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Tiesong Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Tiesong Zhao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

MIMONet: Multi-scale Input and Multi-scale Output Network for Salient Object Detection

The existing methods for saliency detection task focus on the application of multi-level features, aiming to take advantage of the respective strengths of high- and low-level features. However, because the inputs of these models are single-size images, their multi-level features have difficulty in learning the knowledge of size variations of salient objects. Object-scale variation learning has great potential for detecting multi-scale objects, which has not been fully explored by existing methods. To improve the recognition ability of a model for objects with different sizes, we are inspired by the image pyramid to propose a Multi-scale Input and Multi-scale Output Network (MIMONet). In MIMONet, we extract multi-level features for three images with different resolutions to form three encoder branches, and information will be exchanged between the branches. The advantage of this approach is that the features of one branch can learn the knowledge of target size variation from the features of the other two branches. In addition, we design a Multi-scale Perception (MSP) module, in which the input feature layer is divided into several sub-layers with different resolutions. Capturing the multi-level structure information of the objects in these sub-layers can make the objects more fully perceived. For network training, we propose a Joint Saliency Loss (JSL), which can constrain multiple saliency maps output by the network to identify the same foreground objects, and induce their boundaries to be preserved clearly. Experimental results show that MIMONet has stronger detection capabilities and harvests better evaluation scores on multiple datasets compared to existing models. The code of our model will be released.

cs.CV

ParaJSCC: A Parameterized Framework for Reusable Multimodal Joint Source-Channel Coding

Multimodal signals, such as visual, audio, and tactile data, are increasingly maintained as persistent digital assets in immersive communication systems and digital twins. In these settings, the same multimodal content is repeatedly accessed by heterogeneous receivers with varying modality and bandwidth requirements. Existing compression and Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) methods typically follow a per-request encoding paradigm, resulting in redundant computation and low efficiency during repeated access. To address this issue, we propose ParaJSCC, a multimodal JSCC framework designed for reusable representation serving. ParaJSCC converts each multimodal sample offline at the cloud/content server into a compact, quantized parameter package, which is then stored at the edge serving node for low-latency access. During serving, only the subset required by the current request is transmitted over the wireless channel, followed by lightweight decoding at the receiver. The framework employs a progressive shared-private parameterization to support modality-selective transmission and scalable reconstruction under varying bandwidth constraints. Experiments on multimodal datasets show that ParaJSCC significantly reduces online latency (e.g., from 17.18~ms to 4.34~ms for image-only requests and from 43.96~ms to 11.21~ms for full multimodal requests) and transmission rate (by 47.8\%--51.2\% for selective requests), while maintaining strong reconstruction quality under noisy channels.

eess.SP

Flexible Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding: A Vibrotactile Example

The increasing demand for real-time tactile communication in multimedia systems has exposed the limitations of existing Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) techniques. While current JSCC models facilitate end-to-end optimization, they typically operate at fixed coding rates and require separate model instances for different rate settings. This results in significant storage overhead and limited adaptability to dynamic bandwidth conditions. To address these challenges, we propose the Flexible Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding (FD-JSCC) framework for vibrotactile signals, which supports flexible-rate transmission without the need for model switching. The FD-JSCC integrates a flexible-rate encoder-decoder enhanced with Hierarchical Gain Adaptation Module (HGAM) and Rate-Switchable Residual Module (RSRM), enabling bitrate-aware compression by selectively preserving salient vibrotactile features. Additionally, we introduce a Channel Feature Processing Module (CFPM), which leverages real-time SNR information to enhance robustness against channel noise and signal degradation. Trained on the IEEE 1918.1.1 vibrotactile dataset, FD-JSCC achieves reconstruction performance comparable to fixed-rate baselines (e.g., DeepSC-S), while reducing storage requirements by 61.1\% when supporting four rates. These results underscore its potential for scalable, low-latency tactile communication in next-generation networks.

eess.SP

Visual Geometry Foundation-Aware Gaussians for Single-Frame Surround-View Driving Reconstruction

