Diffusion models has underpinned much recent advances of dataset augmentation in various computer vision tasks. However, when involving generating multi-object images as real scenarios, most existing methods either rely entirely on text condition, resulting in a deviation between the generated objects and the original data, or rely too much on the original images, resulting in a lack of diversity in the generated images, which is of limited help to downstream tasks. To mitigate both problems with one stone, we propose a prompt-free conditional diffusion framework for multi-object image augmentation. Specifically, we introduce a local-global semantic fusion strategy to extract semantics from images to replace text, and inject knowledge into the diffusion model through LoRA to alleviate the category deviation between the original model and the target dataset. In addition, we design a reward model based counting loss to assist the traditional reconstruction loss for model training. By constraining the object counts of each category instead of pixel-by-pixel constraints, bridging the quantity deviation between the generated data and the original data while improving the diversity of the generated data. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over several representative state-of-the-art baselines and showcase strong downstream task gain and out-of-domain generalization capabilities. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/00why00/PFCD}{here}.
rQdia regularizes Q-value distributions with augmented images in pixel-based deep reinforcement learning. With a simple auxiliary loss, that equalizes these distributions via MSE, rQdia boosts DrQ and SAC on 9/12 and 10/12 tasks respectively in the MuJoCo Continuous Control Suite from pixels, and Data-Efficient Rainbow on 18/26 Atari Arcade environments. Gains are measured in both sample efficiency and longer-term training. Moreover, the addition of rQdia finally propels model-free continuous control from pixels over the state encoding baseline.
Cancer is an abnormal growth with potential to invade locally and metastasize to distant organs. Accurate auto-segmentation of the tumor and surrounding normal tissues is required for radiotherapy treatment plan optimization. Recent AI-based segmentation models are generally trained on large public datasets, which lack the heterogeneity of local patient populations. While these studies advance AI-based medical image segmentation, research on local datasets is necessary to develop and integrate AI tumor segmentation models directly into hospital software for efficient and accurate oncology treatment planning and execution. This study enhances tumor segmentation using computationally efficient hybrid UNet-Transformer models on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets acquired from a local hospital under strict privacy protection. We developed a robust data pipeline for seamless DICOM extraction and preprocessing, followed by extensive image augmentation to ensure model generalization across diverse clinical settings, resulting in a total dataset of 6080 images for training. Our novel architecture integrates UNet-based convolutional neural networks with a transformer bottleneck and complementary attention modules, including efficient attention, Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks, Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and ResNeXt blocks. To accelerate convergence and reduce computational demands, we used a maximum batch size of 8 and initialized the encoder with pretrained ImageNet weights, training the model on dual NVIDIA T4 GPUs via checkpointing to overcome Kaggle's runtime limits. Quantitative evaluation on the local MRI dataset yielded a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.764 and an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.736, demonstrating competitive performance despite limited data and underscoring the importance of site-specific model development for clinical deployment.
This work introduces a novel framework for brain tumor segmentation leveraging pre-trained GANs and Unet architectures. By combining a global anomaly detection module with a refined mask generation network, the proposed model accurately identifies tumor-sensitive regions and iteratively enhances segmentation precision using adversarial loss constraints. Multi-modal MRI data and synthetic image augmentation are employed to improve robustness and address the challenge of limited annotated datasets. Experimental results on the BraTS dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, achieving high sensitivity and accuracy in both lesion-wise Dice and HD95 metrics than the baseline. This scalable method minimizes the dependency on fully annotated data, paving the way for practical real-world applications in clinical settings.
The identification and classification of vehicles play a crucial role in various aspects of the control-sanction system. Current technologies such as weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems can classify most vehicle categories but they struggle to accurately classify vehicles with lifted axles. Moreover, very few commercial and technical methods exist for detecting lifted axles. In this paper, as part of the European project SETO (Smart Enforcement of Transport Operations), a method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), namely YOLOv8s, was proposed for the detection of lifted truck axles in images of trucks captured by cameras placed perpendicular to the direction of traffic. The performance of the proposed method was assessed and it was found that it had a precision of 87%, a recall of 91.7%, and an inference time of 1.4 ms, which makes it well-suited for real time implantations. These results suggest that further improvements could be made, potentially by increasing the size of the datasets and/or by using various image augmentation methods.
