FUSE: Label-Free Image-Event Joint Monocular Depth Estimation via Frequency-Decoupled Alignment and Degradation-Robust Fusion

Image-event joint depth estimation methods leverage complementary modalities for robust perception, yet face challenges in generalizability stemming from two factors: 1) limited annotated image-event-depth datasets causing insufficient cross-modal supervision, and 2) inherent frequency mismatches between static images and dynamic event streams with distinct spatiotemporal patterns, leading to ineffective feature fusion. To address this dual challenge, we propose Frequency-decoupled Unified Self-supervised Encoder (FUSE) with two synergistic components: The Parameter-efficient Self-supervised Transfer (PST) establishes cross-modal knowledge transfer through latent space alignment with image foundation models, effectively mitigating data scarcity by enabling joint encoding without depth ground truth. Complementing this, we propose the Frequency-Decoupled Fusion module (FreDFuse) to explicitly decouple high-frequency edge features from low-frequency structural components, resolving modality-specific frequency mismatches through physics-aware fusion. This combined approach enables FUSE to construct a universal image-event encoder that only requires lightweight decoder adaptation for target datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with 14% and 24.9% improvements in Abs.Rel on MVSEC and DENSE datasets. The framework exhibits remarkable zero-shot adaptability to challenging scenarios including extreme lighting and motion blur, significantly advancing real-world deployment capabilities. The source code for our method is publicly available at: https://github.com/sunpihai-up/FUSE

COB-GS: Clear Object Boundaries in 3DGS Segmentation Based on Boundary-Adaptive Gaussian Splitting

Accurate object segmentation is crucial for high-quality scene understanding in the 3D vision domain. However, 3D segmentation based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) struggles with accurately delineating object boundaries, as Gaussian primitives often span across object edges due to their inherent volume and the lack of semantic guidance during training. In order to tackle these challenges, we introduce Clear Object Boundaries for 3DGS Segmentation (COB-GS), which aims to improve segmentation accuracy by clearly delineating blurry boundaries of interwoven Gaussian primitives within the scene. Unlike existing approaches that remove ambiguous Gaussians and sacrifice visual quality, COB-GS, as a 3DGS refinement method, jointly optimizes semantic and visual information, allowing the two different levels to cooperate with each other effectively. Specifically, for the semantic guidance, we introduce a boundary-adaptive Gaussian splitting technique that leverages semantic gradient statistics to identify and split ambiguous Gaussians, aligning them closely with object boundaries. For the visual optimization, we rectify the degraded suboptimal texture of the 3DGS scene, particularly along the refined boundary structures. Experimental results show that COB-GS substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness against inaccurate masks from pre-trained model, yielding clear boundaries while preserving high visual quality. Code is available at https://github.com/ZestfulJX/COB-GS.

CALLIC: Content Adaptive Learning for Lossless Image Compression

Learned lossless image compression has achieved significant advancements in recent years. However, existing methods often rely on training amortized generative models on massive datasets, resulting in sub-optimal probability distribution estimation for specific testing images during encoding process. To address this challenge, we explore the connection between the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle and Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL), leading to the development of a novel content-adaptive approach for learned lossless image compression, dubbed CALLIC. Specifically, we first propose a content-aware autoregressive self-attention mechanism by leveraging convolutional gating operations, termed Masked Gated ConvFormer (MGCF), and pretrain MGCF on training dataset. Cache then Crop Inference (CCI) is proposed to accelerate the coding process. During encoding, we decompose pre-trained layers, including depth-wise convolutions, using low-rank matrices and then adapt the incremental weights on testing image by Rate-guided Progressive Fine-Tuning (RPFT). RPFT fine-tunes with gradually increasing patches that are sorted in descending order by estimated entropy, optimizing learning process and reducing adaptation time. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate that CALLIC sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for learned lossless image compression.

