Lesion-aware network for diabetic retinopathy diagnosis

Deep learning brought boosts to auto diabetic retinopathy (DR) diagnosis, thus, greatly helping ophthalmologists for early disease detection, which contributes to preventing disease deterioration that may eventually lead to blindness. It has been proved that convolutional neural network (CNN)-aided lesion identifying or segmentation benefits auto DR screening. The key to fine-grained lesion tasks mainly lies in: (1) extracting features being both sensitive to tiny lesions and robust against DR-irrelevant interference, and (2) exploiting and re-using encoded information to restore lesion locations under extremely imbalanced data distribution. To this end, we propose a CNN-based DR diagnosis network with attention mechanism involved, termed lesion-aware network, to better capture lesion information from imbalanced data. Specifically, we design the lesion-aware module (LAM) to capture noise-like lesion areas across deeper layers, and the feature-preserve module (FPM) to assist shallow-to-deep feature fusion. Afterward, the proposed lesion-aware network (LANet) is constructed by embedding the LAM and FPM into the CNN decoders for DR-related information utilization. The proposed LANet is then further extended to a DR screening network by adding a classification layer. Through experiments on three public fundus datasets with pixel-level annotations, our method outperforms the mainstream methods with an area under curve of 0.967 in DR screening, and increases the overall average precision by 7.6%, 2.1%, and 1.2% in lesion segmentation on three datasets. Besides, the ablation study validates the effectiveness of the proposed sub-modules.

Few-shot Defect Image Generation based on Consistency Modeling

Image generation can solve insufficient labeled data issues in defect detection. Most defect generation methods are only trained on a single product without considering the consistencies among multiple products, leading to poor quality and diversity of generated results. To address these issues, we propose DefectDiffu, a novel text-guided diffusion method to model both intra-product background consistency and inter-product defect consistency across multiple products and modulate the consistency perturbation directions to control product type and defect strength, achieving diversified defect image generation. Firstly, we leverage a text encoder to separately provide consistency prompts for background, defect, and fusion parts of the disentangled integrated architecture, thereby disentangling defects and normal backgrounds. Secondly, we propose the double-free strategy to generate defect images through two-stage perturbation of consistency direction, thereby controlling product type and defect strength by adjusting the perturbation scale. Besides, DefectDiffu can generate defect mask annotations utilizing cross-attention maps from the defect part. Finally, to improve the generation quality of small defects and masks, we propose the adaptive attention-enhance loss to increase the attention to defects. Experimental results demonstrate that DefectDiffu surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of generation quality and diversity, thus effectively improving downstream defection performance. Moreover, defect perturbation directions can be transferred among various products to achieve zero-shot defect generation, which is highly beneficial for addressing insufficient data issues. The code are available at https://github.com/FFDD-diffusion/DefectDiffu.

MSP-MVS: Multi-granularity Segmentation Prior Guided Multi-View Stereo

Reconstructing textureless areas in MVS poses challenges due to the absence of reliable pixel correspondences within fixed patch. Although certain methods employ patch deformation to expand the receptive field, their patches mistakenly skip depth edges to calculate areas with depth discontinuity, thereby causing ambiguity. Consequently, we introduce Multi-granularity Segmentation Prior Multi-View Stereo (MSP-MVS). Specifically, we first propose multi-granularity segmentation prior by integrating multi-granularity depth edges to restrict patch deformation within homogeneous areas. Moreover, we present anchor equidistribution that bring deformed patches with more uniformly distributed anchors to ensure an adequate coverage of their own homogeneous areas. Furthermore, we introduce iterative local search optimization to represent larger patch with sparse representative candidates, significantly boosting the expressive capacity for each patch. The state-of-the-art results on ETH3D and Tanks & Temples benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robust generalization ability of our proposed method.

