LEGNet: Lightweight Edge-Gaussian Driven Network for Low-Quality Remote Sensing Image Object Detection

Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) faces formidable challenges in complex visual environments. Aerial and satellite images inherently suffer from limitations such as low spatial resolution, sensor noise, blurred objects, low-light degradation, and partial occlusions. These degradation factors collectively compromise the feature discriminability in detection models, resulting in three key issues: (1) reduced contrast that hampers foreground-background separation, (2) structural discontinuities in edge representations, and (3) ambiguous feature responses caused by variations in illumination. These collectively weaken model robustness and deployment feasibility. To address these challenges, we propose LEGNet, a lightweight network that incorporates a novel edge-Gaussian aggregation (EGA) module specifically designed for low-quality remote sensing images. Our key innovation lies in the synergistic integration of Scharr operator-based edge priors with uncertainty-aware Gaussian modeling: (a) The orientation-aware Scharr filters preserve high-frequency edge details with rotational invariance; (b) The uncertainty-aware Gaussian layers probabilistically refine low-confidence features through variance estimation. This design enables precision enhancement while maintaining architectural simplicity. Comprehensive evaluations across four RSOD benchmarks (DOTA-v1.0, v1.5, DIOR-R, FAIR1M-v1.0) and a UAV-view dataset (VisDrone2019) demonstrate significant improvements. LEGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmark datasets while ensuring computational efficiency, making it well-suited for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices in real-world remote sensing applications. The code is available at https://github.com/lwCVer/LEGNet.

DehazeMamba: SAR-guided Optical Remote Sensing Image Dehazing with Adaptive State Space Model

Optical remote sensing image dehazing presents significant challenges due to its extensive spatial scale and highly non-uniform haze distribution, which traditional single-image dehazing methods struggle to address effectively. While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery offers inherently haze-free reference information for large-scale scenes, existing SAR-guided dehazing approaches face two critical limitations: the integration of SAR information often diminishes the quality of haze-free regions, and the instability of feature quality further exacerbates cross-modal domain shift. To overcome these challenges, we introduce DehazeMamba, a novel SAR-guided dehazing network built on a progressive haze decoupling fusion strategy. Our approach incorporates two key innovations: a Haze Perception and Decoupling Module (HPDM) that dynamically identifies haze-affected regions through optical-SAR difference analysis, and a Progressive Fusion Module (PFM) that mitigates domain shift through a two-stage fusion process based on feature quality assessment. To facilitate research in this domain, we present MRSHaze, a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising 8,000 pairs of temporally synchronized, precisely geo-registered SAR-optical images with high resolution and diverse haze conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DehazeMamba significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 0.73 dB improvement in PSNR and substantial enhancements in downstream tasks such as semantic segmentation. The dataset is available at https://github.com/mmic-lcl/Datasets-and-benchmark-code.

Towards General Multimodal Visual Tracking

Existing multimodal tracking studies focus on bi-modal scenarios such as RGB-Thermal, RGB-Event, and RGB-Language. Although promising tracking performance is achieved through leveraging complementary cues from different sources, it remains challenging in complex scenes due to the limitations of bi-modal scenarios. In this work, we introduce a general multimodal visual tracking task that fully exploits the advantages of four modalities, including RGB, thermal infrared, event, and language, for robust tracking under challenging conditions. To provide a comprehensive evaluation platform for general multimodal visual tracking, we construct QuadTrack600, a large-scale, high-quality benchmark comprising 600 video sequences (totaling 384.7K high-resolution (640x480) frame groups). In each frame group, all four modalities are spatially aligned and meticulously annotated with bounding boxes, while 21 sequence-level challenge attributes are provided for detailed performance analysis. Despite quad-modal data provides richer information, the differences in information quantity among modalities and the computational burden from four modalities are two challenging issues in fusing four modalities. To handle these issues, we propose a novel approach called QuadFusion, which incorporates an efficient Multiscale Fusion Mamba with four different scanning scales to achieve sufficient interactions of the four modalities while overcoming the exponential computational burden, for general multimodal visual tracking. Extensive experiments on the QuadTrack600 dataset and three bi-modal tracking datasets, including LasHeR, VisEvent, and TNL2K, validate the effectiveness of our QuadFusion.

Breaking Shallow Limits: Task-Driven Pixel Fusion for Gap-free RGBT Tracking

Current RGBT tracking methods often overlook the impact of fusion location on mitigating modality gap, which is key factor to effective tracking. Our analysis reveals that shallower fusion yields smaller distribution gap. However, the limited discriminative power of shallow networks hard to distinguish task-relevant information from noise, limiting the potential of pixel-level fusion. To break shallow limits, we propose a novel \textbf{T}ask-driven \textbf{P}ixel-level \textbf{F}usion network, named \textbf{TPF}, which unveils the power of pixel-level fusion in RGBT tracking through a progressive learning framework. In particular, we design a lightweight Pixel-level Fusion Adapter (PFA) that exploits Mamba's linear complexity to ensure real-time, low-latency RGBT tracking. To enhance the fusion capabilities of the PFA, our task-driven progressive learning framework first utilizes adaptive multi-expert distillation to inherits fusion knowledge from state-of-the-art image fusion models, establishing robust initialization, and then employs a decoupled representation learning scheme to achieve task-relevant information fusion. Moreover, to overcome appearance variations between the initial template and search frames, we presents a nearest-neighbor dynamic template updating scheme, which selects the most reliable frame closest to the current search frame as the dynamic template. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TPF significantly outperforms existing most of advanced trackers on four public RGBT tracking datasets. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Text-RGBT Person Retrieval: Multilevel Global-Local Cross-Modal Alignment and A High-quality Benchmark

The performance of traditional text-image person retrieval task is easily affected by lighting variations due to imaging limitations of visible spectrum sensors. In this work, we design a novel task called text-RGBT person retrieval that integrates complementary benefits from thermal and visible modalities for robust person retrieval in challenging environments. Aligning text and multi-modal visual representations is the key issue in text-RGBT person retrieval, but the heterogeneity between visible and thermal modalities may interfere with the alignment of visual and text modalities. To handle this problem, we propose a Multi-level Global-local cross-modal Alignment Network (MGANet), which sufficiently mines the relationships between modality-specific and modality-collaborative visual with the text, for text-RGBT person retrieval. To promote the research and development of this field, we create a high-quality text-RGBT person retrieval dataset, RGBT-PEDES. RGBT-PEDES contains 1,822 identities from different age groups and genders with 4,723 pairs of calibrated RGB and thermal images, and covers high-diverse scenes from both daytime and nighttime with a various of challenges such as occlusion, weak alignment and adverse lighting conditions. Additionally, we carefully annotate 7,987 fine-grained textual descriptions for all RGBT person image pairs. Extensive experiments on RGBT-PEDES demonstrate that our method outperforms existing text-image person retrieval methods. The code and dataset will be released upon the acceptance.

Sign Language Translation using Frame and Event Stream: Benchmark Dataset and Algorithms

Accurate sign language understanding serves as a crucial communication channel for individuals with disabilities. Current sign language translation algorithms predominantly rely on RGB frames, which may be limited by fixed frame rates, variable lighting conditions, and motion blur caused by rapid hand movements. Inspired by the recent successful application of event cameras in other fields, we propose to leverage event streams to assist RGB cameras in capturing gesture data, addressing the various challenges mentioned above. Specifically, we first collect a large-scale RGB-Event sign language translation dataset using the DVS346 camera, termed VECSL, which contains 15,676 RGB-Event samples, 15,191 glosses, and covers 2,568 Chinese characters. These samples were gathered across a diverse range of indoor and outdoor environments, capturing multiple viewing angles, varying light intensities, and different camera motions. Due to the absence of benchmark algorithms for comparison in this new task, we retrained and evaluated multiple state-of-the-art SLT algorithms, and believe that this benchmark can effectively support subsequent related research. Additionally, we propose a novel RGB-Event sign language translation framework (i.e., M$^2$-SLT) that incorporates fine-grained micro-sign and coarse-grained macro-sign retrieval, achieving state-of-the-art results on the proposed dataset. Both the source code and dataset will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenESL.

