Computer Vision
Papers
Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.
Tuesday 24 March
Flicker artifacts, arising from unstable illumination and row-wise exposure inconsistencies, pose a significant challenge in short-exposure photography, severely degrading image quality. Unlike typical artifacts, e.g., noise and low-light, flicker is a structured degradation with specific spatial-temporal patterns, which are not accounted for in current generic restoration frameworks, leading to suboptimal flicker suppression and ghosting artifacts. In this work, we reveal that flicker artifacts exhibit two intrinsic characteristics, periodicity and directionality, and propose Flickerformer, a transformer-based architecture that effectively removes flicker without introducing ghosting. Specifically, Flickerformer comprises three key components: a phase-based fusion module (PFM), an autocorrelation feed-forward network (AFFN), and a wavelet-based directional attention module (WDAM). Based on the periodicity, PFM performs inter-frame phase correlation to adaptively aggregate burst features, while AFFN exploits intra-frame structural regularities through autocorrelation, jointly enhancing the network's ability to perceive spatially recurring patterns. Moreover, motivated by the directionality of flicker artifacts, WDAM leverages high-frequency variations in the wavelet domain to guide the restoration of low-frequency dark regions, yielding precise localization of flicker artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flickerformer outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/qulishen/Flickerformer.
Computer Vision
Predictive Photometric Uncertainty in Gaussian Splatting for Novel View Synthesis
Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting have enabled impressive photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, to transition from a pure rendering engine to a reliable spatial map for autonomous agents and safety-critical applications, knowing where the representation is uncertain is as important as the rendering fidelity itself. We bridge this critical gap by introducing a lightweight, plug-and-play framework for pixel-wise, view-dependent predictive uncertainty estimation. Our post-hoc method formulates uncertainty as a Bayesian-regularized linear least-squares optimization over reconstruction residuals. This architecture-agnostic approach extracts a per-primitive uncertainty channel without modifying the underlying scene representation or degrading baseline visual fidelity. Crucially, we demonstrate that providing this actionable reliability signal successfully translates 3D Gaussian splatting into a trustworthy spatial map, further improving state-of-the-art performance across three critical downstream perception tasks: active view selection, pose-agnostic scene change detection, and pose-agnostic anomaly detection.
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Computer Vision
Exposure-Normalized Bed and Chair Fall Rates via Continuous AI Monitoring
This retrospective cohort study used continuous AI monitoring to estimate fall rates by exposure time rather than occupied bed-days. From August 2024 to December 2025, 3,980 eligible monitoring units contributed 292,914 hourly rows, yielding probability-weighted rates of 17.8 falls per 1,000 chair exposure-hours and 4.3 per 1,000 bed exposure-hours. Within the study window, 43 adjudicated falls matched the monitoring pipeline, and 40 linked to eligible exposure hours for the primary Poisson model, producing an adjusted chair-versus-bed rate ratio of 2.35 (95% confidence interval 0.87 to 6.33; p=0.0907). In a separate broader observation cohort (n=32 deduplicated events), 6 of 7 direct chair falls involved footrest-positioning failures. Because this was an observational study in a single health system, these findings remain hypothesis-generating and support testing safer chair setups rather than using chairs less.
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Computer Vision
Know3D: Prompting 3D Generation with Knowledge from Vision-Language Models
Recent advances in 3D generation have improved the fidelity and geometric details of synthesized 3D assets. However, due to the inherent ambiguity of single-view observations and the lack of robust global structural priors caused by limited 3D training data, the unseen regions generated by existing models are often stochastic and difficult to control, which may sometimes fail to align with user intentions or produce implausible geometries. In this paper, we propose Know3D, a novel framework that incorporates rich knowledge from multimodal large language models into 3D generative processes via latent hidden-state injection, enabling language-controllable generation of the back-view for 3D assets. We utilize a VLM-diffusion-based model, where the VLM is responsible for semantic understanding and guidance. The diffusion model acts as a bridge that transfers semantic knowledge from the VLM to the 3D generation model. In this way, we successfully bridge the gap between abstract textual instructions and the geometric reconstruction of unobserved regions, transforming the traditionally stochastic back-view hallucination into a semantically controllable process, demonstrating a promising direction for future 3D generation models.