Single-frame surround-view reconstruction faces severe geometric instability and rendering artifacts due to minimal inter-camera overlap. While existing methods rely on complex decoders or auxiliary cues, they remain bottlenecked by the weak geometric capacity of upstream features. We argue that leveraging pretrained visual geometry priors strengthens upstream representations and alleviates the geometric ambiguity in sparse surround views. To this end, we propose VGGD, a visual geometry foundation-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting framework for feed-forward surround-view driving reconstruction, which shifts geometric modeling to the frontend and adapts foundation priors to the driving camera setting. First, VGGD leverages VGGT to provide transferable multi-view geometric prior tokens. Next, we introduce a Dual-Path Neck to decouple geometry-consistent and appearance-aware representations, improving appearance completion in weakly observed regions. We further apply Scale Warmup to stabilize early geometry learning and suppress scale drift under ego-pose changes. Finally, we use a hybrid pixel--volume Gaussian decoder to produce a renderable 3D Gaussian scene for novel-view synthesis. Experiments on the nuScenes single-frame benchmark show that VGGD achieves the best overall rendering quality among the compared methods and improves relative geometric consistency.

cs.CV

Revisiting the Current Frame: Physical-Trace-Guided Network Output Correction for Video Restoration

Video restoration methods exploit temporal information to recover information missing from degraded observations. However, reference frames within the sequence may introduce inconsistent degradation, content discrepancy, or reconstruction errors due to physical image-formation variations, occlusion, and imperfect temporal aggregation. Existing approaches mainly focus on improving restoration networks, while the reliability of the generated outputs at different spatial locations remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose ANCHOR, a model-agnostic framework that revisits the low-quality current frame as a temporally aligned anchor for video restoration correction. Specifically, ANCHOR estimates a spatial trust field from heterogeneous physical-trace evidence and adaptively balances the restoration proposal with the original observation. Experiments on High Dynamic Range video reconstruction and video deraining demonstrate consistent improvements across various state-of-the-art restoration models, validating the effectiveness of reliability-aware output correction for video restoration.

cs.CV

SpatialQ: Understanding 3D Gaussian Splatting Scene Quality via Visual-based MLLM

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as an effective representation for novel view synthesis and 3D scene reconstruction, creating an increasing demand for reliable quality assessment. Unlike conventional image quality assessment (IQA), the quality of a 3DGS scene depends not only on the perceptual fidelity of rendered views, but also on scene-level factors such as spatial structure and cross-view consistency. Existing IQA methods are limited by their reliance on 2D perceptual cues, whereas general multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are not designed for stable quality regression and may produce unreliable judgments. To address these limitations, a multimodal quality assessment framework is developed for 3DGS scene understanding. First, a 3D-aware quality representation learning framework is introduced by augmenting a VGGT-based encoder with a dedicated quality head. Multi-view images are encoded into view-specific features and aggregated to capture cross-view consistency, while geometric cues are incorporated through joint modeling of depth and point-cloud-related structural information, enabling the learning of structure-aware quality representations beyond appearance-driven features. Second, a grounded multimodal reasoning mechanism is constructed by jointly feeding original images, depth maps, point cloud renderings, and camera parameters into a Qwen-based MLLM.

cs.CV

Bio-SFT: Asymmetric Cortical Guidance and Retinal Adaptation for Robust HDR Reconstruction

Recovering high dynamic range (HDR) radiance from a single standard dynamic range (SDR) image is highly ill-posed. Extreme luminance variation and severe quantization in dark regions make accurate reconstruction challenging, often leading to visual artifacts and color distortions. To address this problem, we propose Bio-SFT, a bio-inspired spiking frequency transformer for single-image HDR reconstruction. Bio-SFT incorporates three biologically motivated components. First, a learnable Naka--Rushton retinal adaptation frontend stabilizes the input under complex lighting conditions. Second, an explicit Parvo--Magno split introduces asymmetric Parvo-to-Magno guidance, allowing high-frequency structural cues to modulate low-frequency reconstruction. Third, an event-driven SNN hard gating module applies all-or-none spiking to suppress dark-region noise while preserving structural details. The module is trained with a sparsity prior to encourage efficient feature utilization. Built for end-to-end training within a transformer backbone, these lightweight components provide strong parameter efficiency. Experiments on HDRTV1K show that Bio-SFT achieves competitive perceptual quality and consistently improves HDR-VDP-3 and $ΔE_{ITP}$ while reducing artifact propagation in symmetric guidance pipelines.