Large language/multimodal models (LLMs/LMMs) store extensive pre-trained knowledge but struggle to maintain consistency with real-world updates, making it difficult to avoid catastrophic forgetting while acquiring evolving knowledge. Previous work focused on constructing textual knowledge datasets and exploring knowledge injection in LLMs, lacking exploration of multimodal evolving knowledge injection in LMMs. To address this, we propose the EVOKE benchmark to evaluate LMMs' ability to inject multimodal evolving knowledge in real-world scenarios. Meanwhile, a comprehensive evaluation of multimodal evolving knowledge injection revealed two challenges: (1) Existing knowledge injection methods perform terribly on evolving knowledge. (2) Supervised fine-tuning causes catastrophic forgetting, particularly instruction following ability is severely compromised. Additionally, we provide pathways and find that: (1) Text knowledge augmentation during the training phase improves performance, while image augmentation cannot achieve it. (2) Continual learning methods, especially Replay and MoELoRA, effectively mitigate forgetting. Our findings indicate that current knowledge injection methods have many limitations on evolving knowledge, which motivates further research on more efficient and stable knowledge injection methods.
Recent advancements in deep learning and aerial imaging have transformed wildlife monitoring, enabling researchers to survey wildlife populations at unprecedented scales. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide a cost-effective means of capturing high-resolution imagery, particularly for monitoring densely populated seabird colonies. In this study, we assess the performance of a general-purpose avian detection model, BirdDetector, in estimating the breeding population of Salvin's albatross (Thalassarche salvini) on the Bounty Islands, New Zealand. Using drone-derived imagery, we evaluate the model's effectiveness in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, incorporating enhanced inference techniques and stronger augmentation methods. Our findings indicate that while applying the model in a zero-shot setting offers a strong baseline, fine-tuning with annotations from the target domain and stronger image augmentation leads to marked improvements in detection accuracy. These results highlight the potential of leveraging pre-trained deep-learning models for species-specific monitoring in remote and challenging environments.
A fault detection method for power conversion circuits using thermal images and a convolutional autoencoder is presented. The autoencoder is trained on thermal images captured from a commercial power module at randomly varied load currents and augmented image2 generated through image processing techniques such as resizing, rotation, perspective transformation, and bright and contrast adjustment. Since the autoencoder is trained to output images identical to input only for normal samples, it reconstructs images similar to normal ones even when the input images containing faults. A small heater is attached to the circuit board to simulate a fault on a power module, and then thermal images were captured from different angles and positions, as well as various load currents to test the trained autoencoder model. The areas under the curve (AUC) were obtained to evaluate the proposed method. The results show the autoencoder model can detect anomalies with 100% accuracy under given conditions. The influence of hyperparameters such as the number of convolutional layers and image augmentation conditions on anomaly detection accuracy was also investigated.
Generalizing an object detector trained on a single domain to multiple unseen domains is a challenging task. Existing methods typically introduce image or feature augmentation to diversify the source domain to raise the robustness of the detector. Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based augmentation techniques have been proven to be effective, but they require that the detector's backbone has the same structure as the image encoder of VLM, limiting the detector framework selection. To address this problem, we propose Language-Driven Dual Style Mixing (LDDS) for single-domain generalization, which diversifies the source domain by fully utilizing the semantic information of the VLM. Specifically, we first construct prompts to transfer style semantics embedded in the VLM to an image translation network. This facilitates the generation of style diversified images with explicit semantic information. Then, we propose image-level style mixing between the diversified images and source domain images. This effectively mines the semantic information for image augmentation without relying on specific augmentation selections. Finally, we propose feature-level style mixing in a double-pipeline manner, allowing feature augmentation to be model-agnostic and can work seamlessly with the mainstream detector frameworks, including the one-stage, two-stage, and transformer-based detectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across various benchmark datasets, including real to cartoon and normal to adverse weather tasks. The source code and pre-trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/qinhongda8/LDDS.
This paper proposes batch augmentation with unimodal fine-tuning to detect the fetus's organs from ultrasound images and associated clinical textual information. We also prescribe pre-training initial layers with investigated medical data before the multimodal training. At first, we apply a transferred initialization with the unimodal image portion of the dataset with batch augmentation. This step adjusts the initial layer weights for medical data. Then, we apply neural networks (NNs) with fine-tuned initial layers to images in batches with batch augmentation to obtain features. We also extract information from descriptions of images. We combine this information with features obtained from images to train the head layer. We write a dataloader script to load the multimodal data and use existing unimodal image augmentation techniques with batch augmentation for the multimodal data. The dataloader brings a new random augmentation for each batch to get a good generalization. We investigate the FPU23 ultrasound and UPMC Food-101 multimodal datasets. The multimodal large language model (LLM) with the proposed training provides the best results among the investigated methods. We receive near state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the UPMC Food-101 dataset. We share the scripts of the proposed method with traditional counterparts at the following repository: github.com/dipuk0506/multimodal
With the rapid advancement of text-to-image (T2I) generation models, assessing the semantic alignment between generated images and text descriptions has become a significant research challenge. Current methods, including those based on Visual Question Answering (VQA), still struggle with fine-grained assessments and precise quantification of image-text alignment. This paper presents an improved evaluation method named Instruction-augmented Multimodal Alignment for Image-Text and Element Matching (iMatch), which evaluates image-text semantic alignment by fine-tuning multimodal large language models. We introduce four innovative augmentation strategies: First, the QAlign strategy creates a precise probabilistic mapping to convert discrete scores from multimodal large language models into continuous matching scores. Second, a validation set augmentation strategy uses pseudo-labels from model predictions to expand training data, boosting the model's generalization performance. Third, an element augmentation strategy integrates element category labels to refine the model's understanding of image-text matching. Fourth, an image augmentation strategy employs techniques like random lighting to increase the model's robustness. Additionally, we propose prompt type augmentation and score perturbation strategies to further enhance the accuracy of element assessments. Our experimental results show that the iMatch method significantly surpasses existing methods, confirming its effectiveness and practical value. Furthermore, our iMatch won first place in the CVPR NTIRE 2025 Text to Image Generation Model Quality Assessment - Track 1 Image-Text Alignment.
