With the increasing popularity of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recent works on face-based age estimation employ these networks as the backbone. However, state-of-the-art CNN-based methods treat each facial region equally, thus entirely ignoring the importance of some facial patches that may contain rich age-specific information. In this paper, we propose a face-based age estimation framework, called Attention-based Dynamic Patch Fusion (ADPF). In ADPF, two separate CNNs are implemented, namely the AttentionNet and the FusionNet. The AttentionNet dynamically locates and ranks age-specific patches by employing a novel Ranking-guided Multi-Head Hybrid Attention (RMHHA) mechanism. The FusionNet uses the discovered patches along with the facial image to predict the age of the subject. Since the proposed RMHHA mechanism ranks the discovered patches based on their importance, the length of the learning path of each patch in the FusionNet is proportional to the amount of information it carries (the longer, the more important). ADPF also introduces a novel diversity loss to guide the training of the AttentionNet and reduce the overlap among patches so that the diverse and important patches are discovered. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several age estimation benchmark datasets.
The objective of this study is to develop a patch-based labeling method that cooperates with a label fusion using non-rigid registrations. We present a novel patch-based label fusion method, whose selected patches and their weights are calculated from a combination of similarity measures between patches using intensity-based distances and labeling-based distances, where a previous labeling of the target image is inferred through a label fusion method using non-rigid registrations. These combined similarity measures result in better selection of the patches, and their weights are more robust, w…
National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra（国立库鲁克谢特拉技术学院）
SAR (VV and VH polarization) and optical data are widely used in image fusion to use the complimentary information of each other and to obtain the better-quality image (in terms of spatial and spectral features) for the improved classification results. This paper uses anisotropic diffusion with PCA for the fusion of SAR and optical data and patch-based SVM Classification with LBP (LBP-PSVM). Fusion results with VV polarization performed better than VH polarization using considered fusion method. For classification, the performance of LBP-PSVM using S1 (VV) with S2, S1 (VH) with S2 is compared …
Jiangnan University（江南大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
The Transformer architecture has witnessed a rapid development in recent years, outperforming the CNN architectures in many computer vision tasks, as exemplified by the Vision Transformers (ViT) for image classification. However, existing visual transformer models aim to extract semantic information for high-level tasks, such as classification and detection.These methods ignore the importance of the spatial resolution of the input image, thus sacrificing the local correlation information of neighboring pixels. In this paper, we propose a Patch Pyramid Transformer(PPT) to effectively address th…
Halmstad University（哈尔姆斯塔德大学）；University of Malta（马耳他大学）
Current research in iris recognition is moving towards enabling more relaxed acquisition conditions. This has effects on the quality of acquired images, with low resolution being a predominant issue. Here, we evaluate a super-resolution algorithm used to reconstruct iris images based on Eigen-transformation of local image patches. Each patch is reconstructed separately, allowing better quality of enhanced images by preserving local information. Contrast enhancement is used to improve the reconstruction quality, while matcher fusion has been adopted to improve iris recognition performance. We v…
Context Patch Fusion With Class Token Enhancement for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuxi University（网络安全科学与工程学院，无锡大学）；School of Informatics, Xiamen University（信息学院，厦门大学）；School of Computer Science, University of Liverpool（计算机科学学院，利物浦大学）
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；QUT Centre for Robotics（QUT机器人中心）
Visual Place Recognition is a challenging task for robotics and autonomous systems, which must deal with the twin problems of appearance and viewpoint change in an always changing world. This paper introduces Patch-NetVLAD, which provides a novel formulation for combining the advantages of both local and global descriptor methods by deriving patch-level features from NetVLAD residuals. Unlike the fixed spatial neighborhood regime of existing local keypoint features, our method enables aggregation and matching of deep-learned local features defined over the feature-space grid. We further introd…
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；Østfold University College（东福尔德大学学院）
Text independent writer identification is a challenging problem that differentiates between different handwriting styles to decide the author of the handwritten text. Earlier writer identification relied on handcrafted features to reveal pieces of differences between writers. Recent work with the advent of convolutional neural network, deep learning-based methods have evolved. In this paper, three different deep learning techniques - spatial attention mechanism, multi-scale feature fusion and patch-based CNN were proposed to effectively capture the difference between each writer's handwriting.…
Bosch Research North America（博世北美研究院）；University of Missouri（密苏里大学）
A well-known challenge in applying deep-learning methods to omnidirectional images is spherical distortion. In dense regression tasks such as depth estimation, where structural details are required, using a vanilla CNN layer on the distorted 360 image results in undesired information loss. In this paper, we propose a 360 monocular depth estimation pipeline, OmniFusion, to tackle the spherical distortion issue. Our pipeline transforms a 360 image into less-distorted perspective patches (i.e. tangent images) to obtain patch-wise predictions via CNN, and then merge the patch-wise results for fina…
