Person Re-Identification (ReID) task is important for designing intelligent surveillance systems. ReID can be highly challenging in low-light and low resolution scenarios. Existing ReID datasets predominantly feature cropped pedestrian images captured in well-lit environments, often lacking semantic richness, frame-level temporal continuity, and robustness to adverse conditions. To address these limitations, we introduce VAST-ReID, a new benchmark dataset specifically designed for the low-light person ReID task in real-world surveillance contexts. VAST-ReID consists of 1,441 surveillance videos collected at 24 different locations, capturing 256 distinct pedestrians of various age groups. The dataset emphasizes naturally low-light and visually degraded scenarios. Each identity is annotated with dense bounding boxes and enriched with auxiliary semantic labels, including pedestrian attributes and LLM-generated descriptions. While these annotations are not used during supervised training, they provide valuable semantic context for advancing research in language-guided retrieval and attribute-aware modeling. Additionally, we release identity-aligned image crops under the BoxTrack-ReID subset, which has over 18.7K frames sampled at 1fps from the raw videos, with standard training, gallery, and query splits compatible with the Market-1501 evaluation protocol, enabling straightforward benchmarking. The dataset has been benchmarked against SOTA methods, and experiments reveal that there is huge scope for improvement in ReID research. VAST-ReID is available at: https://github.com/Byte0wl/VAST-ReID

Identifying the Most Important Person (MIP) in complex social and sports events remains a challenging problem due to the dynamic nature of group interactions, subtle visual cues, and context-dependent semantics. Traditional methods often struggle to accurately capture the interplay between individuals and the overarching activity, especially in unstructured real-world environments. In addition, the lack of strong supervision and the need for a deeper contextual understanding further complicate the task. In this work, we propose IMPACT, a novel multi-modal framework that leverages recent advances in vision language models to bridge the gap between visual perception and semantic reasoning. Our approach integrates structured scene understanding, natural language generation, and cross-modal learning to jointly model activity recognition and MIP localization. The method integrates language, vision, and spatial reasoning to improve scene interpretability as well as accuracy in group activity recognition tasks. By incorporating language-based representations, the proposed method enables interpretable and robust performance in sports-centric group activity scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on C-Sports and NCAA datasets demonstrate that the framework significantly enhances the localization of key individuals as well as the accuracy of activity prediction, laying the groundwork for a holistic scene understanding in human-centric video and image analysis. Our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 81.6% when compared with human annotator markings and an increase in mAP scores by ∼ 5% for MIP identification.

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) serves as a fun-damental task in computer vision and is crucial for upgradign security systems. It helps in precisely identifying and characterizing various attributes of pedestrians. However, current PAR datasets have certain issues in representing a wide range of attributes correctly, which makes the ex-isting PAR methods less effective in real-world scenarios. Addressing this limitation, this paper introduces PEARL, a comprehensive dataset comprising of diverse pedestrian images annotated with 146 attributes. These samples have been sourced from surveillance videos across twelve coun-tries. This paper also formulates an image-based PAR using language-image fusion strategy and utilizes CLIP as a new evaluation baseline. Specifically, we leverage textual infor-mation by transforming sets of attributes into meaningful sentences. Addressing the inherent data imbalance in PAR, we provide three types of prompt settings to optimize the training of the CLIP model. Our evaluation encompasses a thorough assessment of the proposed baseline model across various datasets, including PEARL dataset as well as estab-lished PAR benchmarks such as PA100K, RAP, and PETA.

The main challenge in multi-view pedestrian detection is integrating view-specific features into a unified space for comprehensive end-to-end perception. Prior multi-view detection methods have focused on projecting perspective-view features onto the ground plane, creating a "bird’s eye view" (BEV) representation of the scene. This paper proposes a simple but effective architecture that utilizes a nonparametric 3D feature-pulling strategy. This strategy directly extracts the corresponding 2D features for each valid voxel within the 3D feature volume, addressing the feature loss that may arise in previous methods. The proposed framework introduces three novel modules, each crafted to bolster the generalization capabilities of multi-view detection systems. Through extensive experiments, the efficacy of the proposed model is demonstrated. The results show a new state-of-the-art accuracy, both in conventional scenarios and particularly in the context of scene generalization benchmarks.

Motion blur, which disturbs human and machine perceptions of a scene, has been considered an unnecessary artifact that should be removed. However, the blur can be a useful clue to understanding the dynamic scene, since various sources of motion generate different types of artifacts. Motivated by the relationship between motion and blur, we propose a motion-aware feature learning framework for dynamic scene deblurring through multi-task learning. Our multi-task framework simultaneously estimates a deblurred image and a motion field from a blurred image. We design the encoder-decoder architectures for two tasks, and the encoder part is shared between them. Our motion estimation network could effectively distinguish between different types of blur, which facilitates image deblurring. Understanding implicit motion information through image deblurring could improve the performance of motion estimation. In addition to sharing the network between two tasks, we propose a reblurring loss function to optimize the overall parameters in our multi-task architecture. We provide an intensive analysis of complementary tasks to show the effectiveness of our multi-task framework. Furthermore, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art deblurring methods with respect to both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have facilitated substantial progress on various problems in computer vision and image processing. However, applying them to image fusion has remained challenging due to the lack of the labelled data for supervised learning. This paper introduces a deep image fusion network (DIF-Net), an unsupervised deep learning framework for image fusion. The DIF-Net parameterizes the entire processes of image fusion, comprising of feature extraction, feature fusion, and image reconstruction, using a CNN. The purpose of DIF-Net is to generate an output image which has an identical contrast to high-dimensional input images. To realize this, we propose an unsupervised loss function using the structure tensor representation of the multi-channel image contrasts. Different from traditional fusion methods that involve time-consuming optimization or iterative procedures to obtain the results, our loss function is minimized by a stochastic deep learning solver with large-scale examples. Consequently, the proposed method can produce fused images that preserve source image details through a single forward network trained without reference ground-truth labels. The proposed method has broad applicability to various image fusion problems, including multi-spectral, multi-focus, and multi-exposure image fusions. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that the proposed technique outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches for various applications.

