High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is a fundamental problem in image processing, which aims to generate well-exposed images, even in the presence of varying illumination in the scenes. In recent years, multi-exposure fusion methods have achieved remarkable results, which merge multiple low dynamic range (LDR) images, captured with different exposures, to generate corresponding HDR images. However, synthesizing HDR images in dynamic scenes is still challenging and in high demand. There are two challenges in producing HDR images: 1). Object motion between LDR images can easily cause undesirable ghosting artifacts in the generated results. 2). Under and overexposed regions often contain distorted image content, because of insufficient compensation for these regions in the merging stage. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale sampling and aggregation network for HDR imaging in dynamic scenes. To effectively alleviate the problems caused by small and large motions, our method implicitly aligns LDR images by sampling and aggregating high-correspondence features in a coarse-to-fine manner. Furthermore, we propose a densely connected network based on discrete wavelet transform for performance improvement, which decomposes the input into several non-overlapping frequency subbands and adaptively performs compensation in the wavelet domain. Experiments show that our proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performances under diverse scenes, compared to other promising HDR imaging methods. In addition, the HDR images generated by our method contain cleaner and more detailed content, with fewer distortions, leading to better visual quality.
In the field of deep-sea exploration, sonar is presently the only efficient long-distance sensing device. The complicated underwater environment, such as noise interference, low target intensity or background dynamics, has brought many negative effects on sonar imaging. Among them, the problem of nonlinear intensity is extremely prevalent. It is also known as the anisotropy of acoustic imaging, that is, when AUVs carry sonar to detect the same target from different angles, the intensity difference between image pairs is sometimes very large, which makes the traditional matching algorithm almost ineffective. However, image matching is the basis of comprehensive tasks such as navigation, positioning, and mapping. Therefore, it is very valuable to obtain robust and accurate matching results. This paper proposes a combined matching method based on phase information and deep convolution features. It has two outstanding advantages: one is that deep convolution features could be used to measure the similarity of the local and global positions of the sonar image; the other is that local feature matching could be performed at the key target position of the sonar image. This method does not need complex manual design, and completes the matching task of nonlinear intensity sonar images in a close end-to-end manner. Feature matching experiments are carried out on the deep-sea sonar images captured by AUVs, and the results show that our proposal has good matching accuracy and robustness.
Building detection and change detection using remote sensing images can help urban and rescue planning. Moreover, they can be used for building damage assessment after natural disasters. Currently, most of the existing models for building detection use only one image (pre-disaster image) to detect buildings. This is based on the idea that post-disaster images reduce the model's performance because of presence of destroyed buildings. In this paper, we propose a siamese model, called SiamixFormer, which uses pre- and post-disaster images as input. Our model has two encoders and has a hierarchical transformer architecture. The output of each stage in both encoders is given to a temporal transformer for feature fusion in a way that query is generated from pre-disaster images and (key, value) is generated from post-disaster images. To this end, temporal features are also considered in feature fusion. Another advantage of using temporal transformers in feature fusion is that they can better maintain large receptive fields generated by transformer encoders compared with CNNs. Finally, the output of the temporal transformer is given to a simple MLP decoder at each stage. The SiamixFormer model is evaluated on xBD, and WHU datasets, for building detection and on LEVIR-CD and CDD datasets for change detection and could outperform the state-of-the-art.
One of the open issues in fingerprint verification is the lack of robustness against image-quality degradation. Poor-quality images result in spurious and missing features, thus degrading the performance of the overall system. Therefore, it is important for a fingerprint recognition system to estimate the quality and validity of the captured fingerprint images. In this work, we review existing approaches for fingerprint image-quality estimation, including the rationale behind the published measures and visual examples showing their behavior under different quality conditions. We have also tested a selection of fingerprint image-quality estimation algorithms. For the experiments, we employ the BioSec multimodal baseline corpus, which includes 19200 fingerprint images from 200 individuals acquired in two sessions with three different sensors. The behavior of the selected quality measures is compared, showing high correlation between them in most cases. The effect of low-quality samples in the verification performance is also studied for a widely available minutiae-based fingerprint matching system.
In this paper, we introduce a graph representation learning architecture for spatial image steganalysis, which is motivated by the assumption that steganographic modifications unavoidably distort the statistical characteristics of the hidden graph features derived from cover images. In the detailed architecture, we translate each image to a graph, where nodes represent the patches of the image and edges indicate the local associations between the patches. Each node is associated with a feature vector determined from the corresponding patch by a shallow convolutional neural network (CNN) structure. By feeding the graph to an attention network, the discriminative features can be learned for efficient steganalysis. Experiments indicate that the reported architecture achieves a competitive performance compared to the benchmark CNN model, which has shown the potential of graph learning for steganalysis.
Automated abdominal multi-organ segmentation is a crucial yet challenging task in the computer-aided diagnosis of abdominal organ-related diseases. Although numerous deep learning models have achieved remarkable success in many medical image segmentation tasks, accurate segmentation of abdominal organs remains challenging, due to the varying sizes of abdominal organs and the ambiguous boundaries among them. In this paper, we propose a boundary-aware network (BA-Net) to segment abdominal organs on CT scans and MRI scans. This model contains a shared encoder, a boundary decoder, and a segmentation decoder. The multi-scale deep supervision strategy is adopted on both decoders, which can alleviate the issues caused by variable organ sizes. The boundary probability maps produced by the boundary decoder at each scale are used as attention to enhance the segmentation feature maps. We evaluated the BA-Net on the Abdominal Multi-Organ Segmentation (AMOS) Challenge dataset and achieved an average Dice score of 89.29$\%$ for multi-organ segmentation on CT scans and an average Dice score of 71.92$\%$ on MRI scans. The results demonstrate that BA-Net is superior to nnUNet on both segmentation tasks.
Kidney structures segmentation is a crucial yet challenging task in the computer-aided diagnosis of surgery-based renal cancer. Although numerous deep learning models have achieved remarkable success in many medical image segmentation tasks, accurate segmentation of kidney structures on computed tomography angiography (CTA) images remains challenging, due to the variable sizes of kidney tumors and the ambiguous boundaries between kidney structures and their surroundings. In this paper, we propose a boundary-aware network (BA-Net) to segment kidneys, kidney tumors, arteries, and veins on CTA scans. This model contains a shared encoder, a boundary decoder, and a segmentation decoder. The multi-scale deep supervision strategy is adopted on both decoders, which can alleviate the issues caused by variable tumor sizes. The boundary probability maps produced by the boundary decoder at each scale are used as attention to enhance the segmentation feature maps. We evaluated the BA-Net on the Kidney PArsing (KiPA) Challenge dataset and achieved an average Dice score of 89.65$\%$ for kidney structure segmentation on CTA scans using 4-fold cross-validation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the BA-Net.
After the outbreak of COVID-19, mask detection, as the most convenient and effective means of prevention, plays a crucial role in epidemic prevention and control. An excellent automatic real-time mask detection system can reduce a lot of work pressure for relevant staff. However, by analyzing the existing mask detection approaches, we find that they are mostly resource-intensive and do not achieve a good balance between speed and accuracy. And there is no perfect face mask dataset at present. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for mask detection. Our system uses SSD as the mask locator and classifier, and further replaces VGG-16 with MobileNetV2 to extract the features of the image and reduce a lot of parameters. Therefore, our system can be deployed on embedded devices. Transfer learning methods are used to transfer pre-trained models from other domains to our model. Data enhancement methods in our system such as MixUp effectively prevent overfitting. It also effectively reduces the dependence on large-scale datasets. By doing experiments in practical scenarios, the results demonstrate that our system performed well in real-time mask detection.
The existence of completely aligned and paired multi-modal neuroimaging data has proved its effectiveness in the diagnosis of brain diseases. However, collecting the full set of well-aligned and paired data is impractical or even luxurious, since the practical difficulties may include high cost, long time acquisition, image corruption, and privacy issues. Previously, the misaligned unpaired neuroimaging data (termed as MUD) are generally treated as noisy label. However, such a noisy label-based method could not work very well when misaligned data occurs distortions severely, for example, different angles of rotation. In this paper, we propose a novel federated self-supervised learning (FedMed) for brain image synthesis. An affine transform loss (ATL) was formulated to make use of severely distorted images without violating privacy legislation for the hospital. We then introduce a new data augmentation procedure for self-supervised training and fed it into three auxiliary heads, namely auxiliary rotation, auxiliary translation, and auxiliary scaling heads. The proposed method demonstrates advanced performance in both the quality of synthesized results under a severely misaligned and unpaired data setting, and better stability than other GAN-based algorithms. The proposed method also reduces the demand for deformable registration while encouraging to realize the usage of those misaligned and unpaired data. Experimental results verify the outstanding ability of our learning paradigm compared to other state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available on the website: https://github.com/FedMed-Meta/FedMed-ATL
Top-down methods dominate the field of 3D human pose and shape estimation, because they are decoupled from human detection and allow researchers to focus on the core problem. However, cropping, their first step, discards the location information from the very beginning, which makes themselves unable to accurately predict the global rotation in the original camera coordinate system. To address this problem, we propose to Carry Location Information in Full Frames (CLIFF) into this task. Specifically, we feed more holistic features to CLIFF by concatenating the cropped-image feature with its bounding box information. We calculate the 2D reprojection loss with a broader view of the full frame, taking a projection process similar to that of the person projected in the image. Fed and supervised by global-location-aware information, CLIFF directly predicts the global rotation along with more accurate articulated poses. Besides, we propose a pseudo-ground-truth annotator based on CLIFF, which provides high-quality 3D annotations for in-the-wild 2D datasets and offers crucial full supervision for regression-based methods. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that CLIFF outperforms prior arts by a significant margin, and reaches the first place on the AGORA leaderboard (the SMPL-Algorithms track). The code and data are available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/noah-research/tree/master/CLIFF.