Fragile Watermarking for Image Certification Using Deep Steganographic Embedding

Modern identity verification systems increasingly rely on facial images embedded in biometric documents such as electronic passports. To ensure global interoperability and security, these images must comply with strict standards defined by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which specify acquisition, quality, and format requirements. However, once issued, these images may undergo unintentional degradations (e.g., compression, resizing) or malicious manipulations (e.g., morphing) and deceive facial recognition systems. In this study, we explore fragile watermarking, based on deep steganographic embedding as a proactive mechanism to certify the authenticity of ICAO-compliant facial images. By embedding a hidden image within the official photo at the time of issuance, we establish an integrity marker that becomes sensitive to any post-issuance modification. We assess how a range of image manipulations affects the recovered hidden image and show that degradation artifacts can serve as robust forensic cues. Furthermore, we propose a classification framework that analyzes the revealed content to detect and categorize the type of manipulation applied. Our experiments demonstrate high detection accuracy, including cross-method scenarios with multiple deep steganography-based models. These findings support the viability of fragile watermarking via steganographic embedding as a valuable tool for biometric document integrity verification.

Enhancing Person-to-Person Virtual Try-On with Multi-Garment Virtual Try-Off

Computer vision is transforming fashion through Virtual Try-On (VTON) and Virtual Try-Off (VTOFF). VTON generates images of a person in a specified garment using a target photo and a standardized garment image, while a more challenging variant, Person-to-Person Virtual Try-On (p2p-VTON), uses a photo of another person wearing the garment. VTOFF, on the other hand, extracts standardized garment images from clothed individuals. We introduce TryOffDiff, a diffusion-based VTOFF model. Built on a latent diffusion framework with SigLIP image conditioning, it effectively captures garment properties like texture, shape, and patterns. TryOffDiff achieves state-of-the-art results on VITON-HD and strong performance on DressCode dataset, covering upper-body, lower-body, and dresses. Enhanced with class-specific embeddings, it pioneers multi-garment VTOFF, the first of its kind. When paired with VTON models, it improves p2p-VTON by minimizing unwanted attribute transfer, such as skin color. Code is available at: https://rizavelioglu.github.io/tryoffdiff/

DeepWheel: Generating a 3D Synthetic Wheel Dataset for Design and Performance Evaluation

Data-driven design is emerging as a powerful strategy to accelerate engineering innovation. However, its application to vehicle wheel design remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets that include 3D geometry and physical performance metrics. To address this gap, this study proposes a synthetic design-performance dataset generation framework using generative AI. The proposed framework first generates 2D rendered images using Stable Diffusion, and then reconstructs the 3D geometry through 2.5D depth estimation. Structural simulations are subsequently performed to extract engineering performance data. To further expand the design and performance space, topology optimization is applied, enabling the generation of a more diverse set of wheel designs. The final dataset, named DeepWheel, consists of over 6,000 photo-realistic images and 900 structurally analyzed 3D models. This multi-modal dataset serves as a valuable resource for surrogate model training, data-driven inverse design, and design space exploration. The proposed methodology is also applicable to other complex design domains. The dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International(CC BY-NC 4.0) and is available on the https://www.smartdesignlab.org/datasets

Beyond Reconstruction: A Physics Based Neural Deferred Shader for Photo-realistic Rendering

Deep learning based rendering has demonstrated major improvements for photo-realistic image synthesis, applicable to various applications including visual effects in movies and photo-realistic scene building in video games. However, a significant limitation is the difficulty of decomposing the illumination and material parameters, which limits such methods to reconstruct an input scene, without any possibility to control these parameters. This paper introduces a novel physics based neural deferred shading pipeline to decompose the data-driven rendering process, learn a generalizable shading function to produce photo-realistic results for shading and relighting tasks, we also provide a shadow estimator to efficiently mimic shadowing effect. Our model achieves improved performance compared to classical models and a state-of-art neural shading model, and enables generalizable photo-realistic shading from arbitrary illumination input.

ZeroGrasp: Zero-Shot Shape Reconstruction Enabled Robotic Grasping

Robotic grasping is a cornerstone capability of embodied systems. Many methods directly output grasps from partial information without modeling the geometry of the scene, leading to suboptimal motion and even collisions. To address these issues, we introduce ZeroGrasp, a novel framework that simultaneously performs 3D reconstruction and grasp pose prediction in near real-time. A key insight of our method is that occlusion reasoning and modeling the spatial relationships between objects is beneficial for both accurate reconstruction and grasping. We couple our method with a novel large-scale synthetic dataset, which comprises 1M photo-realistic images, high-resolution 3D reconstructions and 11.3B physically-valid grasp pose annotations for 12K objects from the Objaverse-LVIS dataset. We evaluate ZeroGrasp on the GraspNet-1B benchmark as well as through real-world robot experiments. ZeroGrasp achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes to novel real-world objects by leveraging synthetic data.

