Unsupervised camouflaged object detection (UCOD) poses significant challenges, primarily attributed to the absence of human labels. Existing UCOD methodologies, leveraging attention mechanisms, often struggle to achieve precise localization of camouflaged objects. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a groundbreaking fully unsupervised algorithm for attention-guided camouflaged object localization, shift, and inference, termed the self-distilled attention localization and shift network (SdalsNet). In this study, we formulate an attention localization methodology aimed at accurately identifying the central coordinate of the camouflaged object. Furthermore, we propose four distinct loss functions tailored to refine the precision of attentional positioning. These loss functions effectively constrain the distances between three types of class tokens, facilitating seamless attentional shifting across the input sample. Additionally, we design a sophisticated prediction inference technique to reconstruct the binary output of an attention map, thereby providing a comprehensive understanding of the detected camouflaged objects. Experimental results on four challenging COD benchmark datasets corroborate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, demonstrating notable superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

The essence of the cross-view geo-localization task is to accurately identify the same object across images captured from different viewpoints. Due to variations in image acquisition methods and viewing angles, the content information of the images can differ significantly, which may result in localization failure. Therefore, cross-view geo-localization remains a challenging task. To solve this issue, a joint representation learning network based on feature center region diffusion and edge radiation is proposed in this article. First, to extract the crucial information from the global features, we design the central diffusion module that identifies important regions within the features and enhances feature robustness. Additionally, we design an edge radiation mechanism that expands the receptive field and further highlights crucial information in the image to support the central diffusion module in achieving more stable performance. On this basis, we propose an adaptive triple InfoNCE loss function to assist network training, improving the discriminability of the extracted features. Finally, the proposed network is tested on two mainstream datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which can prove its effectiveness.

The internet of things (IoT) is revolutionizing various industries by enabling the creation of smart systems for forest management, promoting the emergence of the forestry Internet of Things (IoFT). However, existing IoT node deployment methods often overlook geographic constraints, while solar-powered IoFT nodes face limitations in forests due to tree obstruction and maintenance challenges. Furthermore, to achieve cost-effective monitoring, it is essential to consider both coverage and network costs. In this paper, we propose a new metric, the coverage benefit ratio (CBR), which balances coverage and cost, ensuring long-term stable operation of forest monitoring systems while reducing maintenance costs and environmental impact. We first formulate the optimal deployment model to find the minimum-cost IoFT. Then, we propose develop a low complexity algorithm to solve the defined NP-hard optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the effectiveness and progressiveness of the proposed method.

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been significantly accelerated by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), gradually showcasing potential cognitive reasoning abilities in problem-solving and scientific discovery (i.e., AI4Science) once exclusive to human intellect. To comprehensively evaluate current models' performance in cognitive reasoning abilities, we introduce OlympicArena, which includes 11,163 bilingual problems across both text-only and interleaved text-image modalities. These challenges encompass a wide range of disciplines spanning seven fields and 62 international Olympic competitions, rigorously examined for data leakage. We argue that the challenges in Olympic competition problems are ideal for evaluating AI's cognitive reasoning due to their complexity and interdisciplinary nature, which are essential for tackling complex scientific challenges and facilitating discoveries. Beyond evaluating performance across various disciplines using answer-only criteria, we conduct detailed experiments and analyses from multiple perspectives. We delve into the models' cognitive reasoning abilities, their performance across different modalities, and their outcomes in process-level evaluations, which are vital for tasks requiring complex reasoning with lengthy solutions. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97\% overall accuracy (28.67\% for mathematics and 29.71\% for physics), illustrating current AI limitations in complex reasoning and multimodal integration. Through the OlympicArena, we aim to advance AI towards superintelligence, equipping it to address more complex challenges in science and beyond. We also provide a comprehensive set of resources to support AI research, including a benchmark dataset, an open-source annotation platform, a detailed evaluation tool, and a leaderboard with automatic submission features.

Cross-view geo-localization refers to recognizing images of the same geographic target obtained from different platforms (such as drone-view, satellite-view and ground-view). However, cross-view geo-localization is challenging as image capture using different platforms coupled with extreme viewpoint variations can cause significant changes to the visual image content. Existing methods mainly focus on mining the fine-grained features or the contextual information in neighboring areas, but ignore the complete information of the entire image and the association of contextual information of adjacent regions. Therefore, a multi-branch joint representation learning network model based on information fusion strategies is proposed to solve this cross-view geo-localization problem. Firstly, we obtain feature information from the image through global information fusion branch and local information fusion branch to help the network learn the discernable information in the different images. In addition, a local-guided-global information fusion branch is introduced to make local information assist global features to enhance the learning of potential information in the images. Secondly, we introduced different information fusion strategies in each branch to increase the extraction of contextual information through expanding the global receptive field, thus improving the performance of the model. Finally, a series of experiments is carried out on four prevailing benchmark datasets, namely University-1652, SUES-200, CVUAS and CVACT datasets. The quantitative comparisons from the experiments clearly indicate that the proposed network framework has great performance. For example, compared with some state-of-the-art methods, the quantitative improvements of the R@1 and AP on the University-1652 datasets are 1.91%, 2.18% and 1.55%, 2.99% in both tasks, respectively.

