Mask Factory: Towards High-quality Synthetic Data Generation for Dichotomous Image Segmentation

Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) tasks require highly precise annotations, and traditional dataset creation methods are labor intensive, costly, and require extensive domain expertise. Although using synthetic data for DIS is a promising solution to these challenges, current generative models and techniques struggle with the issues of scene deviations, noise-induced errors, and limited training sample variability. To address these issues, we introduce a novel approach, \textbf{\ourmodel{}}, which provides a scalable solution for generating diverse and precise datasets, markedly reducing preparation time and costs. We first introduce a general mask editing method that combines rigid and non-rigid editing techniques to generate high-quality synthetic masks. Specially, rigid editing leverages geometric priors from diffusion models to achieve precise viewpoint transformations under zero-shot conditions, while non-rigid editing employs adversarial training and self-attention mechanisms for complex, topologically consistent modifications. Then, we generate pairs of high-resolution image and accurate segmentation mask using a multi-conditional control generation method. Finally, our experiments on the widely-used DIS5K dataset benchmark demonstrate superior performance in quality and efficiency compared to existing methods. The code is available at \url{https://qian-hao-tian.github.io/MaskFactory/}.

COMPrompter: reconceptualized segment anything model with multiprompt network for camouflaged object detection

We rethink the segment anything model (SAM) and propose a novel multiprompt network called COMPrompter for camouflaged object detection (COD). SAM has zero-shot generalization ability beyond other models and can provide an ideal framework for COD. Our network aims to enhance the single prompt strategy in SAM to a multiprompt strategy. To achieve this, we propose an edge gradient extraction module, which generates a mask containing gradient information regarding the boundaries of camouflaged objects. This gradient mask is then used as a novel boundary prompt, enhancing the segmentation process. Thereafter, we design a box-boundary mutual guidance module, which fosters more precise and comprehensive feature extraction via mutual guidance between a boundary prompt and a box prompt. This collaboration enhances the model's ability to accurately detect camouflaged objects. Moreover, we employ the discrete wavelet transform to extract high-frequency features from image embeddings. The high-frequency features serve as a supplementary component to the multiprompt system. Finally, our COMPrompter guides the network to achieve enhanced segmentation results, thereby advancing the development of SAM in terms of COD. Experimental results across COD benchmarks demonstrate that COMPrompter achieves a cutting-edge performance, surpassing the current leading model by an average positive metric of 2.2% in COD10K. In the specific application of COD, the experimental results in polyp segmentation show that our model is superior to top-tier methods as well. The code will be made available at https://github.com/guobaoxiao/COMPrompter.

PR-MIM: Delving Deeper into Partial Reconstruction in Masked Image Modeling

Masked image modeling has achieved great success in learning representations but is limited by the huge computational costs. One cost-saving strategy makes the decoder reconstruct only a subset of masked tokens and throw the others, and we refer to this method as partial reconstruction. However, it also degrades the representation quality. Previous methods mitigate this issue by throwing tokens with minimal information using temporal redundancy inaccessible for static images or attention maps that incur extra costs and complexity. To address these limitations, we propose a progressive reconstruction strategy and a furthest sampling strategy to reconstruct those thrown tokens in an extremely lightweight way instead of completely abandoning them. This approach involves all masked tokens in supervision to ensure adequate pre-training, while maintaining the cost-reduction benefits of partial reconstruction. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method across various existing frameworks. For example, when throwing 50% patches, we can achieve lossless performance of the ViT-B/16 while saving 28% FLOPs and 36% memory usage compared to standard MAE. Our source code will be made publicly available

PlantCamo: Plant Camouflage Detection

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to detect objects with camouflaged properties. Although previous studies have focused on natural (animals and insects) and unnatural (artistic and synthetic) camouflage detection, plant camouflage has been neglected. However, plant camouflage plays a vital role in natural camouflage. Therefore, this paper introduces a new challenging problem of Plant Camouflage Detection (PCD). To address this problem, we introduce the PlantCamo dataset, which comprises 1,250 images with camouflaged plants representing 58 object categories in various natural scenes. To investigate the current status of plant camouflage detection, we conduct a large-scale benchmark study using 20+ cutting-edge COD models on the proposed dataset. Due to the unique characteristics of plant camouflage, including holes and irregular borders, we developed a new framework, named PCNet, dedicated to PCD. Our PCNet surpasses performance thanks to its multi-scale global feature enhancement and refinement. Finally, we discuss the potential applications and insights, hoping this work fills the gap in fine-grained COD research and facilitates further intelligent ecology research. All resources will be available on https://github.com/yjybuaa/PlantCamo.

Frontiers in Intelligent Colonoscopy

Colonoscopy is currently one of the most sensitive screening methods for colorectal cancer. This study investigates the frontiers of intelligent colonoscopy techniques and their prospective implications for multimodal medical applications. With this goal, we begin by assessing the current data-centric and model-centric landscapes through four tasks for colonoscopic scene perception, including classification, detection, segmentation, and vision-language understanding. This assessment enables us to identify domain-specific challenges and reveals that multimodal research in colonoscopy remains open for further exploration. To embrace the coming multimodal era, we establish three foundational initiatives: a large-scale multimodal instruction tuning dataset ColonINST, a colonoscopy-designed multimodal language model ColonGPT, and a multimodal benchmark. To facilitate ongoing monitoring of this rapidly evolving field, we provide a public website for the latest updates: https://github.com/ai4colonoscopy/IntelliScope.