EventSTR: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines for Event Stream based Scene Text Recognition

Mainstream Scene Text Recognition (STR) algorithms are developed based on RGB cameras which are sensitive to challenging factors such as low illumination, motion blur, and cluttered backgrounds. In this paper, we propose to recognize the scene text using bio-inspired event cameras by collecting and annotating a large-scale benchmark dataset, termed EventSTR. It contains 9,928 high-definition (1280 * 720) event samples and involves both Chinese and English characters. We also benchmark multiple STR algorithms as the baselines for future works to compare. In addition, we propose a new event-based scene text recognition framework, termed SimC-ESTR. It first extracts the event features using a visual encoder and projects them into tokens using a Q-former module. More importantly, we propose to augment the vision tokens based on a memory mechanism before feeding into the large language models. A similarity-based error correction mechanism is embedded within the large language model to correct potential minor errors fundamentally based on contextual information. Extensive experiments on the newly proposed EventSTR dataset and two simulation STR datasets fully demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. We believe that the dataset and algorithmic model can innovatively propose an event-based STR task and are expected to accelerate the application of event cameras in various industries. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/EventSTR

XiHeFusion: Harnessing Large Language Models for Science Communication in Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear fusion is one of the most promising ways for humans to obtain infinite energy. Currently, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the mission of nuclear fusion has also entered a critical period of its development. How to let more people to understand nuclear fusion and join in its research is one of the effective means to accelerate the implementation of fusion. This paper proposes the first large model in the field of nuclear fusion, XiHeFusion, which is obtained through supervised fine-tuning based on the open-source large model Qwen2.5-14B. We have collected multi-source knowledge about nuclear fusion tasks to support the training of this model, including the common crawl, eBooks, arXiv, dissertation, etc. After the model has mastered the knowledge of the nuclear fusion field, we further used the chain of thought to enhance its logical reasoning ability, making XiHeFusion able to provide more accurate and logical answers. In addition, we propose a test questionnaire containing 180+ questions to assess the conversational ability of this science popularization large model. Extensive experimental results show that our nuclear fusion dialogue model, XiHeFusion, can perform well in answering science popularization knowledge. The pre-trained XiHeFusion model is released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/XiHeFusion.

Event Stream-based Visual Object Tracking: HDETrack V2 and A High-Definition Benchmark

We then introduce a novel hierarchical knowledge distillation strategy that incorporates the similarity matrix, feature representation, and response map-based distillation to guide the learning of the student Transformer network. We also enhance the model's ability to capture temporal dependencies by applying the temporal Fourier transform to establish temporal relationships between video frames. We adapt the network model to specific target objects during testing via a newly proposed test-time tuning strategy to achieve high performance and flexibility in target tracking. Recognizing the limitations of existing event-based tracking datasets, which are predominantly low-resolution, we propose EventVOT, the first large-scale high-resolution event-based tracking dataset. It comprises 1141 videos spanning diverse categories such as pedestrians, vehicles, UAVs, ping pong, etc. Extensive experiments on both low-resolution (FE240hz, VisEvent, FELT), and our newly proposed high-resolution EventVOT dataset fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed method. Both the benchmark dataset and source code have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/EventVOT_Benchmark

LWGANet: A Lightweight Group Attention Backbone for Remote Sensing Visual Tasks

Remote sensing (RS) visual tasks have gained significant academic and practical importance. However, they encounter numerous challenges that hinder effective feature extraction, including the detection and recognition of multiple objects exhibiting substantial variations in scale within a single image. While prior dual-branch or multi-branch architectural strategies have been effective in managing these object variances, they have concurrently resulted in considerable increases in computational demands and parameter counts. Consequently, these architectures are rendered less viable for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Contemporary lightweight backbone networks, designed primarily for natural images, frequently encounter difficulties in effectively extracting features from multi-scale objects, which compromises their efficacy in RS visual tasks. This article introduces LWGANet, a specialized lightweight backbone network tailored for RS visual tasks, incorporating a novel lightweight group attention (LWGA) module designed to address these specific challenges. LWGA module, tailored for RS imagery, adeptly harnesses redundant features to extract a wide range of spatial information, from local to global scales, without introducing additional complexity or computational overhead. This facilitates precise feature extraction across multiple scales within an efficient framework.LWGANet was rigorously evaluated across twelve datasets, which span four crucial RS visual tasks: scene classification, oriented object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. The results confirm LWGANet's widespread applicability and its ability to maintain an optimal balance between high performance and low complexity, achieving SOTA results across diverse datasets. LWGANet emerged as a novel solution for resource-limited scenarios requiring robust RS image processing capabilities.