arXiv subjects

Zain Ul Abidin

Publications and source records attributed to Zain Ul Abidin.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Self-Supervised Perceptually Interpretable Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (MDE) enables depth prediction from monocular images without requiring ground-truth supervision, making it attractive for large-scale and real-world applications. Despite steady improvements in accuracy, most existing methods remain difficult to interpret, as depth is inferred from RGB representations that obscure the impact of individual perceptual image components. This lack of transparency limits systematic analysis of failure cases and reduces confidence in safety-critical settings. This paper presents a self-supervised framework for perceptually interpretable monocular depth estimation (PIMDE), designed to associate depth predictions with distinct perceptual components of the input image. Rather than operating directly on RGB inputs, the proposed method decomposes each image into a set of perceptual feature maps (PFMs), each encoding a specific visual cue. Distinct depth estimation branches process these PFMs independently to produce depth estimates (PIDEs), which are subsequently combined through an explicit fusion strategy. This formulation allows us to examine directly the contribution of each perceptual cue to the final depth prediction. Experiments conducted on the KITTI benchmark dataset demonstrate that PIMDE achieves performance comparable to established self-supervised MDE methods while providing additional insight into how different perceptual cues influence depth estimation. These results indicate that perceptual decomposition can support interpretability without sacrificing depth estimation accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Computational Depth Measurement in Thermographic Video: Overcoming Spatial Overfitting via Spatio-Temporal Decoupling

Accurate through-thickness measurement of subsurface delamination depth in Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) is important for structural assessment because defect location determines affected load-bearing layers. Optical pulsed thermography (OPT) provides a two-dimensional thermal video rather than volumetric measurements, so depth must be inferred from temporal heat-diffusion responses. A challenge is spatial dataset bias: when calibration defects follow regular grids, regression models may memorize their geometry instead of learning physical relationship between thermal decay and depth. This work introduces a spatio-temporal decoupling architecture that separates spatial defect localization from temporal depth measurement. Defect regions are first localized using segmentation methods, after which thermal responses are spatially averaged and converted into sixteen physics-informed temporal, energy, statistical, and geometric features. These features expose the one-dimensional heat-conduction relationship while withholding pixel coordinates from the depth model. Four regression models are evaluated using specimen-level cross-validation: Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Advanced Multi-Layer Perceptron (Adv-MLP), and XGBoost. Unregularized trees and over-parameterized Adv-MLP exhibit calibration collapse under geometric shifts, with errors exceeding 0.5 mm. In contrast, regularized XGBoost with L1/L2 penalties and column sampling maintains cross-specimen calibration, achieving a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.056 mm and root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.085 mm. Predicted depths are merged with masks to generate Delaunay-triangulated three-dimensional defect models in three to five seconds per specimen. Results show that mathematical regularization and spatio-temporal decoupling reduce spatial memorization in thermal-video depth regression.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Illuminating Darkness: Learning to Enhance Low-light Images In-the-Wild

Single-shot low-light image enhancement (SLLIE) remains challenging due to the limited availability of diverse, real-world paired datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Low-Light Smartphone Dataset (LSD), a large-scale, high-resolution (4K+) dataset collected in the wild across a wide range of challenging lighting conditions (0.1 to 200 lux). LSD contains 6,425 precisely aligned low and normal-light image pairs, selected from over 8,000 dynamic indoor and outdoor scenes through multi-frame acquisition and expert evaluation. To evaluate generalization and aesthetic quality, we collect 2,117 unpaired low-light images from previously unseen devices. To fully exploit LSD, we propose TFFormer, a hybrid model that encodes luminance and chrominance (LC) separately to reduce color-structure entanglement. We further propose a cross-attention-driven joint decoder for context-aware fusion of LC representations, along with LC refinement and LC-guided supervision to significantly enhance perceptual fidelity and structural consistency. TFFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on LSD (+2.45 dB PSNR) and substantially improves downstream vision tasks, such as low-light object detection (+6.80 mAP on ExDark).

cs.CV↗