Histogram Assisted Quality Aware Generative Model for Resolution Invariant NIR Image Colorization

We present HAQAGen, a unified generative model for resolution-invariant NIR-to-RGB colorization that balances chromatic realism with structural fidelity. The proposed model introduces (i) a combined loss term aligning the global color statistics through differentiable histogram matching, perceptual image quality measure, and feature based similarity to preserve texture information, (ii) local hue-saturation priors injected via Spatially Adaptive Denormalization (SPADE) to stabilize chromatic reconstruction, and (iii) texture-aware supervision within a Mamba backbone to preserve fine details. We introduce an adaptive-resolution inference engine that further enables high-resolution translation without sacrificing quality. Our proposed NIR-to-RGB translation model simultaneously enforces global color statistics and local chromatic consistency, while scaling to native resolutions without compromising texture fidelity or generalization. Extensive evaluations on FANVID, OMSIV, VCIP2020, and RGB2NIR using different evaluation metrics demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baseline methods. HAQAGen produces images with sharper textures, natural colors, attaining significant gains as per perceptual metrics. These results position HAQAGen as a scalable and effective solution for NIR-to-RGB translation across diverse imaging scenarios. Project Page: https://rajeev-dw9.github.io/HAQAGen/

MultiCaption: Detecting disinformation using multilingual visual claims

Online disinformation poses an escalating threat to society, driven increasingly by the rapid spread of misleading content across both multimedia and multilingual platforms. While automated fact-checking methods have advanced in recent years, their effectiveness remains constrained by the scarcity of datasets that reflect these real-world complexities. To address this gap, we first present MultiCaption, a new dataset specifically designed for detecting contradictions in visual claims. Pairs of claims referring to the same image or video were labeled through multiple strategies to determine whether they contradict each other. The resulting dataset comprises 11,088 visual claims in 64 languages, offering a unique resource for building and evaluating misinformation-detection systems in truly multimodal and multilingual environments. We then provide comprehensive experiments using transformer-based architectures, natural language inference models, and large language models, establishing strong baselines for future research. The results show that MultiCaption is more challenging than standard NLI tasks, requiring task-specific finetuning for strong performance. Moreover, the gains from multilingual training and testing highlight the dataset's potential for building effective multilingual fact-checking pipelines without relying on machine translation.

Anomaly Detection by Effectively Leveraging Synthetic Images

Anomaly detection plays a vital role in industrial manufacturing. Due to the scarcity of real defect images, unsupervised approaches that rely solely on normal images have been extensively studied. Recently, diffusion-based generative models brought attention to training data synthesis as an alternative solution. In this work, we focus on a strategy to effectively leverage synthetic images to maximize the anomaly detection performance. Previous synthesis strategies are broadly categorized into two groups, presenting a clear trade-off. Rule-based synthesis, such as injecting noise or pasting patches, is cost-effective but often fails to produce realistic defect images. On the other hand, generative model-based synthesis can create high-quality defect images but requires substantial cost. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework that leverages a pre-trained text-guided image-to-image translation model and image retrieval model to efficiently generate synthetic defect images. Specifically, the image retrieval model assesses the similarity of the generated images to real normal images and filters out irrelevant outputs, thereby enhancing the quality and relevance of the generated defect images. To effectively leverage synthetic images, we also introduce a two stage training strategy. In this strategy, the model is first pre-trained on a large volume of images from rule-based synthesis and then fine-tuned on a smaller set of high-quality images. This method significantly reduces the cost for data collection while improving the anomaly detection performance. Experiments on the MVTec AD dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Plasticine: A Traceable Diffusion Model for Medical Image Translation

Domain gaps arising from variations in imaging devices and population distributions pose significant challenges for machine learning in medical image analysis. Existing image-to-image translation methods primarily aim to learn mappings between domains, often generating diverse synthetic data with variations in anatomical scale and shape, but they usually overlook spatial correspondence during the translation process. For clinical applications, traceability, defined as the ability to provide pixel-level correspondences between original and translated images, is equally important. This property enhances clinical interpretability but has been largely overlooked in previous approaches. To address this gap, we propose Plasticine, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first end-to-end image-to-image translation framework explicitly designed with traceability as a core objective. Our method combines intensity translation and spatial transformation within a denoising diffusion framework. This design enables the generation of synthetic images with interpretable intensity transitions and spatially coherent deformations, supporting pixel-wise traceability throughout the translation process.

From Performance to Practice: Knowledge-Distilled Segmentator for On-Premises Clinical Workflows

Deploying medical image segmentation models in routine clinical workflows is often constrained by on-premises infrastructure, where computational resources are fixed and cloud-based inference may be restricted by governance and security policies. While high-capacity models achieve strong segmentation accuracy, their computational demands hinder practical deployment and long-term maintainability in hospital environments. We present a deployment-oriented framework that leverages knowledge distillation to translate a high-performing segmentation model into a scalable family of compact student models, without modifying the inference pipeline. The proposed approach preserves architectural compatibility with existing clinical systems while enabling systematic capacity reduction. The framework is evaluated on a multi-site brain MRI dataset comprising 1,104 3D volumes, with independent testing on 101 curated cases, and is further examined on abdominal CT to assess cross-modality generalizability. Under aggressive parameter reduction (94%), the distilled student model preserves nearly all of the teacher's segmentation accuracy (98.7%), while achieving substantial efficiency gains, including up to a 67% reduction in CPU inference latency without additional deployment overhead. These results demonstrate that knowledge distillation provides a practical and reliable pathway for converting research-grade segmentation models into maintainable, deployment-ready components for on-premises clinical workflows in real-world health systems.

