High-resolution (HR) image harmonization is of great significance in real-world applications such as image synthesis and image editing. However, due to the high memory costs, existing dense pixel-to-pixel harmonization methods are mainly focusing on processing low-resolution (LR) images. Some recent works resort to combining with color-to-color transformations but are either limited to certain resolutions or heavily depend on hand-crafted image filters. In this work, we explore leveraging the implicit neural representation (INR) and propose a novel image Harmonization method based on Implicit neural Networks (HINet), which to the best of our knowledge, is the first dense pixel-to-pixel method applicable to HR images without any hand-crafted filter design. Inspired by the Retinex theory, we decouple the MLPs into two parts to respectively capture the content and environment of composite images. A Low-Resolution Image Prior (LRIP) network is designed to alleviate the Boundary Inconsistency problem, and we also propose new designs for the training and inference process. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, some interesting and practical applications of the proposed method are explored. Our code is available at //github.com/WindVChen/INR-Harmonization.
Accurate localization of mobile terminals is crucial for integrated sensing and communication systems. Existing fingerprint localization methods, which deduce coordinates from channel information in pre-defined rectangular areas, struggle with the heterogeneous fingerprint distribution inherent in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios. To address the problem, we introduce a novel multi-source information fusion learning framework referred to as the Autosync Multi-Domain NLOS Localization (AMDNLoc). Specifically, AMDNLoc employs a two-stage matched filter fused with a target tracking algorithm and iterative centroid-based clustering to automatically and irregularly segment NLOS regions, ensuring uniform fingerprint distribution within channel state information across frequency, power, and time-delay domains. Additionally, the framework utilizes a segment-specific linear classifier array, coupled with deep residual network-based feature extraction and fusion, to establish the correlation function between fingerprint features and coordinates within these regions. Simulation results demonstrate that AMDNLoc significantly enhances localization accuracy by over 55% compared with traditional convolutional neural network on the wireless artificial intelligence research dataset.
Given an image and a natural language expression as input, the goal of referring image segmentation is to segment the foreground masks of the entities referred by the expression. Existing methods mainly focus on interactive learning between vision and language to enhance the multi-modal representations for global context reasoning. However, predicting directly in pixel-level space can lead to collapsed positioning and poor segmentation results. Its main challenge lies in how to explicitly model entity localization, especially for non-salient entities. In this paper, we tackle this problem by executing a Collaborative Position Reasoning Network (CPRN) via the proposed novel Row-and-Column interactive (RoCo) and Guided Holistic interactive (Holi) modules. Specifically, RoCo aggregates the visual features into the row- and column-wise features corresponding two directional axes respectively. It offers a fine-grained matching behavior that perceives the associations between the linguistic features and two decoupled visual features to perform position reasoning over a hierarchical space. Holi integrates features of the two modalities by a cross-modal attention mechanism, which suppresses the irrelevant redundancy under the guide of positioning information from RoCo. Thus, with the incorporation of RoCo and Holi modules, CPRN captures the visual details of position reasoning so that the model can achieve more accurate segmentation. To our knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly focuses on position reasoning modeling. We also validate the proposed method on three evaluation datasets. It consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
The manipulation of deformable objects by robotic systems presents a significant challenge due to their complex and infinite-dimensional configuration spaces. This paper introduces a novel approach to Deformable Object Manipulation (DOM) by emphasizing the identification and manipulation of Structures of Interest (SOIs) in deformable fabric bags. We propose a bimanual manipulation framework that leverages a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based latent dynamics model to succinctly represent and predict the behavior of these SOIs. Our approach involves constructing a graph representation from partial point cloud data of the object and learning the latent dynamics model that effectively captures the essential deformations of the fabric bag within a reduced computational space. By integrating this latent dynamics model with Model Predictive Control (MPC), we empower robotic manipulators to perform precise and stable manipulation tasks focused on the SOIs. We have validated our framework through various empirical experiments demonstrating its efficacy in bimanual manipulation of fabric bags. Our contributions not only address the complexities inherent in DOM but also provide new perspectives and methodologies for enhancing robotic interactions with deformable objects by concentrating on their critical structural elements. Experimental videos can be obtained from //sites.google.com/view/bagbot.
