Underwater Image Restoration Through a Prior Guided Hybrid Sense Approach and Extensive Benchmark Analysis

Underwater imaging grapples with challenges from light-water interactions, leading to color distortions and reduced clarity. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel Color Balance Prior \textbf{Guided} \textbf{Hyb}rid \textbf{Sens}e \textbf{U}nderwater \textbf{I}mage \textbf{R}estoration framework (\textbf{GuidedHybSensUIR}). This framework operates on multiple scales, employing the proposed \textbf{Detail Restorer} module to restore low-level detailed features at finer scales and utilizing the proposed \textbf{Feature Contextualizer} module to capture long-range contextual relations of high-level general features at a broader scale. The hybridization of these different scales of sensing results effectively addresses color casts and restores blurry details. In order to effectively point out the evolutionary direction for the model, we propose a novel \textbf{Color Balance Prior} as a strong guide in the feature contextualization step and as a weak guide in the final decoding phase. We construct a comprehensive benchmark using paired training data from three real-world underwater datasets and evaluate on six test sets, including three paired and three unpaired, sourced from four real-world underwater datasets. Subsequently, we tested 14 traditional and retrained 23 deep learning existing underwater image restoration methods on this benchmark, obtaining metric results for each approach. This effort aims to furnish a valuable benchmarking dataset for standard basis for comparison. The extensive experiment results demonstrate that our method outperforms 37 other state-of-the-art methods overall on various benchmark datasets and metrics, despite not achieving the best results in certain individual cases. The code and dataset are available at \href{https://github.com/CXH-Research/GuidedHybSensUIR}{https://github.com/CXH-Research/GuidedHybSensUIR}.

Underwater Image Restoration via Polymorphic Large Kernel CNNs

Underwater Image Restoration (UIR) remains a challenging task in computer vision due to the complex degradation of images in underwater environments. While recent approaches have leveraged various deep learning techniques, including Transformers and complex, parameter-heavy models to achieve significant improvements in restoration effects, we demonstrate that pure CNN architectures with lightweight parameters can achieve comparable results. In this paper, we introduce UIR-PolyKernel, a novel method for underwater image restoration that leverages Polymorphic Large Kernel CNNs. Our approach uniquely combines large kernel convolutions of diverse sizes and shapes to effectively capture long-range dependencies within underwater imagery. Additionally, we introduce a Hybrid Domain Attention module that integrates frequency and spatial domain attention mechanisms to enhance feature importance. By leveraging the frequency domain, we can capture hidden features that may not be perceptible to humans but are crucial for identifying patterns in both underwater and on-air images. This approach enhances the generalization and robustness of our UIR model. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that UIR-PolyKernel achieves state-of-the-art performance in underwater image restoration tasks, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our results show that well-designed pure CNN architectures can effectively compete with more complex models, offering a balance between performance and computational efficiency. This work provides new insights into the potential of CNN-based approaches for challenging image restoration tasks in underwater environments. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/CXH-Research/UIR-PolyKernel}{https://github.com/CXH-Research/UIR-PolyKernel}.

Wearable intelligent throat enables natural speech in stroke patients with dysarthria

Wearable silent speech systems hold significant potential for restoring communication in patients with speech impairments. However, seamless, coherent speech remains elusive, and clinical efficacy is still unproven. Here, we present an AI-driven intelligent throat (IT) system that integrates throat muscle vibrations and carotid pulse signal sensors with large language model (LLM) processing to enable fluent, emotionally expressive communication. The system utilizes ultrasensitive textile strain sensors to capture high-quality signals from the neck area and supports token-level processing for real-time, continuous speech decoding, enabling seamless, delay-free communication. In tests with five stroke patients with dysarthria, IT's LLM agents intelligently corrected token errors and enriched sentence-level emotional and logical coherence, achieving low error rates (4.2% word error rate, 2.9% sentence error rate) and a 55% increase in user satisfaction. This work establishes a portable, intuitive communication platform for patients with dysarthria with the potential to be applied broadly across different neurological conditions and in multi-language support systems.