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Computer Vision
Typography-Based Monocular Distance Estimation Framework for Vehicle Safety Systems
Accurate inter-vehicle distance estimation is a cornerstone of advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving. While LiDAR and radar provide high precision, their cost prohibits widespread adoption in mass-market vehicles. Monocular vision offers a low-cost alternative but suffers from scale ambiguity and sensitivity to environmental disturbances. This paper introduces a typography-based monocular distance estimation framework, which exploits the standardized typography of license plates as passive fiducial markers for metric distance estimation. The core geometric module uses robust plate detection and character segmentation to measure character height and computes distance via the pinhole camera model. The system incorporates interactive calibration, adaptive detection with strict and permissive modes, and multi-method character segmentation leveraging both adaptive and global thresholding. To enhance robustness, the framework further includes camera pose compensation using lane-based horizon estimation, hybrid deep-learning fusion, temporal Kalman filtering for velocity estimation, and multi-feature fusion that exploits additional typographic cues such as stroke width, character spacing, and plate border thickness. Experimental validation with a calibrated monocular camera in a controlled indoor setup achieved a coefficient of variation of 2.3% in character height across consecutive frames and a mean absolute error of 7.7%. The framework operates without GPU acceleration, demonstrating real-time feasibility. A comprehensive comparison with a plate-width based method shows that character-based ranging reduces the standard deviation of estimates by 35%, translating to smoother, more consistent distance readings in practice, where erratic estimates could trigger unnecessary braking or acceleration.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV
Viewport-based Neural 360{\deg} Image Compression
Given the popularity of 360{\deg} images on social media platforms, 360{\deg} image compression becomes a critical technology for media storage and transmission. Conventional 360{\deg} image compression pipeline projects the spherical image into a single 2D plane, leading to issues of oversampling and distortion. In this paper, we propose a novel viewport-based neural compression pipeline for 360{\deg} images. By replacing the image projection in conventional 360{\deg} image compression pipelines with viewport extraction and efficiently compressing multiple viewports, the proposed pipeline minimizes the inherent oversampling and distortion issues. However, viewport extraction impedes information sharing between multiple viewports during compression, causing the loss of global information about the spherical image. To tackle this global information loss, we design a neural viewport codec to capture global prior information across multiple viewports and maximally compress the viewport data. The viewport codec is empowered by a transformer-based ViewPort ConText (VPCT) module that can be integrated with canonical learning-based 2D image compression structures. We compare the proposed pipeline with existing 360{\deg} image compression models and conventional 360{\deg} image compression pipelines building on learning-based 2D image codecs and standard hand-crafted codecs. Results show that our pipeline saves an average of $14.01\%$ bit consumption compared to the best-performing 360{\deg} image compression methods without compromising quality. The proposed VPCT-based codec also outperforms existing 2D image codecs in the viewport-based neural compression pipeline. Our code can be found at: https://github.com/Jingwei-Liao/VPCT.
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Computer Vision
From Pixels to Semantics: A Multi-Stage AI Framework for Structural Damage Detection in Satellite Imagery
Rapid and accurate structural damage assessment following natural disasters is critical for effective emergency response and recovery. However, remote sensing imagery often suffers from low spatial resolution, contextual ambiguity, and limited semantic interpretability, reducing the reliability of traditional detection pipelines. In this work, we propose a novel hybrid framework that integrates AI-based super-resolution, deep learning object detection, and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for comprehensive post-disaster building damage assessment. First, we enhance pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery using a Video Restoration Transformer (VRT) to upscale images from 1024x1024 to 4096x4096 resolution, improving structural detail visibility. Next, a YOLOv11-based detector localizes buildings in pre-disaster imagery, and cropped building regions are analyzed using VLMs to semantically assess structural damage across four severity levels. To ensure robust evaluation in the absence of ground-truth captions, we employ CLIPScore for reference-free semantic alignment and introduce a multi-model VLM-as-a-Jury strategy to reduce individual model bias in safety-critical decision making. Experiments on subsets of the xBD dataset, including the Moore Tornado and Hurricane Matthew events, demonstrate that the proposed framework enhances the semantic interpretation of damaged buildings. In addition, our framework provides helpful recommendations to first responders for recovery based on damage analysis.
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Computer Vision
ENC-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Electronic Navigational Chart Understanding
Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs) are the safety-critical backbone of modern maritime navigation, yet it remains unclear whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can reliably interpret them. Unlike natural images or conventional charts, ENCs encode regulations, bathymetry, and route constraints via standardized vector symbols, scale-dependent rendering, and precise geometric structure – requiring specialized maritime expertise for interpretation. We introduce ENC-Bench, the first benchmark dedicated to professional ENC understanding. ENC-Bench contains 20,490 expert-validated samples from 840 authentic National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ENCs, organized into a three-level hierarchy: Perception (symbol and feature recognition), Spatial Reasoning (coordinate localization, bearing, distance), and Maritime Decision-Making (route legality, safety assessment, emergency planning under multiple constraints). All samples are generated from raw S-57 data through a calibrated vector-to-image pipeline with automated consistency checks and expert review. We evaluate 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs such as GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5, Qwen3-VL, InternVL-3, and GLM-4.5V, under a unified zero-shot protocol. The best model achieves only 47.88% accuracy, with systematic challenges in symbolic grounding, spatial computation, multi-constraint reasoning, and robustness to lighting and scale variations. By establishing the first rigorous ENC benchmark, we open a new research frontier at the intersection of specialized symbolic reasoning and safety-critical AI, providing essential infrastructure for advancing MLLMs toward professional maritime applications.
