Rainy weather conditions significantly degrade image quality, posing a major challenge for object detection tasks. Conventional methods often address this issue through domain adaptation, or the "derain then detect" approach that utilizes image deraining as the preprocessing technique. This paper presents KBY-Net, a novel end-to-end Y-Net architecture that is built upon the YOLOv8 architecture and leverages multi-task learning for concurrent image restoration and object detection. First, KBY-Net incorporates a novel KBY-decoder designed for image deraining. This decoder leverages Cross Stage Partial (CSP) layer and kernel basis attention (KBA) module to improve feature representation. Second, KBY-Net adopted two innovative modules; a multi-Dconv head transposed attention (MDTA) module at the bottleneck and a multi-axis feature fusion (MFF) block at the neck of the Y-Net. The multi-DConv module empowers the model to capture long-range dependencies and complex representations, and the MFF block refines the extracted features – both contribute significantly to accurate object detection in challenging rainy scenes. Empirical evaluations on benchmark rainy datasets demonstrate that KBY-Net outperforms the state-ofthe-art object detection approaches by a significant margin both quantitatively and qualitatively

Despite demonstrated outstanding effectiveness in various computer vision tasks, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Nowadays, adversarial attacks as well as their defenses w.r.t. DNNs in image domain have been intensively studied, and there are some recent works starting to explore adversarial attacks w.r.t. DNNs in video domain. However, the corresponding defense is rarely studied. In this paper, we propose a new two-stage framework for defending video adversarial attack. It contains two main components, namely self-adaptive Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compression defense and optical texture based defense (OTD). In self-adaptive JPEG compression defense, we propose to adaptively choose an appropriate JPEG quality based on an estimation of moving foreground object, such that the JPEG compression could depress most impact of adversarial noise without losing too much video quality. In OTD, we generate "optical texture" containing high-frequency information based on the optical flow map, and use it to edit Y channel (in YCrCb color space) of input frames, thus further reducing the influence of adversarial perturbation. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in recovering the classification performance on perturbed videos.

After the works on the state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, the standard organizations continued to study the potential video coding technologies for the next generation of video coding standard, named Versatile Video Coding (VVC). Transform is a key technique for compression efficiency, and core experiment 6 (CE6) is carried out to explore the transform related coding tools. In this paper, we propose a novel separable transform based on Karhunen-Loève Transform (KLT) to eliminate the horizontal and vertical correlations in the residual samples of intra coding. In the proposed method, the weaknesses of the traditional KLT are addressed. The separable KLT is developed as an alternative transform type in addition to DCT-II, and the transform matrices from 4×4 to 64×64 are trained from intra residual samples. Experimental results show the proposed method can achieve 2.7% bitrate saving averagely on top of the reference software of VVC (VTM-1.1), and the consistent performance improvement on test set also validates the strong generalization capacity of the proposed separable KLT.

Conventional content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems with the Euclidean distance metric in a high-dimensional visual feature space usually cannot achieve satisfactory performance due to the semantic gap. Relevance feedback (RF) has been introduced as a powerful tool to involve the user in the system to improve the performance of CBIR. Despite the success, an on-line learning task can be tedious and boring for the user. Various schemes have been proposed to exploit the RF log data to further enhance the performance of CBIR. In this paper, we propose a semantic subspace learning (SSL) method to exploit the RF log data with contextual information for an image retrieval task. Different from conventional subspace learning approaches, our method can directly learn a semantic concept subspace from the RF log data with contextual information without using any class label information. We show that the performance of the image retrieval task can be significantly improved in the low-dimensional semantic concept subspace. Extensive experiments on a real-world image database demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in improving the performance of CBIR by exploiting the RF log data.