A Unified Platform for At-Home Post-Stroke Rehabilitation Enabled by Wearable Technologies and Artificial Intelligence

At-home rehabilitation for post-stroke patients presents significant challenges, as continuous, personalized care is often limited outside clinical settings. Additionally, the absence of comprehensive solutions addressing diverse rehabilitation needs in home environments complicates recovery efforts. Here, we introduce a smart home platform that integrates wearable sensors, ambient monitoring, and large language model (LLM)-powered assistance to provide seamless health monitoring and intelligent support. The system leverages machine learning enabled plantar pressure arrays for motor recovery assessment (94% classification accuracy), a wearable eye-tracking module for cognitive evaluation, and ambient sensors for precise smart home control (100% operational success, <1 s latency). Additionally, the LLM-powered agent, Auto-Care, offers real-time interventions, such as health reminders and environmental adjustments, enhancing user satisfaction by 29%. This work establishes a fully integrated platform for long-term, personalized rehabilitation, offering new possibilities for managing chronic conditions and supporting aging populations.

Layer-Wise Feature Metric of Semantic-Pixel Matching for Few-Shot Learning

In Few-Shot Learning (FSL), traditional metric-based approaches often rely on global metrics to compute similarity. However, in natural scenes, the spatial arrangement of key instances is often inconsistent across images. This spatial misalignment can result in mismatched semantic pixels, leading to inaccurate similarity measurements. To address this issue, we propose a novel method called the Layer-Wise Features Metric of Semantic-Pixel Matching (LWFM-SPM) to make finer comparisons. Our method enhances model performance through two key modules: (1) the Layer-Wise Embedding (LWE) Module, which refines the cross-correlation of image pairs to generate well-focused feature maps for each layer; (2)the Semantic-Pixel Matching (SPM) Module, which aligns critical pixels based on semantic embeddings using an assignment algorithm. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate our method on four widely used few-shot classification benchmarks: miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CUB-200-2011, and CIFAR-FS. The results indicate that LWFM-SPM achieves competitive performance across these benchmarks. Our code will be publicly available on https://github.com/Halo2Tang/Code-for-LWFM-SPM.

High-Fidelity Document Stain Removal via A Large-Scale Real-World Dataset and A Memory-Augmented Transformer

Document images are often degraded by various stains, significantly impacting their readability and hindering downstream applications such as document digitization and analysis. The absence of a comprehensive stained document dataset has limited the effectiveness of existing document enhancement methods in removing stains while preserving fine-grained details. To address this challenge, we construct StainDoc, the first large-scale, high-resolution ($2145\times2245$) dataset specifically designed for document stain removal. StainDoc comprises over 5,000 pairs of stained and clean document images across multiple scenes. This dataset encompasses a diverse range of stain types, severities, and document backgrounds, facilitating robust training and evaluation of document stain removal algorithms. Furthermore, we propose StainRestorer, a Transformer-based document stain removal approach. StainRestorer employs a memory-augmented Transformer architecture that captures hierarchical stain representations at part, instance, and semantic levels via the DocMemory module. The Stain Removal Transformer (SRTransformer) leverages these feature representations through a dual attention mechanism: an enhanced spatial attention with an expanded receptive field, and a channel attention captures channel-wise feature importance. This combination enables precise stain removal while preserving document content integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate StainRestorer's superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on the StainDoc dataset and its variants StainDoc\_Mark and StainDoc\_Seal, establishing a new benchmark for document stain removal. Our work highlights the potential of memory-augmented Transformers for this task and contributes a valuable dataset to advance future research.

IMAN: An Adaptive Network for Robust NPC Mortality Prediction with Missing Modalities

Accurate prediction of mortality in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), a complex malignancy particularly challenging in advanced stages, is crucial for optimizing treatment strategies and improving patient outcomes. However, this predictive process is often compromised by the high-dimensional and heterogeneous nature of NPC-related data, coupled with the pervasive issue of incomplete multi-modal data, manifesting as missing radiological images or incomplete diagnostic reports. Traditional machine learning approaches suffer significant performance degradation when faced with such incomplete data, as they fail to effectively handle the high-dimensionality and intricate correlations across modalities. Even advanced multi-modal learning techniques like Transformers struggle to maintain robust performance in the presence of missing modalities, as they lack specialized mechanisms to adaptively integrate and align the diverse data types, while also capturing nuanced patterns and contextual relationships within the complex NPC data. To address these problem, we introduce IMAN: an adaptive network for robust NPC mortality prediction with missing modalities.