LLV-FSR: Exploiting Large Language-Vision Prior for Face Super-resolution

Existing face super-resolution (FSR) methods have made significant advancements, but they primarily super-resolve face with limited visual information, original pixel-wise space in particular, commonly overlooking the pluralistic clues, like the higher-order depth and semantics, as well as non-visual inputs (text caption and description). Consequently, these methods struggle to produce a unified and meaningful representation from the input face. We suppose that introducing the language-vision pluralistic representation into unexplored potential embedding space could enhance FSR by encoding and exploiting the complementarity across language-vision prior. This motivates us to propose a new framework called LLV-FSR, which marries the power of large vision-language model and higher-order visual prior with the challenging task of FSR. Specifically, besides directly absorbing knowledge from original input, we introduce the pre-trained vision-language model to generate pluralistic priors, involving the image caption, descriptions, face semantic mask and depths. These priors are then employed to guide the more critical feature representation, facilitating realistic and high-quality face super-resolution. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly improves both the reconstruction quality and perceptual quality, surpassing the SOTA by 0.43dB in terms of PSNR on the MMCelebA-HQ dataset.

Adaptive Stereo Depth Estimation with Multi-Spectral Images Across All Lighting Conditions

Depth estimation under adverse conditions remains a significant challenge. Recently, multi-spectral depth estimation, which integrates both visible light and thermal images, has shown promise in addressing this issue. However, existing algorithms struggle with precise pixel-level feature matching, limiting their ability to fully exploit geometric constraints across different spectra. To address this, we propose a novel framework incorporating stereo depth estimation to enforce accurate geometric constraints. In particular, we treat the visible light and thermal images as a stereo pair and utilize a Cross-modal Feature Matching (CFM) Module to construct a cost volume for pixel-level matching. To mitigate the effects of poor lighting on stereo matching, we introduce Degradation Masking, which leverages robust monocular thermal depth estimation in degraded regions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Multi-Spectral Stereo (MS2) dataset, with qualitative evaluations demonstrating high-quality depth maps under varying lighting conditions.

Improving Domain Generalization in Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation via Stabilized Adversarial Training

Learning a self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) model with great generalization remains significantly challenging. Despite the success of adversarial augmentation in the supervised learning generalization, naively incorporating it into self-supervised MDE models potentially causes over-regularization, suffering from severe performance degradation. In this paper, we conduct qualitative analysis and illuminate the main causes: (i) inherent sensitivity in the UNet-alike depth network and (ii) dual optimization conflict caused by over-regularization. To tackle these issues, we propose a general adversarial training framework, named Stabilized Conflict-optimization Adversarial Training (SCAT), integrating adversarial data augmentation into self-supervised MDE methods to achieve a balance between stability and generalization. Specifically, we devise an effective scaling depth network that tunes the coefficients of long skip connection and effectively stabilizes the training process. Then, we propose a conflict gradient surgery strategy, which progressively integrates the adversarial gradient and optimizes the model toward a conflict-free direction. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that SCAT can achieve state-of-the-art performance and significantly improve the generalization capability of existing self-supervised MDE methods.

Learning Lossless Compression for High Bit-Depth Volumetric Medical Image

Recent advances in learning-based methods have markedly enhanced the capabilities of image compression. However, these methods struggle with high bit-depth volumetric medical images, facing issues such as degraded performance, increased memory demand, and reduced processing speed. To address these challenges, this paper presents the Bit-Division based Lossless Volumetric Image Compression (BD-LVIC) framework, which is tailored for high bit-depth medical volume compression. The BD-LVIC framework skillfully divides the high bit-depth volume into two lower bit-depth segments: the Most Significant Bit-Volume (MSBV) and the Least Significant Bit-Volume (LSBV). The MSBV concentrates on the most significant bits of the volumetric medical image, capturing vital structural details in a compact manner. This reduction in complexity greatly improves compression efficiency using traditional codecs. Conversely, the LSBV deals with the least significant bits, which encapsulate intricate texture details. To compress this detailed information effectively, we introduce an effective learning-based compression model equipped with a Transformer-Based Feature Alignment Module, which exploits both intra-slice and inter-slice redundancies to accurately align features. Subsequently, a Parallel Autoregressive Coding Module merges these features to precisely estimate the probability distribution of the least significant bit-planes. Our extensive testing demonstrates that the BD-LVIC framework not only sets new performance benchmarks across various datasets but also maintains a competitive coding speed, highlighting its significant potential and practical utility in the realm of volumetric medical image compression.