Regularization-based image restoration is one of the most powerful tools in image processing and computer vision thanks to its flexibility for handling various inverse problems. However, designing an optimal regularization function still remains unsolved since natural images and related scene types have a complex structure. In this paper, we present a general and principled framework, called deeply aggregated alternating minimization (DeepAM). We design a convolutional neural network (CNN) to implicitly parameterize the regularizer of the alternating minimization (AM) algorithm. Contrary to the conventional AM algorithm based on a point-wise proximal mapping, the DeepAM projects intermediate estimate into a set of natural images via deep aggregation. Since the CNN is fully integrated into the AM procedure, all parameters can be jointly optimized through end-to-end training. These properties enable the DeepAM to converge with a small number of iterations, while maintaining an algorithmic simplicity. We show that the DeepAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including nonlocal-based methods, Plug-and-Play regularization, and recent data-driven approaches. The effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated in a variety of image restoration tasks: Guassian denoising, deraining, deblurring, super-resolution, color-guided depth upsampling, and RGB/NIR restoration.

Training deep networks commonly follows the supervised learning paradigm, which requires large-scale semantically-labeled data. The construction of such dataset is one of the major challenges when approaching to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) due to the expense of human annotation. In this paper, we explore whether unsupervised stereo-based cues can be used to learn high-level semantics for monocular road detection. Specifically, we estimate drivable space and surface normals from stereo images, which are used for pseudo ground-truth to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) as a multi-task learning scheme. Combining these multiple self-supervision tasks enables CNN to jointly encode the knowledge of obstacle and ground-plane into a single frame. We demonstrate that the feature representation learned by our multi-task approach synergistically provides a rich knowledge about geometrical characteristics. Experiments on the KITTI road dataset show that our representation outperforms state-of-the-art road detection approaches.

Recent works on machine learning have greatly advanced the accuracy of single image depth estimation. However, the resulting depth images are still over-smoothed and perceptually unsatisfying. This paper casts depth prediction from single image as a parametric learning problem. Specifically, we propose a deep variational model that effectively integrates heterogeneous predictions from two convolutional neural networks (CNNs), named global and local networks. They have contrasting network architecture and are designed to capture depth information with complementary attributes. These intermediate outputs are then combined in the integration network based on the variational framework. By unrolling the optimization steps of Split Bregman (SB) iterations in the integration network, our model can be trained in an end-to-end manner. This enables one to simultaneously learn an efficient parameterization of the CNNs and hyper-parameter in the variational method. Finally, we offer a new dataset of 0.22 million RGB-D images captured by Microsoft Kinect v2. Our model generates realistic and discontinuity-preserving depth prediction without involving any low-level segmentation or superpixels. Intensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in a range of RGB-D benchmarks including both indoor and outdoor scenarios.

Regularization-based image restoration has remained an active research topic in image processing and computer vision. It often leverages a guidance signal captured in different-fields as an additional cue. In this work, we present a general framework for image restoration, called deeply aggregated alternating minimization (DeepAM). We propose to train deep neural network to advance two of the steps in the conventional AM algorithm: proximal mapping and β-continuation. Both steps are learned from a large dataset in an end-to-end manner. The proposed framework enables the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to operate as a regularizer in the AM algorithm. We show that our learned regularizer via deep aggregation outperforms the recent data-driven approaches as well as the nonlocal-based methods. The flexibility and effectiveness of our framework are demonstrated in several restoration tasks, including single image denoising, RGB-NIR restoration, and depth superresolution.

Recent works on machine learning have greatly advanced the accuracy of depth estimation from a single image. However, resulting depth images are still visually unsatisfactory, often producing poor boundary localization and spurious regions. In this paper, we formulate this problem from single images as a deep adversarial learning framework. A two-stage convolutional network is designed as a generator to sequentially predict global and local structures of the depth image. At the heart of our approach is a training criterion based on adversarial discriminator which attempts to distinguish between real and generated depth images as accurately as possible. Our model enables more realistic and structure-preserving depth prediction from a single image, compared to state-of-the-arts approaches. An experimental comparison demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach on large RGB-D dataset.

We present a multi-scale deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for the task of automatic 2D-to-3D conversion. Traditional methods, which make a virtual view from a reference view, consist of separate stages i.e., depth (or disparity) estimation for the reference image and depth image-based rendering (DIBR) with estimated depth. In contrast, we reformulate the view synthesis task as an image reconstruction problem with a spatial transformer module and directly make stereo image pairs with a unified CNN framework without ground-truth depth as a supervision. We further propose a multi-scale deep architecture to capture the large displacements between images from coarse-level and enhance the detail from fine-level. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over state-of-the-art approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively on the KITTI driving dataset.