Quantum communication networks (QCNs) utilize quantum mechanics for secure information transmission, but the reliance on fragile and expensive photonic quantum resources renders QCN resource optimization challenging. Unlike prior QCN works that relied on blindly compressing direct quantum embeddings of classical data, this letter proposes a novel quantum semantic communications (QSC) framework exploiting advancements in quantum machine learning and quantum semantic representations to extracts and embed only the relevant information from classical data into minimal high-dimensional quantum states that are accurately communicated over quantum channels with quantum communication and semantic fidelity measures. Simulation results indicate that, compared to semantic-agnostic QCN schemes, the proposed framework achieves approximately 50-75% reduction in quantum communication resources needed, while achieving a higher quantum semantic fidelity.
One of the fundamental challenges in microscopy (MS) image analysis is instance segmentation (IS), particularly when segmenting cluster regions where multiple objects of varying sizes and shapes may be connected or even overlapped in arbitrary orientations. Existing IS methods usually fail in handling such scenarios, as they rely on coarse instance representations such as keypoints and horizontal bounding boxes (h-bboxes). In this paper, we propose a novel one-stage framework named A2B-IS to address this challenge and enhance the accuracy of IS in MS images. Our approach represents each instance with a pixel-level mask map and a rotated bounding box (r-bbox). Unlike two-stage methods that use box proposals for segmentations, our method decouples mask and box predictions, enabling simultaneous processing to streamline the model pipeline. Additionally, we introduce a Gaussian skeleton map to aid the IS task in two key ways: (1) It guides anchor placement, reducing computational costs while improving the model's capacity to learn RoI-aware features by filtering out noise from background regions. (2) It ensures accurate isolation of densely packed instances by rectifying erroneous box predictions near instance boundaries. To further enhance the performance, we integrate two modules into the framework: (1) An Atrous Attention Block (A2B) designed to extract high-resolution feature maps with fine-grained multiscale information, and (2) A Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) strategy that leverages both labeled and unlabeled images for model training. Our method has been thoroughly validated on two large-scale MS datasets, demonstrating its superiority over most state-of-the-art approaches.
The key challenge of image manipulation detection is how to learn generalizable features that are sensitive to manipulations in novel data, whilst specific to prevent false alarms on authentic images. Current research emphasizes the sensitivity, with the specificity overlooked. In this paper we address both aspects by multi-view feature learning and multi-scale supervision. By exploiting noise distribution and boundary artifact surrounding tampered regions, the former aims to learn semantic-agnostic and thus more generalizable features. The latter allows us to learn from authentic images which are nontrivial to be taken into account by current semantic segmentation network based methods. Our thoughts are realized by a new network which we term MVSS-Net. Extensive experiments on five benchmark sets justify the viability of MVSS-Net for both pixel-level and image-level manipulation detection.
Learning latent representations of nodes in graphs is an important and ubiquitous task with widespread applications such as link prediction, node classification, and graph visualization. Previous methods on graph representation learning mainly focus on static graphs, however, many real-world graphs are dynamic and evolve over time. In this paper, we present Dynamic Self-Attention Network (DySAT), a novel neural architecture that operates on dynamic graphs and learns node representations that capture both structural properties and temporal evolutionary patterns. Specifically, DySAT computes node representations by jointly employing self-attention layers along two dimensions: structural neighborhood and temporal dynamics. We conduct link prediction experiments on two classes of graphs: communication networks and bipartite rating networks. Our experimental results show that DySAT has a significant performance gain over several different state-of-the-art graph embedding baselines.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.
The low resolution of objects of interest in aerial images makes pedestrian detection and action detection extremely challenging tasks. Furthermore, using deep convolutional neural networks to process large images can be demanding in terms of computational requirements. In order to alleviate these challenges, we propose a two-step, yes and no question answering framework to find specific individuals doing one or multiple specific actions in aerial images. First, a deep object detector, Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), is used to generate object proposals from small aerial images. Second, another deep network, is used to learn a latent common sub-space which associates the high resolution aerial imagery and the pedestrian action labels that are provided by the human-based sources
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.