Cross-view geo-localization refers to the task of matching the same geographic target using images obtained from different platforms, such as drone-view and satellite-view. However, the view angle of images obtained through different platforms will vary greatly, which can bring great challenges to the cross-view geo-localization task. Therefore, we propose a multi-level feedback joint representation learning network based on adaptive area elimination to solve the cross-view geo-localization problem. In our network model, we first process the extracted global features to obtain part-level and patch-level features. We then utilize these features as feedback to the global features to extract the contextual information in the global features and improve the robustness of the extracted features. In addition, as images obtained from different platforms differ, there will always be some interference when matching images. Therefore, we introduce an adaptive area elimination strategy to erase the interference information in the global features and assist the model in obtaining crucial information. On this basis, the feature correlation loss function is designed to constrain learning when using global feature information, thereby eliminating the possible interference, which can improve the network model performance. Finally, a series of experiments is carried out using two well-known benchmarks, namely University-1652 and SUES-200, and the experimental results show that the proposed network model achieves competitive results, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of proposed model.

Unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID) attracts growing attention due to its broad prospects in practical applications. State-of-the-art unsupervised re-ID approaches combine clustering-based pseudo-label prediction with feature fine-tuning. However, pseudo labels generated directly by clustering are not always reliable and inevitably contain noisy labels. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel noise inhibition framework to estimate the confidence of each pseudo label and actively correct noisy labels. By introducing the silhouette coefficient, our method can estimate the pseudo-label confidence without any extra model or data, and calculate the correction matrix to correct clustering results directly. However, the silhouette coefficient is usually applied on the hyper-parameters selection of clustering algorithms. In order to make the silhouette coefficient more suitable for estimation and correction tasks, we calibrate the Jaccard distance matrix to alleviate the negative influence of the cluster size on the silhouette coefficient. Our proposed method brings significant improvement and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.

Person re-identification (ReID) is a crucial aspect of recognising pedestrians across multiple surveillance cameras. Even though significant progress has been made in recent years, the viewpoint change and scale variations still affect model performance. In this paper, we observe that it is beneficial for the model to handle the above issues when boost the consistent feature extraction capability among different transforms (e.g., flipping and scaling) of the same image. To this end, we propose a visual attention consistency network (VAC-Net). Specifically, we propose Embedding Spatial Consistency (ESC) architecture with flipping, scaling and original forms of the same image as inputs to learn a consistent embedding space. Furthermore, we design an Input-Wise visual attention consistent loss (IW-loss) so that the class activation maps(CAMs) from the three transforms are aligned with each other to enforce their advanced semantic information remains consistent. Finally, we propose a Layer-Wise visual attention consistent loss (LW-loss) to further enforce the semantic information among different stages to be consistent with the CAMs within each branch. These two losses can effectively improve the model to address the viewpoint and scale variations. Experiments on the challenging Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and MSMT17 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VAC-Net.

In this paper, a data assimilation network is proposed to tackle the challenges of domain generalization for person re-identification (ReID). Most of the existing research efforts only focus on single-dataset issues, and the trained models are difficult to generalize to unseen scenarios. This paper presents a distinctive idea to improve the generality of the model by assimilating three types of images: style-variant images, misaligned images and unlabeled images. The latter two are often ignored in the previous domain generalization ReID studies. In this paper, a non-local convolutional block attention module is designed for assimilating the misaligned images, and an attention adversary network is introduced to correct it. A progressive augmented memory is designed for assimilating the unlabeled images by progressive learning. Moreover, we propose an attention adversary difference loss for attention correction, and a labeling-guide discriminative embedding loss for progressive learning. Rather than designing a specific feature extractor that is robust to style shift as in most previous domain generalization work, we propose a data assimilation meta-learning procedure to train the proposed network, so that it learns to assimilate style-variant images. It is worth mentioning that we add an unlabeled augmented dataset to the source domain to tackle the domain generalization ReID tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art domain generalization methods.

Existing enhancement methods are empirically expected to help the high-level end computer vision task: however, that is observed to not always be the case in practice. We focus on object or face detection in poor visibility enhancements caused by bad weathers (haze, rain) and low light conditions. To provide a more thorough examination and fair comparison, we introduce three benchmark sets collected in real-world hazy, rainy, and low-light conditions, respectively, with annotated objects/faces. We launched the UG2+ challenge Track 2 competition in IEEE CVPR 2019, aiming to evoke a comprehensive discussion and exploration about whether and how low-level vision techniques can benefit the high-level automatic visual recognition in various scenarios. To our best knowledge, this is the first and currently largest effort of its kind. Baseline results by cascading existing enhancement and detection models are reported, indicating the highly challenging nature of our new data as well as the large room for further technical innovations. Thanks to a large participation from the research community, we are able to analyze representative team solutions, striving to better identify the strengths and limitations of existing mindsets as well as the future directions.