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Computer Vision
Reconstruction-Guided Slot Curriculum: Addressing Object Over-Fragmentation in Video Object-Centric Learning
Video Object-Centric Learning seeks to decompose raw videos into a small set of object slots, but existing slot-attention models often suffer from severe over-fragmentation. This is because the model is implicitly encouraged to occupy all slots to minimize the reconstruction objective, thereby representing a single object with multiple redundant slots. We tackle this limitation with a reconstruction-guided slot curriculum (SlotCurri). Training starts with only a few coarse slots and progressively allocates new slots where reconstruction error remains high, thus expanding capacity only where it is needed and preventing fragmentation from the outset. Yet, during slot expansion, meaningful sub-parts can emerge only if coarse-level semantics are already well separated; however, with a small initial slot budget and an MSE objective, semantic boundaries remain blurry. Therefore, we augment MSE with a structure-aware loss that preserves local contrast and edge information to encourage each slot to sharpen its semantic boundaries. Lastly, we propose a cyclic inference that rolls slots forward and then backward through the frame sequence, producing temporally consistent object representations even in the earliest frames. All combined, SlotCurri addresses object over-fragmentation by allocating representational capacity where reconstruction fails, further enhanced by structural cues and cyclic inference. Notable FG-ARI gains of +6.8 on YouTube-VIS and +8.3 on MOVi-C validate the effectiveness of SlotCurri. Our code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SlotCurri.
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Computer Vision
Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection via Geometric Prior
The purpose of multimodal industrial anomaly detection is to detect complex geometric shape defects such as subtle surface deformations and irregular contours that are difficult to detect in 2D-based methods. However, current multimodal industrial anomaly detection lacks the effective use of crucial geometric information like surface normal vectors and 3D shape topology, resulting in low detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel Geometric Prior-based Anomaly Detection network (GPAD). Firstly, we propose a point cloud expert model to perform fine-grained geometric feature extraction, employing differential normal vector computation to enhance the geometric details of the extracted features and generate geometric prior. Secondly, we propose a two-stage fusion strategy to efficiently leverage the complementarity of multimodal data as well as the geometric prior inherent in 3D points. We further propose attention fusion and anomaly regions segmentation based on geometric prior, which enhance the model's ability to perceive geometric defects. Extensive experiments show that our multimodal industrial anomaly detection model outperforms the State-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in detection accuracy on both MVTec-3D AD and Eyecandies datasets.
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Computer Vision
MVPBench: A Multi-Video Perception Evaluation Benchmark for Multi-Modal Video Understanding
The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred growing interest in Multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) and motivated the development of benchmarks to evaluate their perceptual and comprehension abilities. Existing benchmarks, however, are limited to static images or single videos, overlooking the complex interactions across multiple videos. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-Video Perception Evaluation Benchmark (MVPBench), a new benchmark featuring 14 subtasks across diverse visual domains designed to evaluate models on extracting relevant information from video sequences to make informed decisions. MVPBench includes 5K question-answering tests involving 2.7K video clips sourced from existing datasets and manually annotated clips. Extensive evaluations reveal that current models struggle to process multi-video inputs effectively, underscoring substantial limitations in their multi-video comprehension. We anticipate MVPBench will drive advancements in multi-video perception.
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Computer Vision
SOUPLE: Enhancing Audio-Visual Localization and Segmentation with Learnable Prompt Contexts
Large-scale pre-trained image-text models exhibit robust multimodal representations, yet applying the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to audio-visual localization remains challenging. Replacing the classification token ([CLS]) with an audio-embedded token ([V_A]) struggles to capture semantic cues, and the prompt "a photo of a [V_A]" fails to establish meaningful connections between audio embeddings and context tokens. To address these issues, we propose Sound-aware Prompt Learning (SOUPLE), which replaces fixed prompts with learnable context tokens. These tokens incorporate visual features to generate conditional context for a mask decoder, effectively bridging semantic correspondence between audio and visual inputs. Experiments on VGGSound, SoundNet, and AVSBench demonstrate that SOUPLE improves localization and segmentation performance.
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Computer Vision
How Far Can VLMs Go for Visual Bug Detection? Studying 19,738 Keyframes from 41 Hours of Gameplay Videos
Video-based quality assurance (QA) for long-form gameplay video is labor-intensive and error-prone, yet valuable for assessing game stability and visual correctness over extended play sessions. Vision language models (VLMs) promise general-purpose visual reasoning capabilities and thus appear attractive for detecting visual bugs directly from video frames. Recent benchmarks suggest that VLMs can achieve promising results in detecting visual glitches on curated datasets. Building on these findings, we conduct a real-world study using industrial QA gameplay videos to evaluate how well VLMs perform in practical scenarios. Our study samples keyframes from long gameplay videos and asks a VLM whether each keyframe contains a bug. Starting from a single-prompt baseline, the model achieves a precision of 0.50 and an accuracy of 0.72. We then examine two common enhancement strategies used to improve VLM performance without fine-tuning: (1) a secondary judge model that re-evaluates VLM outputs, and (2) metadata-augmented prompting through the retrieval of prior bug reports. Across 100 videos totaling 41 hours and 19,738 keyframes, these strategies provide only marginal improvements over the simple baseline, while introducing additional computational cost and output variance. Our findings indicate that off-the-shelf VLMs are already capable of detecting a certain range of visual bugs in QA gameplay videos, but further progress likely requires hybrid approaches that better separate textual and visual anomaly detection.
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Computer Vision
TimeWeaver: Age-Consistent Reference-Based Face Restoration with Identity Preservation
Recent progress in face restoration has shifted from visual fidelity to identity fidelity, driving a transition from reference-free to reference-based paradigms that condition restoration on reference images of the same person. However, these methods assume the reference and degraded input are age-aligned. When only cross-age references are available, as in historical restoration or missing-person retrieval, they fail to maintain age fidelity. To address this limitation, we propose TimeWeaver, the first reference-based face restoration framework supporting cross-age references. Given arbitrary reference images and a target-age prompt, TimeWeaver produces restorations with both identity fidelity and age consistency. Specifically, we decouple identity and age conditioning across training and inference. During training, the model learns an age-robust identity representation by fusing a global identity embedding with age-suppressed facial tokens via a transformer-based ID-Fusion module. During inference, two training-free techniques, Age-Aware Gradient Guidance and Token-Targeted Attention Boost, steer sampling toward desired age semantics, enabling precise adherence to the target-age prompt. Extensive experiments show that TimeWeaver surpasses existing methods in visual quality, identity preservation, and age consistency.
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Computer Vision
WiFi2Cap: Semantic Action Captioning from Wi-Fi CSI via Limb-Level Semantic Alignment
Privacy-preserving semantic understanding of human activities is important for indoor sensing, yet existing Wi-Fi CSI-based systems mainly focus on pose estimation or predefined action classification rather than fine-grained language generation. Mapping CSI to natural-language descriptions remains challenging because of the semantic gap between wireless signals and language and direction-sensitive ambiguities such as left/right limb confusion. We propose WiFi2Cap, a three-stage framework for generating action captions directly from Wi-Fi CSI. A vision-language teacher learns transferable supervision from synchronized video-text pairs, and a CSI student is aligned to the teacher's visual space and text embeddings. To improve direction-sensitive captioning, we introduce a Mirror-Consistency Loss that reduces mirrored-action and left-right ambiguities during cross-modal alignment. A prefix-tuned language model then generates action descriptions from CSI embeddings. We also introduce the WiFi2Cap Dataset, a synchronized CSI-RGB-sentence benchmark for semantic captioning from Wi-Fi signals. Experimental results show that WiFi2Cap consistently outperforms baseline methods on BLEU-4, METEOR, ROUGE-L, CIDEr, and SPICE, demonstrating effective privacy-friendly semantic sensing.
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Computer Vision
Think 360{\deg}: Evaluating the Width-centric Reasoning Capability of MLLMs Beyond Depth
In this paper, we present a holistic multimodal benchmark that evaluates the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs with an explicit focus on reasoning width, a complementary dimension to the more commonly studied reasoning depth. Specifically, reasoning depth measures the model's ability to carry out long-chain, sequential reasoning in which each step is tightly and rigorously linked to the next. Reasoning width tends to focus more on the model's capacity for broad trial-and-error search or multi-constrained optimization: it must systematically traverse many possible and parallelized reasoning paths, apply diverse constraints to prune unpromising branches, and identify valid solution routes for efficient iteration or backtracking. To achieve it, we carefully curate 1200+ high-quality multimodal cases spanning heterogeneous domains, and propose a fine-grained tree-of-thought evaluation protocol that jointly quantifies reasoning width and depth. We evaluate 12 major model families (over 30 advanced MLLMs) across difficulty tiers, question types, and required skills. Results show that while current models exhibit strong performance on general or common-sense VQA tasks, they still struggle to combine deep sequential thought chains with wide exploratory search to perform genuine insight-based reasoning. Finally, we analyze characteristic failure modes to provide possible directions for building MLLMs that reason not only deeper but also wider.