cs.CV

When Sensing Varies with Contexts: Context Probing for Tactile Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to recognize novel classes from only a few labeled samples while retaining previously learned knowledge. Although recent FSCIL methods have achieved substantial progress on visual benchmarks, they remain limited in tactile sensing, where the same material may produce markedly different observations under different acquisition contexts, such as sensing devices, contact states, scanning trajectories, and interaction conditions. In tactile FSCIL, the challenges of few-shot learning and class-incremental learning are further amplified by acquisition context: the limited support samples may not only be scarce, but also carry context-induced biases. Once the resulting biased prototypes are inserted into the classifier, they may affect the decision boundaries in subsequent sessions. To address this problem, we propose Context-Probing Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (CoP-FSCIL), a context-aware framework for tactile FSCIL. CoP-FSCIL first employs Context-Probing Intervention (CPI) to diagnose local context-sensitive variations in tactile representations. It then introduces a Probe-Conditioned Quotient Adapter (PCQA) to suppress context-sensitive components identified by the probes. Finally, Probe-Stability Prototype Calibration (PSPC) estimates support sample reliability from probe-induced embedding fluctuations and calibrates stochastic prototypes accordingly. Experiments on HapTex and LMT108 show that CoP-FSCIL consistently outperforms representative FSCIL baselines, and extended experiments on audio FSCIL further demonstrate the generality of the proposed context probing mechanism. The source code is currently being prepared and will be released soon.

cs.AI

Beyond Fidelity: Semantic Similarity Assessment in Low-Level Image Processing

Low-level image processing has long been evaluated mainly from the perspective of visual fidelity. However, with the rise of deep learning and generative models, processed images may preserve perceptual quality while altering semantic content, making conventional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) insufficient for semantic-level assessment. In this paper, we formalize \textit{Semantic Similarity} as a new evaluation task for low-level image processing, aimed at measuring whether semantic content is preserved after processing. We further present a structured formulation of image semantics based on semantic entities and their relations, and discuss the desired properties and constraints of a valid semantic similarity index. Based on this formulation, we propose Triplet-based Semantic Similarity Score (T3S), which models image semantics through foreground entities, background entities, and relations. T3S combines semantic entity extraction, foreground-background disentanglement, and open-world class/relation modeling. Experiments on COCO and SPA-Data show that T3S consistently outperforms existing fidelity-oriented metrics and representative semantic-level baselines, while better reflecting progressive semantic changes under diverse degradations. These results highlight the importance of semantic assessment in modern low-level vision.

cs.CV

MSDS: Deep Structural Similarity with Multiscale Representation

Deep-feature-based perceptual similarity models have demonstrated strong alignment with human visual perception in Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, most existing approaches operate at a single spatial scale, implicitly assuming that structural similarity at a fixed resolution is sufficient. The role of spatial scale in deep-feature similarity modeling thus remains insufficiently understood. In this letter, we isolate spatial scale as an independent factor using a minimal multiscale extension of DeepSSIM, referred to as Deep Structural Similarity with Multiscale Representation (MSDS). The proposed framework decouples deep feature representation from cross-scale integration by computing DeepSSIM independently across pyramid levels and fusing the resulting scores with a lightweight set of learnable global weights. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over the single-scale baseline, while introducing negligible additional complexity. The results empirically confirm spatial scale as a non-negligible factor in deep perceptual similarity, isolated here via a minimal testbed.

cs.CV

The Language of Touch: Translating Vibrations into Text with Dual-Branch Learning

The standardization of vibrotactile data by IEEE P1918.1 workgroup has greatly advanced its applications in virtual reality, human-computer interaction and embodied artificial intelligence. Despite these efforts, the semantic interpretation and understanding of vibrotactile signals remain an unresolved challenge. In this paper, we make the first attempt to address vibrotactile captioning, {\it i.e.}, generating natural language descriptions from vibrotactile signals. We propose Vibrotactile Periodic-Aperiodic Captioning (ViPAC), a method designed to handle the intrinsic properties of vibrotactile data, including hybrid periodic-aperiodic structures and the lack of spatial semantics. Specifically, ViPAC employs a dual-branch strategy to disentangle periodic and aperiodic components, combined with a dynamic fusion mechanism that adaptively integrates signal features. It also introduces an orthogonality constraint and weighting regularization to ensure feature complementarity and fusion consistency. Additionally, we construct LMT108-CAP, the first vibrotactile-text paired dataset, using GPT-4o to generate five constrained captions per surface image from the popular LMT-108 dataset. Experiments show that ViPAC significantly outperforms the baseline methods adapted from audio and image captioning, achieving superior lexical fidelity and semantic alignment.

