Underwater object detection presents significant challenges due to the unique visual degradations in underwater environments, such as low contrast, poor visibility, and blurry object boundaries. While ANNs have achieved impressive detection accuracy, their high computational cost and power consumption limit their deployment in resource-constrained underwater platforms. In this work, we propose a Spatial-Frequency Spiking Neural Network (SFSNN) that combines the energy-efficient and event-driven nature of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with the discriminative power of spatial-frequency analysis. SFSNN introduces a novel spatial-frequency spiking module that integrates spatial and frequency-domain representations, enhancing edge and texture features crucial for object detection in murky waters. Furthermore, we adapt the YOLOX architecture into a spike-based detector via ANN-to-SNN conversion using signed spiking neurons. Extensive experiments on the RUOD dataset demonstrate that SFSNN achieves superior performance over both SNN- and ANN-based detection models, offering a compelling solution for low-power underwater object detection.

Underwater object detection plays a crucial role in marine resource exploration and ecological conservation. However, it suffers from significant challenges due to severe image blurring and low contrast, which substantially degrade the detection performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose DAF-DETR, a novel Detection Transformer framework with Dual Attention and Dual Fusion Modules (DFMs). DAF-DETR first introduces an Aggregated Attention Mechanism to enhance the ResNet residual blocks, which boosts both global context awareness and local detail extraction in the backbone network. Second, it incorporates a Deformable Attention-based Feature Interaction (DAFI) module to improve the discriminability between object and background features in low-contrast underwater images. Finally, a DFM, which integrates Global-to-Local Spatial Aggregation (GLSA) with Haar Wavelet-based Downsampling (HWD), is employed to effectively alleviate the adverse effects of severe underwater blurring. Extensive experiments on the DUO and Underwater Object Detection Dataset (UODD) datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed DAF-DETR framework, demonstrating significant improvements over existing methods.

• Proposes an Adversarial Batch Representation Augmentation for batch correction. • Models uncertainty of biological batch effects in representation learning. • Uses adversarial learning to identify challenges in the objective function. • Presents a synergistic optimization process for stable training. • Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. High-Content Screening routinely generates massive volumes of cell painting images for phenotypic profiling. However, technical variations across experimental executions inevitably induce biological batch (bio-batch) effects. These cause covariate shifts and degrade the generalization of deep learning models on unseen data. Existing batch correction methods typically rely on additional prior knowledge (e.g., treatment or cell culture information) or struggle to generalize to unseen bio-batches. In this work, we frame bio-batch mitigation as a Domain Generalization (DG) problem and propose Adversarial Batch Representation Augmentation (ABRA). ABRA explicitly models batch-wise statistical fluctuations by parameterizing feature statistics as structured uncertainties. Through a min-max optimization framework, it actively synthesizes worst-case bio-batch perturbations in the representation space, guided by a strict angular geometric margin to preserve fine-grained class discriminability. To prevent representation collapse during this adversarial exploration, we introduce a synergistic distribution alignment objective. Extensive evaluations on the large-scale RxRx1 and RxRx1-WILDS benchmarks demonstrate that ABRA establishes a new state-of-the-art for siRNA perturbation classification.

Multimodal image synthesis, which predicts target-modality images from source-modality images, has garnered considerable attention in the field of clinical diagnosis. Both unidirectional and bidirectional multimodal image synthesis methods have been explored in the medical domain, however, unidirectional models heavily rely on paired images, while current bidirectional models typically overlook local image details due to their unsupervised training patterns. In this work, we propose a Bidirectional Variational Generative Adversarial Network (BVGAN) for multimodal image synthesis, which achieves high-quality bidirectional translations between any two modalities using only a limited number paired images. Firstly, BVGAN's generator incorporates a variational structure (VAS) to regularise the latent space for noise reduction. This regularisation imposes smoothness to the latent space, enabling BVGAN to produce high-quality, noise-free images. Secondly, a novel generic-to-personalised (GTP) learning strategy is introduced to train BVGAN and reduce its reliance on a large sets of paired images. GTP initially leverages an unsupervised learning model to capture the global mapping between two modalities using unpaired images from generic patients. It then applies a supervised learning model to refine the mapping for individual patient, enhancing image details. Finally, the GTP learning strategy along with VAS enables BVGAN to achieve state-of-the-art performance on two multi-modality medical datasets: Brain CTMRI and BRATS.