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Computer Vision
GeoTikzBridge: Advancing Multimodal Code Generation for Geometric Perception and Reasoning
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable perceptual and reasoning abilities. However, they struggle to perceive fine-grained geometric structures, constraining their ability of geometric understanding and visual reasoning. To address this, we propose GeoTikzBridge, a framework that enhances local geometric perception and visual reasoning through tikz-based code generation. Within this framework, we build two models supported by two complementary datasets. The GeoTikzBridge-Base model is trained on GeoTikz-Base dataset, the largest image-to-tikz dataset to date with 2.5M pairs (16 $\times$ larger than existing open-sourced datasets). This process is achieved via iterative data expansion and a localized geometric transformation strategy. Subsequently, GeoTikzBridge-Instruct is fine-tuned on GeoTikz-Instruct dataset which is the first instruction-augmented tikz dataset supporting visual reasoning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance among open-sourced MLLMs. Furthermore, GeoTikzBridge models can serve as plug-and-play reasoning modules for any MLLM(LLM), enhancing reasoning performance in geometric problem-solving. Datasets and codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/sjy-1995/GeoTikzBridge.
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Computer Vision
Large-Scale Avalanche Mapping from SAR Images with Deep Learning-based Change Detection
Accurate change detection from satellite imagery is essential for monitoring rapid mass-movement hazards such as snow avalanches, which increasingly threaten human life, infrastructure, and ecosystems due to their rising frequency and intensity. This study presents a systematic investigation of large-scale avalanche mapping through bi-temporal change detection using Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. Extensive experiments across multiple alpine ecoregions with manually validated avalanche inventories show that treating the task as a unimodal change detection problem, relying solely on pre- and post-event SAR images, achieves the most consistent performance. The proposed end-to-end pipeline achieves an F1-score of 0.8061 in a conservative (F1-optimized) configuration and attains an F2-score of 0.8414 with 80.36% avalanche-polygon hit rate under a less conservative, recall-oriented (F2-optimized) tuning. These results highlight the trade-off between precision and completeness and demonstrate how threshold adjustment can improve the detection of smaller or marginal avalanches. The release of the annotated multi-region dataset establishes a reproducible benchmark for SAR-based avalanche mapping.
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Monday 23 March
Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Brain-CLIPLM: Semantic Compression for EEG-to-Text Decoding
Decoding natural language from non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) remains constrained by low signal-to-noise ratio and limited information bandwidth. This raises a central question: can sentence-level language be reliably recovered from such signals? Under realistic information constraints, this direct-recovery assumption may be too strong. We introduce a semantic compression hypothesis: non-invasive EEG may preserve recoverable semantic anchors rather than the full lexical–syntactic form of a sentence. From this perspective, direct sentence reconstruction is overly fine-grained relative to the recoverable information scale of EEG. To address this mismatch, we propose Brain-CLIPLM, a two-stage framework that decomposes EEG-to-text decoding into semantic-anchor recovery and anchor-guided sentence reconstruction. Stage 1 uses contrastive learning to align word-level EEG evidence with a fixed keyword vocabulary and recover ordered semantic anchors. Stage 2 uses a retrieval-grounded large language model with chain-of-thought reasoning prompts to reconstruct sentence meaning from these anchors, following a granularity matching principle that aligns decoding complexity with the recoverable neural information scale. On the combined Zurich Cognitive Language Processing (ZuCo) benchmark, Brain-CLIPLM achieves 67.6% Top-5 and 85.0% Top-25 sentence retrieval accuracy, with the strongest performance at intermediate anchor granularity. Control analyses show that EEG-derived anchors carry sentence-specific information beyond language-model priors. Within the constrained ZuCo sentence pool and fixed keyword-vocabulary settings, these findings suggest that EEG-to-text decoding is better framed as recovering compressed semantic content before anchor-guided sentence reconstruction.