cs.CV

Event-based Visual Deformation Measurement

Visual Deformation Measurement (VDM) aims to recover dense deformation fields by tracking surface motion from camera observations. Traditional image-based methods rely on minimal inter-frame motion to constrain the correspondence search space, which limits their applicability to highly dynamic scenes or necessitates high-speed cameras at the cost of prohibitive storage and computational overhead. We propose an event-frame fusion framework that exploits events for temporally dense motion cues and frames for spatially dense precise estimation. Revisiting the solid elastic modeling prior, we propose an Affine Invariant Simplicial (AIS) framework. It partitions the deformation field into linearized sub-regions with low-parametric representation, effectively mitigating motion ambiguities arising from sparse and noisy events. To speed up parameter searching and reduce error accumulation, a neighborhood-greedy optimization strategy is introduced, enabling well-converged sub-regions to guide their poorly-converged neighbors, effectively suppress local error accumulation in long-term dense tracking. To evaluate the proposed method, a benchmark dataset with temporally aligned event streams and frames is established, encompassing over 120 sequences spanning diverse deformation scenarios. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by 1.6% in survival rate. Remarkably, it achieves this using only 18.9% of the data storage and processing resources of high-speed video methods.

cs.CV

OmniVaT: Single Domain Generalization for Multimodal Visual-Tactile Learning

Visual-tactile learning (VTL) enables embodied agents to perceive the physical world by integrating visual (VIS) and tactile (TAC) sensors. However, VTL still suffers from modality discrepancies between VIS and TAC images, as well as domain gaps caused by non-standardized tactile sensors and inconsistent data collection procedures. We formulate these challenges as a new task, termed single domain generalization for multimodal VTL (SDG-VTL). In this paper, we propose an OmniVaT framework that, for the first time, successfully addresses this task. On the one hand, OmniVaT integrates a multimodal fractional Fourier adapter (MFFA) to map VIS and TAC embeddings into a unified embedding-frequency space, thereby effectively mitigating the modality gap without multi-domain training data or careful cross-modal fusion strategies. On the other hand, it also incorporates a discrete tree generation (DTG) module that obtains diverse and reliable multimodal fractional representations through a hierarchical tree structure, thereby enhancing its adaptivity to fluctuating domain shifts in unseen domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior cross-domain generalization performance of OmniVaT on the SDG-VTL task.

cs.CV

Structural Similarity in Deep Features: Image Quality Assessment Robust to Geometrically Disparate Reference

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) with references plays an important role in optimizing and evaluating computer vision tasks. Traditional methods assume that all pixels of the reference and test images are fully aligned. Such Aligned-Reference IQA (AR-IQA) approaches fail to address many real-world problems with various geometric deformations between the two images. Although significant effort has been made to attack Geometrically-Disparate-Reference IQA (GDR-IQA) problem, it has been addressed in a task-dependent fashion, for example, by dedicated designs for image super-resolution and retargeting, or by assuming the geometric distortions to be small that can be countered by translation-robust filters or by explicit image registrations. Here we rethink this problem and propose a unified, non-training-based Deep Structural Similarity (DeepSSIM) approach to address the above problems in a single framework, which assesses structural similarity of deep features in a simple but efficient way and uses an attention calibration strategy to alleviate attention deviation. The proposed method, without application-specific design, achieves state-of-the-art performance on AR-IQA datasets and meanwhile shows strong robustness to various GDR-IQA test cases. Interestingly, our test also shows the effectiveness of DeepSSIM as an optimization tool for training image super-resolution, enhancement and restoration, implying an even wider generalizability. \footnote{Source code will be made public after the review is completed.