Università degli Studi di Brescia（布雷西亚大学）；Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；Telecom Italia S.P.A.（意大利电信股份公司）
This work addresses the problem of learning compact yet discriminative patch descriptors within a deep learning framework. We observe that features extracted by convolutional layers in the pixel domain are largely complementary to features extracted in a transformed domain. We propose a convolutional network framework for learning binary patch descriptors where pixel domain features are fused with features extracted from the transformed domain. In our framework, while convolutional and transformed features are distinctly extracted, they are fused and provided to a single classifier which thus …
HPFF: Hierarchical Locally Supervised Learning with Patch Feature Fusion
Southeast University（东南大学）；East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海理工大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Ultra-high resolution image segmentation has raised increasing interests in recent years due to its realistic applications. In this paper, we innovate the widely used high-resolution image segmentation pipeline, in which an ultra-high resolution image is partitioned into regular patches for local segmentation and then the local results are merged into a high-resolution semantic mask. In particular, we introduce a novel locality-aware context fusion based segmentation model to process local patches, where the relevance between local patch and its various contexts are jointly and complementarily…
Global contextual information and local detail features are essential for haze removal tasks. Deep learning models perform well on small, low-resolution images, but they encounter difficulties with large, high-resolution ones due to GPU memory limitations. As a compromise, they often resort to image slicing or downsampling. The former diminishes global information, while the latter discards high-frequency details. To address these challenges, we propose DehazeXL, a haze removal method that effectively balances global context and local feature extraction, enabling end-to-end modeling of large i…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Kings College London（伦敦国王学院）
Brain age estimation from Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) derives the difference between a subject's biological brain age and their chronological age. This is a potential biomarker for neurodegeneration, e.g. as part of Alzheimer's disease. Early detection of neurodegeneration manifesting as a higher brain age can potentially facilitate better medical care and planning for affected individuals. Many studies have been proposed for the prediction of chronological age from brain MRI using machine learning and specifically deep learning techniques. Contrary to most studies, which use the whole bra…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））
The availability of curated large-scale training data is a crucial factor for the development of well-generalizing deep learning methods for the extraction of geoinformation from multi-sensor remote sensing imagery. While quite some datasets have already been published by the community, most of them suffer from rather strong limitations, e.g. regarding spatial coverage, diversity or simply number of available samples. Exploiting the freely available data acquired by the Sentinel satellites of the Copernicus program implemented by the European Space Agency, as well as the cloud computing facili…
The University of Warwick（华威大学）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）；Charles Sturt University（查尔斯史都华大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been applied to age-related research as the core framework. Although faces are composed of numerous facial attributes, most works with CNNs still consider a face as a typical object and do not pay enough attention to facial regions that carry age-specific feature for this particular task. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN architecture called Fusion Network (FusionNet) to tackle the age estimation problem. Apart from the whole face image, the FusionNet successively takes several age-specific facial patches as part of the input to emphasize the age-sp…
Local deep neural networks have been recently introduced for gender recognition. Although, they achieve very good performance they are very computationally expensive to train. In this work, we introduce a simplified version of local deep neural networks which significantly reduces the training time. Instead of using hundreds of patches per image, as suggested by the original method, we propose to use 9 overlapping patches per image which cover the entire face region. This results in a much reduced training time, since just 9 patches are extracted per image instead of hundreds, at the expense o…
Fusion of Multi-scale Heterogeneous Pathology Foundation Models for Whole Slide Image Analysis
School of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学生物医学工程学院）；Division of Life Science, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Nervous System Disorders, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学生命科学系）；SIAT-HKUST Joint Laboratory of Cell Evolution and Digital Health, HKUST Shenzhen-Hong Kong Collaborative Innovation Research Institute（深圳-香港联合创新研究院细胞进化与数字健康联合实验室）；Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学附属第一医院肝胆外科）；Center for Medical Imaging, Robotics, Analytic Computing & Learning (MIRACLE), Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, USTC, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China（中国科学技术大学苏州先进研究所）；Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算机网络信息中心）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Digital Twin Technology, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China（江苏省多模态数字孪生技术重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Precision and Intelligent Chemistry, USTC, Hefei, Anhui, China（中国科学技术大学精准与智能化学重点实验室）；Department of Pathology, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing, China（中国人民解放军总医院病理科）
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Histology imaging is an essential diagnosis method to finalize the grade and stage of cancer of different tissues, especially for breast cancer diagnosis. Specialists often disagree on the final diagnosis on biopsy tissue due to the complex morphological variety. Although convolutional neural networks (CNN) have advantages in extracting discriminative features in image classification, directly training a CNN on high resolution histology images is computationally infeasible currently. Besides, inconsistent discriminative features often distribute over the whole histology image, which incurs cha…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are state-of-the-art models for many image classification tasks. However, to recognize cancer subtypes automatically, training a CNN on gigapixel resolution Whole Slide Tissue Images (WSI) is currently computationally impossible. The differentiation of cancer subtypes is based on cellular-level visual features observed on image patch scale. Therefore, we argue that in this situation, training a patch-level classifier on image patches will perform better than or similar to an image-level classifier. The challenge becomes how to intelligently combine patch-lev…
Qian Xuesen Laboratory of Space Technology, China Academy of Space Technology（中国空间技术研究院钱学森空间技术实验室）
Deep learning techniques have made an increasing impact on the field of remote sensing. However, deep neural networks based fusion of multimodal data from different remote sensors with heterogenous characteristics has not been fully explored, due to the lack of availability of big amounts of perfectly aligned multi-sensor image data with diverse scenes of high resolutions, especially for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and optical imagery. To promote the development of deep learning based SAR-optical fusion approaches, we release the QXS-SAROPT dataset, which contains 20,000 pairs of SAR-o…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SmartMore
We study the vision transformer structure in the mobile level in this paper, and find a dramatic performance drop. We analyze the reason behind this phenomenon, and propose a novel irregular patch embedding module and adaptive patch fusion module to improve the performance. We conjecture that the vision transformer blocks (which consist of multi-head attention and feed-forward network) are more suitable to handle high-level information than low-level features. The irregular patch embedding module extracts patches that contain rich high-level information with different receptive fields. The tra…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
In this paper, we focus on estimating the 6D pose of objects in point clouds. Although the topic has been widely studied, pose estimation in point clouds remains a challenging problem due to the noise and occlusion. To address the problem, a novel 3DPVNet is presented in this work, which utilizes 3D local patches to vote for the object 6D poses. 3DPVNet is comprised of three modules. In particular, a Patch Unification (\textbf{PU}) module is first introduced to normalize the input patch, and also create a standard local coordinate frame on it to generate a reliable vote. We then devise a Weigh…
Patch Progression Masked Autoencoder with Fusion CNN Network for Classifying Evolution Between Two Pairs of 2D OCT Slices
LaTIM UMR 1101, Inserm（LaTIM UMR 1101，Inserm）；University of Western Brittany（西部布列塔尼大学）；Evolucare Technologies（Evolucare技术公司）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）；United Imaging Healthcare（联合影像医疗）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；MD Anderson Cancer Center（MD安德森癌症中心）；Guangdong General Hospital（广东人民医院）
School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University（北京大学软件与微电子学院）；Alibaba Group, Inc.（阿里巴巴集团）
Learning subtle representation about object parts plays a vital role in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) field. The vision transformer (ViT) achieves promising results on computer vision due to its attention mechanism. Nonetheless, with the fixed size of patches in ViT, the class token in deep layer focuses on the global receptive field and cannot generate multi-granularity features for FGVR. To capture region attention without box annotations and compensate for ViT shortcomings in FGVR, we propose a novel method named Adaptive attention multi-scale Fusion Transformer (AFTrans). The Sele…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）
Chronological age of healthy brain is able to be predicted using deep neural networks from T1-weighted magnetic resonance images (T1 MRIs), and the predicted brain age could serve as an effective biomarker for detecting aging-related diseases or disorders. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural network architecture, referred to as optimal transport based feature pyramid fusion (OTFPF) network, for the brain age estimation with T1 MRIs. The OTFPF consists of three types of modules: Optimal Transport based Feature Pyramid Fusion (OTFPF) module, 3D overlapped ConvNeXt (3D OL-ConvNeXt) mod…
Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
Deep learning can provide rapid brain age estimation based on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, most studies use one neural network to extract the global information from the whole input image, ignoring the local fine-grained details. In this paper, we propose a global-local transformer, which consists of a global-pathway to extract the global-context information from the whole input image and a local-pathway to extract the local fine-grained details from local patches. The fine-grained information from the local patches are fused with the global-context information by the atten…
