Infants develop complex visual understanding rapidly, even preceding of the acquisition of linguistic skills. As computer vision seeks to replicate the human vision system, understanding infant visual development may offer valuable insights. In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary study exploring this question: can a computational model that imitates the infant learning process develop broader visual concepts that extend beyond the vocabulary it has heard, similar to how infants naturally learn? To investigate this, we analyze a recently published model in Science by Vong et al., which is trained on longitudinal, egocentric images of a single child paired with transcribed parental speech. We perform neuron labeling to identify visual concept neurons hidden in the model’s internal representations. We then demonstrate that these neurons can recognize objects beyond the model’s original vocabulary. Furthermore, we compare the differences in representation between infant models and those in modern computer vision models, such as CLIP and ImageNet pre-trained model. Ultimately, our work bridges cognitive science and computer vision by analyzing the internal representations of a computational model trained on an infant visual and linguistic inputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kexueyi/discover_infant_vis.

Zero-watermarking is a key technique for achieving lossless and flexible copyright protection of depth image-based rendering (DIBR) videos. Existing approaches extract features of both 2D frames and depth maps via a single mechanism to protect them simultaneously. However, it is difficult for these schemes to fully satisfy the copyright protection requirements of the two components, including the remarkable discriminative capability of 3D videos and robustness against various attacks. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel multiple-feature-based zero-watermarking scheme to protect the copyright of DIBR 3D videos. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scheme that integrates multiple features to improve both the discriminative capability and robustness against various attacks. Specifically, dual-tree complex wavelet transform and discrete cosine transform features enhance the robustness against DIBR conversion and noise addition, respectively, while ring-partition statistical residual features ensure robustness against geometric attacks and provide sufficient discriminative capacity. In addition, we use a logistic-logistic chaotic system to encrypt these multiple features for enhanced security and design an attention-based fusion approach to offer an optimal copyright protection solution. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme has stronger robustness and discriminative capacity compared to state-of-the-art zero-watermarking methods.

Copyright protection of depth image-based rendering (DIBR) 3D videos is crucial due to the popularity of these videos. Despite the success of recent watermarking schemes, it is still challenging to ensure the robustness against strong geometric attacks when both lossless quality and distinguishability of protected videos are required. In this paper, we pro-pose a novel zero-watermarking scheme to improve the performance under strong geometric attacks when satisfying the other two requirements. In our scheme, CT-SVD-based features are extracted to ensure both distinguishability and robustness against signal processing and DIBR conversion at-tacks, while a SIFT-based rectication mechanism is designed to resist geometric attacks. Further, an attention-based fusion strategy is proposed to complement the robustness of rectied and unrectied CT-SVD features. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms the existing zero-watermarking schemes in terms of distinguishability and robustness against strong geometric attacks such as rotation, cyclic translation and shearing.

In recent years, coverless image steganography attracts significant attentions due to its distortion-free trait on carrier images to avoid the detection by steganalysis tools. Despite this advantage, current coverless methods face several challenges, e.g., vulnerability to geometrical attacks and low hidden capacity. In this paper, we propose a novel coverless steganography algorithm based on chaotic encrypted dual radial harmonic Fourier moments (DRHFM) to tackle the challenges. In specific, we build mappings between the extracted DRHFM features and secret messages. These features are robust to various of attacks, especially to geometrical attacks. We further deploy the DRHFM parameters to adjust the feature length, thus ensuring the high hidden capacity. Moreover, we introduce a chaos encryption algorithm to enhance the security of the mapping features. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art coverless steganography based on image mapping in terms of robustness and hidden capacity.