Image-to-Image Translation with Generative Adversarial Network for Electrical Resistance Tomography Reconstruction

Electrical tomography techniques have been widely employed for multiphase-flow monitoring owing to their non invasive nature, intrinsic safety, and low cost. Nevertheless, conventional reconstructions struggle to capture fine details, which hampers broader adoption. Motivated by recent advances in deep learning, this study introduces a Pix2Pix generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance image reconstruction in electrical capacitance tomography (ECT). Comprehensive simulated and experimental databases were established and multiple baseline reconstruction algorithms were implemented. The proposed GAN demonstrably improves quantitative metrics such as SSIM, PSNR, and PMSE, while qualitatively producing high resolution images with sharp boundaries that are no longer constrained by mesh discretization.

Multi-Attribute guided Thermal Face Image Translation based on Latent Diffusion Model

Modern surveillance systems increasingly rely on multi-wavelength sensors and deep neural networks to recognize faces in infrared images captured at night. However, most facial recognition models are trained on visible light datasets, leading to substantial performance degradation on infrared inputs due to significant domain shifts. Early feature-based methods for infrared face recognition proved ineffective, prompting researchers to adopt generative approaches that convert infrared images into visible light images for improved recognition. This paradigm, known as Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR), faces challenges such as model and modality discrepancies, leading to distortion and feature loss in generated images. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a novel latent diffusion-based model designed to generate high-quality visible face images from thermal inputs while preserving critical identity features. A multi-attribute classifier is incorporated to extract key facial attributes from visible images, mitigating feature loss during infrared-to-visible image restoration. Additionally, we propose the Self-attn Mamba module, which enhances global modeling of cross-modal features and significantly improves inference speed. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both image quality and identity preservation.

HyperCOD: The First Challenging Benchmark and Baseline for Hyperspectral Camouflaged Object Detection

RGB-based camouflaged object detection struggles in real-world scenarios where color and texture cues are ambiguous. While hyperspectral image offers a powerful alternative by capturing fine-grained spectral signatures, progress in hyperspectral camouflaged object detection (HCOD) has been critically hampered by the absence of a dedicated, large-scale benchmark. To spur innovation, we introduce HyperCOD, the first challenging benchmark for HCOD. Comprising 350 high-resolution hyperspectral images, It features complex real-world scenarios with minimal objects, intricate shapes, severe occlusions, and dynamic lighting to challenge current models. The advent of foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) presents a compelling opportunity. To adapt the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for HCOD, we propose HyperSpectral Camouflage-aware SAM (HSC-SAM). HSC-SAM ingeniously reformulates the hyperspectral image by decoupling it into a spatial map fed to SAM's image encoder and a spectral saliency map that serves as an adaptive prompt. This translation effectively bridges the modality gap. Extensive experiments show that HSC-SAM sets a new state-of-the-art on HyperCOD and generalizes robustly to other public HSI datasets. The HyperCOD dataset and our HSC-SAM baseline provide a robust foundation to foster future research in this emerging area.

MHub.ai: A Simple, Standardized, and Reproducible Platform for AI Models in Medical Imaging

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform medical imaging by automating image analysis and accelerating clinical research. However, research and clinical use are limited by the wide variety of AI implementations and architectures, inconsistent documentation, and reproducibility issues. Here, we introduce MHub.ai, an open-source, container-based platform that standardizes access to AI models with minimal configuration, promoting accessibility and reproducibility in medical imaging. MHub.ai packages models from peer-reviewed publications into standardized containers that support direct processing of DICOM and other formats, provide a unified application interface, and embed structured metadata. Each model is accompanied by publicly available reference data that can be used to confirm model operation. MHub.ai includes an initial set of state-of-the-art segmentation, prediction, and feature extraction models for different modalities. The modular framework enables adaptation of any model and supports community contributions. We demonstrate the utility of the platform in a clinical use case through comparative evaluation of lung segmentation models. To further strengthen transparency and reproducibility, we publicly release the generated segmentations and evaluation metrics and provide interactive dashboards that allow readers to inspect individual cases and reproduce or extend our analysis. By simplifying model use, MHub.ai enables side-by-side benchmarking with identical execution commands and standardized outputs, and lowers the barrier to clinical translation.

Generative diffusion models for agricultural AI: plant image generation, indoor-to-outdoor translation, and expert preference alignment

The success of agricultural artificial intelligence depends heavily on large, diverse, and high-quality plant image datasets, yet collecting such data in real field conditions is costly, labor intensive, and seasonally constrained. This paper investigates diffusion-based generative modeling to address these challenges through plant image synthesis, indoor-to-outdoor translation, and expert preference aligned fine tuning. First, a Stable Diffusion model is fine tuned on captioned indoor and outdoor plant imagery to generate realistic, text conditioned images of canola and soybean. Evaluation using Inception Score, Frechet Inception Distance, and downstream phenotype classification shows that synthetic images effectively augment training data and improve accuracy. Second, we bridge the gap between high resolution indoor datasets and limited outdoor imagery using DreamBooth-based text inversion and image guided diffusion, generating translated images that enhance weed detection and classification with YOLOv8. Finally, a preference guided fine tuning framework trains a reward model on expert scores and applies reward weighted updates to produce more stable and expert aligned outputs. Together, these components demonstrate a practical pathway toward data efficient generative pipelines for agricultural AI.