cs.CV

SIAVC: Semi-Supervised Framework for Industrial Accident Video Classification

Semi-supervised learning suffers from the imbalance of labeled and unlabeled training data in the video surveillance scenario. In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised learning method called SIAVC for industrial accident video classification. Specifically, we design a video augmentation module called the Super Augmentation Block (SAB). SAB adds Gaussian noise and randomly masks video frames according to historical loss on the unlabeled data for model optimization. Then, we propose a Video Cross-set Augmentation Module (VCAM) to generate diverse pseudo-label samples from the high-confidence unlabeled samples, which alleviates the mismatch of sampling experience and provides high-quality training data. Additionally, we construct a new industrial accident surveillance video dataset with frame-level annotation, namely ECA9, to evaluate our proposed method. Compared with the state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning based methods, SIAVC demonstrates outstanding video classification performance, achieving 88.76\% and 89.13\% accuracy on ECA9 and Fire Detection datasets, respectively. The source code and the constructed dataset ECA9 will be released in \url{https://github.com/AlchemyEmperor/SIAVC}.

cs.CV

Beyond Night Visibility: Adaptive Multi-Scale Fusion of Infrared and Visible Images

In addition to low light, night images suffer degradation from light effects (e.g., glare, floodlight, etc). However, existing nighttime visibility enhancement methods generally focus on low-light regions, which neglects, or even amplifies the light effects. To address this issue, we propose an Adaptive Multi-scale Fusion network (AMFusion) with infrared and visible images, which designs fusion rules according to different illumination regions. First, we separately fuse spatial and semantic features from infrared and visible images, where the former are used for the adjustment of light distribution and the latter are used for the improvement of detection accuracy. Thereby, we obtain an image free of low light and light effects, which improves the performance of nighttime object detection. Second, we utilize detection features extracted by a pre-trained backbone that guide the fusion of semantic features. Hereby, we design a Detection-guided Semantic Fusion Module (DSFM) to bridge the domain gap between detection and semantic features. Third, we propose a new illumination loss to constrain fusion image with normal light intensity. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of AMFusion with better visual quality and detection accuracy. The source code will be released after the peer review process.

cs.CV

Non-Intrusive Electric Load Monitoring Approach Based on Current Feature Visualization for Smart Energy Management

The state-of-the-art smart city has been calling for an economic but efficient energy management over large-scale network, especially for the electric power system. It is a critical issue to monitor, analyze and control electric loads of all users in system. In this paper, we employ the popular computer vision techniques of AI to design a non-invasive load monitoring method for smart electric energy management. First of all, we utilize both signal transforms (including wavelet transform and discrete Fourier transform) and Gramian Angular Field (GAF) methods to map one-dimensional current signals onto two-dimensional color feature images. Second, we propose to recognize all electric loads from color feature images using a U-shape deep neural network with multi-scale feature extraction and attention mechanism. Third, we design our method as a cloud-based, non-invasive monitoring of all users, thereby saving energy cost during electric power system control. Experimental results on both public and our private datasets have demonstrated our method achieves superior performances than its peers, and thus supports efficient energy management over large-scale Internet of Things (IoT).

eess.SP

Hybrid Relay-Reflecting Intelligent Surface-Aided Covert Communications

In this paper, we propose to use a hybrid relay-reflecting intelligent surface (HR-RIS) to enhance the performance of a covert communication system. Specifically, the HR-RIS consists of passive reflecting elements and active relay elements to manipulate the wireless signals from a transmitter to a desired receiver while ensuring the covertness of the transmission via avoiding such signals being detected by a warden. To fully explore the benefits offered by the HR-RIS, we first formulate the joint design of the transmit power and relay/reflection coefficients of the HR-RIS as an optimization problem to maximize the covert rate subject to a covertness constraint. To tackle the solution to this optimization problem, we then derive a closed-form expression for an upper bound on covert rate, based on which we develop an alternate algorithm to solve the formulated optimization problem. Our examination shows that the HR-RIS outperforms the traditional RIS in term of achieving a higher covert rate. Interestingly, we also observe the major part of the performance gain brought by the HR-RIS can be obtained by a small number of active relay elements (e.g., 5) and further increasing this number does not improve the covert communication performance.

cs.IT