VCP-CLIP: A visual context prompting model for zero-shot anomaly segmentation

Recently, large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP have demonstrated immense potential in zero-shot anomaly segmentation (ZSAS) task, utilizing a unified model to directly detect anomalies on any unseen product with painstakingly crafted text prompts. However, existing methods often assume that the product category to be inspected is known, thus setting product-specific text prompts, which is difficult to achieve in the data privacy scenarios. Moreover, even the same type of product exhibits significant differences due to specific components and variations in the production process, posing significant challenges to the design of text prompts. In this end, we propose a visual context prompting model (VCP-CLIP) for ZSAS task based on CLIP. The insight behind VCP-CLIP is to employ visual context prompting to activate CLIP's anomalous semantic perception ability. In specific, we first design a Pre-VCP module to embed global visual information into the text prompt, thus eliminating the necessity for product-specific prompts. Then, we propose a novel Post-VCP module, that adjusts the text embeddings utilizing the fine-grained features of the images. In extensive experiments conducted on 10 real-world industrial anomaly segmentation datasets, VCP-CLIP achieved state-of-the-art performance in ZSAS task. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaozhen228/VCP-CLIP.

IMAGDressing-v1: Customizable Virtual Dressing

Latest advances have achieved realistic virtual try-on (VTON) through localized garment inpainting using latent diffusion models, significantly enhancing consumers' online shopping experience. However, existing VTON technologies neglect the need for merchants to showcase garments comprehensively, including flexible control over garments, optional faces, poses, and scenes. To address this issue, we define a virtual dressing (VD) task focused on generating freely editable human images with fixed garments and optional conditions. Meanwhile, we design a comprehensive affinity metric index (CAMI) to evaluate the consistency between generated images and reference garments. Then, we propose IMAGDressing-v1, which incorporates a garment UNet that captures semantic features from CLIP and texture features from VAE. We present a hybrid attention module, including a frozen self-attention and a trainable cross-attention, to integrate garment features from the garment UNet into a frozen denoising UNet, ensuring users can control different scenes through text. IMAGDressing-v1 can be combined with other extension plugins, such as ControlNet and IP-Adapter, to enhance the diversity and controllability of generated images. Furthermore, to address the lack of data, we release the interactive garment pairing (IGPair) dataset, containing over 300,000 pairs of clothing and dressed images, and establish a standard pipeline for data assembly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our IMAGDressing-v1 achieves state-of-the-art human image synthesis performance under various controlled conditions. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/IMAGDressing.

Boosting Consistency in Story Visualization with Rich-Contextual Conditional Diffusion Models

Recent research showcases the considerable potential of conditional diffusion models for generating consistent stories. However, current methods, which predominantly generate stories in an autoregressive and excessively caption-dependent manner, often underrate the contextual consistency and relevance of frames during sequential generation. To address this, we propose a novel Rich-contextual Conditional Diffusion Models (RCDMs), a two-stage approach designed to enhance story generation's semantic consistency and temporal consistency. Specifically, in the first stage, the frame-prior transformer diffusion model is presented to predict the frame semantic embedding of the unknown clip by aligning the semantic correlations between the captions and frames of the known clip. The second stage establishes a robust model with rich contextual conditions, including reference images of the known clip, the predicted frame semantic embedding of the unknown clip, and text embeddings of all captions. By jointly injecting these rich contextual conditions at the image and feature levels, RCDMs can generate semantic and temporal consistency stories. Moreover, RCDMs can generate consistent stories with a single forward inference compared to autoregressive models. Our qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our proposed RCDMs outperform in challenging scenarios. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/RCDMs.

V-Express: Conditional Dropout for Progressive Training of Portrait Video Generation

In the field of portrait video generation, the use of single images to generate portrait videos has become increasingly prevalent. A common approach involves leveraging generative models to enhance adapters for controlled generation. However, control signals (e.g., text, audio, reference image, pose, depth map, etc.) can vary in strength. Among these, weaker conditions often struggle to be effective due to interference from stronger conditions, posing a challenge in balancing these conditions. In our work on portrait video generation, we identified audio signals as particularly weak, often overshadowed by stronger signals such as facial pose and reference image. However, direct training with weak signals often leads to difficulties in convergence. To address this, we propose V-Express, a simple method that balances different control signals through the progressive training and the conditional dropout operation. Our method gradually enables effective control by weak conditions, thereby achieving generation capabilities that simultaneously take into account the facial pose, reference image, and audio. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively generate portrait videos controlled by audio. Furthermore, a potential solution is provided for the simultaneous and effective use of conditions of varying strengths.