A Survey on All-in-One Image Restoration: Taxonomy, Evaluation and Future Trends

Image restoration (IR) refers to the process of improving visual quality of images while removing degradation, such as noise, blur, weather effects, and so on. Traditional IR methods typically target specific types of degradation, which limits their effectiveness in real-world scenarios with complex distortions. In response to this challenge, the all-in-one image restoration (AiOIR) paradigm has emerged, offering a unified framework that adeptly addresses multiple degradation types. These innovative models enhance both convenience and versatility by adaptively learning degradation-specific features while simultaneously leveraging shared knowledge across diverse corruptions. In this review, we delve into the AiOIR methodologies, emphasizing their architecture innovations and learning paradigm and offering a systematic review of prevalent approaches. We systematically categorize prevalent approaches and critically assess the challenges these models encounter, proposing future research directions to advance this dynamic field. Our paper begins with an introduction to the foundational concepts of AiOIR models, followed by a categorization of cutting-edge designs based on factors such as prior knowledge and generalization capability. Next, we highlight key advancements in AiOIR, aiming to inspire further inquiry and innovation within the community. To facilitate a robust evaluation of existing methods, we collate and summarize commonly used datasets, implementation details, and evaluation metrics. Additionally, we present an objective comparison of open-sourced methods, providing valuable insights for researchers and practitioners alike. This paper stands as the first comprehensive and insightful review of AiOIR. A related repository is available at https://github.com/Harbinzzy/All-in-One-Image-Restoration-Survey.

Fusion from Decomposition: A Self-Supervised Approach for Image Fusion and Beyond

Image fusion is famous as an alternative solution to generate one high-quality image from multiple images in addition to image restoration from a single degraded image. The essence of image fusion is to integrate complementary information from source images. Existing fusion methods struggle with generalization across various tasks and often require labor-intensive designs, in which it is difficult to identify and extract useful information from source images due to the diverse requirements of each fusion task. Additionally, these methods develop highly specialized features for different downstream applications, hindering the adaptation to new and diverse downstream tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce DeFusion++, a novel framework that leverages self-supervised learning (SSL) to enhance the versatility of feature representation for different image fusion tasks. DeFusion++ captures the image fusion task-friendly representations from large-scale data in a self-supervised way, overcoming the constraints of limited fusion datasets. Specifically, we introduce two innovative pretext tasks: common and unique decomposition (CUD) and masked feature modeling (MFM). CUD decomposes source images into abstract common and unique components, while MFM refines these components into robust fused features. Jointly training of these tasks enables DeFusion++ to produce adaptable representations that can effectively extract useful information from various source images, regardless of the fusion task. The resulting fused representations are also highly adaptable for a wide range of downstream tasks, including image segmentation and object detection. DeFusion++ stands out by producing versatile fused representations that can enhance both the quality of image fusion and the effectiveness of downstream high-level vision tasks, simplifying the process with the elegant fusion framework.

MCGS: Multiview Consistency Enhancement for Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Radiance Fields

Radiance fields represented by 3D Gaussians excel at synthesizing novel views, offering both high training efficiency and fast rendering. However, with sparse input views, the lack of multi-view consistency constraints results in poorly initialized point clouds and unreliable heuristics for optimization and densification, leading to suboptimal performance. Existing methods often incorporate depth priors from dense estimation networks but overlook the inherent multi-view consistency in input images. Additionally, they rely on multi-view stereo (MVS)-based initialization, which limits the efficiency of scene representation. To overcome these challenges, we propose a view synthesis framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, named MCGS, enabling photorealistic scene reconstruction from sparse input views. The key innovations of MCGS in enhancing multi-view consistency are as follows: i) We introduce an initialization method by leveraging a sparse matcher combined with a random filling strategy, yielding a compact yet sufficient set of initial points. This approach enhances the initial geometry prior, promoting efficient scene representation. ii) We develop a multi-view consistency-guided progressive pruning strategy to refine the Gaussian field by strengthening consistency and eliminating low-contribution Gaussians. These modular, plug-and-play strategies enhance robustness to sparse input views, accelerate rendering, and reduce memory consumption, making MCGS a practical and efficient framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting.