ABSTRACT The Vehicular Social Network (VSN) enables convenient interactions through its unique social characteristics, but simultaneously faces critical security threats—including privacy leakage, malicious information propagation, and social engineering attacks—that endanger system security and compromise user interests. Existing privacy‐preserving schemes exhibit substantial limitations in dynamic VSN environments, as they struggle to simultaneously ensure strong security, real‐time responsiveness, and efficient resource utilization. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes an efficient and reliable message privacy protection scheme leveraging signcryption technology. The scheme restructures the signcryption process into two distinct phases—offline and online—for enhanced efficiency. During the offline phase, the majority of computations are pre‐processed without requiring the actual message content or recipient identity. In the online phase, ciphertexts are assembled rapidly with minimal computational overhead, substantially improving signcryption efficiency and addressing the stringent efficiency and security demands of short‐lived communications in VSN scenarios. Security analysis confirms that the scheme satisfies multiple critical requirements, including message confidentiality, unforgeability, vehicle identity privacy preservation, and traceability of malicious nodes. Performance evaluation indicates that, relative to the latest Certificateless Online/Offline Signcryption (CLOOSC) scheme, the proposed approach achieves a 20% reduction in communication overhead and approximately 50% reduction in signcryption computation costs. This offers a practical and effective solution for secure and efficient message communication in VSN environments.

Multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) combine different modal data (e.g., text and image) for a comprehensive understanding of entities. Despite the recent progress of large-scale MMKGs, existing MMKGs neglect the multi-aspect nature of entities, limiting the ability to comprehend entities from various perspectives.In this paper, we construct AspectMMKG, the first MMKG with aspect-related images by matching images to different entity aspects. Specifically, we collect aspect-related images from a knowledge base, and further extract aspect-related sentences from the knowledge base as queries to retrieve a large number of aspect-related images via an online image search engine. Finally, AspectMMKG contains 2,380 entities, 18,139 entity aspects, and 645,383 aspect-related images. We demonstrate the usability of AspectMMKG in entity aspect linking (EAL) downstream task and show that previous EAL models achieve a new state-of-the-art performance with the help of AspectMMKG.To facilitate the research on aspect-related MMKG, we further propose an aspect-related image retrieval (AIR) model, that aims to correct and expand aspect-related images in AspectMMKG.We train an AIR model to learn the relationship between entity image and entity aspect-related images by incorporating entity image, aspect, and aspect image information. Experimental results indicate that the AIR model could retrieve suitable images for a given entity w.r.t different aspects.

We propose to tackle the problem of multiview 2D/3D rigid registration for intervention via a Point-Of-Interest Network for Tracking and Triangulation (POINT2). POINT2learns to establish 2D point-to-point correspondences between the pre- and intra-intervention images by tracking a set of random POIs. The 3D pose of the pre-intervention volume is then estimated through a triangulation layer. In POINT2, the unified framework of the POI tracker and the triangulation layer enables learning informative 2D features and estimating 3D pose jointly. In contrast to existing approaches, POINT2only requires a single forward-pass to achieve a reliable 2D/3D registration. As the POI tracker is shift-invariant, POINT2is more robust to the initial pose of the 3D pre-intervention image. Extensive experiments on a large-scale clinical cone-beam CT (CBCT) dataset show that the proposed POINT2method outperforms the existing learning-based method in terms of accuracy, robustness and running time. Furthermore, when used as an initial pose estimator, our method also improves the robustness and speed of the state-of-the-art optimization-based approaches by ten folds.

Computed tomography (CT) is an imaging modality widely used for medical diagnosis and treatment. CT images are often corrupted by undesirable artifacts when metallic implants are carried by patients, which creates the problem of metal artifact reduction (MAR). Existing methods for reducing the artifacts due to metallic implants are inadequate for two main reasons. First, metal artifacts are structured and non-local so that simple image domain enhancement approaches would not suffice. Second, the MAR approaches which attempt to reduce metal artifacts in the X-ray projection (sinogram) domain inevitably lead to severe secondary artifact due to sinogram inconsistency. To overcome these difficulties, we propose an end-to-end trainable Dual Domain Network (DuDoNet) to simultaneously restore sinogram consistency and enhance CT images. The linkage between the sigogram and image domains is a novel Radon inversion layer that allows the gradients to back-propagate from the image domain to the sinogram domain during training. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvements over other single domain MAR approaches. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first end-to-end dual-domain network for MAR.

This paper presents an approach to predict the deformation of the lungs and surrounding organs during respiration. The framework incorporates a computational model of the respiratory system, which comprises an anatomical model extracted from computed tomography (CT) images at end-expiration (EE), and a biomechanical model of the respiratory physiology, including the material behavior and interactions between organs. A personalization step is performed to automatically estimate patient-specific thoracic pressure, which drives the biomechanical model. The zone-wise pressure values are obtained by using a trust-region optimizer, where the estimated motion is compared to CT images at end-inspiration (EI). A detailed convergence analysis in terms of mesh resolution, time stepping and number of pressure zones on the surface of the thoracic cavity is carried out. The method is then tested on five public datasets. Results show that the model is able to predict the respiratory motion with an average landmark error of 3.40 ±1.0 mm over the entire respiratory cycle. The estimated 3-D lung motion may constitute as an advanced 3-D surrogate for more accurate medical image reconstruction and patient respiratory analysis.

Routine ultrasound exam in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy involves manually measuring fetal head and brain structures in 2-D scans. The procedure requires a sonographer to find the standardized visualization planes with a probe and manually place measurement calipers on the structures of interest. The process is tedious, time consuming, and introduces user variability into the measurements. This paper proposes an automatic fetal head and brain (AFHB) system for automatically measuring anatomical structures from 3-D ultrasound volumes. The system searches the 3-D volume in a hierarchy of resolutions and by focusing on regions that are likely to be the measured anatomy. The output is a standardized visualization of the plane with correct orientation and centering as well as the biometric measurement of the anatomy. The system is based on a novel framework for detecting multiple structures in 3-D volumes. Since a joint model is difficult to obtain in most practical situations, the structures are detected in a sequence, one-by-one. The detection relies on Sequential Estimation techniques, frequently applied to visual tracking. The interdependence of structure poses and strong prior information embedded in our domain yields faster and more accurate results than detecting the objects individually. The posterior distribution of the structure pose is approximated at each step by sequential Monte Carlo. The samples are propagated within the sequence across multiple structures and hierarchical levels. The probabilistic model helps solve many challenges present in the ultrasound images of the fetus such as speckle noise, signal drop-out, shadows caused by bones, and appearance variations caused by the differences in the fetus gestational age. This is possible by discriminative learning on an extensive database of scans comprising more than two thousand volumes and more than thirteen thousand annotations. The average difference between ground truth and automatic measurements is below 2 mm with a running time of 6.9 s (GPU) or 14.7 s (CPU). The accuracy of the AFHB system is within inter-user variability and the running time is fast, which meets the requirements for clinical use.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for detecting multiple objects in 2D and 3D images. Since a joint multi-object model is difficult to obtain in most practical situations, we focus here on detecting the objects sequentially, one-by-one. The interdependence of object poses and strong prior information embedded in our domain of medical images results in better performance than detecting the objects individually. Our approach is based on Sequential Estimation techniques, frequently applied to visual tracking. Unlike in tracking, where the sequential order is naturally determined by the time sequence, the order of detection of multiple objects must be selected, leading to a Hierarchical Detection Network (HDN). We present an algorithm that optimally selects the order based on probability of states (object poses) within the ground truth region. The posterior distribution of the object pose is approximated at each step by sequential Monte Carlo. The samples are propagated within the sequence across multiple objects and hierarchical levels. We show on 2D ultrasound images of left atrium, that the automatically selected sequential order yields low mean detection error. We also quantitatively evaluate the hierarchical detection of fetal faces and three fetal brain structures in 3D ultrasound images.

Many vision problems can be cast as optimizing the conditional probability density function p(C\I) where I is an image and C is a vector of model parameters describing the image. Ideally, the density function p(C\I) would be smooth and unimodal allowing local optimization techniques, such as gradient descent or simplex, to converge to an optimal solution quickly, while preserving significant nonlinearities of the model. We propose to learn a conditional probability density satisfying these desired properties for the given training data set. To do this, we formulate a novel regression problem that finds a function approximating the target density. Learning the regressor is challenging due to the high dimensionality of model parameters, C, and the complexity of relating the image and the model. Our approach makes two contributions. First, we take a multilevel refinement approach by learning a series of density functions, each of which guides the solution of optimization algorithms increasingly converging to the correct solution. Second, we propose a new data sampling algorithm that takes into account the gradient information of the target function. We have applied this learning approach to deformable shape segmentation and have achieved better accuracy than the previous methods.

In this paper, we present a learning procedure called probabilistic boosting network (PBN) for joint real-time object detection and pose estimation. Grounded on the law of total probability, PBN integrates evidence from two building blocks, namely a multiclass boosting classifier for pose estimation and a boosted detection cascade for object detection. By inferring the pose parameter, we avoid the exhaustive scanning for the pose, which hampers real time requirement. In addition, we only need one integral image/volume with no need of image/volume rotation. We implement PBN using a graph-structured network that alternates the two tasks of foreground/background discrimination and pose estimation for rejecting negatives as quickly as possible. Compared with previous approaches, we gain accuracy in object localization and pose estimation while noticeably reducing the computation. We invoke PBN to detect the left ventricle from a 3D ultrasound volume, processing about 10 volumes per second, and the left atrium from 2D images in real time.

Illumination inconsistencies cause serious problems for classical computer vision applications such as tracking and stereo matching. We present a new approach to model illumination variations using an Illumination Ratio Map (IRM). An IRM computes the intensity ratio of corresponding points in an image pair. We formulate IRM recovery as a Markov network, which assumes spatially varying illumination changes can be modeled as a locally smooth function with boundaries. We show that the IRM Markov network can be easily incorporated into low-level vision problems, such as tracking and stereo matching, by integrating IRM estimation with the optical flow field/disparity map solution process. This leads to a unified Markov network. We develop an iterative optimization algorithm based on Belief Propagation to efficiently recover the illumination ratio map and the optical field/disparity map at the same time. Experiments demonstrate that our methods are robust and reliable.

This paper presents an image-based three-dimensioal (3-D) reverse modeling system. We take advantage of stereo vision-based method to acquire geometric information through sampling the surface of a physical object mounted on end effectors of a 4-DOF planar robot. Based on real-world sampling datasets, a realistic 3-D graphical model can be automatically constructed. We provide a new approach to system calibration, geometric information acquisition, and surface parameterization, and also implement a prototype system of rapidly establishing textured model that is available to virtual reality application.

Motion capture data from human subjects exhibits considerable redundancy. In this paper, we propose novel methods for exploiting this redundancy. In particular, we set out to find a subset of motion-capture markers that are able to provide fast and high-quality predictions of the remaining markers. We then develop a model that uses this reduced marker set to predict the others. We demonstrate that this subset of original markers is sufficient to capture subtle variations in human motion.We take a data-driven modeling approach to learn piecewise local linear models from a marker-based training set. We first divide motion sequences into segments of low dimensionality. We then retrieve a feature vector from each of the motion segments and use these feature vectors as modeling primitives to cluster the segments into a hierarchy of local linear models via a divisive clustering method. The selection of an appropriate linear model for reconstruction of a full-body pose is determined automatically via a classifier driven by a reduced marker set. After offline training, our method can quickly reconstruct full-body human motion using a reduced marker set without storing and searching the large database. We also demonstrate our method's ability to generalize over a variety of motions from multiple subjects.

We demonstrate a data-driven approach for representing, compressing, and indexing human-motion databases. Our modeling approach is based on piecewise-linear components that are determined via a divisive clustering method. Selection of the appropriate linear model is determined automatically via a classifier using a subspace of the most significant, or principle features (markers). We show that, after offline training, our model can accurately estimate and classify human motions. We can also construct indexing structures for motion sequences according to their transition trajectories through these linear components. Our method not only provides indices for whole and/or partial motion sequences, but also serves as a compressed representation for the entire motion database. Our method also tends to be immune to temporal variations, and thus avoids the expense of time-warping.

The bidirectional texture function (BTF) is a 6D function that describes the appearance of a real-world surface as a function of lighting and viewing directions. The BTF can model the fine-scale shadows, occlusions, and specularities caused by surface mesostructures. In this paper, we present algorithms for efficient synthesis of BTFs on arbitrary surfaces and for hardware-accelerated rendering. For both synthesis and rendering, a main challenge is handling the large amount of data in a BTF sample. To addresses this challenge, we approximate the BTF sample by a small number of 4D point appearance functions (PAFs) multiplied by 2D geometry maps. The geometry maps and PAFs lead to efficient synthesis and fast rendering of BTFs on arbitrary surfaces. For synthesis, a surface BTF can be generated by applying a texton-based sysnthesis algorithm to a small set of 2D geometry maps while leaving the companion 4D PAFs untouched. As for rendering, a surface BTF synthesized using geometry maps is well-suited for leveraging the programmable vertex and pixel shaders on the graphics hardware. We present a real-time BTF rendering algorithm that runs at the speed of about 30 frames/second on a mid-level PC with an ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our synthesis and rendering algorithms using both real and synthetic BTF samples.

We present an approach for decorating surfaces with progressively-variant textures . Unlike a homogeneous texture, a progressively-variant texture can model local texture variations, including the scale, orientation, color, and shape variations of texture elements. We describe techniques for modeling progressively-variant textures in 2D as well as for synthesizing them over surfaces. For 2D texture modeling, our feature-based warping technique allows the user to control the shape variations of texture elements, making it possible to capture complex texture variations such as those seen in animal coat patterns. In addition, our feature-based blending technique can create a smooth transition between two given homogeneous textures, with progressive changes of both shapes and colors of texture elements. For synthesizing textures over surfaces, the biggest challenge is that the synthesized texture elements tend to break apart as they progressively vary. To address this issue, we propose an algorithm based on texton masks, which mark most prominent texture elements in the 2D texture sample. By leveraging the power of texton masks, our algorithm can maintain the integrity of the synthesized texture elements on the target surface.

In this paper we describe a new method to map a texture on a surface with a spatially-variant filter. Our filter takes into consideration the effects of anisotropy using a Jacobian approximation while computing the sampling rate, and the interpolation weights are computed with a sinc function. We also discuss how to do forward and backward mapping with the filter and extend our algorithms to 3D meshes. Our experimental results verify our analysis.

The bidirectional texture function (BTF) is a 6D function that can describe textures arising from both spatially-variant surface reflectance and surface mesostructures. In this paper, we present an algorithm for synthesizing the BTF on an arbitrary surface from a sample BTF. A main challenge in surface BTF synthesis is the requirement of a consistent mesostructure on the surface, and to achieve that we must handle the large amount of data in a BTF sample. Our algorithm performs BTF synthesis based on surface textons, which extract essential information from the sample BTF to facilitate the synthesis. We also describe a general search strategy, called the k-coherent search, for fast BTF synthesis using surface textons. A BTF synthesized using our algorithm not only looks similar to the BTF sample in all viewing/lighthing conditions but also exhibits a consistent mesostructure when viewing and lighting directions change. Moreover, the synthesized BTF fits the target surface naturally and seamlessly. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm with sample BTFs from various sources, including those measured from real-world textures.