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Computer Vision
PA-SFM: Tracker-free differentiable acoustic radiation for freehand 3D photoacoustic imaging
Three-dimensional (3D) handheld photoacoustic tomography typically relies on bulky and expensive external positioning sensors to correct motion artifacts, which severely limits its clinical flexibility and accessibility. To address this challenge, we present PA-SFM, a tracker-free framework that leverages exclusively single-modality photoacoustic data for both sensor pose recovery and high-fidelity 3D reconstruction via differentiable acoustic radiation modeling. Unlike traditional structure-from-motion (SFM) methods based on visual features, PA-SFM integrates the acoustic wave equation into a differentiable programming pipeline. By leveraging a high-performance, GPU-accelerated acoustic radiation kernel, the framework simultaneously optimizes the 3D photoacoustic source distribution and the sensor array pose via gradient descent. To ensure robust convergence in freehand scenarios, we introduce a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy that incorporates geometric consistency checks and rigid-body constraints to eliminate motion outliers. We validated the proposed method through both numerical simulations and in-vivo rat experiments. The results demonstrate that PA-SFM achieves sub-millimeter positioning accuracy and restores high-resolution 3D vascular structures comparable to ground-truth benchmarks, offering a low-cost, software-defined solution for clinical freehand photoacoustic imaging. The source code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/JaegerCQ/PA-SFM}{https://github.com/JaegerCQ/PA-SFM}.
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Computer Vision
A Camera-Native Talking-Head Video Dataset for Various Computer Vision Tasks
Talking-head videos constitute a predominant content type in real-time communication, yet publicly available datasets for video processing research in this domain remain scarce and limited in signal fidelity. In this paper, we open-source a camera-native dataset of 838 talking-head recordings (approximately 210 minutes), each 15s in duration, captured from 799 participants across 443 camera-code categories in their natural environments. All recordings are stored using the FFV1 lossless codec, preserving the camera-native signal—uncompressed (24.7%) or MJPEG-encoded (75.3%)—without additional lossy processing. Each recording is annotated with a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and ten perceptual quality tokens that jointly explain 64.4% of the MOS variance. From this corpus, we curate a stratified benchmarking subset of 120 clips in three content conditions: original, background blur, and background replacement. Codec efficiency evaluation across four datasets and four codecs, namely H.264, H.265, H.266, and AV1, yields VMAF BD-rate savings up to $-71.3%$ (H.266) relative to H.264, with significant encoder$\times$dataset ($\eta_p^2 = .112$) and encoder$\times$content condition ($\eta_p^2 = .149$) interactions, demonstrating that both content type and background processing affect compression efficiency. A preliminary super-resolution evaluation with four SR models confirms that the dataset significantly affects absolute performance while preserving model rankings, demonstrating applicability beyond codec benchmarking. The dataset offers 5$\times$ the scale of the largest prior talking-head webcam dataset (838 vs. 160 clips) and preserves the camera-native signal without additional lossy compression, establishing a resource for benchmarking video compression, super-resolution, quality assessment, and enhancement models in real-time communication.
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Computer Vision
Tiny-ViT: A Compact Vision Transformer for Efficient and Explainable Potato Leaf Disease Classification
Early and precise identification of plant diseases, especially in potato crops is important to ensure the health of the crops and ensure the maximum yield . Potato leaf diseases, such as Early Blight and Late Blight, pose significant challenges to farmers, often resulting in yield losses and increased pesticide use. Traditional methods of detection are not only time-consuming, but are also subject to human error, which is why automated and efficient methods are required. The paper introduces a new method of potato leaf disease classification Tiny-ViT model, which is a small and effective Vision Transformer (ViT) developed to be used in resource-limited systems. The model is tested on a dataset of three classes, namely Early Blight, Late Blight, and Healthy leaves, and the preprocessing procedures include resizing, CLAHE, and Gaussian blur to improve the quality of the image. Tiny-ViT model has an impressive test accuracy of 99.85% and a mean CV accuracy of 99.82% which is better than baseline models such as DEIT Small, SWIN Tiny, and MobileViT XS. In addition to this, the model has a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.9990 and narrow confidence intervals (CI) of [0.9980, 0.9995], which indicates high reliability and generalization. The training and testing inference time is competitive, and the model exhibits low computational expenses, thereby, making it applicable in real-time applications. Moreover, interpretability of the model is improved with the help of GRAD-CAM, which identifies diseased areas. Altogether, the proposed Tiny-ViT is a solution with a high level of robustness, efficiency, and explainability to the problem of plant disease classification.
