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Due to the combined effects of different acoustic propagation, reflection patterns in different time-scale, time-varying underwater acoustic (UWA) channel generally exhibits hybrid sparsity, i.e., contains not only rapidly time-varying elements, but also stationary or slowly time-varying ones. While the classic sparse reconstruction algorithms such as orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) generally do not take it into account, the existence of static multipath will unavoidably hinder the tracking of rapid time variations. In this paper, a sequential adaptive observation length orthogonal matching pursuit (SAOLOMP) approach is proposed to sequentially explore rapidly time-varying sparsity in a two-step sequential manner. Specifically, the static components are firstly separated via simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit (SOMP) among continuous measurements. Upon the residual error of the SOMP, the measurement-wise OMP is applied for estimating the remained dynamic components. As the variation of the SOMP residual error indicates how rapidly the remained dynamic multipath components vary, the observation length of the OMP is adjusted according to the gradient of residual error to adapt to rapidly time-varying components. Finally, both types of sparse components are summed up to obtain the whole channel response. Numerical simulations as well as experimental results from field UWA communication data show that the proposed algorithm exhibits better performance in exploiting rapidly time-varying sparsity than the state-of-the-art compressive methods do under UWA channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The calibration accuracy of the Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) error directly affects the performance of the SINS/DVL integrated navigation system. Previous studies of DVL calibration have not dealt with DVL measurement outliers. Therefore, in this paper, a novel DVL calibration method is proposed to reduce the influence of outliers on calibration accuracy. Introducing the Lie group theory to the DVL calibration study for the first time, and taking advantage of the Special Orthogonal Group of order 3 [SO(3)] representation, a new DVL calibration model based SO(3) group with the ability to represent large misalignment angles is established. And an invariant extended Kalman filter (IEKF) design for the DVL calibration model is introduced. Then, a robust IEKF is proposed by combining the linear error propagation equation of the SO(3)-based DVL calibration model with the statistical similarity measure (SSM) theory. The proposed robust IEKF algorithm enriches the IEKF theory and has the ability to accurately estimate the state of the Lie group model in outlier environments. The simulation and lake trial are used to illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed DVL calibration method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Range-velocity (RV) map (also called the range-Doppler map) is used in radar to detect targets and estimate the range and velocity of the targets. The conventional range-Doppler processing has its limits in attaining a high-resolution RV map with few samples. Moreover, the conventional range-Doppler processing may cause severe range migration problems and bias in the range estimation. In this paper, we propose to attain a high-resolution and accurate RV map with the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework. Unlike the existing works that use the discrete Fourier transform to build the dictionary for sparse representation, we build a dictionary from a model of the wide-band frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar to avoid the model mismatch problem. This dictionary allows for the effective decomposition of the signal and the full utilization of the structure of the signal. In addition, based on the fast marginal likelihood maximization, we also propose a fast method to reduce the computational burden. Simulations show that the proposed method and the proposed fast method are superior in terms of resolution, accuracy, and maximum unambiguous velocity compared with the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In connected vehicular networks, it is vital to have vehicular nodes that are capable of sensing surrounding environments and exchanging messages with each other for automating and coordinating purposes. Towards this end, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), combining both sensing and communication systems to jointly utilize their resources and pursue mutual benefits, emerges as a new cost-effective solution. In ISAC, the hardware and spectrum co-sharing leads to a fundamental tradeoff between sensing and communication performance, which is not well understood except for very simple cases with the same sensing and channel states, and perfect channel state information at the receiver (CSIR). In this paper, a general point-to-point ISAC model is proposed to account for the scenarios where the sensing state is different from but correlated with the channel state, and the CSIR is not necessarily perfect. For the model considered, the optimal tradeoff is characterized by a capacity-distortion function that quantifies the best communication rate for a given sensing distortion constraint requirement. An iterative algorithm is proposed to compute such tradeoff, and a few non-trivial examples are constructed to demonstrate the benefits of ISAC as compared to the separation-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, research on the design of relay structure and optimal precoding matrix in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay systems has been proposed in many works assuming that partial or all of the channel state information (CSI) is known. However, in the practical communication systems, the CSI is unknown and needs to be estimated. In particular, channel estimation is more difficult when the relay adopts a hybrid precoding structure. In this paper, we propose an efficient channel estimation scheme based on Tucker-2 tensor model for a multi-way massive MIMO hybrid relay system. The proposed algorithm provides all the CSI involved in the communication links at each user end. Compared with traditional channel estimation algorithms, the proposed algorithm has better estimation performance and requires few iterations to achieve convergence. In addition, we derive the analytical expression of the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRB) for reference. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed Tucker-2-based channel estimation approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the anti-jamming problem of a directional modulation (DM) system with the aid of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). As an efficient tool to combat malicious jamming, receive beamforming (RBF) is usually designed by using the statistical properties of the jamming received by Bob. Thus, it is very necessary to estimate the receive jamming covariance matrix (JCM) at Bob. To achieve a precise JCM estimation, three JCM estimation methods, including eigenvalue decomposition (EVD), parametric estimation method by gradient descend (PEM-GD) and parametric estimation method by alternating optimization (PEM-AO), are proposed. Here, the proposed EVD is derived according to the rank-2 constraint of JCM. The PEM-GD method fully explores the structure features of JCM and the PEM-AO is proposed to decrease the computational complexity of the former via dimensionality reduction. The simulation results show that the proposed three methods perform better than directly using sample covariance matrix. Additionally, the proposed PEM-GD and PEM-AO outperform EVD method and the clutter and disturbance covariance estimator RCML. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time monitoring has received considerable attention recently due to its potential in automatic driving, tele-surgery, and factory automation in the 6G era. In remote estimation or reconstruction of stochastic processes, the statistical properties of stochastic processes to be monitored play a central role. Among the stochastic processes interested by real-time applications, the Brownian motion, also known as the Wiener processes is a typical one. In this paper, we are interested in how to monitor Brownian motions efficiently, timely, and reliably. To achieve this goal, we reveal that the real-time estimation error is jointly determined by the quantization error and freshness of data samples. Based on this observation, we present an optimal joint sampling and quantization scheme that efficiently balances the quantization distortion and the age-of-information (AoI). Furthermore, we find that the error accumulation will lead to infinite distortion as monitoring time increases. To overcome this, a multi-layer error correction method is presented for infinite-time monitoring, in which bounded distortion can be achieved with limited data rate. Finally, to conquer the accumulation of transmission errors in unreliable channels, we present an error correction mechanism based on periodic feedback. Diffusion approximation is then adopted to determine the optimal feedback rate and interval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy-efficient time synchronizations for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been put under the spotlight for years. A promising technique among which is the timestamp-free approach where no timestamps are required to establish the synchronization, thereby sparing the transmissions of the timing messages for conserving significant transmission energy. In this paper, we first investigate the feasibility of adopting timestamp-free time synchronization in practical resource-constrained WSNs; we then identify the issue of inaccuracy in maintaining the pre-defined response interval which affects the foundations of most existing timestamp-free schemes. Based on the investigation and our previously proposed reverse asymmetric time synchronization framework, we further propose an asymmetric timestamp-free time synchronization scheme with two estimation methods tailored for resource-constrained WSNs. We as well introduce the centralized and distributed multi-hop extension methods for the proposed scheme to cover diverse multi-hop scenarios. Experimental results on a real WSN testbed consisting of TelosB motes running TinyOS demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves high energy efficiency while maintaining microsecond-level time synchronization accuracy compared to three other conventional schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) integrated with millimeter-wave (mmWave) can provide unprecedented performance improvement for realizing future wireless communications. However, acquiring accurate channel state information in wideband mmWave massive MIMO systems with hybrid transceiver architectures is even challenging, especially in high-mobility scenarios with severe Doppler effects. In this paper, we propose a tensor decomposition-based method to estimate the time-varying and frequency-selective (TVFS) mmWave MIMO channels. Specifically, by exploiting the sparse scattering nature of TVFS channels, we model the frequency-domain received signal as a third-order tensor that admits a canonical polyadic (CP) decomposition format. Then, we analyze the uniqueness condition of the proposed CP decomposition-based channel estimation problem and propose a novel estimator to acquire TVFS channel parameters including angle of departure/arrival (AoD/AoA), time delay, path gain, and the Doppler shift. To address the sophisticated coupling among unknown parameters, we further propose a joint AoD and Doppler shift estimation (JADE) algorithm that provides reliable initial and iteratively refined estimates. The derived analysis and simulation results verify that the proposed JADE algorithm achieves higher estimation accuracy and guarantees the superiority of the proposed TVFS channel estimator over existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate a privacy-signaling game problem in which a sender with privacy concerns observes a pair of correlated random vectors which are modeled as jointly Gaussian. The sender aims to hide one of these random vectors and convey the other one whereas the objective of the receiver is to accurately estimate both of the random vectors. We analyze these conflicting objectives in a game theoretic framework with quadratic costs where depending on the commitment conditions (of the sender), we consider Nash or Stackelberg (Bayesian persuasion) equilibria. We show that a payoff dominant Nash equilibrium among all admissible policies is attained by a set of explicitly characterized linear policies. We also show that a payoff dominant Nash equilibrium coincides with a Stackelberg equilibrium. We formulate the information bottleneck problem within our Stackelberg framework under the mean squared error distortion criterion where the information bottleneck setup has a further restriction that only one of the random variables is observed at the sender. We show that this MMSE Gaussian Information Bottleneck Problem admits a linear solution which is explicitly characterized in the paper. We provide explicit conditions on when the optimal solutions, or equilibrium solutions in the Nash setup, are informative or noninformative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a face image, most of previous works in gaze estimation infer the gaze via a well-trained model with supervised training. However, the distribution of test data may be very different compared to that of training data since samples might be corrupted in real-world scenarios (e.g., taking a photo in strong light). This will lead to a gap between source domain (i.e., training data) and target domain (i.e., test data). In this paper, we first introduce self-supervised learning into our method for addressing challenging situations in gaze estimation. Moreover, existing appearance-based gaze estimation methods focus on directing towards the development of powerful regressors, which mainly utilize face and eye images simultaneously or face (eye) images only. However, the problem of inter cues between face and eye features has been largely overlooked. To this end, we propose a novel Modulation-based Adaptive Network (MANet) for gaze estimation, which uses high-level knowledge to filter the distractive information and bridges the intrinsic relationship between face and eye features. Further, we combine self-supervised learning and MANet to learn to adapt to challenging cases, such as abnormal lighting conditions and poor-quality images, by minimizing a self-supervised loss and a supervised loss jointly. The experimental results on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach with a real-time speed of 900 fps on a PC with an NVIDIA Titan RTX GPU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Point cloud registration (PCR) is an important and fundamental problem in 3D computer vision, whose goal is to seek an optimal rigid model to register a point cloud pair. Correspondence-based PCR techniques do not require initial guesses and gain more attentions. However, 3D keypoint techniques are much more difficult than their 2D counterparts, which results in extremely high outlier rates. Current robust techniques suffer from very high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a polynomial time ($O(N^2)$ O (N 2) , where $N$ N is the number of correspondences.) outlier removal method. Its basic idea is to reduce the input set into a smaller one with a lower outlier rate based on bound principle. To seek tight lower and upper bounds, we originally define two concepts, i.e., correspondence matrix (CM) and augmented correspondence matrix (ACM). We propose a cost function to minimize the determinant of CM or ACM, where the cost of CM rises to a tight lower bound and the cost of ACM leads to a tight upper bound. Then, we propose a scale-adaptive Cauchy estimator (SA-Cauchy) for further optimization. Extensive experiments on simulated and real PCR datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is robust at outlier rates above 99 percent and 1 $\sim$ ∼ 2 orders faster than its competitors. The source code will be made publicly available in https://ljy-rs.github.io/web/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel method, Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation (Zero-DCE), which formulates light enhancement as a task of image-specific curve estimation with a deep network. Our method trains a lightweight deep network, DCE-Net, to estimate pixel-wise and high-order curves for dynamic range adjustment of a given image. The curve estimation is specially designed, considering pixel value range, monotonicity, and differentiability. Zero-DCE is appealing in its relaxed assumption on reference images, i.e., it does not require any paired or even unpaired data during training. This is achieved through a set of carefully formulated non-reference loss functions, which implicitly measure the enhancement quality and drive the learning of the network. Despite its simplicity, we show that it generalizes well to diverse lighting conditions. Our method is efficient as image enhancement can be achieved by an intuitive and simple nonlinear curve mapping. We further present an accelerated and light version of Zero-DCE, called Zero-DCE++, that takes advantage of a tiny network with just 10K parameters. Zero-DCE++ has a fast inference speed (1000/11 FPS on a single GPU/CPU for an image of size 1200×900×3) while keeping the enhancement performance of Zero-DCE. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the advantages of our method over state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Furthermore, the potential benefits of our method to face detection in the dark are discussed. The source code is made publicly available at https://li-chongyi.github.io/Proj_Zero-DCE++.html. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deblurring images captured in dynamic scenes is challenging as the motion blurs are spatially varying caused by camera shakes and object movements. In this paper, we propose a spatially varying neural network to deblur dynamic scenes. The proposed model is composed of three deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and a recurrent neural network (RNN). The RNN is used as a deconvolution operator on feature maps extracted from the input image by one of the CNNs. Another CNN is used to learn the spatially varying weights for the RNN. As a result, the RNN is spatial-aware and can implicitly model the deblurring process with spatially varying kernels. To better exploit properties of the spatially varying RNN, we develop both one-dimensional and two-dimensional RNNs for deblurring. The third component, based on a CNN, reconstructs the final deblurred feature maps into a restored image. In addition, the whole network is end-to-end trainable. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art deblurring algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stochastic optimization algorithms have been popular for training deep neural networks. Recently, there emerges a new approach of learning-based optimizer, which has achieved promising performance for training neural networks. However, these black-box learning-based optimizers do not fully take advantage of the experience in human-designed optimizers and heavily rely on learning from meta-training tasks, therefore have limited generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel optimizer, dubbed as Variational HyperAdam, which is based on a parametric generalized Adam algorithm, i.e., HyperAdam, in a variational framework. With Variational HyperAdam as optimizer for training neural network, the parameter update vector of the neural network at each training step is considered as random variable, whose approximate posterior distribution given the training data and current network parameter vector is predicted by Variational HyperAdam. The parameter update vector for network training is sampled from this approximate posterior distribution. Specifically, in Variational HyperAdam, we design a learnable generalized Adam algorithm for estimating expectation, paired with a VarBlock for estimating the variance of the approximate posterior distribution of parameter update vector. The Variational HyperAdam is learned in a meta-learning approach with meta-training loss derived by variational inference. Experiments verify that the learned Variational HyperAdam achieved state-of-the-art network training performance for various types of networks on different datasets, such as multilayer perceptron, CNN, LSTM and ResNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate estimation and quantification of the corneal nerve fiber tortuosity in corneal confocal microscopy (CCM) is of great importance for disease understanding and clinical decision-making. However, the grading of corneal nerve tortuosity remains a great challenge due to the lack of agreements on the definition and quantification of tortuosity. In this paper, we propose a fully automated deep learning method that performs image-level tortuosity grading of corneal nerves, which is based on CCM images and segmented corneal nerves to further improve the grading accuracy with interpretability principles. The proposed method consists of two stages: 1) A pre-trained feature extraction backbone over ImageNet is fine-tuned with a proposed novel bilinear attention (BA) module for the prediction of the regions of interest (ROIs) and coarse grading of the image. The BA module enhances the ability of the network to model long-range dependencies and global contexts of nerve fibers by capturing second-order statistics of high-level features. 2) An auxiliary tortuosity grading network (AuxNet) is proposed to obtain an auxiliary grading over the identified ROIs, enabling the coarse and additional gradings to be finally fused together for more accurate final results. The experimental results show that our method surpasses existing methods in tortuosity grading, and achieves an overall accuracy of 85.64% in four-level classification. We also validate it over a clinical dataset, and the statistical analysis demonstrates a significant difference of tortuosity levels between healthy control and diabetes group. We have released a dataset with 1500 CCM images and their manual annotations of four tortuosity levels for public access. The code is available at: https://github.com/iMED-Lab/TortuosityGrading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) is a type of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) that measures diffusion signals on a sphere in q-space. It has been widely used in data acquisition for human brain structural connectome analysis. To more accurately estimate the structural connectome, dense samples in q-space are often acquired, potentially resulting in long scanning times and logistical challenges. This paper proposes a statistical method to select q-space directions optimally and estimate the local diffusion function from sparse observations. The proposed approach leverages relevant historical dMRI data to calculate a prior distribution to characterize local diffusion variability in each voxel in a template space. For a new subject to be scanned, the priors are mapped into the subject-specific coordinate and used to help select the best q-space samples. Simulation studies demonstrate big advantages over the existing HARDI sampling and analysis framework. We also applied the proposed method to the Human Connectome Project data and a dataset of aging adults with mild cognitive impairment. The results indicate that with very few q-space samples (e.g., 15 or 20), we can recover structural brain networks comparable to the ones estimated from 60 or more diffusion directions with the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a fast model-agnosticmethod for recovering noisy Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) data streams with missing entries. The measurements are first transformed into a Page matrix, and the original signals are reconstructed using low-rank matrix estimation based on optimal singular value thresholding. Two variations of the recovery algorithm are shown- a) an offline block-processing method for imputing past measurements, and b) an online method for predicting future measurements. Information within a PMU channel (temporal correlation) as well as from different PMU channels in a network (spatial correlation) are utilized to recover degraded data. The proposed method is fast and needs no explicit knowledge of the underlying system model or measurement noise distribution. The performance of the recovery algorithms is illustrated using simulated measurements from the IEEE 39-bus test system as well as real measurements from an anonymized U.S. electric utility. Extensive numeric tests show that the original signals can be accurately recovered in the presence of additive noise, consecutive data drop, as well as simultaneous data erasures across multiple PMU channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-enhanced wireless communication is one of the critical technologies of the sixth generation mobile communication, which has recently emerged as an innovative solution to the realization of intelligent transportation. It can meet the increasing demand for high-speed railway (HSR) communications services. In this paper, we consider a train-ground TDD wireless mobile communication paradigm to deploy two IRSs on the roadside and the train roof to assist the wireless transmission for the HSR communication system. To achieve the more significant performance gain, in the uplink transmission phase, we propose the practical channel estimation framework of the MIMO system aided by double IRSs to acquire reliable channel state information (CSI) of each channel. To facilitate the processing of the three-dimension tensor, we leverage the trilinearity of the parallel factor decomposition to decompose the received signal into a two-dimensional matrix. The Doppler frequency offset compensating scheme and channel tracking scheme based on Kalman-Filter are proposed to further decrease the pilot overheads. Then, in the downlink phase, a block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm is proposed to handle the data rate maximization problem of double IRSs communication system with the estimated CSI. We reformulate the original problem and decouple the double IRSs phase optimization problem into two single IRS phase optimization non-convex problems under the unit-modulus constraint. The Majorization-Minimization (MM) algorithm is proposed to approximate the optimal solution of the two optimization subproblems. