Despite significant advances in the field of specular highlight removal in recent years, existing methods predominantly focus on natural images, where highlights typically appear on raised or edged surfaces of objects. These highlights are often small and sparsely distributed. However, for text images such as cards and posters, the flat surfaces reflect light uniformly, resulting in large areas of highlights. Current methods struggle with these large-area highlights in text images, often producing severe visual artifacts or noticeable discrepancies between filled pixels and the original image in the central high-intensity highlight areas. To address these challenges, we propose the Hierarchical Adaptive Filtering Network (HAFNet). Our approach performs filtering at both the downsampled deep feature layer and the upsampled image reconstruction layer. By designing and applying the Adaptive Comprehensive Filtering Module (ACFM) and Adaptive Dilated Filtering Module (ADFM) at different layers, our method effectively restores semantic information in large-area specular highlight regions and recovers detail loss at various scales. The required filtering kernels are pre-generated by a prediction network, allowing them to adaptively adjust according to different images and their semantic content, enabling robust performance across diverse scenarios. Additionally, we utilize Unity3D to construct a comprehensive large-area highlight dataset featuring images with rich texts and complex textures. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Eyeglass reflection removal can restore the texture information in the reflection destructed eye area, which is meaningful for various tasks on the facial images. It is still challenging to correctly eliminate reflections, reasonably restore the lost contents, and guarantee that the final result has a consistent color and illumination with the input image. In this paper, we introduce a Degradation-guided Local-to-Global (DL2G) restoration framework to address this problem. We first propose a multiplicative reflection degradation model, which is used to alleviate reflection degradation to obtain a preliminary result. Then, in the local details restoration stage, we propose a local structure-aware diffusion model to learn the true distribution of texture details in the eye area. This helps in recovering lost contents in the regions of heavy degradation where the background is invisible. Finally, in the global consistency refinement stage, we utilize the input image as a reference image to generate the final result that is consistent with the input image in color and illumination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can improve the effect of reflection removal and generate results with more reasonable semantics, exquisite details, and harmonious illumination.

Abstract The YOLO series of algorithms have made substantial contributions to the detection of insulator defects in power transmission line operations. However, existing target detection algorithms for the small target detection and low‐quality insulator images encounter difficulties in effectively capturing relevant features, resulting in a higher probability of target loss. To identify and classify defects in the operational state of insulators, an improved YOLOv8 target identification algorithm called DGW‐YOLOv8 is proposed in this paper. The deformable attention backbone of the DGW‐YOLOv8 target identification algorithm is designed by adding the deformable ConvNets v2 module and the global attention mechanism. This addition reduces the feature loss caused by the network feature processing, enhances the sensitivity of the algorithm to small‐scale targets, and reduces the impact caused by the different global positions of the targets. Additionally, to address the problem of low quality of captured images, WIoU v3 is used to replace CIoU in the original YOLOv8 target identification algorithm to optimize the loss function, reduce the degrees of freedom, and improve the network robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced YOLOv8 algorithm can achieve an improvement of 2.4% and 5.5% in mAP and mAP50‐95, respectively, compared with the original algorithm.

Fault simulation is a critical component of the automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) tool, which is widely used in chip development. The CPU–GPU heterogeneous system can accelerate fault simulation. However, existing work faces the following challenges: 1) Path Divergence: The simulation path of different faults is not uniform, which leads to low parallel efficiency of different GPU threads; 2) Unbalanced Workload: The load of different computing units is not balanced, leading to serious differences in the execution time of each part; and 3) Poor Scalability: When the circuit scale increases, the GPU memory is limited and the simulation has strong structural dependence, which makes the simulation difficult. In this work, we propose an adaptive multidimensional parallel fault simulation framework based on the CPU–GPU heterogeneous system. We adaptively select different simulation approaches according to different circuit scales. In detail, we use the fanout-free region (FFR) grouping method to solve the problem of path divergence. We also use a combination of static and dynamic load balancing to tradeoff data handling and the execution time of each computing unit. We limit the queue length used in the GPU to improve the scalability of the simulation. To further accelerate, we propose the 4-D parallel architecture on multiple GPUs. Extensive experimental results show that our fault simulator based on 8 GPU is$105.7\times $faster than the commercial tool on average. For tens of millions of gate-level circuits, our fault simulator based on one GPU is up to$25.9\times $faster than the CPU single-threaded simulator.

Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) is widely used in many fields (e.g., recommender systems). In recent years, the graph-based ANNS methods have attracted the attention of many researchers due to their superiority compared to non-graph-based methods. Compared with traditional recommender systems, mobile recommender systems have higher latency requirements. The graph-based ANNS method faces the following challenges that make it difficult to meet the requirements. (1) Poor connectivity. Due to the limitation of the construction algorithm, the connectivity of the graph is poor, which in turn affects the search performance. (2) Redundant search. The existing search algorithm uses sufficiently long search steps for all queries to achieve high search accuracy. However, the query search steps follow the long-tailed distribution that brings the redundant search, e.g., for more than 40 % of the queries, 87.4 % of the search overhead is redundant. We propose two optimization strategies to tackle the above challenges. (1) Reverse connection enhancement strategy. In the graph construction process, we increase the in-degree of the point to be inserted to enhance the graph connectivity, while keeping the out-degree low to maintain the high search efficiency. (2) Query aware early termination strategy. We identify regional features to predict the number of remaining search steps to achieve dynamic search termination and reduce the redundant search overhead. Finally, we verify the proposed solutions on multiple representative datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art graph-based algorithm, our solutions can improve the search speed up to 1.21x when the recall rate equals 0.95.

With the down-scaling of CMOS technology, the design complexity of very large-scale integrated is increasing. Although the application of machine learning (ML) techniques in electronic design automation (EDA) can trace its history back to the 1990s, the recent breakthrough of ML and the increasing complexity of EDA tasks have aroused more interest in incorporating ML to solve EDA tasks. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of existing ML for EDA studies, organized following the EDA hierarchy.