needs.