Imaging

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a commonly used technique to measure neural activation. Its application has been particularly important in identifying underlying neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Autism. Recent analysis of fMRI data models the brain as a graph and extracts features by graph neural networks (GNNs). However, the unique characteristics of fMRI data require a special design of GNN. Tailoring GNN to generate effective and domain-explainable features remains challenging...

Treemaps are a powerful tool for representing hierarchical data in a space-efficient manner and are used in various domains, including network security or software development. However, interpreting the topology encoded by nested rectangles can be challenging, particularly compared to tree-structured representations like node-link diagrams or icicle plots. To address this challenge, we introduce TreEducation, a visual education platform designed to improve the visualization literacy skills required for reading treemaps among non-expert users...

Speech-driven gesture generation is an emerging field within virtual human creation. However, a significant challenge lies in accurately determining and processing the multitude of input features (such as acoustic, semantic, emotional, personality, and even subtle unknown features). Traditional approaches, reliant on various explicit feature inputs and complex multimodal processing, constrain the expressiveness of resulting gestures and limit their applicability. To address these challenges, we present Persona-Gestor, a novel end-to-end generative model designed to generate highly personalized 3D full-body gestures solely relying on raw speech audio...

Urban safety plays an essential role in the quality of citizens' lives and in the sustainable development of cities. In recent years, researchers have attempted to apply machine learning techniques to identify the role of location-specific attributes in the development of urban safety. However, existing studies have mainly relied on limited images (e.g., map images, single- or four-directional images) of areas based on a relatively large geographical unit and have narrowly focused on severe crime rates, which limits their predictive performance and implications for urban safety...

This paper introduces a novel Perturbation-Assisted Inference (PAI) framework utilizing synthetic data generated by the Perturbation-Assisted Sample Synthesis (PASS) method. The framework focuses on uncertainty quantification in complex data scenarios, particularly involving unstructured data while utilizing deep learning models. On one hand, PASS employs a generative model to create synthetic data that closely mirrors raw data while preserving its rank properties through data perturbation, thereby enhancing data diversity and bolstering privacy...

Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures are becoming increasingly popular and widely employed to tackle computer vision applications. Their main feature is the capacity to extract global information through the self-attention mechanism, outperforming earlier convolutional neural networks. However, ViT deployment and performance have grown steadily with their size, number of trainable parameters, and operations. Furthermore, self-attention's computational and memory cost quadratically increases with the image resolution...

We present a novel framework named NeuralRecon for real-time 3D scene reconstruction from a monocular video. Unlike previous methods that estimate single-view depth maps separately on each key-frame and fuse them later, we propose to directly reconstruct local surfaces represented as sparse TSDF volumes for each video fragment sequentially by a neural network. A learning-based TSDF fusion module based on gated recurrent units is used to guide the network to fuse features from previous fragments. This design allows the network to capture local smoothness prior and global shape prior of 3D surfaces when sequentially reconstructing the surfaces, resulting in accurate, coherent, and real-time surface reconstruction...

Generating radiology reports automatically reduces the workload of radiologists and helps the diagnoses of specific diseases. Many existing methods take this task as modality transfer process. However, since the key information related to disease accounts for a small proportion in both image and report, it is hard for the model to learn the latent relation between the radiology image and its report, thus failing to generate fluent and accurate radiology reports. To tackle this problem, we propose a memory-based cross-modal semantic alignment model (MCSAM) following an encoder-decoder paradigm...

The primary objective of interactive medical image segmentation systems is to achieve more precise segmentation outcomes with reduced human intervention. This endeavor holds significant clinical importance for both pre-diagnostic pathological assessments and prognostic recovery. Among the various interaction methods available, click-based interactions stand out as an intuitive and straightforward approach compared to alternatives such as graffiti, bounding boxes, and extreme points. To improve the model's ability to interpret click-based interactions, we propose a comprehensive interactive segmentation framework that leverages an iterative weighted loss function based on user clicks...

The recently proposed tensor tubal rank has been witnessed to obtain extraordinary success in real-world tensor data completion. However, existing works usually fix the transform orientation along the third mode and may fail to turn multidimensional low-tubal-rank structure into account. To alleviate these bottlenecks, we introduce two unfolding induced tensor nuclear norms (TNNs) for the tensor completion (TC) problem, which naturally extends tensor tubal rank to high-order data. Specifically, we show how multidimensional low-tubal-rank structure can be captured by utilizing a novel balanced unfolding strategy, upon which two TNNs, namely, overlapped TNN (OTNN) and latent TNN (LTNN), are developed...

