Masked autoencoder (MAE) shows that severe augmentation during training produces robust representations for high-level tasks. This paper brings the MAE-like framework to nighttime image enhancement, demonstrating that severe augmentation during training produces strong network priors that are resilient to real-world night haze degradations. We propose a novel nighttime image dehazing method with self-prior learning. Our main novelty lies in the design of severe augmentation, which allows our model to learn robust priors. Unlike MAE that uses masking, we leverage two key challenging factors of nighttime images as augmentation: light effects and noise. During training, we intentionally degrade clear images by blending them with light effects as well as by adding noise, and subsequently restore the clear images. This enables our model to learn clear background priors. By increasing the noise values to approach as high as the pixel intensity values of the glow and light effect blended images, our augmentation becomes severe, resulting in stronger priors. While our self-prior learning is considerably effective in suppressing glow and revealing details of background scenes, in some cases, there are still some undesired artifacts that remain, particularly in the forms of over-suppression. To address these artifacts, we propose a self-refinement module based on the semi-supervised teacher-student framework. Our NightHaze, especially our MAE-like self-prior learning, shows that models trained with severe augmentation effectively improve the visibility of input haze images, approaching the clarity of clear nighttime images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our NightHaze achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing nighttime image dehazing methods by a substantial margin of 15.5% for MUSIQ and 23.5% for ClipIQA.

Image-based 3D texture transfer from a single 2D reference image enables practical customization of 3D object appearances with minimal manual effort. Adapted 2D editing and text-driven 3D editing approaches can serve this purpose. However, 2D editing typically involves frame-by-frame manipulation, often resulting in inconsistencies across views, while text-driven 3D editing struggles to preserve texture characteristics from reference images. To tackle these challenges, we introduce \textbf{3DOT}, a \textbf{3D} Gaussian Splatting \textbf{O}bject \textbf{T}exture Transfer method based on a single reference image, integrating: 1) progressive generation, 2) view-consistency gradient guidance, and 3) prompt-tuned gradient guidance. To ensure view consistency, progressive generation starts by transferring texture from the reference image and gradually propagates it to adjacent views. View-consistency gradient guidance further reinforces coherence by conditioning the generation model on feature differences between consistent and inconsistent outputs. To preserve texture characteristics, prompt-tuning-based gradient guidance learns a token that describes differences between original and reference textures, guiding the transfer for faithful texture preservation across views. Overall, 3DOT combines these strategies to achieve effective texture transfer while maintaining structural coherence across viewpoints. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations confirm that our three components enable convincing and effective 2D-to-3D texture transfer. Our project page is available here: https://massyzs.github.io/3DOT_web/.

Reference-driven image completion, which restores missing regions in a target view using additional images, is particularly challenging when the target view differs significantly from the references. Existing generative methods rely solely on diffusion priors and, without geometric cues such as camera pose or depth, often produce misaligned or implausible content. We propose GeoComplete, a novel framework that incorporates explicit 3D structural guidance to enforce geometric consistency in the completed regions, setting it apart from prior image-only approaches. GeoComplete introduces two key ideas: conditioning the diffusion process on projected point clouds to infuse geometric information, and applying target-aware masking to guide the model toward relevant reference cues. The framework features a dual-branch diffusion architecture. One branch synthesizes the missing regions from the masked target, while the other extracts geometric features from the projected point cloud. Joint self-attention across branches ensures coherent and accurate completion. To address regions visible in references but absent in the target, we project the target view into each reference to detect occluded areas, which are then masked during training. This target-aware masking directs the model to focus on useful cues, enhancing performance in difficult scenarios. By integrating a geometry-aware dual-branch diffusion architecture with a target-aware masking strategy, GeoComplete offers a unified and robust solution for geometry-conditioned image completion. Experiments show that GeoComplete achieves a 17.1% PSNR improvement over state-of-the-art methods, significantly boosting geometric accuracy while maintaining high visual quality.

