Understanding human actions in videos requires more than raw pixel analysis; it relies on high-level semantic reasoning and effective integration of multimodal features. We propose a deep translational action recognition framework that enhances recognition accuracy by jointly predicting action concepts and auxiliary features from RGB video frames. At test time, hallucination streams infer missing cues, enriching feature representations without increasing computational overhead. To focus on action-relevant regions beyond raw pixels, we introduce two novel domain-specific descriptors. Object Detection Features (ODF) aggregate outputs from multiple object detectors to capture contextual cues, while Saliency Detection Features (SDF) highlight spatial and intensity patterns crucial for action recognition. Our framework seamlessly integrates these descriptors with auxiliary modalities such as optical flow, Improved Dense Trajectories, skeleton data, and audio cues. It remains compatible with state-of-the-art architectures, including I3D, AssembleNet, Video Transformer Network, FASTER, and recent models like VideoMAE V2 and InternVideo2. To handle uncertainty in auxiliary features, we incorporate aleatoric uncertainty modeling in the hallucination step and introduce a robust loss function to mitigate feature noise. Our multimodal self-supervised action recognition framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, including Kinetics-400, Kinetics-600, and Something-Something V2, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing fine-grained action dynamics.
Generative semantic communication models are reshaping semantic communication frameworks by moving beyond pixel-wise optimization to align with human perception. However, many existing approaches prioritize image-level perceptual quality, often neglecting alignment with downstream tasks, which can lead to suboptimal semantic representation. This paper introduces an Ultra-Low Bitrate Semantic Communication (ULBSC) system that employs a conditional generative model and a learnable condition codebook.By integrating saliency conditions and image-level semantic information, the proposed method enables high-perceptual-quality and controllable task-oriented image transmission. Recognizing shared patterns among objects, we propose a codebook-assisted condition transmission method, integrated with joint source-channel coding (JSCC)-based text transmission to establish ULBSC. The codebook serves as a knowledge base, reducing communication costs to achieve ultra-low bitrate while enhancing robustness against noise and inaccuracies in saliency detection. Simulation results indicate that, under ultra-low bitrate conditions with an average compression ratio of 0.57Z%o, the proposed system delivers superior visual quality compared to traditional JSCC techniques and achieves higher saliency similarity between the generated and source images compared to state-of-the-art generative semantic communication methods.
News outlets' competition for attention in news interfaces has highlighted the need for demographically-aware saliency prediction models. Despite recent advancements in saliency detection applied to user interfaces (UI), existing datasets are limited in size and demographic representation. We present a deep learning framework that enhances the SaRa (Saliency Ranking) model with DeepGaze IIE, improving Salient Object Ranking (SOR) performance by 10.7%. Our framework optimizes three key components: saliency map generation, grid segment scoring, and map normalization. Through a two-fold experiment using eye-tracking (30 participants) and mouse-tracking (375 participants aged 13--70), we analyze attention patterns across demographic groups. Statistical analysis reveals significant age-based variations (p < 0.05, {\epsilon^2} = 0.042), with older users (36--70) engaging more with textual content and younger users (13--35) interacting more with images. Mouse-tracking data closely approximates eye-tracking behavior (sAUC = 0.86) and identifies UI elements that immediately stand out, validating its use in large-scale studies. We conclude that saliency studies should prioritize gathering data from a larger, demographically representative sample and report exact demographic distributions.
Natural language video localization (NLVL) is a crucial task in video understanding that aims to localize the target moment in videos specified by a given language description. Recently, a point-supervised paradigm has been presented to address this task, requiring only a single annotated frame within the target moment rather than complete temporal boundaries. Compared with the fully-supervised paradigm, it offers a balance between localization accuracy and annotation cost. However, due to the absence of complete annotation, it is challenging to align the video content with language descriptions, consequently hindering accurate moment prediction. To address this problem, we propose a new COllaborative Temporal consistEncy Learning (COTEL) framework that leverages the synergy between saliency detection and moment localization to strengthen the video-language alignment. Specifically, we first design a frame- and a segment-level Temporal Consistency Learning (TCL) module that models semantic alignment across frame saliencies and sentence-moment pairs. Then, we design a cross-consistency guidance scheme, including a Frame-level Consistency Guidance (FCG) and a Segment-level Consistency Guidance (SCG), that enables the two temporal consistency learning paths to reinforce each other mutually. Further, we introduce a Hierarchical Contrastive Alignment Loss (HCAL) to comprehensively align the video and text query. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method performs favorably against SoTA approaches. We will release all the source codes.