LAKE-RED: Camouflaged Images Generation by Latent Background Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion

Camouflaged vision perception is an important vision task with numerous practical applications. Due to the expensive collection and labeling costs, this community struggles with a major bottleneck that the species category of its datasets is limited to a small number of object species. However, the existing camouflaged generation methods require specifying the background manually, thus failing to extend the camouflaged sample diversity in a low-cost manner. In this paper, we propose a Latent Background Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion (LAKE-RED) for camouflaged image generation. To our knowledge, our contributions mainly include: (1) For the first time, we propose a camouflaged generation paradigm that does not need to receive any background inputs. (2) Our LAKE-RED is the first knowledge retrieval-augmented method with interpretability for camouflaged generation, in which we propose an idea that knowledge retrieval and reasoning enhancement are separated explicitly, to alleviate the task-specific challenges. Moreover, our method is not restricted to specific foreground targets or backgrounds, offering a potential for extending camouflaged vision perception to more diverse domains. (3) Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing approaches, generating more realistic camouflage images.

Minimize Quantization Output Error with Bias Compensation

Quantization is a promising method that reduces memory usage and computational intensity of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), but it often leads to significant output error that hinder model deployment. In this paper, we propose Bias Compensation (BC) to minimize the output error, thus realizing ultra-low-precision quantization without model fine-tuning. Instead of optimizing the non-convex quantization process as in most previous methods, the proposed BC bypasses the step to directly minimize the quantizing output error by identifying a bias vector for compensation. We have established that the minimization of output error through BC is a convex problem and provides an efficient strategy to procure optimal solutions associated with minimal output error,without the need for training or fine-tuning. We conduct extensive experiments on Vision Transformer models and Large Language Models, and the results show that our method notably reduces quantization output error, thereby permitting ultra-low-precision post-training quantization and enhancing the task performance of models. Especially, BC improves the accuracy of ViT-B with 4-bit PTQ4ViT by 36.89% on the ImageNet-1k task, and decreases the perplexity of OPT-350M with 3-bit GPTQ by 5.97 on WikiText2.The code is in https://github.com/GongCheng1919/bias-compensation.

Latent Semantic Consensus For Deterministic Geometric Model Fitting

Estimating reliable geometric model parameters from the data with severe outliers is a fundamental and important task in computer vision. This paper attempts to sample high-quality subsets and select model instances to estimate parameters in the multi-structural data. To address this, we propose an effective method called Latent Semantic Consensus (LSC). The principle of LSC is to preserve the latent semantic consensus in both data points and model hypotheses. Specifically, LSC formulates the model fitting problem into two latent semantic spaces based on data points and model hypotheses, respectively. Then, LSC explores the distributions of points in the two latent semantic spaces, to remove outliers, generate high-quality model hypotheses, and effectively estimate model instances. Finally, LSC is able to provide consistent and reliable solutions within only a few milliseconds for general multi-structural model fitting, due to its deterministic fitting nature and efficiency. Compared with several state-of-the-art model fitting methods, our LSC achieves significant superiority for the performance of both accuracy and speed on synthetic data and real images. The code will be available at https://github.com/guobaoxiao/LSC.

Effectiveness Assessment of Recent Large Vision-Language Models

The advent of large vision-language models (LVLMs) represents a noteworthy advancement towards the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. However, the extent of their efficacy across both specialized and general tasks warrants further investigation. This article endeavors to evaluate the competency of popular LVLMs in specialized and general tasks, respectively, aiming to offer a comprehensive comprehension of these innovative methodologies. To gauge their efficacy in specialized tasks, we tailor a comprehensive testbed comprising three distinct scenarios: natural, healthcare, and industrial, encompassing six challenging tasks. These tasks include salient, camouflaged, and transparent object detection, as well as polyp and skin lesion detection, alongside industrial anomaly detection. We examine the performance of three recent open-source LVLMs -- MiniGPT-v2, LLaVA-1.5, and Shikra -- in the realm of visual recognition and localization. Moreover, we conduct empirical investigations utilizing the aforementioned models alongside GPT-4V, assessing their multi-modal understanding capacities in general tasks such as object counting, absurd question answering, affordance reasoning, attribute recognition, and spatial relation reasoning. Our investigations reveal that these models demonstrate limited proficiency not only in specialized tasks but also in general tasks. We delve deeper into this inadequacy and suggest several potential factors, including limited cognition in specialized tasks, object hallucination, text-to-image interference, and decreased robustness in complex problems. We hope this study would provide valuable insights for the future development of LVLMs, augmenting their power in coping with both general and specialized applications.

Vanishing-Point-Guided Video Semantic Segmentation of Driving Scenes

The estimation of implicit cross-frame correspondences and the high computational cost have long been major challenges in video semantic segmentation (VSS) for driving scenes. Prior works utilize keyframes, feature propagation, or cross-frame attention to address these issues. By contrast, we are the first to harness vanishing point (VP) priors for more effective segmentation. Intuitively, objects near VPs (i.e., away from the vehicle) are less discernible. Moreover, they tend to move radially away from the VP over time in the usual case of a forward-facing camera, a straight road, and linear forward motion of the vehicle. Our novel, efficient network for VSS, named VPSeg, incorporates two modules that utilize exactly this pair of static and dynamic VP priors: sparse-to-dense feature mining (DenseVP) and VP-guided motion fusion (MotionVP). MotionVP employs VP-guided motion estimation to establish explicit correspondences across frames and help attend to the most relevant features from neighboring frames, while DenseVP enhances weak dynamic features in distant regions around VPs. These modules operate within a context-detail framework, which separates contextual features from high-resolution local features at different input resolutions to reduce computational costs. Contextual and local features are integrated through contextualized motion attention (CMA) for the final prediction. Extensive experiments on two popular driving segmentation benchmarks, Cityscapes and ACDC, demonstrate that VPSeg outperforms previous SOTA methods, with only modest computational overhead.