Polarization images provide rich physical information that is fundamentally absent from standard RGB images, benefiting a wide range of computer vision applications such as reflection separation and material classification. However, the acquisition of polarization images typically requires additional optical components, which increases both the cost and the complexity of the applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new task: RGB-to-polarization image estimation, which aims to infer polarization information directly from RGB images. In this work, we establish the first comprehensive benchmark for this task by leveraging existing polarization datasets and evaluating a diverse set of state-of-the-art deep learning models, including both restoration-oriented and generative architectures. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, our benchmark not only establishes the current performance ceiling of RGB-to-polarization estimation, but also systematically reveals the respective strengths and limitations of different model families — such as direct reconstruction versus generative synthesis, and task-specific training versus large-scale pre-training. In addition, we provide some potential directions for future research on polarization estimation. This benchmark is intended to serve as a foundational resource to facilitate the design and evaluation of future methods for polarization estimation from standard RGB inputs.

Gait benchmarks empower the research community to train and evaluate high-performance gait recognition systems. Even though growing efforts have been devoted to cross-view recognition, academia is restricted by current existing databases captured in the controlled environment. In this paper, we contribute a new benchmark and strong baseline for Gait REcognition in the Wild (GREW). The GREW dataset is constructed from natural videos, which contain hundreds of cameras and thousands of hours of streams in open systems. With tremendous manual annotations, the GREW consists of 26 K identities and 128 K sequences with rich attributes for unconstrained gait recognition. Moreover, we add a distractor set of over 233 K sequences, making it more suitable for real-world applications. Compared with prevailing predefined cross-view datasets, the GREW has diverse and practical view variations, as well as more naturally challenging factors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale dataset for gait recognition in the wild. Equipped with this benchmark, we dissect the unconstrained gait recognition problem, where representative appearance-based and model-based methods are explored. The proposed GREW benchmark proves to be essential for both training and evaluating gait recognizers in unconstrained scenarios. In addition, we propose the Single Path One-Shot neural architecture search with uniform sampling for Gait recognition, named SPOSGait, which is the first NAS-based gait recognition model. In experiments, SPOSGait achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CASIA-B, OU-MVLP, Gait3D, and GREW benchmarks, outperforming existing approaches by a large margin.

Existing deep-learning-based methods for nighttime video deraining rely on synthetic data due to the absence of real-world paired data. However, the intricacies of the real world, particularly with the presence of light effects and low-light regions affected by noise, create significant domain gaps, hampering synthetic-trained models in removing rain streaks properly and leading to over-saturation and color shifts. Motivated by this, we introduce NightRain, a novel nighttime video deraining method with adaptive-rain-removal and adaptive-correction. Our adaptive-rain-removal uses unlabeled rain videos to enable our model to derain real-world rain videos, particularly in regions affected by complex light effects. The idea is to allow our model to obtain rain-free regions based on the confidence scores. Once rain-free regions and the corresponding regions from our input are obtained, we can have region-based paired real data. These paired data are used to train our model using a teacher-student framework, allowing the model to iteratively learn from less challenging regions to more challenging regions. Our adaptive-correction aims to rectify errors in our model's predictions, such as over-saturation and color shifts. The idea is to learn from clear night input training videos based on the differences or distance between those input videos and their corresponding predictions. Our model learns from these differences, compelling our model to correct the errors. From extensive experiments, our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance. It achieves a PSNR of 26.73dB, surpassing existing nighttime video deraining methods by a substantial margin of 13.7%.

