Phaseformer: Phase-based Attention Mechanism for Underwater Image Restoration and Beyond

Quality degradation is observed in underwater images due to the effects of light refraction and absorption by water, leading to issues like color cast, haziness, and limited visibility. This degradation negatively affects the performance of autonomous underwater vehicles used in marine applications. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight phase-based transformer network with 1.77M parameters for underwater image restoration (UIR). Our approach focuses on effectively extracting non-contaminated features using a phase-based self-attention mechanism. We also introduce an optimized phase attention block to restore structural information by propagating prominent attentive features from the input. We evaluate our method on both synthetic (UIEB, UFO-120) and real-world (UIEB, U45, UCCS, SQUID) underwater image datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate its effectiveness for low-light image enhancement using the LOL dataset. Through extensive ablation studies and comparative analysis, it is clear that the proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

MIPI 2024 Challenge on Nighttime Flare Removal: Methods and Results

The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Nighttime Flare Removal track on MIPI 2024. In total, 170 participants were successfully registered, and 14 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Nighttime Flare Removal. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipi-challenge.org/MIPI2024/.

Efficient Neural Architecture Search for Emotion Recognition

Automated human emotion recognition from facial expressions is a well-studied problem and still remains a very challenging task. Some efficient or accurate deep learning models have been presented in the literature. However, it is quite difficult to design a model that is both efficient and accurate at the same time. Moreover, identifying the minute feature variations in facial regions for both macro and micro-expressions requires expertise in network design. In this paper, we proposed to search for a highly efficient and robust neural architecture for both macro and micro-level facial expression recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to design a NAS-based solution for both macro and micro-expression recognition. We produce lightweight models with a gradient-based architecture search algorithm. To maintain consistency between macro and micro-expressions, we utilize dynamic imaging and convert microexpression sequences into a single frame, preserving the spatiotemporal features in the facial regions. The EmoNAS has evaluated over 13 datasets (7 macro expression datasets: CK+, DISFA, MUG, ISED, OULU-VIS CASIA, FER2013, RAF-DB, and 6 micro-expression datasets: CASME-I, CASME-II, CAS(ME)2, SAMM, SMIC, MEGC2019 challenge). The proposed models outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods and perform very well in terms of speed and space complexity.

Deep Insights of Learning based Micro Expression Recognition: A Perspective on Promises, Challenges and Research Needs

Micro expression recognition (MER) is a very challenging area of research due to its intrinsic nature and fine-grained changes. In the literature, the problem of MER has been solved through handcrafted/descriptor-based techniques. However, in recent times, deep learning (DL) based techniques have been adopted to gain higher performance for MER. Also, rich survey articles on MER are available by summarizing the datasets, experimental settings, conventional and deep learning methods. In contrast, these studies lack the ability to convey the impact of network design paradigms and experimental setting strategies for DL-based MER. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a deep insight into the DL-based MER frameworks with a perspective on promises in network model designing, experimental strategies, challenges, and research needs. Also, the detailed categorization of available MER frameworks is presented in various aspects of model design and technical characteristics. Moreover, an empirical analysis of the experimental and validation protocols adopted by MER methods is presented. The challenges mentioned earlier and network design strategies may assist the affective computing research community in forging ahead in MER research. Finally, we point out the future directions, research needs, and draw our conclusions.

RARITYNet: Rarity Guided Affective Emotion Learning Framework

Inspired from the assets of handcrafted and deep learning approaches, we proposed a RARITYNet: RARITY guided affective emotion learning framework to learn the appearance features and identify the emotion class of facial expressions. The RARITYNet framework is designed by combining the shallow (RARITY) and deep (AffEmoNet) features to recognize the facial expressions from challenging images as spontaneous expressions, pose variations, ethnicity changes, and illumination conditions. The RARITY is proposed to encode the inter-radial transitional patterns in the local neighbourhood. The AffEmoNet: affective emotion learning network is proposed by incorporating three feature streams: high boost edge filtering (HBSEF) stream, to extract the edge information of highly affected facial expressive regions, multi-scale sophisticated edge cumulative (MSSEC) stream is to learns the sophisticated edge information from multi-receptive fields and RARITY uplift complementary context feature (RUCCF) stream refines the RARITY-encoded features and aid the MSSEC stream features to enrich the learning ability of RARITYNet.

Cross-Centroid Ripple Pattern for Facial Expression Recognition

In this paper, we propose a new feature descriptor Cross-Centroid Ripple Pattern (CRIP) for facial expression recognition. CRIP encodes the transitional pattern of a facial expression by incorporating cross-centroid relationship between two ripples located at radius r1 and r2 respectively. These ripples are generated by dividing the local neighborhood region into subregions. Thus, CRIP has ability to preserve macro and micro structural variations in an extensive region, which enables it to deal with side views and spontaneous expressions. Furthermore, gradient information between cross centroid ripples provides strenght to captures prominent edge features in active patches: eyes, nose and mouth, that define the disparities between different facial expressions. Cross centroid information also provides robustness to irregular illumination. Moreover, CRIP utilizes the averaging behavior of pixels at subregions that yields robustness to deal with noisy conditions. The performance of proposed descriptor is evaluated on seven comprehensive expression datasets consisting of challenging conditions such as age, pose, ethnicity and illumination variations. The experimental results show that our descriptor consistently achieved better accuracy rate as compared to existing state-of-art approaches.