Light propagation in underwater scenes is significantly hindered by wavelength- and distance-dependent attenuation and scattering, leading to low contrast and severe color distortion in underwater images. Recent advancements in diffusion models have shown impressive performance in image restoration by learning data distribution prior knowledge (diffusion prior) from large amounts of paired data. However, due to the difficulties in collecting paired underwater images, the available data for underwater image enhancement is limited in both quality and quantity. This scarcity leads to a biased diffusion prior and suboptimal performance of diffusion models. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, termed SeaDiff, to learn underwater diffusion prior with wavelength- and distance-dependent degradation awareness. Specifically, we introduce a Prior Knowledge Mining Model (PKMM), which includes two key components: (1) the Physical Prior Embedding Module (PPEM) that simulates the underwater imaging process through a distance-dependent physical model and embeds physical prior by incorporating generalizable distance-aware cues from a large vision foundation model; and (2) the Color Prior Embedding Module (CPEM) that extracts wavelength-dependent color distribution prior from a log-chroma color space. Additionally, we propose a Degradation-Aware Diffusion Model (DADM) that seamlessly integrates degradation prior with diffusion prior and enhances the underwater images with high visual quality. Extensive experiments on popular UIE benchmarks and downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed SeaDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both visual quality and quantitative metrics. The code will be released at https://github.com/Henry-Bi/SeaDiff.

Automated social behaviour analysis of mice has become an increasingly popular research area in behavioural neuroscience. Recently, pose information (i.e., locations of keypoints or skeleton) has been used to interpret social behaviours of mice. Nevertheless, effective encoding and decoding of social interaction information underlying the keypoints of mice has been rarely investigated in the existing methods. In particular, it is challenging to model complex social interactions between mice due to highly deformable body shapes and ambiguous movement patterns. To deal with the interaction modelling problem, we here propose a Cross-Skeleton Interaction Graph Aggregation Network (CS-IGANet) to learn abundant dynamics of freely interacting mice, where a Cross-Skeleton Node-level Interaction module (CS-NLI) is used to model multi-level interactions (i.e., intra-, inter- and cross-skeleton interactions). Furthermore, we design a novel Interaction-Aware Transformer (IAT) to dynamically learn the graph-level representation of social behaviours and update the node-level representation, guided by our proposed interaction-aware self-attention mechanism. Finally, to enhance the representation ability of our model, an auxiliary self-supervised learning task is proposed for measuring the similarity between cross-skeleton nodes. Experimental results on the standard CRMI13-Skeleton and our PDMB-Skeleton datasets show that our proposed model outperforms several other state-of-the-art approaches.

The emergence of deep and large-scale spiking neural networks (SNNs) exhibiting high performance across diverse complex datasets has led to a need for compressing network models due to the presence of a significant number of redundant structural units, aiming to more effectively leverage their low-power consumption and biological interpretability advantages. Currently, most model compression techniques for SNNs are based on unstructured pruning of individual connections, which requires specific hardware support. Hence, we propose a structured pruning approach based on the activity levels of convolutional kernels named Spiking Channel Activity-based (SCA) network pruning framework. Inspired by synaptic plasticity mechanisms, our method dynamically adjusts the network’s structure by pruning and regenerating convolutional kernels during training, enhancing the model’s adaptation to the current target task. While maintaining model performance, this approach refines the network architecture, ultimately reducing computational load and accelerating the inference process. This indicates that structured dynamic sparse learning methods can better facilitate the application of deep SNNs in low-power and high-efficiency scenarios.

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) equipped with the intelligent underwater object detection technique is of great significance for underwater navigation. Advanced underwater object detection frameworks adopt skip connections to enhance the feature representation which further boosts the detection precision. However, we reveal two limitations of standard skip connections: 1) standard skip connections do not consider the feature heterogeneity, resulting in a sub-optimal feature fusion strategy; 2) feature redundancy exists in the skip connected features that not all the channels in the fused feature maps are equally important, the network learning should focus on the informative channels rather than the redundant ones. In this paper, we propose a novel channel-weighted skip connection network (CWSCNet) to learn multiple hyper fusion features for improving multi-scale underwater object detection. In CWSCNet, a novel feature fusion module, named channel-weighted skip connection (CWSC), is proposed to adaptively adjust the importance of different channels during feature fusion. The CWSC module removes feature heterogeneity that strengthens the compatibility of different feature maps, it also works as an effective feature selection strategy that enables CWSCNet to focus on learning channels with more object-related information. Extensive experiments on three underwater object detection datasets RUOD, URPC2017 and URPC2018 show that the proposed CWSCNet achieves comparable or state-of-the-art performances in underwater object detection.

Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders, and a large number of depressed people commit suicide each year. Potential depression sufferers usually do not consult psychological doctors because they feel ashamed or are unaware of any depression, which may result in severe delay of diagnosis and treatment. In the meantime, evidence shows that social media data provides valuable clues about physical and mental health conditions. In this paper, we argue that it is feasible to identify depression at an early stage by mining online social behaviours. Our approach, which is innovative to the practice of depression detection, does not rely on the extraction of numerous or complicated features to achieve accurate depression detection. Instead, we propose a novel classifier, namely, Cost-sensitive Boosting Pruning Trees (CBPT), which demonstrates a strong classification ability on two publicly accessible Twitter depression detection datasets. To comprehensively evaluate the classification capability of CBPT, we use additional three datasets from the UCI machine learning repository and CBPT obtains appealing classification results against several state of the arts boosting algorithms. Finally, we comprehensively explore the influence factors for the model prediction, and the results manifest that our proposed framework is promising for identifying Twitter users with depression.

The study of mouse social behaviors has been increasingly undertaken in neuroscience research. However, automated quantification of mouse behaviors from the videos of interacting mice is still a challenging problem, where object tracking plays a key role in locating mice in their living spaces. Artificial markers are often applied for multiple mice tracking, which are intrusive and consequently interfere with the movements of mice in a dynamic environment. In this article, we propose a novel method to continuously track several mice and individual parts without requiring any specific tagging. First, we propose an efficient and robust deep-learning-based mouse part detection scheme to generate part candidates. Subsequently, we propose a novel Bayesian-inference integer linear programming (BILP) model that jointly assigns the part candidates to individual targets with necessary geometric constraints while establishing pair-wise association between the detected parts. There is no publicly available dataset in the research community that provides a quantitative test bed for part detection and tracking of multiple mice, and we here introduce a new challenging Multi-Mice PartsTrack dataset that is made of complex behaviors. Finally, we evaluate our proposed approach against several baselines on our new datasets, where the results show that our method outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy. We also demonstrate the generalization ability of the proposed approach on tracking zebra and locust.

Deep learning based object detection methods have achieved promising performance in controlled environments. However, these methods lack sufficient capabilities to handle underwater object detection due to these challenges: (1) images in the underwater datasets and real applications are blurry whilst accompanying severe noise that confuses the detectors and (2) objects in real applications are usually small. In this paper, we propose a Sample-WeIghted hyPEr Network (SWIPENET), and a novel training paradigm named Curriculum Multi-Class Adaboost (CMA), to address these two problems at the same time. Firstly, the backbone of SWIPENET produces multiple high resolution and semantic-rich Hyper Feature Maps, which significantly improve small object detection. Secondly, inspired by the human education process that drives the learning from easy to hard concepts, we propose the noise-robust CMA training paradigm that learns the clean data first and then move on to learns the diverse noisy data. Experiments on four underwater object detection datasets show that the proposed SWIPENET+CMA framework achieves better or competitive accuracy in object detection against several state-of-the-art approaches.

Automated analysis of mouse behaviours is crucial for many applications in neuroscience. However, quantifying mouse behaviours from videos or images remains a challenging problem, where pose estimation plays an important role in describing mouse behaviours. Although deep learning based methods have made promising advances in human pose estimation, they cannot be directly applied to pose estimation of mice due to different physiological natures. Particularly, since mouse body is highly deformable, it is a challenge to accurately locate different keypoints on the mouse body. In this paper, we propose a novel Hourglass network based model, namely Graphical Model based Structured Context Enhancement Network (GM-SCENet) where two effective modules, i.e., Structured Context Mixer (SCM) and Cascaded Multi-level Supervision (CMLS) are subsequently implemented. SCM can adaptively learn and enhance the proposed structured context information of each mouse part by a novel graphical model that takes into account the motion difference between body parts. Then, the CMLS module is designed to jointly train the proposed SCM and the Hourglass network by generating multi-level information, increasing the robustness of the whole network. Using the multi-level prediction information from SCM and CMLS, we develop an inference method to ensure the accuracy of the localisation results. Finally, we evaluate our proposed approach against several baselines on our Parkinson’s Disease Mouse Behaviour (PDMB) and the standard DeepLabCut Mouse Pose datasets. The experimental results show that our method achieves better or competitive performance against the other state-of-the-art approaches.

