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Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) consistently requires language and appearance semantics to more understand each other. The need becomes acute especially under hard situations. To achieve, existing works tend to resort to various trans-representing mechanisms to directly feed forward language semantic along main RGB branch, which however will result in referent distribution weakly-mined in space and non-referent semantic contaminated along channel. In this paper, we propose Spatial Semantic Recurrent Mining (S\textsuperscript{2}RM) to achieve high-quality cross-modality fusion. It follows a working strategy of trilogy: distributing language feature, spatial semantic recurrent coparsing, and parsed-semantic balancing. During fusion, S\textsuperscript{2}RM will first generate a constraint-weak yet distribution-aware language feature, then bundle features of each row and column from rotated features of one modality context to recurrently correlate relevant semantic contained in feature from other modality context, and finally resort to self-distilled weights to weigh on the contributions of different parsed semantics. Via coparsing, S\textsuperscript{2}RM transports information from the near and remote slice layers of generator context to the current slice layer of parsed context, capable of better modeling global relationship bidirectional and structured. Besides, we also propose a Cross-scale Abstract Semantic Guided Decoder (CASG) to emphasize the foreground of the referent, finally integrating different grained features at a comparatively low cost. Extensive experimental results on four current challenging datasets show that our proposed method performs favorably against other state-of-the-art algorithms.

To address the challenging portrait video matting problem more precisely, existing works typically apply some matting priors that require additional user efforts to obtain, such as annotated trimaps or background images. In this work, we observe that instead of asking the user to explicitly provide a background image, we may recover it from the input video itself. To this end, we first propose a novel background restoration module (BRM) to recover the background image dynamically from the input video. BRM is extremely lightweight and can be easily integrated into existing matting models. By combining BRM with a recent image matting model, MODNet, we then present MODNet-V for portrait video matting. Benefited from the strong background prior provided by BRM, MODNet-V has only 1/3 of the parameters of MODNet but achieves comparable or even better performances. Our design allows MODNet-V to be trained in an end-to-end manner on a single NVIDIA 3090 GPU. Finally, we introduce a new patch refinement module (PRM) to adapt MODNet-V for high-resolution videos while keeping MODNet-V lightweight and fast.

Being low-level radiation exposure and less harmful to health, low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) has been widely adopted in the early screening of lung cancer and COVID-19. LDCT images inevitably suffer from the degradation problem caused by complex noises. It was reported that deep learning (DL)-based LDCT denoising methods using convolutional neural network (CNN) achieved impressive denoising performance. Although most existing DL-based methods (e.g., encoder-decoder framework) can implicitly utilize non-local and contextual information via downsampling operator and 3D CNN, the explicit multi-information (i.e., local, non-local, and contextual) integration may not be explored enough. To address this issue, we propose a novel graph convolutional network-based LDCT denoising model, namely GCN-MIF, to explicitly perform multi-information fusion for denoising purpose. Concretely, by constructing intra- and inter-slice graph, the graph convolutional network is introduced to leverage the non-local and contextual relationships among pixels. The traditional CNN is adopted for the extraction of local information. Finally, the proposed GCN-MIF model fuses all the extracted local, non-local, and contextual information. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed GCN-MIF model by quantitative and visualized results. Furthermore, a double-blind reader study on a public clinical dataset is also performed to validate the usability of denoising results in terms of the structural fidelity, the noise suppression, and the overall score. Models and code are available at https://github.com/tonyckc/GCN-MIF_demo., Comment: Submitted to TMI with under review

Deep learning has achieved notable performance in the denoising task of low-quality medical images and the detection task of lesions, respectively. However, existing low-quality medical image denoising approaches are disconnected from the detection task of lesions. Intuitively, the quality of denoised images will influence the lesion detection accuracy that in turn can be used to affect the denoising performance. To this end, we propose a play-and-plug medical image denoising framework, namely Lesion-Inspired Denoising Network (LIDnet), to collaboratively improve both denoising performance and detection accuracy of denoised medical images. Specifically, we propose to insert the feedback of downstream detection task into existing denoising framework by jointly learning a multi-loss objective. Instead of using perceptual loss calculated on the entire feature map, a novel region-of-interest (ROI) perceptual loss induced by the lesion detection task is proposed to further connect these two tasks. To achieve better optimization for overall framework, we propose a customized collaborative training strategy for LIDnet. On consideration of clinical usability and imaging characteristics, three low-dose CT images datasets are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed LIDnet. Experiments show that, by equipping with LIDnet, both of the denoising and lesion detection performance of baseline methods can be significantly improved.

Existing portrait matting methods either require auxiliary inputs that are costly to obtain or involve multiple stages that are computationally expensive, making them less suitable for real-time applications. In this work, we present a light-weight matting objective decomposition network (MODNet) for portrait matting in real-time with a single input image. The key idea behind our efficient design is by optimizing a series of sub-objectives simultaneously via explicit constraints. In addition, MODNet includes two novel techniques for improving model efficiency and robustness. First, an Efficient Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (e-ASPP) module is introduced to fuse multi-scale features for semantic estimation. Second, a self-supervised sub-objectives consistency (SOC) strategy is proposed to adapt MODNet to real-world data to address the domain shift problem common to trimap-free methods. MODNet is easy to be trained in an end-to-end manner. It is much faster than contemporaneous methods and runs at 67 frames per second on a 1080Ti GPU. Experiments show that MODNet outperforms prior trimap-free methods by a large margin on both Adobe Matting Dataset and a carefully designed photographic portrait matting (PPM-100) benchmark proposed by us. Further, MODNet achieves remarkable results on daily photos and videos. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/ZHKKKe/MODNet, and the PPM-100 benchmark is released at https://github.com/ZHKKKe/PPM.

Metalization of carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRPs) composites by the surface modification method to enhance their electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, electromagnetic shielding, erosion, and radiation protection, has a significant meaning in the aerospace field. In this study, Sn coating was successfully fabricated on the CFRP composite substrate via low-pressure cold spray under four gas temperatures (473K, 523K, 573K, and 623K). Their bonding mechanism was explored via the surface observation after peel-off adhesion strength, accompanying with surface temperature distribution investigation. The results indicates that we cannot obtain coating at 623 K, the epoxy matrix of the CFRP substrate was gradually eroded during deposition over 523 K. Meanwhile, Sn particles melt under 623 K condition. Three kinds of interfaces: Sn/epoxy, Sn/CF, and Sn/CF/epoxy are revealed as characteristics with respect to different gas temperatures to explore the bonding mechanisms.