Text-based person search (TBPS) is a problem that gained significant interest within the research community. The task is that of retrieving one or more images of a specific individual based on a textual description. The multi-modal nature of the task requires learning representations that bridge text and image data within a shared latent space. Existing TBPS systems face two major challenges. One is defined as inter-identity noise that is due to the inherent vagueness and imprecision of text descriptions and it indicates how descriptions of visual attributes can be generally associated to different people; the other is the intra-identity variations, which are all those nuisances e.g. , pose, illumination, that can alter the visual appearance of the same textual attributes for a given subject. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel TBPS architecture named MARS (Mae-Attribute-Relation-Sensitive), which enhances current state-of-the-art models by introducing two key components: a Visual Reconstruction Loss and an Attribute Loss. The former employs a Masked AutoEncoder trained to reconstruct randomly masked image patches with the aid of the textual description. In doing so the model is encouraged to learn more expressive representations and textual-visual relations in the latent space. The Attribute Loss, instead, balances the contribution of different types of attributes, defined as adjective-noun chunks of text. This loss ensures that every attribute is taken into consideration in the person retrieval process. Extensive experiments on three commonly used datasets, namely CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid, report performance improvements, with significant gains in the mean Average Precision (mAP) metric w.r.t. the current state of the art. Code will be available at https://github.com/ErgastiAlex/MARS .

Road sweepers are ubiquitous machines that help preserve our cities cleanliness and health by collecting road garbage and sweeping out dirt from our streets and sidewalks. They are often very mechanical instruments, needing to operate in harsh conditions dealing with all sorts of abandoned trash and natural garbage. They are usually composed of rotating brushes, collector belts and bins, and sometimes water or air streams. All of these mechanical tools are usually high in power demand and strongly subject to wear and tear. Moreover, due to the simple working logic often implied by these cleaning machines, these tools work in an “always on”/“max power” state, and any further regulation is left to the pilot. Therefore, adding artificial intelligence able to correctly operate these tools in a semi-automatic way would be greatly beneficial. In this paper, we propose an automatic road garbage detection system, able to locate with great precision most types of road waste, and to correctly instruct a road sweeper in order to handle them. With this simple addition to an existing sweeper, we will be able to save more than 80% electrical power currently absorbed by the cleaning systems and reduce by the same amount brush weariness (prolonging their lifetime). This is done by choosing when to use the brushes and when not to, with how much strength, and where. The only hardware components needed by the system will be a camera and a PC board able to read the camera output (and communicate via CanBus). The software of the system will be mainly composed of a deep neural network for semantic segmentation of images, and a real-time software program to control the sweeper actuators with the appropriate timings. To prove the claimed results, we run extensive tests onboard of such a truck, as well as benchmark tests for accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and inference speed of the system.

Due to the limitations of current optical and sensor technologies and the high cost of updating them, the spectral and spatial resolution of satellites may not always meet desired requirements. For these reasons, Remote‐Sensing Single‐Image Super‐Resolution (RS‐SISR) techniques have gained significant interest. In this paper, Swin2‐MoSE model is proposed, an enhanced version of Swin2SR. The model introduces MoE‐SM, an enhanced Mixture‐of‐Experts (MoE) to replace the Feed‐Forward inside all Transformer block. MoE‐SM is designed with Smart‐Merger, and new layer for merging the output of individual experts, and with a new way to split the work between experts, defining a new per‐example strategy instead of the commonly used per‐token one. Furthermore, it is analyzed how positional encodings interact with each other, demonstrating that per‐channel bias and per‐head bias can positively cooperate. Finally, the authors propose to use a combination of Normalized‐Cross‐Correlation (NCC) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) losses, to avoid typical MSE loss limitations. Experimental results demonstrate that Swin2‐MoSE outperforms any Swin derived models by up to 0.377–0.958 dB (PSNR) on task of , and resolution‐upscaling ( and OLI2MSI datasets). It also outperforms SOTA models by a good margin, proving to be competitive and with excellent potential, especially for complex tasks. Additionally, an analysis of computational costs is also performed. Finally, the efficacy of Swin2‐MoSE is shown, applying it to a semantic segmentation task (SeasoNet dataset). Code and pretrained are available on https://github.com/IMPLabUniPr/swin2‐mose/tree/official_code

In this paper, we propose FrankenMask, a novel framework that allows swapping and rearranging face parts in semantic masks for automatic editing of shape-related facial attributes. This is a novel yet challenging task as substituting face parts in a semantic mask requires to account for possible spatial misalignment and the adaptation of surrounding regions. We obtain such a feature by combining a Transformer encoder to learn the spatial relationships of facial parts, with an encoder–decoder architecture, which reconstructs a complete mask from the composition of local parts. Reconstruction and attribute classification results demonstrate the effective synthesis of facial images, while showing the generation of accurate and plausible facial attributes. Code is available at https://github.com/TFonta/FrankenMask_semantic.

In semantic image synthesis the state of the art is dominated by methods that use customized variants of the SPatially-Adaptive DE-normalization (SPADE) layers, which allowfor good visual generation quality and editing versatility. By design, such layers learn pixel-wise modulation parameters to de-normalize the generator activations based on the semantic class each pixel belongs to. Thus, they tend to overlook global image statistics, ultimately leading to unconvincing local style editing and causing global inconsistencies such as color or illumination distribution shifts. Also, SPADE layers require the semantic segmentation mask for mapping styles in the generator, preventing shape manipulations without manual intervention. In response, we designed a novel architecture where cross-attention layers are used in place of SPADE for learning shape-style correlations and so conditioning the image generation process. Our model inherits the versatility of SPADE, at the same time obtaining state-of-the-art generation quality, as well as improved global and local style transfer. Code and models available at https://github.com/TFonta/CA2SIS.