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation and phase shifts optimization scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to the probability hypothesis density (PHD) and cardinalized PHD (CPHD) filters, the trajectory PHD (TPHD) and trajectory CPHD (TCPHD) filters are for sets of trajectories, and thus are able to produce trajectory estimates with better performance. In this paper, we develop the TPHD and TCPHD filters which can adaptively learn the history of the unknown target detection probability, and therefore they can perform more robustly in scenarios where targets are with unknown and time-varying detection probabilities. These filters are referred to as the unknown TPHD (U-TPHD) and unknown TCPHD (U-TCPHD) filters. By minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD), the U-TPHD and U-TCPHD filters can obtain, respectively, the best Poisson and independent identically distributed (IID) density approximations over a set of augmented trajectories. For computational efficiency, we also propose the U-TPHD and U-TCPHD filters that only consider the unknown detection profile at the current time. Specifically, the Beta-Gaussian mixture method is adopted for the implementations of proposed filters, which are referred to as the BG-U-TPHD and BG-U-TCPHD filters. The $L$ -scan approximations of these filters with much lower computational burden are also presented. Finally, various simulation results demonstrate that the BG-U-TPHD and BG-U-TCPHD filters can achieve robust tracking performance to adapt to unknown detection profile. Besides, it also shows that usually a small value of $L$ in the $L$ -scan approximation has similar performance than with a large value at a fraction of the computational cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithms are sensitive to array imperfections and outliers, making it challenging to realize accurate estimates in real applications. Facing the challenge, we propose a robust variational Bayesian inference based DOA estimation algorithm using the linear sparse array in this paper, where accurate DOA estimation with increased number of degrees of freedom (DOFs) is realized. With the mixture of von Mises model, a prior-grid scheme is further proposed to alleviate the computational burden introduced by the Bayesian variational inference framework. Since there is no restriction on the prior knowledge of the number of sources, the proposed algorithm is friendly to actual scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) and millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are two major technologies to enhance the spectrum efficiency (SE). Considering that the SE improvement in the CRNs is limited due to the interference temperature imposed on the primary user (PU), and the severe path loss and high directivity in mmWave communications make it vulnerable to blockage events, we introduce an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) into mmWave CRNs. Due to the estimation mismatch and the passivity of Eavesdroppers (Eves), perfect channel state information (CSI) of wiretap links is challenging to obtain, which promotes our research on robust secure beamforming (BF) design in the IRS-assisted mmWave CRNs. This paper considers the collaborate scenario of Eves, which allows us to investigate the BF design in the harsh eavesdropping environment. Specifically, by using a uniform linear array (ULA) at the cognitive base station (CBS) and a uniform planar array (UPA) at the IRS, and supposing that imperfect CSIs of angle-of-departures for wiretap links are known, we formulate a constrained problem to maximize the worst-case achievable secrecy rate (ASR) of the secondary user (SU) by jointly designing the transmit BF at the CBS and reflect BF at the IRS. To solve the non-convex problem with coupled variables, an efficient alternating optimization algorithm is proposed. As for the transmit BF at the CBS, we propose a heuristic robust transmit BF algorithm to attain the BF vectors analytically. As for the reflect BF at the IRS, by means of an auxiliary variable, we transform the non-convex problem into a semi-definite programming problem with rank-1 constraint, which is handled with the help of an iterative penalty function, and then obtain the optimal reflect BF through CVX. Finally, simulation results indicate that the ASR performance of our proposed algorithm has a small gap with that of the optimal solution with perfect CSI compared with the other benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel antenna configuration to measure directions of multiple signal sources at the receiver in a THz mobile network via a single channel measurement. Directional communication is an intrinsic attribute of THz wireless networks and the knowledge of direction should be harvested continuously to maintain link quality. Direction discovery can potentially impose an immense burden on the network that limits its communication capacity exceedingly. To utterly mitigate direction discovery overhead, we propose a novel technique called spectrum shaping capable of measuring direction, power, and relative distance of propagation paths via a single measurement. We demonstrate that the proposed technique is also able to measure the transmitter antenna orientation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed design in several scenarios and show that the introduced technique performs similar to a large array of antennas while attaining a much simpler hardware architecture. Results show that the spectrum shaping with only two antennas placed 0.5 mm, 5 mm, and 1 cm apart performs direction of arrival estimation similar to a much more complex uniform linear array equipped with 7, 60, and 120 antennas, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a revolutionary technology and can be used to assist communication systems by adaptively manipulating the wireless environment. In this paper, we propose a novel cascaded channel estimation algorithm for the RIS-assisted multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. Inspired by the channel compression idea, we can obtain a sub-sampled channel by turning off a fraction of RIS elements and then extrapolate it to the complete one, by which the pilot overhead is greatly reduced. The problem of channel extrapolation is transformed into recovering the physical parameters of the cascaded channel from the partial channel observations and is then formulated by the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework. In order to circumvent the curse of high dimensional matrices inversion in the vector-matrix system, we further introduce the tensor structure into the SBL framework. Specially, by leveraging of the channel sparsity over the angle domain and delay domain, we derive the virtual channel expression in tensor form and model a Kronecker-structured prior distribution for the virtual channels. The multi-domain sparse properties of the virtual channel tensor can be effectively captured by a group of low-dimensional hyper-parameters, and thus reduce the computational complexity. In addition, the Cramer-Rao lower bound is derived for the proposed channel extrapolation. Simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Channel estimation is one of the main challenges for implementing reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided communication system with a large number of antennas at the base station (BS) because RIS is equipped with many passive reflective elements without active transmitting/receiving and signal processing abilities. In this paper, we focus on the channel estimation in a general RIS-aided multi-user mmWave communication system. Specifically, a novel two-phase channel estimation scheme consisting of on-line and off-line phases is proposed to estimate the BS-RIS channel, RIS-user channel, and BS-user