This paper introduces a novel dual-region augmentation approach designed to reduce reliance on large-scale labeled datasets while improving model robustness and adaptability across diverse computer vision tasks, including source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) and person re-identification (ReID). Our method performs targeted data transformations by applying random noise perturbations to foreground objects and spatially shuffling background patches. This effectively increases the diversity of the training data, improving model robustness and generalization. Evaluations on the PACS dataset for SFDA demonstrate that our augmentation strategy consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving significant accuracy improvements in both single-target and multi-target adaptation settings. By augmenting training data through structured transformations, our method enables model generalization across domains, providing a scalable solution for reducing reliance on manually annotated datasets. Furthermore, experiments on Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach for person ReID, surpassing traditional augmentation techniques.
Diffusion generative models have demonstrated remarkable success in visual domains such as image and video generation. They have also recently emerged as a promising approach in robotics, especially in robot manipulations. Diffusion models leverage a probabilistic framework, and they stand out with their ability to model multi-modal distributions and their robustness to high-dimensional input and output spaces. This survey provides a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art diffusion models in robotic manipulation, including grasp learning, trajectory planning, and data augmentation. Diffusion models for scene and image augmentation lie at the intersection of robotics and computer vision for vision-based tasks to enhance generalizability and data scarcity. This paper also presents the two main frameworks of diffusion models and their integration with imitation learning and reinforcement learning. In addition, it discusses the common architectures and benchmarks and points out the challenges and advantages of current state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods.
Foundation models pretrained on extensive datasets, such as GroundingDINO and LAE-DINO, have performed remarkably in the cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) task. Through rigorous few-shot training, we found that the integration of image-based data augmentation techniques and grid-based sub-domain search strategy significantly enhances the performance of these foundation models. Building upon GroundingDINO, we employed several widely used image augmentation methods and established optimization objectives to effectively navigate the expansive domain space in search of optimal sub-domains. This approach facilitates efficient few-shot object detection and introduces an approach to solving the CD-FSOD problem by efficiently searching for the optimal parameter configuration from the foundation model. Our findings substantially advance the practical deployment of vision-language models in data-scarce environments, offering critical insights into optimizing their cross-domain generalization capabilities without labor-intensive retraining. Code is available at https://github.com/jaychempan/ETS.
Data plays a pivotal role in Text-Based Person Retrieval (TBPR) research. Mainstream research paradigm necessitates real-world person images with manual textual annotations for training models, posing privacy-sensitive and labor-intensive issues. Several pioneering efforts explore synthetic data for TBPR but still rely on real data, keeping the aforementioned issues and also resulting in diversity-deficient issue in synthetic datasets, thus impacting TBPR performance. Moreover, these works tend to explore synthetic data for TBPR through limited perspectives, leading to exploration-restricted issue. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to explore the potential of synthetic data for TBPR, highlighting three key aspects. (1) We propose an inter-class image generation pipeline, in which an automatic prompt construction strategy is introduced to guide generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in generating various inter-class images without reliance on original data. (2) We develop an intra-class image augmentation pipeline, in which the generative AI models are applied to further edit the images for obtaining various intra-class images. (3) Building upon the proposed pipelines and an automatic text generation pipeline, we explore the effectiveness of synthetic data in diverse scenarios through extensive experiments. Additionally, we experimentally investigate various noise-robust learning strategies to mitigate the inherent noise in synthetic data. We will release the code, along with the synthetic large-scale dataset generated by our pipelines, which are expected to advance practical TBPR research.