An Empirical Review of Deep Learning Frameworks for Change Detection: Model Design, Experimental Frameworks, Challenges and Research Needs

Visual change detection, aiming at segmentation of video frames into foreground and background regions, is one of the elementary tasks in computer vision and video analytics. The applications of change detection include anomaly detection, object tracking, traffic monitoring, human machine interaction, behavior analysis, action recognition, and visual surveillance. Some of the challenges in change detection include background fluctuations, illumination variation, weather changes, intermittent object motion, shadow, fast/slow object motion, camera motion, heterogeneous object shapes and real-time processing. Traditionally, this problem has been solved using hand-crafted features and background modelling techniques. In recent years, deep learning frameworks have been successfully adopted for robust change detection. This article aims to provide an empirical review of the state-of-the-art deep learning methods for change detection. More specifically, we present a detailed analysis of the technical characteristics of different model designs and experimental frameworks. We provide model design based categorization of the existing approaches, including the 2D-CNN, 3D-CNN, ConvLSTM, multi-scale features, residual connections, autoencoders and GAN based methods. Moreover, an empirical analysis of the evaluation settings adopted by the existing deep learning methods is presented. To the best of our knowledge, this is a first attempt to comparatively analyze the different evaluation frameworks used in the existing deep change detection methods. Finally, we point out the research needs, future directions and draw our own conclusions.

MOR-UAV: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines for Moving Object Recognition in UAV Videos

Visual data collected from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has opened a new frontier of computer vision that requires automated analysis of aerial images/videos. However, the existing UAV datasets primarily focus on object detection. An object detector does not differentiate between the moving and non-moving objects. Given a real-time UAV video stream, how can we both localize and classify the moving objects, i.e. perform moving object recognition (MOR)? The MOR is one of the essential tasks to support various UAV vision-based applications including aerial surveillance, search and rescue, event recognition, urban and rural scene understanding.To the best of our knowledge, no labeled dataset is available for MOR evaluation in UAV videos. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce MOR-UAV, a large-scale video dataset for MOR in aerial videos. We achieve this by labeling axis-aligned bounding boxes for moving objects which requires less computational resources than producing pixel-level estimates. We annotate 89,783 moving object instances collected from 30 UAV videos, consisting of 10,948 frames in various scenarios such as weather conditions, occlusion, changing flying altitude and multiple camera views. We assigned the labels for two categories of vehicles (car and heavy vehicle). Furthermore, we propose a deep unified framework MOR-UAVNet for MOR in UAV videos. Since, this is a first attempt for MOR in UAV videos, we present 16 baseline results based on the proposed framework over the MOR-UAV dataset through quantitative and qualitative experiments. We also analyze the motion-salient regions in the network through multiple layer visualizations. The MOR-UAVNet works online at inference as it requires only few past frames. Moreover, it doesn't require predefined target initialization from user. Experiments also demonstrate that the MOR-UAV dataset is quite challenging.

Non-Linearities Improve OrigiNet based on Active Imaging for Micro Expression Recognition

Micro expression recognition (MER)is a very challenging task as the expression lives very short in nature and demands feature modeling with the involvement of both spatial and temporal dynamics. Existing MER systems exploit CNN networks to spot the significant features of minor muscle movements and subtle changes. However, existing networks fail to establish a relationship between spatial features of facial appearance and temporal variations of facial dynamics. Thus, these networks were not able to effectively capture minute variations and subtle changes in expressive regions. To address these issues, we introduce an active imaging concept to segregate active changes in expressive regions of a video into a single frame while preserving facial appearance information. Moreover, we propose a shallow CNN network: hybrid local receptive field based augmented learning network (OrigiNet) that efficiently learns significant features of the micro-expressions in a video. In this paper, we propose a new refined rectified linear unit (RReLU), which overcome the problem of vanishing gradient and dying ReLU. RReLU extends the range of derivatives as compared to existing activation functions. The RReLU not only injects a nonlinearity but also captures the true edges by imposing additive and multiplicative property. Furthermore, we present an augmented feature learning block to improve the learning capabilities of the network by embedding two parallel fully connected layers. The performance of proposed OrigiNet is evaluated by conducting leave one subject out experiments on four comprehensive ME datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that OrigiNet outperformed state-of-the-art techniques with less computational complexity.

3DFR: A Swift 3D Feature Reductionist Framework for Scene Independent Change Detection

In this paper we propose an end-to-end swift 3D feature reductionist framework (3DFR) for scene independent change detection. The 3DFR framework consists of three feature streams: a swift 3D feature reductionist stream (AvFeat), a contemporary feature stream (ConFeat) and a temporal median feature map. These multilateral foreground/background features are further refined through an encoder-decoder network. As a result, the proposed framework not only detects temporal changes but also learns high-level appearance features. Thus, it incorporates the object semantics for effective change detection. Furthermore, the proposed framework is validated through a scene independent evaluation scheme in order to demonstrate the robustness and generalization capability of the network. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on the benchmark CDnet 2014 dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed 3DFR network outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.