channel, respectively. Inspired by the characteristics of few scatterers in mmWave communication systems, the antenna domain channels are converted into the virtual angular domain channels by using the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) matrix. Thus, the estimation problem can be formulated as a compressed sensing (CS) problem, and solved by using efficient vector approximate message passing (VAMP) algorithm with expectation-maximization (EM) to learn unknown parameters and obtain the estimates simultaneously. Simulation results show that, the above algorithm with two choices of prior distributions in the proposed mmWave RIS-aided multi-user system has fast convergence speed and desirable estimation performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fractional hot-deck imputation (FHDI) is a general-purpose, assumption-free imputation method for handling multivariate missing data by filling each missing item with multiple observed values without resorting to artificially created values. The corresponding R package FHDI J. Im, I. Cho, and J. K. Kim, “An R package for fractional hot deck imputation,” R J., vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 140–154, 2018 holds generality and efficiency, but it is not adequate for tackling big incomplete data due to the requirement of excessive memory and long running time. As a first step to tackle big incomplete data by leveraging the FHDI, we developed a new version of a parallel fractional hot-deck imputation (named as P-FHDI) program suitable for curing large incomplete datasets. Results show a favorable speedup when the P-FHDI is applied to big datasets with up to millions of instances or 10,000 of variables. This paper explains the detailed parallel algorithms of the P-FHDI for large instances (big- $n$ n ) or high-dimensionality (big- $p$ p ) datasets and confirms the favorable scalability. The proposed program inherits all the advantages of the serial FHDI and enables a parallel variance estimation, which will benefit a broad audience in science and engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-order proximity is useful for effective network embedding. In contrast to many previous works that only consider order-level weights, this paper proposes to explore a more expressive node-level weighting mechanism to encode the diverse local structure, with a scalable and theoretically justified sampling strategy for its learning. Specifically, we start with a formal definition of multi-order proximity matrix which leads to our new multi-order objective based on Laplacian Eigenmaps and Skip-Gram. Then we instantiate the node-specific multi-order weights in the objective with the help of neighborhood size estimation, which indicates node-specific multi-order information. For objective learning, it is implicitly fulfilled with our proposed branching tree-like random walk strategy termed by BTWalk, which differs from the dominant chain-like walk in existing sampling techniques. BTWalk is designed by a synergetic combination of BFS (breadth-first search) and DFS (depth-first search), which is modulated according to the weights of the considered proximity orders. We theoretically analyze its cost-efficiency, and further propose the so-called Vec4Cross framework that incorporates joint node embedding and network alignment for two partially overlapped networks based on the seed matchings, whereby BTWalk is also adopted for embedding. Promising experimental results are obtained on real-world datasets across popular tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monocular depth estimation, as one of the fundamental tasks of computer vision, plays a crucial role in three-dimensional (3D) scene understanding and perception. Usually, deep learning methods recover monocular depth maps using continuous regression manners by minimizing the errors between the ground-truth depth and the predicted depth. However, fine depth features may not be fully captured through layer-by-layer coding, which is prone to low spatial resolution depth maps and insufficient details. Furthermore, it usually converges slowly and suffers from unsatisfactory results. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel model, named context-based ordinal regression network (CORNet), to reconstruct monocular depth maps in the ordinal regression manner with context information in this paper. Firstly, we put forward a novel context-based encoder with a feature transformation (FT) module to learn context information and details from inputs, and output multi-scale feature maps. Then, we design a boundary enhancement module (BEM) with a spatial attention mechanism following each operation of feature fusion, which captures boundary features in the scene to enhance the border depth. Finally, a feature optimization module (FOM) is designed to fuse and optimize the multi-scale features and boundary features to strengthen depth learning. What’s more, we introduce an ordinal weighted inference to predict depth maps from probabilities and discretization values. Experiments and results on two challenging datasets, KITTI and NYU Depth V2, demonstrate that our proposed CORNet can estimate monocular depth maps effectively and obtain superior performance in capturing geometric features over existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In image forensics, quantization step estimation plays a crucial role in revealing the JPEG compression history. This study focuses on the estimation for images that have been JPEG compressed and re-saved in lossless formats. Several effective methods have been developed, whereas the performance on small sized images still needs to be improved. In this paper, a novel JPEG quantization step estimation method with low complexity and high efficiency is proposed. First, for a given decompressed image, as the special shape of its DCT coefficients distribution is highly related to the quantization step, a function of the candidate step taking a similar shape is designed. Then, the quantization step is determined as the candidate leading to the maximum response of the designed function on the probability density function of DCT coefficients. The relation between the maximum response and the quantization step is verified mathematically, which provides a theoretical basis for the proposed method. In addition, to further improve the estimation performance, two fine adjustment procedures are adopted. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-art works, especially on small sized images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homography estimation is an important task in computer vision applications, such as image stitching, video stabilization, and camera calibration. Traditional homography estimation methods heavily depend on the quantity and distribution of feature correspondences, leading to poor robustness in low-texture scenes. The learning solutions, on the contrary, try to learn robust deep features but demonstrate unsatisfying performance in the scenes with low overlap rates. In this paper, we address these two problems simultaneously by designing a contextual correlation layer (CCL). The CCL can efficiently capture the long-range correlation within feature maps and can be flexibly used in a learning framework. In addition, considering that a single homography can not represent the complex spatial transformation in depth-varying images with parallax, we propose to predict multi-grid homography from global to local. Moreover, we equip our network with a depth perception capability, by introducing a novel depth-aware shape-preserved loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art solutions in the synthetic benchmark dataset and real-world dataset. The codes and models will be available at https://github.com/nie-lang/Multi-Grid-Deep-Homography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In empirical finance, it is usual to consider holidays as if they do not exist. The main goal of this paper is to assess the effects of holidays on volatility estimation and prediction. Holidays are taken into account by assuming they are missing values in a time series of returns generated by a Stochastic volatility (SV) model. Estimation is evaluated through Monte Carlo experiments. In addition, we assess the effects of holidays on one-step ahead Value-at-Risk forecasting using several time series returns. The results are slightly better when we take into account the missing values, especially for VaR forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voltage-to-power sensitivities play a key role in the control and operation of distribution networks. To estimate these sensitivities without network information, data-driven estimation methods have been studied. However, conventional methods do not consider mutual dependency (MD) of the sensitivities and thus the estimation can be inaccurate. Thus, this paper proposes a new data-driven estimation method of the sensitivities, which considers MD of the sensitivities in medium voltage distribution networks. In the proposed method, via MD analysis, the sensitivities are estimated by solving nonlinear least square problems and thus the accurate estimation can be achieved. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified using the real-time platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a technique for the on-line estimation of Thévenin equivalent (TE) which only needs the present phasor measurements. The technique is based on the wide-area measurements including voltage and current phasors of the system loads and synchronous generators, so that it can simultaneously estimate TE of the system seen from the interested buses. The technique has two main steps. In the first step, the conventional impedance matrix $\bar{Z}_{\rm bus}$ is modified to be suitable for TE estimation. In the second step, a correction coefficient based on the sensitivity theory calculated by using two consecutive phasor measurements is applied to correct the diagonal terms of the $\bar{Z}_{\rm bus}$ matrix. Simulation results carried on the IEEE 39-bus and 118-bus test systems show that the proposed technique can accurately estimate the TE for both generation and consumption buses under any load-increase scenario. The comparison scenarios verify the superiority of the proposed technique over others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distribution systems are becoming more active and provide more power support for transmission systems via their connection points at the transmission-distribution (T-D) interfaces. This paper proposes a chance constrained optimization model to estimate the flexibility area at a T-D interface. In this model, network flexibility is for the first time involved and facilitated by introducing power flow routers (PFRs) into the distribution system. The chance-constrained flexibility area (CCFA) given by the proposed model provides a description of the aggregated power dispatchability of distribution system with the guarantee of low risks of voltage violations under renewable uncertainties. We exploit the mechanism of network flexibility and reveal that it significantly reduces the voltage standard deviations, which cannot be achieved by node power flexibility. To evaluate the CCFA, an efficient two-layer iteration algorithm is designed. The inner layer finds the boundary point of CCFA along a given direction for active and reactive power. The outer layer determines those key directions to be included in the estimation as the corresponding points capture the features of the CCFA boundary. Case studies show that PFRs significantly enlarge the CCFA, which reveals that network flexibility is an important supplement to node power flexibility in T-D interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we show how to perform scene-level inverse rendering to recover shape, reflectance and lighting from a single, uncontrolled image using a fully convolutional neural network. The network takes an RGB image as input, regresses albedo, shadow and normal maps from which we infer least squares optimal spherical harmonic lighting coefficients. Our network is trained using large uncontrolled multiview and timelapse image collections without ground truth. By incorporating a differentiable renderer, our network can learn from self-supervision. Since the problem is ill-posed we introduce additional supervision. Our key insight is to perform offline multiview stereo (MVS) on images containing rich illumination variation. From the MVS pose and depth maps, we can cross project between overlapping views such that Siamese training can be used to ensure consistent estimation of photometric invariants. MVS depth also provides direct coarse supervision for normal map estimation. We believe this is the first attempt to use MVS supervision for learning inverse rendering. In addition, we learn a statistical natural illumination prior. We evaluate performance on inverse rendering, normal map estimation and intrinsic image decomposition benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanity has suffered throughout its history from different types of pandemics caused by deadly infectious diseases. Mathematical models are very useful tools to understand the dynamics of the behavior and propagation of these. Among these models are those known as SIS, SIR and SEIR. This paper presents a brief explanation of the structure of these models and its use in some pandemics. In particular, some SIR-type models without and with delays are analyzed with special interest, as well as their applications to the current pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. To determine the correspondence between some of the models analyzed and the data of Infectious and Recovered from Mexico reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), simulations are presented in three different time periods between the years 2020-2021. In addition, an unpublished SIR-type mathematical model with three delays is proposed as a main contribution. Finally, a discussion is given on the application of numerical algorithms to identify some parameters of mathematical models, such as ordinary least squares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection recognizes how persons interact with objects, which is advantageous in autonomous systems such as self-driving vehicles and collaborative robots. However, current HOI detectors are often plagued by model inefficiency and unreliability when making a prediction, which consequently limits its potential for real-world scenarios. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing ERNet, an end-to-end trainable convolutional-transformer network for HOI detection. The proposed model employs an efficient multi-scale deformable attention to effectively capture vital HOI features. We also put forward a novel detection attention module to adaptively generate semantically rich instance and interaction tokens. These tokens undergo pre-emptive detections to produce initial region and vector proposals that also serve as queries which enhances the feature refinement process in the transformer decoders. Several impactful enhancements are also applied to improve the HOI representation learning. Additionally, we utilize a predictive uncertainty estimation framework in the instance and interaction classification heads to quantify the uncertainty behind each prediction. By doing so, we can accurately and reliably predict HOIs even under challenging scenarios. Experiment results on the HICO-Det, V-COCO, and HOI-A datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in detection accuracy and training efficiency. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Monash-CyPhi-AI-Research-Lab/ernet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benefiting from color independence, illumination invariance and location discrimination attributed by the depth map, it can provide important supplemental information for extracting salient objects in complex environments. However, high-quality depth sensors are expensive and can not be widely applied. While general depth sensors produce the noisy and sparse depth information, which brings the depth-based networks with irreversible interference. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task and multi-modal filtered transformer (MMFT) network for RGB-D salient object detection (SOD). Specifically, we unify three complementary tasks: depth estimation, salient object detection and contour estimation. The multi-task mechanism promotes the model to learn the task-aware features from the auxiliary tasks. In this way, the depth information can be completed and purified. Moreover, we introduce a multi-modal filtered transformer (MFT) module, which equips with three modality-specific filters to generate the transformer-enhanced feature for each modality. The proposed model works in a depth-free style during the testing phase. Experiments show that it not only significantly surpasses the depth-based RGB-D SOD methods on multiple datasets, but also precisely predicts a high-quality depth map and salient contour at the same time. And, the resulted depth map can help existing RGB-D SOD methods obtain significant performance gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event cameras such as DAVIS can simultaneously output high temporal resolution events and low frame-rate intensity images, which own great potential in capturing scene motion, such as optical flow estimation. Most of the existing optical flow estimation methods are based on two consecutive image frames and can only estimate discrete flow at a fixed time interval. Previous work has shown that continuous flow estimation can be achieved by changing the quantities or time intervals of events. However, they are difficult to estimate reliable dense flow, especially in the regions without any triggered events. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based dense and continuous optical flow estimation framework from a single image with event streams, which facilitates the accurate perception of high-speed motion. Specifically, we first propose an event-image fusion and correlation module to effectively exploit the internal motion from two different modalities of data. Then we propose an iterative update network structure with bidirectional training for optical flow prediction. Therefore, our model can estimate reliable dense flow as two-frame-based methods, as well as estimate temporal continuous flow as event-based methods. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real captured datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing event-based state-of-the-art methods and our designed baselines for accurate dense and continuous optical flow estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a scalable approximate Bayesian method for image restoration using Total Variation (TV) priors, with the ability to offer uncertainty quantification. In contrast to most optimization methods based on maximum a posteriori estimation, we use the Expectation Propagation (EP) framework to approximate minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimates and marginal (pixel-wise) variances, without resorting to Monte Carlo sampling. For the classical anisotropic TV-based prior, we also propose an iterative scheme to automatically adjust the regularization parameter via Expectation Maximization (EM). Using Gaussian approximating densities with diagonal covariance matrices, the resulting method allows highly parallelizable steps and can scale to large images for denoising, deconvolution, and compressive sensing (CS) problems. The simulation results illustrate that such EP methods can provide a posteriori estimates on par with those obtained via sampling methods but at a fraction of the computational cost. Moreover, EP does not exhibit strong underestimation of posteriori variances, in contrast to variational Bayes alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature matching is a fundamental problem in many computer vision tasks. This paper proposes a novel effective framework for mismatch removal, named LOcality-guided Global-preserving Optimization (LOGO). To identify inliers from a putative matching set generated by feature descriptor similarity, we introduce a fixed-point progressive approach to optimize a graph-based objective, which represents a two-class assignment problem regarding an affinity matrix containing global structures. We introduce a strategy that a small initial set with a high inlier ratio exploits the topology of the affinity matrix to elicit other inliers based on their reliable geometry, which enhances the robustness to outliers. Geometrically, we provide a locality-guided matching strategy, i.e., using local topology consensus as a criterion to determine the initial set, thus expanding to yield the final feature matching set. In addition, we apply local affine transformations based on reference points to determine the local consensus and similarity scores of nodes and edges, ensuring the validity and generality for various scenarios including complex nonrigid transformations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed LOGO, which is competitive with the current state-of-the-art methods. It also exhibits favorable potential for high-level vision tasks, such as essential and fundamental matrix estimation, image registration and loop closure detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compressive covariance estimation has arisen as a class of techniques whose aim is to obtain second-order statistics of stochastic processes from compressive measurements. Recently, these methods have been used in various image processing and communications applications, including denoising, spectrum sensing, and compression. Notice that estimating the covariance matrix from compressive samples leads to ill-posed minimizations with severe performance loss at high compression rates. In this regard, a regularization term is typically aggregated to the cost function to consider prior information about a particular property of the covariance matrix. Hence, this paper proposes an algorithm based on the projected gradient method to recover low-rank or Toeplitz approximations of the covariance matrix from compressive measurements. The proposed algorithm divides the compressive measurements into data subsets projected onto different subspaces and accurately estimates the covariance matrix by solving a single optimization problem assuming that each data subset contains an approximation of the signal statistics. Furthermore, gradient filtering is included at every iteration of the proposed algorithm to minimize the estimation error. The error induced by the proposed splitting approach is analytically derived along with the convergence guarantees of the proposed method. The proposed algorithm estimates the covariance matrix of hyperspectral images from synthetic and real compressive samples. Extensive simulations show that the proposed algorithm can effectively recover the covariance matrix of hyperspectral images from compressive measurements with high compression ratios ($8-15\%$ approx) in noisy scenarios. Moreover, simulations and theoretical results show that the filtering step reduces the recovery error up to twice the number of eigenvectors. Finally, an optical implementation is proposed, and real measurements are used to validate the theoretical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different people age in different ways. Learning a personalized age estimator for each person is a promising direction for age estimation given that it better models the personalization of aging processes. However, most existing personalized methods suffer from the lack of large-scale datasets due to the high-level requirements: identity labels and enough samples for each person to form a long-term aging pattern. In this paper, we aim to learn personalized age estimators without the above requirements and propose a meta-learning method named MetaAge for age estimation. Unlike most existing personalized methods that learn the parameters of a personalized estimator for each person in the training set, our method learns the mapping from identity information to age estimator parameters. Specifically, we introduce a personalized estimator meta-learner, which takes identity features as the input and outputs the parameters of customized estimators. In this way, our method learns the meta knowledge without the above requirements and seamlessly transfers the learned meta knowledge to the test set, which enables us to leverage the existing large-scale age datasets without any additional annotations. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets including MORPH II, ChaLearn LAP 2015 and ChaLearn LAP 2016 databases demonstrate that our MetaAge significantly boosts the performance of existing personalized methods and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables a learning machine to adapt from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain under the distribution shift. Thanks to the strong representation ability of deep neural networks, recent remarkable achievements in UDA resort to learning domain-invariant features. Intuitively, the goal is that a good feature representation and the hypothesis learned from the source domain can generalize well to the target domain. However, the learning processes of domain-invariant features and source hypotheses inevitably involve domain-specific information that would degrade the generalizability of UDA models on the target domain. The lottery ticket hypothesis proves that only partial parameters are essential for generalization. Motivated by it, we find in this paper that only partial parameters are essential for learning domain-invariant information. Such parameters are termed transferable parameters that can generalize well in UDA. In contrast, the rest parameters tend to fit domain-specific details and often cause the failure of generalization, which are termed untransferable parameters. Driven by this insight, we propose Transferable Parameter Learning (TransPar) to reduce the side effect of domain-specific information in the learning process and thus enhance the memorization of domain-invariant information. Specifically, according to the distribution discrepancy degree, we divide all parameters into transferable and untransferable ones in each training iteration. We then perform separate update rules for the two types of parameters. Extensive experiments on image classification and regression tasks (keypoint detection) show that TransPar outperforms prior arts by non-trivial margins. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that TransPar can be integrated into the most popular deep UDA networks and be easily extended to handle any data distribution shift scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous deep learning-based video stabilizers require a large scale of paired unstable and stable videos for training, which are difficult to collect. Traditional trajectory-based stabilizers, on the other hand, divide the task into several sub-tasks and tackle them subsequently, which are fragile in textureless and occluded regions regarding the usage of hand-crafted features. In this paper, we attempt to tackle the video stabilization problem in a deep unsupervised learning manner, which borrows the divide-and-conquer idea from traditional stabilizers while leveraging the representation power of DNNs to handle the challenges in real-world scenarios. Technically, DUT is composed of a trajectory estimation stage and a trajectory smoothing stage. In the trajectory estimation stage, we first estimate the motion of keypoints, initialize and refine the motion of grids via a novel multi-homography estimation strategy and a motion refinement network, respectively, and get the grid-based trajectories via temporal association. In the trajectory smoothing stage, we devise a novel network to predict dynamic smoothing kernels for trajectory smoothing, which can well adapt to trajectories with different dynamic patterns. We exploit the spatial and temporal coherence of keypoints and grid vertices to formulate the training objectives, resulting in an unsupervised training scheme. Experiment results on public benchmarks show that DUT outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. The source code is available at https://github.com/Annbless/DUTCode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiview video coding (MVC) aims to compress the multiview video through the elimination of video redundancies, where the quality of the reference frame directly affects the compression efficiency. In this paper, we propose a deep virtual reference frame generation method based on a disparity-aware reference frame generation network (DAG-Net) to transform the disparity relationship between different viewpoints and generate a more reliable reference frame. The proposed DAG-Net consists of a multi-level receptive field module, a disparity-aware alignment module, and a fusion reconstruction module. First, a multi-level receptive field module is designed to enlarge the receptive field, and extract the multi-scale deep features of the temporal and inter-view reference frames. Then, a disparity-aware alignment module is proposed to learn the disparity relationship, and perform disparity shift on the inter-view reference frame to align it with the temporal reference frame. Finally, a fusion reconstruction module is utilized to fuse the complementary information and generate a more reliable virtual reference frame. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed reference frame generation method achieves superior performance for multiview video coding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-light imaging on mobile devices is typically challenging due to insufficient incident light coming through the relatively small aperture, resulting in low image quality. Most of the previous works on low-light imaging focus either only on a single task such as illumination adjustment, color enhancement, or noise removal; or on a joint illumination adjustment and denoising task that heavily relies on short-long exposure image pairs from specific camera models. These approaches are less practical and generalizable in real-world settings where camera-specific joint enhancement and restoration is required. In this paper, we propose a low-light imaging framework that performs joint illumination adjustment, color enhancement, and denoising to tackle this problem. Considering the difficulty in model-specific data collection and the ultra-high definition of the captured images, we design two branches: a coefficient estimation branch and a joint operation branch. The coefficient estimation branch works in a low-resolution space and predicts the coefficients for enhancement via bilateral learning, whereas the joint operation branch works in a full-resolution space and progressively performs joint enhancement and denoising. In contrast to existing methods, our framework does not need to recollect massive data when adapted to another camera model, which significantly reduces the efforts required to fine-tune our approach for practical usage. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate its great potential in real-world low-light imaging applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inferring the scene illumination from a single image is an essential yet challenging task in computer vision and computer graphics. Existing works estimate lighting by regressing representative illumination parameters or generating illumination maps directly. However, these methods often suffer from poor accuracy and generalization. This paper presents Geometric Mover’s Light (GMLight), a lighting estimation framework that employs a regression network and a generative projector for effective illumination estimation. We parameterize illumination scenes in terms of the geometric light distribution, light intensity, ambient term, and auxiliary depth, which can be estimated by a regression network. Inspired by the earth mover’s distance, we design a novel geometric mover’s loss to guide the accurate regression of light distribution parameters. With the estimated light parameters, the generative projector synthesizes panoramic illumination maps with realistic appearance and high-frequency details. Extensive experiments show that GMLight achieves accurate illumination estimation and superior fidelity in relighting for 3D object insertion. The codes are available at https://github.com/fnzhan/Illumination-Estimation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deconvolutional networks have attracted extensive attention and have been successfully applied in the field of computer vision. In this paper we propose a novel two-branch deconvolutional network (TBDN) that can improve the performance of conventional deconvolutional networks and reduce the computational complexity. A feasible iterative algorithm is designed to solve the optimization problem for the TBDN model, and a theoretical analysis of the convergence and computational complexity for the algorithm is also provided. The application of the TBDN in stereo matching is presented by constructing a disparity estimation network. Extensive experimental results on four commonly used datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed TBDN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data associations in multi-target multi-camera tracking (MTMCT) usually estimate affinity directly from re-identification (re-ID) feature distances. However, we argue that it might not be the best choice given the difference in matching scopes between re-ID and MTMCT problems. Re-ID systems focus on global matching, which retrieves targets from all cameras and all times. In contrast, data association in tracking is a local matching problem, since its candidates only come from neighboring locations and time frames. In this paper, we design experiments to verify such misfit between global re-ID feature distances and local matching in tracking, and propose a simple yet effective approach to adapt affinity estimations to corresponding matching scopes in MTMCT. Instead of trying to deal with all appearance changes, we tailor the affinity metric to specialize in ones that might emerge during data associations. To this end, we introduce a new data sampling scheme with temporal windows originally used for data associations in tracking. Minimizing the mismatch, the adaptive affinity module brings significant improvements over global re-ID distance, and produces competitive performance on CityFlow and DukeMTMC datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]