Pavement distress, such as cracks and potholes, is a significant issue affecting road safety and maintenance. In this study, we present the implementation and evaluation of Bidirectional Cascaded Neural Networks (BCNNs) for the classification of pavement crack images following image augmentation. We classified pavement cracks into three main categories: linear cracks, potholes, and fatigue cracks on an enhanced dataset utilizing U-Net 50 for image augmentation. The augmented dataset comprised 599 images. Our proposed BCNN model was designed to leverage both forward and backward information flows, with detection accuracy enhanced by its cascaded structure wherein each layer progressively refines the output of the preceding one. Our model achieved an overall accuracy of 87%, with precision, recall, and F1-score measures indicating high effectiveness across the categories. For fatigue cracks, the model recorded a precision of 0.87, recall of 0.83, and F1-score of 0.85 on 205 images. Linear cracks were detected with a precision of 0.81, recall of 0.89, and F1-score of 0.85 on 205 images, and potholes with a precision of 0.96, recall of 0.90, and F1-score of 0.93 on 189 images. The macro and weighted average of precision, recall, and F1-score were identical at 0.88, confirming the BCNN's excellent performance in classifying complex pavement crack patterns. This research demonstrates the potential of BCNNs to significantly enhance the accuracy and reliability of pavement distress classification, resulting in more effective and efficient pavement maintenance and management systems.
This paper showcases an experimental study on anomaly detection using computer vision. The study focuses on class distinction and performance evaluation, combining OpenCV with deep learning techniques while employing a TensorFlow-based convolutional neural network for real-time face recognition and classification. The system effectively distinguishes among three classes: authorized personnel (admin), intruders, and non-human entities. A MobileNetV2-based deep learning model is utilized to optimize real-time performance, ensuring high computational efficiency without compromising accuracy. Extensive dataset preprocessing, including image augmentation and normalization, enhances the models generalization capabilities. Our analysis demonstrates classification accuracies of 90.20% for admin, 98.60% for intruders, and 75.80% for non-human detection, while maintaining an average processing rate of 30 frames per second. The study leverages transfer learning, batch normalization, and Adam optimization to achieve stable and robust learning, and a comparative analysis of class differentiation strategies highlights the impact of feature extraction techniques and training methodologies. The results indicate that advanced feature selection and data augmentation significantly enhance detection performance, particularly in distinguishing human from non-human scenes. As an experimental study, this research provides critical insights into optimizing deep learning-based surveillance systems for high-security environments and improving the accuracy and efficiency of real-time anomaly detection.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images provide valuable information for ocean observation and analysis, aiding the understanding of oceanic processes and their role in climate change. This study presents a Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)-based approach for generating realistic and diverse ocean-pattern SAR images. The proposed methodology combines a style-based generator network with an adversarial discriminator network to learn and reproduce complex patterns present in SAR images. To avoid discriminator overfitting due to insufficient training data, an adaptive discriminator augmentation (ADA) mechanism has been exploited. However, the generated images lacked physical properties in the frequency domain. To address this issue, we modified the loss functions by adding the mean square error of the generated and real images in the frequency domain, improving the spectrum of the generated images.
Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models spurred research on personalization, i.e., a customized image synthesis, of subjects within reference images. Although existing personalization methods are able to alter the subjects' positions or to personalize multiple subjects simultaneously, they often struggle to modify the behaviors of subjects or their dynamic interactions. The difficulty is attributable to overfitting to reference images, which worsens if only a single reference image is available. We propose DynASyn, an effective multi-subject personalization from a single reference image addressing these challenges. DynASyn preserves the subject identity in the personalization process by aligning concept-based priors with subject appearances and actions. This is achieved by regularizing the attention maps between the subject token and images through concept-based priors. In addition, we propose concept-based prompt-and-image augmentation for an enhanced trade-off between identity preservation and action diversity. We adopt an SDE-based editing guided by augmented prompts to generate diverse appearances and actions while maintaining identity consistency in the augmented images. Experiments show that DynASyn is capable of synthesizing highly realistic images of subjects with novel contexts and dynamic interactions with the surroundings, and outperforms baseline methods in both quantitative and qualitative aspects.
Consistency regularization has prevailed in semi-supervised semantic segmentation and achieved promising performance. However, existing methods typically concentrate on enhancing the Image-augmentation based Prediction consistency and optimizing the segmentation network as a whole, resulting in insufficient utilization of potential supervisory information. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Constraint Consistency Learning (MCCL) approach to facilitate the staged enhancement of the encoder and decoder. Specifically, we first design a feature knowledge alignment (FKA) strategy to promote the feature consistency learning of the encoder from image-augmentation. Our FKA encourages the encoder to derive consistent features for strongly and weakly augmented views from the perspectives of point-to-point alignment and prototype-based intra-class compactness. Moreover, we propose a self-adaptive intervention (SAI) module to increase the discrepancy of aligned intermediate feature representations, promoting Feature-perturbation based Prediction consistency learning. Self-adaptive feature masking and noise injection are designed in an instance-specific manner to perturb the features for robust learning of the decoder. Experimental results on Pascal VOC2012 and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our proposed MCCL achieves new state-of-the-art performance. The source code and models are made available at https://github.com/NUST-Machine-Intelligence-Laboratory/MCCL.