With increasing revelations of academic fraud, detecting forged experimental images in the biomedical field has become a public concern. The challenge lies in the fact that copy-move targets can include background tissue, small foreground objects, or both, which may be out of the training domain and subject to unseen attacks, rendering standard object-detection-based approaches less effective. To address this, we reformulate the problem of detecting biomedical copy-move forgery regions as an intra-image co-saliency detection task and propose CMSeg-Net, a copy-move forgery segmentation network capable of identifying unseen duplicated areas. Built on a multi-resolution encoder-decoder architecture, CMSeg-Net incorporates self-correlation and correlation-assisted spatial-attention modules to detect intra-image regional similarities within feature tensors at each observation scale. This design helps distinguish even small copy-move targets in complex microscopic images from other similar objects. Furthermore, we created a copy-move forgery dataset of optical microscopic images, named FakeParaEgg, using open data from the ICIP 2022 Challenge to support CMSeg-Net's development and verify its performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on the FakeParaEgg dataset and other open copy-move detection datasets, including CASIA-CMFD, CoMoFoD, and CMF. The FakeParaEgg dataset, our source code, and the CMF dataset with our manually defined segmentation ground truths available at ``https://github.com/YoursEver/FakeParaEgg''.
In the evolving landscape of deep learning, there is a pressing need for more comprehensive datasets capable of training models across multiple modalities. Concurrently, in digital humanities, there is a growing demand to leverage technology for diverse media adaptation and creation, yet limited by sparse datasets due to copyright and stylistic constraints. Addressing this gap, our paper presents a novel dataset comprising Franco-Belgian comics from the 1950s annotated for tasks including depth estimation, semantic segmentation, saliency detection, and character identification. It consists of two distinct and consistent styles and incorporates object concepts and labels taken from natural images. By including such diverse information across styles, this dataset not only holds promise for computational creativity but also offers avenues for the digitization of art and storytelling innovation. This dataset is a crucial component of the AI4VA Workshop Challenges~\url{https://sites.google.com/view/ai4vaeccv2024}, where we specifically explore depth and saliency. Dataset details at \url{https://github.com/IVRL/AI4VA}.
Road ponding, a prevalent traffic hazard, poses a serious threat to road safety by causing vehicles to lose control and leading to accidents ranging from minor fender benders to severe collisions. Existing technologies struggle to accurately identify road ponding due to complex road textures and variable ponding coloration influenced by reflection characteristics. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach called Self-Attention-based Global Saliency-Enhanced Network (AGSENet) for proactive road ponding detection and traffic safety improvement. AGSENet incorporates saliency detection techniques through the Channel Saliency Information Focus (CSIF) and Spatial Saliency Information Enhancement (SSIE) modules. The CSIF module, integrated into the encoder, employs self-attention to highlight similar features by fusing spatial and channel information. The SSIE module, embedded in the decoder, refines edge features and reduces noise by leveraging correlations across different feature levels. To ensure accurate and reliable evaluation, we corrected significant mislabeling and missing annotations in the Puddle-1000 dataset. Additionally, we constructed the Foggy-Puddle and Night-Puddle datasets for road ponding detection in low-light and foggy conditions, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that AGSENet outperforms existing methods, achieving IoU improvements of 2.03\%, 0.62\%, and 1.06\% on the Puddle-1000, Foggy-Puddle, and Night-Puddle datasets, respectively, setting a new state-of-the-art in this field. Finally, we verified the algorithm's reliability on edge computing devices. This work provides a valuable reference for proactive warning research in road traffic safety.
