Dual-Hybrid Attention Network for Specular Highlight Removal

Specular highlight removal plays a pivotal role in multimedia applications, as it enhances the quality and interpretability of images and videos, ultimately improving the performance of downstream tasks such as content-based retrieval, object recognition, and scene understanding. Despite significant advances in deep learning-based methods, current state-of-the-art approaches often rely on additional priors or supervision, limiting their practicality and generalization capability. In this paper, we propose the Dual-Hybrid Attention Network for Specular Highlight Removal (DHAN-SHR), an end-to-end network that introduces novel hybrid attention mechanisms to effectively capture and process information across different scales and domains without relying on additional priors or supervision. DHAN-SHR consists of two key components: the Adaptive Local Hybrid-Domain Dual Attention Transformer (L-HD-DAT) and the Adaptive Global Dual Attention Transformer (G-DAT). The L-HD-DAT captures local inter-channel and inter-pixel dependencies while incorporating spectral domain features, enabling the network to effectively model the complex interactions between specular highlights and the underlying surface properties. The G-DAT models global inter-channel relationships and long-distance pixel dependencies, allowing the network to propagate contextual information across the entire image and generate more coherent and consistent highlight-free results. To evaluate the performance of DHAN-SHR and facilitate future research in this area, we compile a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising a diverse range of images with varying levels of specular highlights. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DHAN-SHR outperforms 18 state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, setting a new standard for specular highlight removal in multimedia applications.

Multi-scale Quaternion CNN and BiGRU with Cross Self-attention Feature Fusion for Fault Diagnosis of Bearing

In recent years, deep learning has led to significant advances in bearing fault diagnosis (FD). Most techniques aim to achieve greater accuracy. However, they are sensitive to noise and lack robustness, resulting in insufficient domain adaptation and anti-noise ability. The comparison of studies reveals that giving equal attention to all features does not differentiate their significance. In this work, we propose a novel FD model by integrating multi-scale quaternion convolutional neural network (MQCNN), bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU), and cross self-attention feature fusion (CSAFF). We have developed innovative designs in two modules, namely MQCNN and CSAFF. Firstly, MQCNN applies quaternion convolution to multi-scale architecture for the first time, aiming to extract the rich hidden features of the original signal from multiple scales. Then, the extracted multi-scale information is input into CSAFF for feature fusion, where CSAFF innovatively incorporates cross self-attention mechanism to enhance discriminative interaction representation within features. Finally, BiGRU captures temporal dependencies while a softmax layer is employed for fault classification, achieving accurate FD. To assess the efficacy of our approach, we experiment on three public datasets (CWRU, MFPT, and Ottawa) and compare it with other excellent methods. The results confirm its state-of-the-art, which the average accuracies can achieve up to 99.99%, 100%, and 99.21% on CWRU, MFPT, and Ottawa datasets. Moreover, we perform practical tests and ablation experiments to validate the efficacy and robustness of the proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/mubai011/MQCCAF.

Medical Visual Prompting (MVP): A Unified Framework for Versatile and High-Quality Medical Image Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of lesion regions is crucial for clinical diagnosis and treatment across various diseases. While deep convolutional networks have achieved satisfactory results in medical image segmentation, they face challenges such as loss of lesion shape information due to continuous convolution and downsampling, as well as the high cost of manually labeling lesions with varying shapes and sizes. To address these issues, we propose a novel medical visual prompting (MVP) framework that leverages pre-training and prompting concepts from natural language processing (NLP). The framework utilizes three key components: Super-Pixel Guided Prompting (SPGP) for superpixelating the input image, Image Embedding Guided Prompting (IEGP) for freezing patch embedding and merging with superpixels to provide visual prompts, and Adaptive Attention Mechanism Guided Prompting (AAGP) for pinpointing prompt content and efficiently adapting all layers. By integrating SPGP, IEGP, and AAGP, the MVP enables the segmentation network to better learn shape prompting information and facilitates mutual learning across different tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate superior performance of this method in various challenging medical image tasks, while simplifying single-task medical segmentation models. This novel framework offers improved performance with fewer parameters and holds significant potential for accurate segmentation of lesion regions in various medical tasks, making it clinically valuable.

UWFormer: Underwater Image Enhancement via a Semi-Supervised Multi-Scale Transformer

Underwater images often exhibit poor quality, imbalanced coloration, and low contrast due to the complex and intricate interaction of light, water, and objects. Despite the significant contributions of previous underwater enhancement techniques, there exist several problems that demand further improvement: (i) Current deep learning methodologies depend on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that lack multi-scale enhancement and also have limited global perception fields. (ii) The scarcity of paired real-world underwater datasets poses a considerable challenge, and the utilization of synthetic image pairs risks overfitting. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper presents a Multi-scale Transformer-based Network called UWFormer for enhancing images at multiple frequencies via semi-supervised learning, in which we propose a Nonlinear Frequency-aware Attention mechanism and a Multi-Scale Fusion Feed-forward Network for low-frequency enhancement. Additionally, we introduce a specialized underwater semi-supervised training strategy, proposing a Subaqueous Perceptual Loss function to generate reliable pseudo labels. Experiments using full-reference and non-reference underwater benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both quantity and visual quality.

ShaDocFormer: A Shadow-attentive Threshold Detector with Cascaded Fusion Refiner for document shadow removal

Document shadow is a common issue that arise when capturing documents using mobile devices, which significantly impacts the readability. Current methods encounter various challenges including inaccurate detection of shadow masks and estimation of illumination. In this paper, we propose ShaDocFormer, a Transformer-based architecture that integrates traditional methodologies and deep learning techniques to tackle the problem of document shadow removal. The ShaDocFormer architecture comprises two components: the Shadow-attentive Threshold Detector (STD) and the Cascaded Fusion Refiner (CFR). The STD module employs a traditional thresholding technique and leverages the attention mechanism of the Transformer to gather global information, thereby enabling precise detection of shadow masks. The cascaded and aggregative structure of the CFR module facilitates a coarse-to-fine restoration process for the entire image. As a result, ShaDocFormer excels in accurately detecting and capturing variations in both shadow and illumination, thereby enabling effective removal of shadows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShaDocFormer outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative measurements.

Devignet: High-Resolution Vignetting Removal via a Dual Aggregated Fusion Transformer With Adaptive Channel Expansion

Vignetting commonly occurs as a degradation in images resulting from factors such as lens design, improper lens hood usage, and limitations in camera sensors. This degradation affects image details, color accuracy, and presents challenges in computational photography. Existing vignetting removal algorithms predominantly rely on ideal physics assumptions and hand-crafted parameters, resulting in ineffective removal of irregular vignetting and suboptimal results. Moreover, the substantial lack of real-world vignetting datasets hinders the objective and comprehensive evaluation of vignetting removal. To address these challenges, we present Vigset, a pioneering dataset for vignette removal. Vigset includes 983 pairs of both vignetting and vignetting-free high-resolution ($5340\times3697$) real-world images under various conditions. In addition, We introduce DeVigNet, a novel frequency-aware Transformer architecture designed for vignetting removal. Through the Laplacian Pyramid decomposition, we propose the Dual Aggregated Fusion Transformer to handle global features and remove vignetting in the low-frequency domain. Additionally, we introduce the Adaptive Channel Expansion Module to enhance details in the high-frequency domain. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

DocDeshadower: Frequency-aware Transformer for Document Shadow Removal

The presence of shadows significantly impacts the visual quality of scanned documents. However, the existing traditional techniques and deep learning methods used for shadow removal have several limitations. These methods either rely heavily on heuristics, resulting in suboptimal performance, or require large datasets to learn shadow-related features. In this study, we propose the DocDeshadower, a multi-frequency Transformer-based model built on Laplacian Pyramid. DocDeshadower is designed to remove shadows at different frequencies in a coarse-to-fine manner. To achieve this, we decompose the shadow image into different frequency bands using Laplacian Pyramid. In addition, we introduce two novel components to this model: the Attention-Aggregation Network and the Gated Multi-scale Fusion Transformer. The Attention-Aggregation Network is designed to remove shadows in the low-frequency part of the image, whereas the Gated Multi-scale Fusion Transformer refines the entire image at a global scale with its large perceptive field. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that DocDeshadower outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative terms.