Most gait recognition methods exploit spatial-temporal representations from static appearances and dynamic walking patterns. However, we observe that many part-based methods neglect representations at boundaries. In addition, the phenomenon of overfitting on training data is relatively common in gait recognition, which is perhaps due to insufficient data and low-informative gait silhouettes. Motivated by these observations, we propose a novel mask-based regularization method named ReverseMask. By injecting perturbation on the feature map, the proposed regularization method helps convolutional architecture learn the discriminative representations and enhances generalization. Also, we design an Inception-like ReverseMask Block, which has three branches composed of a global branch, a feature-dropping branch, and a feature scaling branch. Precisely, the dropping branch can extract fine-grained representations when partial activations are zero-outed. Meanwhile, the scaling branch randomly scales the feature map, keeping structural information of activations and preventing overfitting. The plug-and-play Inception-like ReverseMask block is simple and effective, improving the performance of many state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the ReverseMask regularization help baseline achieves higher accuracy and better generalization. Moreover, the base-line with Inception-like Block significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the two most popular datasets, CASIA-B and OUMVLP.

Gait recognition is a biometric technology that recognizes the identity of humans through their walking patterns. Compared with other biometric technologies, gait recognition is more difficult to disguise and can be applied to the condition of long-distance without the cooperation of subjects. Thus, it has unique potential and wide application for crime prevention and social security. At present, most gait recognition methods directly extract features from the video frames to establish representations. However, these architectures learn representations from different features equally but do not pay enough attention to dynamic features, which refers to a representation of dynamic parts of silhouettes over time (e.g. legs). Since dynamic parts of the human body are more informative than other parts (e.g. bags) during walking, in this paper, we propose a novel and high-performance framework named DyGait. This is the first framework on gait recognition that is designed to focus on the extraction of dynamic features. Specifically, to take full advantage of the dynamic information, we propose a Dynamic Augmentation Module (DAM), which can automatically establish spatial-temporal feature representations of the dynamic parts of the human body. The experimental results show that our DyGait network outperforms other state-of-the-art gait recognition methods. It achieves an average Rank-1 accuracy of 71.4% on the GREW dataset, 66.3% on the Gait3D dataset, 98.4% on the CAS1A-B dataset and 98.3% on the OU-MVLP dataset.

Visibility in hazy nighttime scenes is frequently reduced by multiple factors, including low light, intense glow, light scattering, and the presence of multicolored light sources. Existing nighttime dehazing methods often struggle with handling glow or low-light conditions, resulting in either excessively dark visuals or unsuppressed glow outputs. In this paper, we enhance the visibility from a single nighttime haze image by suppressing glow and enhancing low-light regions. To handle glow effects, our framework learns from the rendered glow pairs. Specifically, a light source aware network is proposed to detect light sources of night images, followed by the APSF (Angular Point Spread Function)-guided glow rendering. Our framework is then trained on the rendered images, resulting in glow suppression. Moreover, we utilize gradient-adaptive convolution, to capture edges and textures in hazy scenes. By leveraging extracted edges and textures, we enhance the contrast of the scene without losing important structural details. To boost low-light intensity, our network learns an attention map, then adjusted by gamma correction. This attention has high values on low-light regions and low values on haze and glow regions. Extensive evaluation on real nighttime haze images, demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a PSNR of 30.38dB, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 13% on GTA5 nighttime haze dataset. Our data and code is available at: https://github.com/jinyeying/nighttime_dehaze.

Generic visual object tracking is challenging due to various difficulties, e.g. scale variations and deformations. To solve those problems, we propose a novel multi-scale selective kernel module for tracking, which contains small-scale and large-scale branches to model the target at different scales and attention mechanism to capture the more effective appearance information of the target. In our module, we cascade multiple small-scale convolutional blocks as an equivalent large-scale branch to extract large-scale features of the target effectively. Besides, we present a hybrid strategy for feature selection to extract significant information from features of different scales. Based on the current excellent segmentation tracking framework, we propose a novel tracking network that leverages our module at multiple places in the up-sample phase to construct a more accurate and robust appearance model. Extensive experimental results show that our tracker outperforms other state-of-the-art trackers on multiple challenging benchmarks including VOT2018, TrackingNet, DAVIS-2017, and YouTube-VOS-2018 while achieves real-time tracking.