The recent developments in deep learning led to the integration of natural language processing (NLP) with computer vision, resulting in powerful integrated Vision and Language Models (VLMs). Despite their remarkable capabilities, these models are frequently regarded as black boxes within the machine learning research community. This raises a critical question: which parts of an image correspond to specific segments of text, and how can we decipher these associations? Understanding these connections is essential for enhancing model transparency, interpretability, and trustworthiness. To answer this question, we present an image-text aligned human visual attention dataset that maps specific associations between image regions and corresponding text segments. We then compare the internal heatmaps generated by VL models with this dataset, allowing us to analyze and better understand the model's decision-making process. This approach aims to enhance model transparency, interpretability, and trustworthiness by providing insights into how these models align visual and linguistic information. We conducted a comprehensive study on text-guided visual saliency detection in these VL models. This study aims to understand how different models prioritize and focus on specific visual elements in response to corresponding text segments, providing deeper insights into their internal mechanisms and improving our ability to interpret their outputs.
This paper reviews the Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction at AIM 2024. The goal of the participants was to develop a method for predicting accurate saliency maps for the provided set of video sequences. Saliency maps are widely exploited in various applications, including video compression, quality assessment, visual perception studies, the advertising industry, etc. For this competition, a previously unused large-scale audio-visual mouse saliency (AViMoS) dataset of 1500 videos with more than 70 observers per video was collected using crowdsourced mouse tracking. The dataset collection methodology has been validated using conventional eye-tracking data and has shown high consistency. Over 30 teams registered in the challenge, and there are 7 teams that submitted the results in the final phase. The final phase solutions were tested and ranked by commonly used quality metrics on a private test subset. The results of this evaluation and the descriptions of the solutions are presented in this report. All data, including the private test subset, is made publicly available on the challenge homepage - https://challenges.videoprocessing.ai/challenges/video-saliency-prediction.html.
In recent years, three-dimensional point clouds are used increasingly to document natural environments. Each dataset contains a diverse set of objects, at varying shapes and sizes, distributed throughout the data and intricately intertwined with the topography. Therefore, regions of interest are difficult to find and consequent analyses become a challenge. Inspired from visual perception principles, we propose to differentiate objects of interest from the cluttered environment by evaluating how much they stand out from their surroundings, i.e., their geometric salience. Previous saliency detection approaches suggested mostly handcrafted attributes for the task. However, such methods fail when the data are too noisy or have high levels of texture. Here we propose a learning-based mechanism that accommodates noise and textured surfaces. We assume that within the natural environment any change from the prevalent surface would suggest a salient object. Thus, we first learn the underlying surface and then search for anomalies within it. Initially, a deep neural network is trained to reconstruct the surface. Regions where the reconstructed part deviates significantly from the original point cloud yield a substantial reconstruction error, signifying an anomaly, i.e., saliency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by searching for salient features in various natural scenarios, which were acquired by different acquisition platforms. We show the strong correlation between the reconstruction error and salient objects.
Identifying the regions of a learning resource that a learner pays attention to is crucial for assessing the material's impact and improving its design and related support systems. Saliency detection in videos addresses the automatic recognition of attention-drawing regions in single frames. In educational settings, the recognition of pertinent regions in a video's visual stream can enhance content accessibility and information retrieval tasks such as video segmentation, navigation, and summarization. Such advancements can pave the way for the development of advanced AI-assisted technologies that support learning with greater efficacy. However, this task becomes particularly challenging for educational videos due to the combination of unique characteristics such as text, voice, illustrations, animations, and more. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no study that evaluates saliency detection approaches in educational videos. In this paper, we address this gap by evaluating four state-of-the-art saliency detection approaches for educational videos. We reproduce the original studies and explore the replication capabilities for general-purpose (non-educational) datasets. Then, we investigate the generalization capabilities of the models and evaluate their performance on educational videos. We conduct a comprehensive analysis to identify common failure scenarios and possible areas of improvement. Our experimental results show that educational videos remain a challenging context for generic video saliency detection models.
Accurate driver attention prediction can serve as a critical reference for intelligent vehicles in understanding traffic scenes and making informed driving decisions. Though existing studies on driver attention prediction improved performance by incorporating advanced saliency detection techniques, they overlooked the opportunity to achieve human-inspired prediction by analyzing driving tasks from a cognitive science perspective. During driving, drivers' working memory and long-term memory play crucial roles in scene comprehension and experience retrieval, respectively. Together, they form situational awareness, facilitating drivers to quickly understand the current traffic situation and make optimal decisions based on past driving experiences. To explicitly integrate these two types of memory, this paper proposes an Adaptive Hybrid-Memory-Fusion (AHMF) driver attention prediction model to achieve more human-like predictions. Specifically, the model first encodes information about specific hazardous stimuli in the current scene to form working memories. Then, it adaptively retrieves similar situational experiences from the long-term memory for final prediction. Utilizing domain adaptation techniques, the model performs parallel training across multiple datasets, thereby enriching the accumulated driving experience within the long-term memory module. Compared to existing models, our model demonstrates significant improvements across various metrics on multiple public datasets, proving the effectiveness of integrating hybrid memories in driver attention prediction.
Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) is an essential task that estimates the perceptual quality of images without reference. While many BIQA methods employ deep neural networks (DNNs) and incorporate saliency detectors to enhance performance, their large model sizes limit deployment on resource-constrained devices. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel and non-deep-learning BIQA method with a lightweight saliency detection module, called Green Saliency-guided Blind Image Quality Assessment (GSBIQA). It is characterized by its minimal model size, reduced computational demands, and robust performance. Experimental results show that the performance of GSBIQA is comparable with state-of-the-art DL-based methods with significantly lower resource requirements.
Visual attention modeling, important for interpreting and prioritizing visual stimuli, plays a significant role in applications such as marketing, multimedia, and robotics. Traditional saliency prediction models, especially those based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Transformers, achieve notable success by leveraging large-scale annotated datasets. However, the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models that use Transformers are computationally expensive. Additionally, separate models are often required for each image type, lacking a unified approach. In this paper, we propose Saliency Unification through Mamba (SUM), a novel approach that integrates the efficient long-range dependency modeling of Mamba with U-Net to provide a unified model for diverse image types. Using a novel Conditional Visual State Space (C-VSS) block, SUM dynamically adapts to various image types, including natural scenes, web pages, and commercial imagery, ensuring universal applicability across different data types. Our comprehensive evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that SUM seamlessly adapts to different visual characteristics and consistently outperforms existing models. These results position SUM as a versatile and powerful tool for advancing visual attention modeling, offering a robust solution universally applicable across different types of visual content.
With the rapid development of depth sensor, more and more RGB-D videos could be obtained. Identifying the foreground in RGB-D videos is a fundamental and important task. However, the existing salient object detection (SOD) works only focus on either static RGB-D images or RGB videos, ignoring the collaborating of RGB-D and video information. In this paper, we first collect a new annotated RGB-D video SOD (ViDSOD-100) dataset, which contains 100 videos within a total of 9,362 frames, acquired from diverse natural scenes. All the frames in each video are manually annotated to a high-quality saliency annotation. Moreover, we propose a new baseline model, named attentive triple-fusion network (ATF-Net), for RGB-D video salient object detection. Our method aggregates the appearance information from an input RGB image, spatio-temporal information from an estimated motion map, and the geometry information from the depth map by devising three modality-specific branches and a multi-modality integration branch. The modality-specific branches extract the representation of different inputs, while the multi-modality integration branch combines the multi-level modality-specific features by introducing the encoder feature aggregation (MEA) modules and decoder feature aggregation (MDA) modules. The experimental findings conducted on both our newly introduced ViDSOD-100 dataset and the well-established DAVSOD dataset highlight the superior performance of the proposed ATF-Net. This performance enhancement is demonstrated both quantitatively and qualitatively, surpassing the capabilities of current state-of-the-art techniques across various domains, including RGB-D saliency detection, video saliency detection, and video object segmentation. Our data and our code are available at github.com/jhl-Det/RGBD_Video_SOD.
Multi-modal salient object detection (MSOD) aims to boost saliency detection performance by integrating visible sources with depth or thermal infrared ones. Existing methods generally design different fusion schemes to handle certain issues or challenges. Although these fusion schemes are effective at addressing specific issues or challenges, they may struggle to handle multiple complex challenges simultaneously. To solve this problem, we propose a novel adaptive fusion bank that makes full use of the complementary benefits from a set of basic fusion schemes to handle different challenges simultaneously for robust MSOD. We focus on handling five major challenges in MSOD, namely center bias, scale variation, image clutter, low illumination, and thermal crossover or depth ambiguity. The fusion bank proposed consists of five representative fusion schemes, which are specifically designed based on the characteristics of each challenge, respectively. The bank is scalable, and more fusion schemes could be incorporated into the bank for more challenges. To adaptively select the appropriate fusion scheme for multi-modal input, we introduce an adaptive ensemble module that forms the adaptive fusion bank, which is embedded into hierarchical layers for sufficient fusion of different source data. Moreover, we design an indirect interactive guidance module to accurately detect salient hollow objects via the skip integration of high-level semantic information and low-level spatial details. Extensive experiments on three RGBT datasets and seven RGBD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the outstanding performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The code and results are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/LAFB.