Underwater image enhancement, as a pre-processing step to support the following object detection task, has drawn considerable attention in the field of underwater navigation and ocean exploration. However, most of the existing underwater image enhancement strategies tend to consider enhancement and detection as two fully independent modules with no interaction, and the practice of separate optimisation does not always help the following object detection task. In this article, we propose two perceptual enhancement models, each of which uses a deep enhancement model with a detection perceptor. The detection perceptor provides feedback information in the form of gradients to guide the enhancement model to generate patch level visually pleasing or detection favourable images. In addition, due to the lack of training data, a hybrid underwater image synthesis model, which fuses physical priors and data-driven cues, is proposed to synthesise training data and generalise our enhancement model for real-world underwater images. Experimental results show the superiority of our proposed method over several state-of-the-art methods on both real-world and synthetic underwater datasets.

Automated segmentation of brain glioma plays an active role in diagnosis decision, progression monitoring and surgery planning. Based on deep neural networks, previous studies have shown promising technologies for brain glioma segmentation. However, these approaches lack powerful strategies to incorporate contextual information of tumor cells and their surrounding, which has been proven as a fundamental cue to deal with local ambiguity. In this work, we propose a novel approach named Context-Aware Network (CANet) for brain glioma segmentation. CANet captures high dimensional and discriminative features with contexts from both the convolutional space and feature interaction graphs. We further propose context guided attentive conditional random fields which can selectively aggregate features. We evaluate our method using publicly accessible brain glioma segmentation datasets BRATS2017, BRATS2018 and BRATS2019. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better or competitive performance against several State-of-The-Art approaches under different segmentation metrics on the training and validation sets.

In recent years, deep learning based methods have achieved promising performance in standard object detection. However, these methods lack sufficient capabilities to handle underwater object detection due to these challenges: (1) Objects in real applications are usually small and their images are blurry, and (2) images in the underwater datasets and real applications accompany heterogeneous noise. To address these two problems, we first propose a novel neural network architecture, namely Sample-WeIghted hyPEr Network (SWIPENet), for small object detection. SWIPENet consists of high resolution and semantic-rich Hyper Feature Maps which can significantly improve small object detection accuracy. In addition, we propose a novel sample-weighted loss function which can model sample weights for SWIPENet, which uses a novel sample re-weighting algorithm, namely Invert Multi-Class Adaboost (IMA), to reduce the influence of noise on the proposed SWIPENet. Experiments on two underwater robot picking contest datasets URPC2017 and URPC2018 show that the proposed SWIPENet+IMA framework achieves better performance in detection accuracy against several state-of-the-art object detection approaches.

Internal waves are a widespread geophysical phenomenon in stratified fluids and studying internal features in the coastal ocean is an important task. Using satellite imagery for studying oceanic internal waves is very popular and studying the low altitude aerial oblique photograph is a new direction. In this paper, we study the images captured from a circling aircraft which track a number of internal wave packets. The captured images are first rectified and photogram metrically mapped to ground coordinates, and then we use canny edge detector to find the internal wave propagation direction. The first several waves' ridges of each ground coordinated images are also exactly labeled and propagation speeds can be achieved. Experiment results show the performance of our algorithms.

Research on pedestrian detection still presents a lot of space for improvements, both on speed and detection accuracy. State-of-the-art object proposals approach has shown the very effective computational efficiency in object detection. In this paper, we present a framework for pedestrian detection based on the object proposals. Instead of scaling the test image to different sizes, we generate a pyramid of HOG templates by simply scaling the primary HOG descriptor. For the test image, Histogram of Oriented Gradient feature vector is calculated only in the region of object proposals without using sliding window, and the corresponding HOG template is selected according to the size of proposal region. Experiment results show that our proposed methods can achieve the equal detection rate while using only 20% time.

Person re-identification has become a hot research topic due to its importance in surveillance and forensics applications. The purpose of person re-identification is to find the same person from disjoint camera views at different time. Most of the existing methods try to identify the person by measuring the similarity of two still images from different camera views, which only uses intraimage features such as color, shape and texture. In this paper, we propose a person re-identification architecture which analyzes a sequence pair while not an image pair, so not only intra-image features but also the gait feature is also considered. In contrast to existing works that use handcrafted features, our method automatically learns spatio-temporal features optimal for the person re-identification task with a deep convolutional network. To learn a discriminant metric, we use a subspace and metric learning method called Cross-view Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (XQDA).The process of XQDA is also called transfer learning. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms the state of the art on both a large dataset (CUHK03) and a medium-sized dataset (CUHK01). We also get a better performance on a small dataset (VIPeR) with a pre-trained network without fine-tuning.

HuiWei Zhou, Long Chen, Fulin Shi, Degen Huang. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2015.