Numerous efforts have been made to design various low-level saliency cues for RGBD saliency detection, such as color and depth contrast features as well as background and color compactness priors. However, how these low-level saliency cues interact with each other and how they can be effectively incorporated to generate a master saliency map remain challenging problems. In this paper, we design a new convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically learn the interaction mechanism for RGBD salient object detection. In contrast to existing works, in which raw image pixels are fed directly to the CNN, the proposed method takes advantage of the knowledge obtained in traditional saliency detection by adopting various flexible and interpretable saliency feature vectors as inputs. This guides the CNN to learn a combination of existing features to predict saliency more effectively, which presents a less complex problem than operating on the pixels directly. We then integrate a superpixel-based Laplacian propagation framework with the trained CNN to extract a spatially consistent saliency map by exploiting the intrinsic structure of the input image. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experimental evaluations on three data sets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Underwater images suffer from color casts and low illumination due to the scattering and absorption of light as it propagates in water. These problems can interfere with underwater vision tasks, such as recognition and detection. We propose an adaptive learning attention network for underwater image enhancement based on supervised learning, named LANet, to solve these degradation issues. First, a multiscale fusion module is proposed to combine different spatial information. Second, we design a novel parallel attention module(PAM) to focus on the illuminated features and more significant color information coupled with the pixel and channel attention. Then, an adaptive learning module(ALM) can retain the shallow information and adaptively learn important feature information. Further, we utilize a multinomial loss function that is formed by mean absolute error and perceptual loss. Finally, we introduce an asynchronous training mode to promote the network’s performance of multinomial loss function. Qualitative analysis and quantitative evaluations show the excellent performance of our method on different underwater datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/LiuShiBen/LANet .

In this paper, we propose a retinex-based decomposition model for a hazy image and a novel end-to-end image dehazing network. In the model, the illumination of the hazy image is decomposed into natural illumination for the haze-free image and residual illumination caused by haze. Based on this model, we design a deep retinex dehazing network (RDN) to jointly estimate the residual illumination map and the haze-free image. Our RDN consists of a multiscale residual dense network for estimating the residual illumination map and a U-Net with channel and spatial attention mechanisms for image dehazing. The multiscale residual dense network can simultaneously capture global contextual information from small-scale receptive fields and local detailed information from large-scale receptive fields to precisely estimate the residual illumination map caused by haze. In the dehazing U-Net, we apply the channel and spatial attention mechanisms in the skip connection of the U-Net to achieve a trade-off between overdehazing and underdehazing by automatically adjusting the channel-wise and pixel-wise attention weights. Compared with scattering model-based networks, fully data-driven networks, and prior-based dehazing methods, our RDN can avoid the errors associated with the simplified scattering model and provide better generalization ability with no dependence on prior information. Extensive experiments show the superiority of the RDN to various state-of-the-art methods.

State-of-the-art multi-object tracking (MOT) methods follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm, where object trajectories are obtained by associating per-frame outputs of object detectors. In crowded scenes, however, detectors often fail to obtain accurate detections due to heavy occlusions and high crowd density. In this paper, we propose a new MOT paradigm, tracking-by-counting, tailored for crowded scenes. Using crowd density maps, we jointly model detection, counting, and tracking of multiple targets as a network flow program, which simultaneously finds the global optimal detections and trajectories of multiple targets over the whole video. This is in contrast to prior MOT methods that either ignore the crowd density and thus are prone to errors in crowded scenes, or rely on a suboptimal two-step process using heuristic density-aware point-tracks for matching targets. Our approach yields promising results on public benchmarks of various domains including people tracking, cell tracking, and fish tracking.

With the development of deep learning, impressive progress has been made in the field of image restoration. The existing methods mainly rely on CNN and Transformer to obtain multi-scale feature information. However, these methods rarely integrate frequency domain information effectively during feature extraction, limiting their performance in image restoration. Additionally, few have combined Mamba with the Fourier domain for image restoration, which limits Mamba’s ability to perceive global degradation in the frequency domain. Therefore, we propose a new image restoration model called FMambaIR, which utilizes the complementarity between frequency and Mamba for image restoration. The core of FMambaIR is the F-Mamba block, which combines Fourier transform and Mamba for global degradation perception modeling. Specifically, F-Mamba adopts a dual branch complementary structure, including spatial Mamba branches and Fourier frequency domain global modeling. Mamba models the long-range dependencies of the entire image features, and the frequency branch utilizes Fourier to extract global degraded features from the image. Finally, we use a forward feedback network to integrate local information, which is beneficial for improving the recovery details. We comprehensively evaluate FMambaIR on several image restoration tasks, including underwater image enhancement, remote sensing image dehazing, and low-light image enhancement. The experimental results demonstrate that FMambaIR not only achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods but also significantly reduces computational complexity. Our code is available at https://github.com/mickoluan/FMambaIR.

Shadow removal, which aims to restore the illumination in shadow regions, is challenging due to the diversity of shadows in terms of location, intensity, shape, and size. Different from most multi-task methods, which design elaborate multi-branch or multi-stage structures for better shadow removal, we introduce feature decomposition to learn better feature representations. Specifically, we propose a single-stage and decoupled multi-task network (DMTN) to explicitly learn the decomposed features for shadow removal, shadow matte estimation, and shadow image reconstruction. First, we propose several coarse-to-fine semi-convolution (SMC) modules to capture features sufficient for joint learning of these three tasks. Second, we design a theoretically supported feature decoupling layer to explicitly decouple the learned features into shadow image features and shadow matte features via weight reassignment. Last, these features are converted to a target shadow-free image, affiliated shadow matte, and shadow image, supervised by multi-task joint loss functions. With multi-task collaboration, DMTN effectively recovers the illumination in shadow areas while ensuring the fidelity of non-shadow areas. Experimental results show that DMTN competes favorably with state-of-the-art multi-branch/multi-stage shadow removal methods, while maintaining the simplicity of single-stage methods. We have released our code to encourage future exploration in powerful feature representation for shadow removal https://github.com/nachifur/DMTN