Ensembling Diffusion Models via Adaptive Feature Aggregation

The success of the text-guided diffusion model has inspired the development and release of numerous powerful diffusion models within the open-source community. These models are typically fine-tuned on various expert datasets, showcasing diverse denoising capabilities. Leveraging multiple high-quality models to produce stronger generation ability is valuable, but has not been extensively studied. Existing methods primarily adopt parameter merging strategies to produce a new static model. However, they overlook the fact that the divergent denoising capabilities of the models may dynamically change across different states, such as when experiencing different prompts, initial noises, denoising steps, and spatial locations. In this paper, we propose a novel ensembling method, Adaptive Feature Aggregation (AFA), which dynamically adjusts the contributions of multiple models at the feature level according to various states (i.e., prompts, initial noises, denoising steps, and spatial locations), thereby keeping the advantages of multiple diffusion models, while suppressing their disadvantages. Specifically, we design a lightweight Spatial-Aware Block-Wise (SABW) feature aggregator that adaptive aggregates the block-wise intermediate features from multiple U-Net denoisers into a unified one. The core idea lies in dynamically producing an individual attention map for each model's features by comprehensively considering various states. It is worth noting that only SABW is trainable with about 50 million parameters, while other models are frozen. Both the quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Adaptive Feature Aggregation method. The code is available at https://github.com/tenvence/afa/.

LR-FPN: Enhancing Remote Sensing Object Detection with Location Refined Feature Pyramid Network

Remote sensing target detection aims to identify and locate critical targets within remote sensing images, finding extensive applications in agriculture and urban planning. Feature pyramid networks (FPNs) are commonly used to extract multi-scale features. However, existing FPNs often overlook extracting low-level positional information and fine-grained context interaction. To address this, we propose a novel location refined feature pyramid network (LR-FPN) to enhance the extraction of shallow positional information and facilitate fine-grained context interaction. The LR-FPN consists of two primary modules: the shallow position information extraction module (SPIEM) and the contextual interaction module (CIM). Specifically, SPIEM first maximizes the retention of solid location information of the target by simultaneously extracting positional and saliency information from the low-level feature map. Subsequently, CIM injects this robust location information into different layers of the original FPN through spatial and channel interaction, explicitly enhancing the object area. Moreover, in spatial interaction, we introduce a simple local and non-local interaction strategy to learn and retain the saliency information of the object. Lastly, the LR-FPN can be readily integrated into common object detection frameworks to improve performance significantly. Extensive experiments on two large-scale remote sensing datasets (i.e., DOTAV1.0 and HRSC2016) demonstrate that the proposed LR-FPN is superior to state-of-the-art object detection approaches. Our code and models will be publicly available.

Low-Complexity Estimation Algorithm and Decoupling Scheme for FRaC System

With the leaping advances in autonomous vehicles and transportation infrastructure, dual function radar-communication (DFRC) systems have become attractive due to the size, cost and resource efficiency. A frequency modulated continuous waveform (FMCW)-based radar-communication system (FRaC) utilizing both sparse multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) arrays and index modulation (IM) has been proposed to form a DFRC system specifically designed for vehicular applications. In this paper, the three-dimensional (3D) parameter estimation problem in the FRaC is considered. Since the 3D-parameters including range, direction of arrival (DOA) and velocity are coupled in the estimating matrix of the FRaC system, the existing estimation algorithms cannot estimate the 3D-parameters accurately. Hence, a novel decomposed decoupled atomic norm minimization (DANM) method is proposed by splitting the 3D-parameter estimating matrix into multiple 2D matrices with sparsity constraints. Then, the 3D-parameters are estimated and efficiently and separately with the optimized decoupled estimating matrix. Moreover, the Cram\'{e}r-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the 3D-parameter estimation are derived, and the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is analyzed. Simulation results show that the proposed decomposed DANM method exploits the advantage of the virtual aperture in the existence of coupling caused by IM and sparse MIMO array and outperforms the co-estimation algorithm with lower computation complexity.