Multi-view subspace clustering (MVSC) has drawn significant attention in recent study. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to MVSC. First, the new method is capable of preserving high-order neighbor information of the data, which provides essential and complicated underlying relationships of the data that is not straightforwardly preserved by the first-order neighbors. Second, we design log-based nonconvex approximations to both tensor rank and tensor sparsity, which are effective and more accurate than the convex approximations...

In recent years, fusing high spatial resolution multispectral images (HR-MSIs) and low spatial resolution hyperspectral images (LR-HSIs) has become a widely used approach for hyperspectral image super-resolution (HSI-SR). Various unsupervised HSI-SR methods based on deep image prior (DIP) have gained wide popularity thanks to no pre-training requirement. However, DIP-based methods often demonstrate mediocre performance in extracting latent information from the data. To resolve this performance deficiency, we propose a coupled spatial and spectral deep image priors (CS2DIPs) method for the fusion of an HR-MSI and an LR-HSI into an HR-HSI...

The removal of outliers is crucial for establishing correspondence between two images. However, when the proportion of outliers reaches nearly 90%, the task becomes highly challenging. Existing methods face limitations in effectively utilizing geometric transformation consistency (GTC) information and incorporating geometric semantic neighboring information. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-Stage Geometric Semantic Attention (MSGSA) network. The MSGSA network consists of three key modules: the multi-branch (MB) module, the GTC module, and the geometric semantic attention (GSA) module...

In modern neuroscience, observing the dynamics of large populations of neurons is a critical step of understanding how networks of neurons process information. Light-field microscopy (LFM) has emerged as a type of scanless, high-speed, three-dimensional (3D) imaging tool, particularly attractive for this purpose. Imaging neuronal activity using LFM calls for the development of novel computational approaches that fully exploit domain knowledge embedded in physics and optics models, as well as enabling high interpretability and transparency...

In this paper, we propose a graph-represented image distribution similarity (GRIDS) index for full-reference (FR) image quality assessment (IQA), which can measure the perceptual distance between distorted and reference images by assessing the disparities between their distribution patterns under a graph-based representation. First, we transform the input image into a graph-based representation, which is proven to be a versatile and effective choice for capturing visual perception features. This is achieved through the automatic generation of a vision graph from the given image content, leading to holistic perceptual associations for irregular image regions...

Detecting infrared small targets under cluttered background is mainly challenged by dim textures, low contrast and varying shapes. This paper proposes an approach to facilitate infrared small target detection by learning contrast-enhanced shape-biased representations. The approach cascades a contrast-shape encoder and a shape-reconstructable decoder to learn discriminative representations that can effectively identify target objects. The contrast-shape encoder applies a stem of central difference convolutions and a few large-kernel convolutions to extract shape-preserving features from input infrared images...

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has emerged as a promising tool in the field of AutoML for designing more accurate and efficient architectures. The majority of NAS works employ a weight-sharing technique to reduce the search cost by sharing the weights of a supernet, which is a composite of all architectures produced from the search space. Nonetheless, this method has a significant drawback in that negative interference may arise when candidate architectures share the same weights. This issue becomes even more severe in multi-task searches, where a supernet is shared across tasks...

Long-term Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a challenging vision-and-language bridging task focusing on semantic understanding of untrimmed long-term videos and diverse free-form questions, simultaneously emphasizing comprehensive cross-modal reasoning to yield precise answers. The canonical approaches often rely on off-the-shelf feature extractors to detour the expensive computation overhead, but often result in domain-independent modality-unrelated representations. Furthermore, the inherent gradient blocking between unimodal comprehension and cross-modal interaction hinders reliable answer generation...

Automated cardiac segmentation from two-dimensional (2D) echocardiographic images is a crucial step toward improving clinical diagnosis. Anatomical heterogeneity and inherent noise, however, present technical challenges and lower segmentation accuracy. The objective of this study is to propose a method for the automatic segmentation of the ventricular endocardium, the myocardium, and the left atrium, in order to accurately determine clinical indices. Specifically, we suggest using the recently introduced pixel-to-pixel Generative Adversarial Network (Pix2Pix GAN) model for accurate segmentation...

BACKGROUND: Metabolic-associated fatty liver disease and liver fibrosis are intimately linked to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome. Transient elastography (TE) and point shear wave elastography (pSWE) were used to measure liver stiffness in patients who met the ultrasound criteria for steatotic liver diseases (SLD). This study compared two methods for estimating liver stiffness in patients with SLD, which in turn correlated with liver fibrosis. METHOD: Ultrasound B-mode imaging was used to identify SLD...