Real-world data often follow a long-tailed distribution with a high imbalance in the number of samples between classes. The problem with training from imbalanced data is that some background features, common to all classes, can be unobserved in classes with scarce samples. As a result, this background correlates to biased predictions into ``major" classes. In this paper, we propose saliency masked contrastive learning, a new method that uses saliency masking and contrastive learning to mitigate the problem and improve the generalizability of a model. Our key idea is to mask the important part of an image using saliency detection and use contrastive learning to move the masked image towards minor classes in the feature space, so that background features present in the masked image are no longer correlated with the original class. Experiment results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art level performance on benchmark long-tailed datasets.
Integrating an RGB camera into a ToF imaging system has become a significant technique for perceiving the real world. The RGB guided ToF imaging system is crucial to several applications, including face anti-spoofing, saliency detection, and trajectory prediction. Depending on the distance of the working range, the implementation schemes of the RGB guided ToF imaging systems are different. Specifically, ToF sensors with a uniform field of illumination, which can output dense depth but have low resolution, are typically used for close-range measurements. In contrast, LiDARs, which emit laser pulses and can only capture sparse depth, are usually employed for long-range detection. In the two cases, depth quality improvement for RGB guided ToF imaging corresponds to two sub-tasks: guided depth super-resolution and guided depth completion. In light of the recent significant boost to the field provided by deep learning, this paper comprehensively reviews the works related to RGB guided ToF imaging, including network structures, learning strategies, evaluation metrics, benchmark datasets, and objective functions. Besides, we present quantitative comparisons of state-of-the-art methods on widely used benchmark datasets. Finally, we discuss future trends and the challenges in real applications for further research.
Salient object detection (SOD) remains an important task in computer vision, with applications ranging from image segmentation to autonomous driving. Fully convolutional network (FCN)-based methods have made remarkable progress in visual saliency detection over the last few decades. However, these methods have limitations in accurately detecting salient objects, particularly in challenging scenes with multiple objects, small objects, or objects with low resolutions. To address this issue, we proposed a Saliency Fusion Attention U-Net (SalFAU-Net) model, which incorporates a saliency fusion module into each decoder block of the attention U-net model to generate saliency probability maps from each decoder block. SalFAU-Net employs an attention mechanism to selectively focus on the most informative regions of an image and suppress non-salient regions. We train SalFAU-Net on the DUTS dataset using a binary cross-entropy loss function. We conducted experiments on six popular SOD evaluation datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that our method, SalFAU-Net, achieves competitive performance compared to other methods in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), F-measure, s-measure, and e-measure.
Recent style transfer problems are still largely dominated by Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) from the perspective of cross-domain image-to-image (I2I) translation, where the pivotal issue is to learn and transfer target-domain style patterns onto source-domain content images. This paper handles the problem of translating real pictures into traditional Chinese ink-wash paintings, i.e., Chinese ink-wash painting style transfer. Though a wide range of I2I models tackle this problem, a notable challenge is that the content details of the source image could be easily erased or corrupted due to the transfer of ink-wash style elements. To remedy this issue, we propose to incorporate saliency detection into the unpaired I2I framework to regularize image content, where the detected saliency map is utilized from two aspects: (\romannumeral1) we propose saliency IOU (SIOU) loss to explicitly regularize object content structure by enforcing saliency consistency before and after image stylization; (\romannumeral2) we propose saliency adaptive normalization (SANorm) which implicitly enhances object structure integrity of the generated paintings by dynamically injecting image saliency information into the generator to guide stylization process. Besides, we also propose saliency attended discriminator which harnesses image saliency information to focus generative adversarial attention onto the drawn objects, contributing to generating more vivid and delicate brush strokes and ink-wash textures. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate superiority of our approach over related advanced image stylization methods in both GAN and diffusion model paradigms.