E-Motion: Future Motion Simulation via Event Sequence Diffusion

Forecasting a typical object's future motion is a critical task for interpreting and interacting with dynamic environments in computer vision. Event-based sensors, which could capture changes in the scene with exceptional temporal granularity, may potentially offer a unique opportunity to predict future motion with a level of detail and precision previously unachievable. Inspired by that, we propose to integrate the strong learning capacity of the video diffusion model with the rich motion information of an event camera as a motion simulation framework. Specifically, we initially employ pre-trained stable video diffusion models to adapt the event sequence dataset. This process facilitates the transfer of extensive knowledge from RGB videos to an event-centric domain. Moreover, we introduce an alignment mechanism that utilizes reinforcement learning techniques to enhance the reverse generation trajectory of the diffusion model, ensuring improved performance and accuracy. Through extensive testing and validation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in various complex scenarios, showcasing its potential to revolutionize motion flow prediction in computer vision applications such as autonomous vehicle guidance, robotic navigation, and interactive media. Our findings suggest a promising direction for future research in enhancing the interpretative power and predictive accuracy of computer vision systems.

MixPolyp: Integrating Mask, Box and Scribble Supervision for Enhanced Polyp Segmentation

Limited by the expensive labeling, polyp segmentation models are plagued by data shortages. To tackle this, we propose the mixed supervised polyp segmentation paradigm (MixPolyp). Unlike traditional models relying on a single type of annotation, MixPolyp combines diverse annotation types (mask, box, and scribble) within a single model, thereby expanding the range of available data and reducing labeling costs. To achieve this, MixPolyp introduces three novel supervision losses to handle various annotations: Subspace Projection loss (L_SP), Binary Minimum Entropy loss (L_BME), and Linear Regularization loss (L_LR). For box annotations, L_SP eliminates shape inconsistencies between the prediction and the supervision. For scribble annotations, L_BME provides supervision for unlabeled pixels through minimum entropy constraint, thereby alleviating supervision sparsity. Furthermore, L_LR provides dense supervision by enforcing consistency among the predictions, thus reducing the non-uniqueness. These losses are independent of the model structure, making them generally applicable. They are used only during training, adding no computational cost during inference. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate MixPolyp's effectiveness.

Generalize Polyp Segmentation via Inpainting across Diverse Backgrounds and Pseudo-Mask Refinement

Inpainting lesions within different normal backgrounds is a potential method of addressing the generalization problem, which is crucial for polyp segmentation models. However, seamlessly introducing polyps into complex endoscopic environments while simultaneously generating accurate pseudo-masks remains a challenge for current inpainting methods. To address these issues, we first leverage the pre-trained Stable Diffusion Inpaint and ControlNet, to introduce a robust generative model capable of inpainting polyps across different backgrounds. Secondly, we utilize the prior that synthetic polyps are confined to the inpainted region, to establish an inpainted region-guided pseudo-mask refinement network. We also propose a sample selection strategy that prioritizes well-aligned and hard synthetic cases for further model fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that our inpainting model outperformed baseline methods both qualitatively and quantitatively in inpainting quality. Moreover, our data augmentation strategy significantly enhances the performance of polyp segmentation models on external datasets, achieving or surpassing the level of fully supervised training benchmarks in that domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/497662892/PolypInpainter.

ECC-PolypDet: Enhanced CenterNet with Contrastive Learning for Automatic Polyp Detection

Accurate polyp detection is critical for early colorectal cancer diagnosis. Although remarkable progress has been achieved in recent years, the complex colon environment and concealed polyps with unclear boundaries still pose severe challenges in this area. Existing methods either involve computationally expensive context aggregation or lack prior modeling of polyps, resulting in poor performance in challenging cases. In this paper, we propose the Enhanced CenterNet with Contrastive Learning (ECC-PolypDet), a two-stage training \& end-to-end inference framework that leverages images and bounding box annotations to train a general model and fine-tune it based on the inference score to obtain a final robust model. Specifically, we conduct Box-assisted Contrastive Learning (BCL) during training to minimize the intra-class difference and maximize the inter-class difference between foreground polyps and backgrounds, enabling our model to capture concealed polyps. Moreover, to enhance the recognition of small polyps, we design the Semantic Flow-guided Feature Pyramid Network (SFFPN) to aggregate multi-scale features and the Heatmap Propagation (HP) module to boost the model's attention on polyp targets. In the fine-tuning stage, we introduce the IoU-guided Sample Re-weighting (ISR) mechanism to prioritize hard samples by adaptively adjusting the loss weight for each sample during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on six large-scale colonoscopy datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model compared with previous state-of-the-art detectors.

SCPMan: Shape Context and Prior Constrained Multi-scale Attention Network for Pancreatic Segmentation

Due to the poor prognosis of Pancreatic cancer, accurate early detection and segmentation are critical for improving treatment outcomes. However, pancreatic segmentation is challenged by blurred boundaries, high shape variability, and class imbalance. To tackle these problems, we propose a multiscale attention network with shape context and prior constraint for robust pancreas segmentation. Specifically, we proposed a Multi-scale Feature Extraction Module (MFE) and a Mixed-scale Attention Integration Module (MAI) to address unclear pancreas boundaries. Furthermore, a Shape Context Memory (SCM) module is introduced to jointly model semantics across scales and pancreatic shape. Active Shape Model (ASM) is further used to model the shape priors. Experiments on NIH and MSD datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our model, which improves the state-of-the-art Dice Score for 1.01% and 1.03% respectively. Our architecture provides robust segmentation performance, against the blurry boundaries, and variations in scale and shape of pancreas.