The Competition on Human Identification at a Distance 2021 (HID 2021) is to promote the research in human identification at a distance and to provide a benchmark to evaluate different methods. HID 2021 is the second follow-up from the first one, HID 2020. The dataset size and the evaluation protocal are the same with the previous competition, but the data in the test set has been changed. The paper firstly introduces the dataset and the evaluation protocol, then describes the methods from the top teams and their results. The methods show how to achieve state-of-the-art performance on gait recognition. The results in HID 2021 are better than those in HID 2020. From the comparisons and analysis, some useful conclusions can be drawn. We hope more improvements can be achieved by better followup competitions.

Gait recognition is one of the most important biometric technologies and has been applied in many fields. Recent gait recognition frameworks represent each gait frame by descriptors extracted from either global appearances or local regions of humans. However, the representations based on global information often neglect the details of the gait frame, while local region based descriptors cannot capture the relations among neighboring regions, thus reducing their discriminativeness. In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction and fusion framework to achieve discriminative feature representations for gait recognition. Towards this goal, we take advantage of both global visual information and local region details and develop a Global and Local Feature Extractor (GLFE). Specifically, our GLFE module is composed of our newly designed multiple global and local convolutional layers (GLConv) to ensemble global and local features in a principle manner. Furthermore, we present a novel operation, namely Local Temporal Aggregation (LTA), to further preserve the spatial information by reducing the temporal resolution to obtain higher spatial resolution. With the help of our GLFE and LTA, our method significantly improves the discriminativeness of our visual features, thus improving the gait recognition performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art gait recognition methods on two popular datasets.

Gait recognition is one of the most important biometric technologies and 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has achieved great success in this field. However, most existing gait recognition frameworks based on 3D CNNs only extract gait features from a single temporal scale, which may not pays enough attention to the gait information in different scales. To solve this problem, we propose a novel multi-scale temporal information extractor to aggregate temporal information from different scales and then represent gait features comprehensively. The small-temporal-scale branch extracts the temporal features from the adjacent frames, which contains the information of slow changes, while the larger-temporal-scale one is used to capture the rapid gait changes. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms most existing gait recognition methods on CASIA-B and OutdoorGait datasets.

In the problem of image deblurring, the restoration of details in severely blurred images has always been difficult. In this paper, we focus on effectively eliminating the ringing artifact and wrinkles that appear after deburring, and propose a novel blind debluring method based on dual attention deep image prior (DADIP) network and 2-dimensional (2D) blur kernel estimation with convolutional neural network (CNN). In the DADIP network, the dual attention mechanism is firstly combined with squeeze and excitation network (SENet), which greatly improves the restoration effect of image details. More importantly, the 2D blur kernel estimation approach via CNN is developed to suppress the ringing artifact of the image, which significantly outperforms previous fully connected network based methods. Experiments show that our deblurring approach achieves superior performance compared with most existing methods.

Gait recognition which is one of the most important and effective biometric technologies has a significant advantage in long-distance recognition systems. For existing gait recognition methods, the template-based approaches may lose temporal information, while the sequence-based methods cannot fully exploit the temporal relations among the sequence. To address the above issues, we propose a novel multiple-temporal-scale gait recognition framework which integrates the temporal information in multiple temporal scales, making use of both the frame and interval fusion information. Moreover, the interval-level representation is realized by a local transformation module. Concretely, 3D convolution neural network (3D CNN) is applied in both the small and the large temporal scales to extract the spatial-temporal information. Moreover, a frame pooling method is developed to address the mismatch of the input of 3D network and video frames, and a novel 3D basic network block is designed to improve efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that the multiple-temporal-scale 3D CNN based gait recognition method can achieve better performance than most recent state-of-the-art methods in CASIA-B dataset. The proposed method obtains the rank-1 accuracy with 96.7% under normal condition, and outperforms other methods on average accuracy by at least 5.8% and 11.1%, respectively, in complex scenarios.