TAGE: Trustworthy Attribute Group Editing for Stable Few-shot Image Generation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have emerged as a prominent research focus for image editing tasks, leveraging the powerful image generation capabilities of the GAN framework to produce remarkable results.However, prevailing approaches are contingent upon extensive training datasets and explicit supervision, presenting a significant challenge in manipulating the diverse attributes of new image classes with limited sample availability. To surmount this hurdle, we introduce TAGE, an innovative image generation network comprising three integral modules: the Codebook Learning Module (CLM), the Code Prediction Module (CPM) and the Prompt-driven Semantic Module (PSM). The CPM module delves into the semantic dimensions of category-agnostic attributes, encapsulating them within a discrete codebook. This module is predicated on the concept that images are assemblages of attributes, and thus, by editing these category-independent attributes, it is theoretically possible to generate images from unseen categories. Subsequently, the CPM module facilitates naturalistic image editing by predicting indices of category-independent attribute vectors within the codebook. Additionally, the PSM module generates semantic cues that are seamlessly integrated into the Transformer architecture of the CPM, enhancing the model's comprehension of the targeted attributes for editing. With these semantic cues, the model can generate images that accentuate desired attributes more prominently while maintaining the integrity of the original category, even with a limited number of samples. We have conducted extensive experiments utilizing the Animal Faces, Flowers, and VGGFaces datasets. The results of these experiments demonstrate that our proposed method not only achieves superior performance but also exhibits a high degree of stability when compared to other few-shot image generation techniques.

Test-Time Intensity Consistency Adaptation for Shadow Detection

Shadow detection is crucial for accurate scene understanding in computer vision, yet it is challenged by the diverse appearances of shadows caused by variations in illumination, object geometry, and scene context. Deep learning models often struggle to generalize to real-world images due to the limited size and diversity of training datasets. To address this, we introduce TICA, a novel framework that leverages light-intensity information during test-time adaptation to enhance shadow detection accuracy. TICA exploits the inherent inconsistencies in light intensity across shadow regions to guide the model toward a more consistent prediction. A basic encoder-decoder model is initially trained on a labeled dataset for shadow detection. Then, during the testing phase, the network is adjusted for each test sample by enforcing consistent intensity predictions between two augmented input image versions. This consistency training specifically targets both foreground and background intersection regions to identify shadow regions within images accurately for robust adaptation. Extensive evaluations on the ISTD and SBU shadow detection datasets reveal that TICA significantly demonstrates that TICA outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior results in balanced error rate (BER).

ASSNet: Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Network for Microtumors and Multi-Organ Segmentation

Medical image segmentation, a crucial task in computer vision, facilitates the automated delineation of anatomical structures and pathologies, supporting clinicians in diagnosis, treatment planning, and disease monitoring. Notably, transformers employing shifted window-based self-attention have demonstrated exceptional performance. However, their reliance on local window attention limits the fusion of local and global contextual information, crucial for segmenting microtumors and miniature organs. To address this limitation, we propose the Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Network (ASSNet), a transformer architecture that effectively integrates local and global features for precise medical image segmentation. ASSNet comprises a transformer-based U-shaped encoder-decoder network. The encoder utilizes shifted window self-attention across five resolutions to extract multi-scale features, which are then propagated to the decoder through skip connections. We introduce an augmented multi-layer perceptron within the encoder to explicitly model long-range dependencies during feature extraction. Recognizing the constraints of conventional symmetrical encoder-decoder designs, we propose an Adaptive Feature Fusion (AFF) decoder to complement our encoder. This decoder incorporates three key components: the Long Range Dependencies (LRD) block, the Multi-Scale Feature Fusion (MFF) block, and the Adaptive Semantic Center (ASC) block. These components synergistically facilitate the effective fusion of multi-scale features extracted by the decoder while capturing long-range dependencies and refining object boundaries. Comprehensive experiments on diverse medical image segmentation tasks, including multi-organ, liver tumor, and bladder tumor segmentation, demonstrate that ASSNet achieves state-of-the-art results. Code and models are available at: \url{https://github.com/lzeeorno/ASSNet}.