GSmoothFace: Generalized Smooth Talking Face Generation via Fine Grained 3D Face Guidance

Although existing speech-driven talking face generation methods achieve significant progress, they are far from real-world application due to the avatar-specific training demand and unstable lip movements. To address the above issues, we propose the GSmoothFace, a novel two-stage generalized talking face generation model guided by a fine-grained 3d face model, which can synthesize smooth lip dynamics while preserving the speaker's identity. Our proposed GSmoothFace model mainly consists of the Audio to Expression Prediction (A2EP) module and the Target Adaptive Face Translation (TAFT) module. Specifically, we first develop the A2EP module to predict expression parameters synchronized with the driven speech. It uses a transformer to capture the long-term audio context and learns the parameters from the fine-grained 3D facial vertices, resulting in accurate and smooth lip-synchronization performance. Afterward, the well-designed TAFT module, empowered by Morphology Augmented Face Blending (MAFB), takes the predicted expression parameters and target video as inputs to modify the facial region of the target video without distorting the background content. The TAFT effectively exploits the identity appearance and background context in the target video, which makes it possible to generalize to different speakers without retraining. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments confirm the superiority of our method in terms of realism, lip synchronization, and visual quality. See the project page for code, data, and request pre-trained models: https://zhanghm1995.github.io/GSmoothFace.

Deep Learning and Medical Imaging for COVID-19 Diagnosis: A Comprehensive Survey

COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) has been quickly spreading since its outbreak, impacting financial markets and healthcare systems globally. Countries all around the world have adopted a number of extraordinary steps to restrict the spreading virus, where early COVID-19 diagnosis is essential. Medical images such as X-ray images and Computed Tomography scans are becoming one of the main diagnostic tools to combat COVID-19 with the aid of deep learning-based systems. In this survey, we investigate the main contributions of deep learning applications using medical images in fighting against COVID-19 from the aspects of image classification, lesion localization, and severity quantification, and review different deep learning architectures and some image preprocessing techniques for achieving a preciser diagnosis. We also provide a summary of the X-ray and CT image datasets used in various studies for COVID-19 detection. The key difficulties and potential applications of deep learning in fighting against COVID-19 are finally discussed. This work summarizes the latest methods of deep learning using medical images to diagnose COVID-19, highlighting the challenges and inspiring more studies to keep utilizing the advantages of deep learning to combat COVID-19.

LKD-Net: Large Kernel Convolution Network for Single Image Dehazing

The deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based single image dehazing methods have achieved significant success. The previous methods are devoted to improving the network's performance by increasing the network's depth and width. The current methods focus on increasing the convolutional kernel size to enhance its performance by benefiting from the larger receptive field. However, directly increasing the size of the convolutional kernel introduces a massive amount of computational overhead and parameters. Thus, a novel Large Kernel Convolution Dehaze Block (LKD Block) consisting of the Decomposition deep-wise Large Kernel Convolution Block (DLKCB) and the Channel Enhanced Feed-forward Network (CEFN) is devised in this paper. The designed DLKCB can split the deep-wise large kernel convolution into a smaller depth-wise convolution and a depth-wise dilated convolution without introducing massive parameters and computational overhead. Meanwhile, the designed CEFN incorporates a channel attention mechanism into Feed-forward Network to exploit significant channels and enhance robustness. By combining multiple LKD Blocks and Up-Down sampling modules, the Large Kernel Convolution Dehaze Network (LKD-Net) is conducted. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed DLKCB and CEFN, and our LKD-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art. On the SOTS indoor dataset, our LKD-Net dramatically outperforms the Transformer-based method Dehamer with only 1.79% #Param and 48.9% FLOPs. The source code of our LKD-Net is available at https://github.com/SWU-CS-MediaLab/LKD-Net.

Video Interpolation by Event-driven Anisotropic Adjustment of Optical Flow

Video frame interpolation is a challenging task due to the ever-changing real-world scene. Previous methods often calculate the bi-directional optical flows and then predict the intermediate optical flows under the linear motion assumptions, leading to isotropic intermediate flow generation. Follow-up research obtained anisotropic adjustment through estimated higher-order motion information with extra frames. Based on the motion assumptions, their methods are hard to model the complicated motion in real scenes. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end training method A^2OF for video frame interpolation with event-driven Anisotropic Adjustment of Optical Flows. Specifically, we use events to generate optical flow distribution masks for the intermediate optical flow, which can model the complicated motion between two frames. Our proposed method outperforms the previous methods in video frame interpolation, taking supervised event-based video interpolation to a higher stage.

Quantitative phase imaging through an ultra-thin lensless fiber endoscope

Quantitative phase imaging (QPI) is a label-free technique providing both morphology and quantitative biophysical information in biomedicine. However, applying such a powerful technique to in vivo pathological diagnosis remains challenging. Multi-core fiber bundles (MCFs) enable ultra-thin probes for in vivo imaging, but current MCF imaging techniques are limited to amplitude imaging modalities. We demonstrate a computational lensless microendoscope that uses an ultra-thin bare MCF to perform quantitative phase imaging of biomedical samples with up to 1 {\mu}m lateral resolution and nanoscale axial resolution. The incident complex light field at the measurement side is precisely reconstructed from a single-shot far-field speckle pattern at the detection side, enabling digital focusing and 3D volumetric reconstruction without any mechanical movement. The accuracy of the quantitative phase reconstruction is validated by imaging the phase target and hydrogel beads through the MCF. With the proposed imaging modality, 3D imaging of human cancer cells is achieved through the ultra-thin fiber endoscope, promising widespread clinical applications.