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Computer Vision
An Intelligent Framework for Real-Time Yoga Pose Detection and Posture Correction
Yoga is widely recognized for improving physical fitness, flexibility, and mental well being. However, these benefits depend strongly on correct posture execution. Improper alignment during yoga practice can reduce effectiveness and increase the risk of musculoskeletal injuries, especially in self guided or online training environments. This paper presents a hybrid Edge AI based framework for real time yoga pose detection and posture correction. The proposed system integrates lightweight human pose estimation models with biomechanical feature extraction and a CNN LSTM based temporal learning architecture to recognize yoga poses and analyze motion dynamics. Joint angles and skeletal features are computed from detected keypoints and compared with reference pose configurations to evaluate posture correctness. A quantitative scoring mechanism is introduced to measure alignment deviations and generate real time corrective feedback through visual, text based, and voice based guidance. In addition, Edge AI optimization techniques such as model quantization and pruning are applied to enable low latency performance on resource constrained devices. The proposed framework provides an intelligent and scalable digital yoga assistant that can improve user safety and training effectiveness in modern fitness applications.
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Computer Vision
Physics-Aware Diffusion for LiDAR Point Cloud Densification
LiDAR perception is severely limited by the distance-dependent sparsity of distant objects. While diffusion models can recover dense geometry, they suffer from prohibitive latency and physical hallucinations manifesting as ghost points. We propose Scanline-Consistent Range-Aware Diffusion, a framework that treats densification as probabilistic refinement rather than generation. By leveraging Partial Diffusion (SDEdit) on a coarse prior, we achieve high-fidelity results in just 156ms. Our novel Ray-Consistency loss and Negative Ray Augmentation enforce sensor physics to suppress artifacts. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on KITTI-360 and nuScenes, directly boosting off-the-shelf 3D detectors without retraining. Code will be made available.
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Computer Vision
GradAttn: Replacing Fixed Residual Connections with Task-Modulated Attention Pathways
Deep ConvNets suffer from gradient signal degradation as network depth increases, limiting effective feature learning in complex architectures. ResNet addressed this through residual connections, but these fixed short circuits cannot adapt to varying input complexity or selectively emphasize task-relevant features across network hierarchies. This study introduces GradAttn, a variation of the residual approach in CNNs that replaces the fixed residual connections with attention-controlled gradient flow. By extracting multi-scale CNN features at different depths and regulating them through self-attention, GradAttn dynamically weights shallow texture features and deep semantic representations. For representational analysis, we evaluated three GradAttn variants across eight diverse datasets: from natural images and medical imaging to fashion recognition. The results demonstrate that GradAttn outperforms ResNet-18 on five of eight datasets, achieving up to +11.07% accuracy improvement on FashionMNIST while maintaining a comparable network size. Gradient flow analysis reveals that controlled instabilities, introduced by attention, often coincide with improved generalization, challenging the assumption that perfect stability is optimal. Furthermore, positional encoding's effectiveness turned out to be dataset-dependent, with CNN hierarchies frequently encoding sufficient spatial structure. These findings render attention mechanisms as enablers of learnable gradient control, offering a new way for adaptive representation learning in deep neural architectures.
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Computer Vision
Domain-Guided YOLO26 with Composite BCE-Dice-Lovász Loss for Multi-Class Fetal Head Ultrasound Segmentation
Segmenting fetal head structures from prenatal ultrasound remains a practical bottleneck in obstetric imaging. The current state-of-the-art baseline, proposed alongside the published dataset, adapts the Segment Anything Model with per-class Dice and Lovász losses but still depends on bounding-box prompts at test time. We build a prompt-free pipeline on top of YOLO26-Seg that jointly detects and segments three structures, Brain, Cavum Septi Pellucidi (CSP), and Lateral Ventricles (LV), in a single forward pass. Three modifications are central to our approach: (i) a composite BCE-Dice-Lovász segmentation loss with inverse-frequency class weighting, injected into the YOLO26 training loop via runtime monkey-patching; (ii) domain-guided copy-paste augmentation that transplants minority-class structures while respecting their anatomical location relative to the brain boundary; and (iii) inter-patient stratified splitting to prevent data leakage. On 575 held-out test images, the composite loss variant reaches a mean Dice coefficient of 0.9253, exceeding the baseline (0.9012) by 2.68 percentage points, despite reporting over three foreground classes only, whereas the baseline's reported mean includes the easy background class. We further ablate each component and discuss annotation-quality and class-imbalance effects on CSP and LV performance.
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Computer Vision
Generating Synthetic Wildlife Health Data from Camera Trap Imagery: A Pipeline for Alopecia and Body Condition Training Data
No publicly available, ML ready datasets exist for wildlife health conditions in camera trap imagery, creating a fundamental barrier to automated health screening. We present a pipeline for generating synthetic training images depicting alopecia and body condition deterioration in wildlife from real camera trap photographs. Our pipeline constructs a curated base image set from iWildCam using MegaDetector derived bounding boxes and center frame weighted stratified sampling across 8 North American species. A generative phenotype editing system produces controlled severity variants depicting hair loss consistent with mange and emaciation. An adaptive scene drift quality control system uses a sham prefilter and decoupled mask then score approach with complementary day or night metrics to reject images where the generative model altered the original scene. We frame the pipeline explicitly as a screening data source. From 201 base images across 4 species, we generate 553 QC passing synthetic variants with an overall pass rate of 83 percent. A sim to real transfer experiment training exclusively on synthetic data and testing on real camera trap images of suspected health conditions achieves 0.85 AUROC, demonstrating that the synthetic data captures visual features sufficient for screening.
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Computer Vision
Survey on Remote Sensing Scene Classification: From Traditional Methods to Large Generative AI Models
Remote sensing scene classification has experienced a paradigmatic transformation from traditional handcrafted feature methods to sophisticated artificial intelligence systems that now form the backbone of modern Earth observation applications. This comprehensive survey examines the complete methodological evolution, systematically tracing development from classical texture descriptors and machine learning classifiers through the deep learning revolution to current state-of-the-art foundation models and generative AI approaches. We chronicle the pivotal shift from manual feature engineering to automated hierarchical representation learning via convolutional neural networks, followed by advanced architectures including Vision Transformers, graph neural networks, and hybrid frameworks. The survey provides in-depth coverage of breakthrough developments in self-supervised foundation models and vision-language systems, highlighting exceptional performance in zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. Special emphasis is placed on generative AI innovations that tackle persistent challenges through synthetic data generation and advanced feature learning strategies. We analyze contemporary obstacles including annotation costs, multimodal data fusion complexities, interpretability demands, and ethical considerations, alongside current trends in edge computing deployment, federated learning frameworks, and sustainable AI practices. Based on comprehensive analysis of recent advances and gaps, we identify key future research priorities: advancing hyperspectral and multi-temporal analysis capabilities, developing robust cross-domain generalization methods, and establishing standardized evaluation protocols to accelerate scientific progress in remote sensing scene classification systems.
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Computer Vision
From Diffusion to Flow: Efficient Motion Generation in MotionGPT3
Recent text-driven motion generation methods span both discrete token-based approaches and continuous-latent formulations. MotionGPT3 exemplifies the latter paradigm, combining a learned continuous motion latent space with a diffusion-based prior for text-conditioned synthesis. While rectified flow objectives have recently demonstrated favorable convergence and inference-time properties relative to diffusion in image and audio generation, it remains unclear whether these advantages transfer cleanly to the motion generation setting. In this work, we conduct a controlled empirical study comparing diffusion and rectified flow objectives within the MotionGPT3 framework. By holding the model architecture, training protocol, and evaluation setup fixed, we isolate the effect of the generative objective on training dynamics, final performance, and inference efficiency. Experiments on the HumanML3D dataset show that rectified flow converges in fewer training epochs, reaches strong test performance earlier, and matches or exceeds diffusion-based motion quality under identical conditions. Moreover, flow-based priors exhibit stable behavior across a wide range of inference step counts and achieve competitive quality with fewer sampling steps, yielding improved efficiency-quality trade-offs. Overall, our results suggest that several known benefits of rectified flow objectives do extend to continuous-latent text-to-motion generation, highlighting the importance of the training objective choice in motion priors.
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Computer Vision
TDEC: Deep Embedded Image Clustering with Transformer and Distribution Information
Image clustering is a crucial but challenging task in multimedia machine learning. Recently the combination of clustering with deep learning has achieved promising performance against conventional methods on high-dimensional image data. Unfortunately, existing deep clustering methods (DC) often ignore the importance of information fusion with a global perception field among different image regions on clustering images, especially complex ones. Additionally, the learned features are usually clustering-unfriendly in terms of dimensionality and are based only on simple distance information for the clustering. In this regard, we propose a deep embedded image clustering TDEC, which for the first time to our knowledge, jointly considers feature representation, dimensional preference, and robust assignment for image clustering. Specifically, we introduce the Transformer to form a novel module T-Encoder to learn discriminative features with global dependency while using the Dim-Reduction block to build a friendly low-dimensional space favoring clustering. Moreover, the distribution information of embedded features is considered in the clustering process to provide reliable supervised signals for joint training. Our method is robust and allows for more flexibility in data size, the number of clusters, and the context complexity. More importantly, the clustering performance of TDEC is much higher than recent competitors. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art approaches on complex datasets show the superiority of TDEC.