Simulation and Experimental Validation of Optical Camera Communication

While simulation tools for visible light communication (VLC) with photo detectors (PDs) have been widely investigated, similar tools for optical camera communication (OCC) with complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors are lacking in this regard. Camera based VLC systems have much lower data rates owing to camera exposure times. Among the few extant OCC simulation tools, none allow for simulation of images when exposure time is greater than the signal period. An accurate simulation of the OCC system can be used to improve the data rate and quality of performance. We propose a simple simulation technique for OCC which allows to test for system performance at frequencies beyond the camera shutter speed. This will allow much needed data rate improvement by operating at the actual frequency a decoding algorithm ceases detection instead of the exposure limit used now. We have tested the accuracy of simulation by comparing the detection success rates of simulated images with experimental images. The proposed simulation technique was shown to be accurate through experimental validation for two different cameras.

FLOSS: Free Lunch in Open-vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Recent Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS) models extend the CLIP model to segmentation while maintaining the use of multiple templates (e.g., a photo of <class>, a sketch of a <class>, etc.) for constructing class-wise averaged text embeddings, acting as a classifier. In this paper, we challenge this status quo and investigate the impact of templates for OVSS. Empirically, we observe that for each class, there exist single-template classifiers significantly outperforming the conventional averaged classifier. We refer to them as class-experts. Given access to unlabeled images and without any training involved, we estimate these experts by leveraging the class-wise prediction entropy of single-template classifiers, selecting as class-wise experts those which yield the lowest entropy. All experts, each specializing in a specific class, collaborate in a newly proposed fusion method to generate more accurate OVSS predictions. Our plug-and-play method, coined FLOSS, is orthogonal and complementary to existing OVSS methods, offering a ''free lunch'' to systematically improve OVSS without labels and additional training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FLOSS consistently boosts state-of-the-art methods on various OVSS benchmarks. Moreover, the selected expert templates can generalize well from one dataset to others sharing the same semantic categories, yet exhibiting distribution shifts. Additionally, we obtain satisfactory improvements under a low-data regime, where only a few unlabeled images are available. Our code is available at https://github.com/yasserben/FLOSS .

CameraBench: Benchmarking Visual Reasoning in MLLMs via Photography

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced artificial intelligence. However, visual reasoning, reasoning involving both visual and textual inputs, remains underexplored. Recent advancements, including the reasoning models like OpenAI o1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, which incorporate image inputs, have opened this capability. In this ongoing work, we focus specifically on photography-related tasks because a photo is a visual snapshot of the physical world where the underlying physics (i.e., illumination, blur extent, etc.) interplay with the camera parameters. Successfully reasoning from the visual information of a photo to identify these numerical camera settings requires the MLLMs to have a deeper understanding of the underlying physics for precise visual comprehension, representing a challenging and intelligent capability essential for practical applications like photography assistant agents. We aim to evaluate MLLMs on their ability to distinguish visual differences related to numerical camera settings, extending a methodology previously proposed for vision-language models (VLMs). Our preliminary results demonstrate the importance of visual reasoning in photography-related tasks. Moreover, these results show that no single MLLM consistently dominates across all evaluation tasks, demonstrating ongoing challenges and opportunities in developing MLLMs with better visual reasoning.

GeoTexBuild: 3D Building Model Generation from Map Footprints

We introduce GeoTexBuild, a modular generative framework for creating 3D building models from map footprints. The proposed framework employs a three-stage process comprising height map generation, geometry reconstruction, and appearance stylization, culminating in building models with intricate geometry and appearance attributes. By integrating customized ControlNet and Text2Mesh models, we explore effective methods for controlling both geometric and visual attributes during the generation process. By this, we eliminate the problem of structural variations behind a single facade photo of the existing 3D generation techniques. Experimental results at each stage validate the capability of GeoTexBuild to generate detailed and accurate building models from footprints derived from site planning or map designs. Our framework significantly reduces manual labor in modeling buildings and can offer inspiration for designers.

SUEDE:Shared Unified Experts for Physical-Digital Face Attack Detection Enhancement

Face recognition systems are vulnerable to physical attacks (e.g., printed photos) and digital threats (e.g., DeepFake), which are currently being studied as independent visual tasks, such as Face Anti-Spoofing and Forgery Detection. The inherent differences among various attack types present significant challenges in identifying a common feature space, making it difficult to develop a unified framework for detecting data from both attack modalities simultaneously. Inspired by the efficacy of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in learning across diverse domains, we explore utilizing multiple experts to learn the distinct features of various attack types. However, the feature distributions of physical and digital attacks overlap and differ. This suggests that relying solely on distinct experts to learn the unique features of each attack type may overlook shared knowledge between them. To address these issues, we propose SUEDE, the Shared Unified Experts for Physical-Digital Face Attack Detection Enhancement. SUEDE combines a shared expert (always activated) to capture common features for both attack types and multiple routed experts (selectively activated) for specific attack types. Further, we integrate CLIP as the base network to ensure the shared expert benefits from prior visual knowledge and align visual-text representations in a unified space. Extensive results demonstrate SUEDE achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art unified detection methods.