Video-based human pose estimation has long been a nontrivial task due to its dynamic nature and challenging detection scenarios such as occlusion and defocus. Inspired by the success of diffusion models, researchers have applied them to video pose estimation, outperforming traditional joint detection methods. However, existing diffusion model-based methods still face challenges like slow convergence and unstable pose generation. To tackle these issues, we propose DiffusionPose, a novel framework for video pose estimation that integrates diffusion models with optimization strategies: (1) We combine the emerging Mamba with Transformers to balance global and local spatio-temporal modeling. (2) We integrate Markov Random Fields into the reverse diffusion process to enhance the denoising of pose heatmaps, particularly addressing the issue of confused generation of occluded joints. (3) We mathematically formulate a Markov objective to supervise the heatmap denoising process, enabling the model to generate anatomically plausible skeletons. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three large-scale benchmark datasets. Interestingly, it shows surprising robustness in challenging video scenarios, improving the accuracy of the most difficult ankle joint by 16.9% compared to the previous best diffusion model-based method on the Challenging-PoseTrack dataset.

Video-based human pose estimation aims to localize keypoints across frames, enabling robust analysis of human motion in applications such as sports, surveillance, and healthcare. However, existing methods rely solely on visual cues, limiting their robustness in complex scenes involving occlusion, motion blur, or poor lighting. In contrast, dual coding theory from psychology suggests that human cognition is inherently multimodal: we learn by integrating visual perception with linguistic context to form structured, semantic understandings of the world. Visual input provides concrete spatiotemporal grounding, while language offers symbolic abstraction that enhances reasoning and generalization. Motivated by this cognitive principle, we present the first framework that explicitly incorporates language as an auxiliary modality to enhance video-based pose estimation. To address the lack of paired video-text datasets, we first employ a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to generate textual descriptions of human interactions from videos. We then propose a novel coarse-to-fine multimodal alignment pipeline: a cross-modal semantic interaction module establishes initial grounding between spatiotemporal visual features and textual embeddings, while an optimal transport-based feature matching mechanism enforces fine-grained, geometry-aware alignment. This cognitively inspired design enables more accurate and robust pose estimation, especially in visually challenging scenes like occlusion and motion blur. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks confirm that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Video-based human pose estimation has vast applications such as action recognition, sports analytics, and crime detection. However, this task is challenging as it involves interpreting both spatial context and temporal dynamics to accurately localize human anatomical keypoints in video sequences. Current approaches, often based on attention mechanisms, perform well but struggle in challenging scenarios like rapid motion and pose occlusion. We attribute these failures to two fundamental limitations: spatial uniformity, where models indiscriminately assign attention to both joint-relevant features and background clutter, thereby introducing spatial noise; and temporal rigidity, an inability to adapt to large joint displacements, resulting in severe feature misalignment during rapid motion. To overcome these challenges, we introduce PSTPose, a novel progressive spatiotemporal refinement framework. Specifically, to address the spatial uniformity problem, we propose a Discriminative Feature Enhancement (DFE) module that emphasizes joint-relevant features and a Feature Cluster Grouping (FCG) module that forms compact, semantically meaningful regions. For the temporal rigidity problem, we introduce a Deformable Spatiotemporal Fusion (DSF) module that adaptively aligns features across consecutive frames via deformation-aware sampling. This design ensures robust keypoint localization, particularly in cluttered and dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments on three large-scale benchmarks, PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, PoseTrack21, demonstrate that PSTPose establishes a new state-of-the-art.

Human pose estimation has given rise to a broad spectrum of novel and compelling applications, including action recognition, sports analysis, as well as surveillance. However, accurate video pose estimation remains an open challenge. One aspect that has been overlooked so far is that existing methods learn motion clues from all pixels rather than focusing on the target human body, making them easily misled and disrupted by unimportant information such as background changes or movements of other people. Additionally, while the current Transformer-based pose estimation methods has demonstrated impressive performance with global modeling, they struggle with local context perception and precise positional identification. In this paper, we try to tackle these challenges from three aspects: (1) We propose a bilayer Human-Keypoint Mask module that performs coarse-to-fine visual token refinement, which gradually zooms in on the target human body and keypoints while masking out unimportant figure regions. (2) We further introduce a novel deformable cross attention mechanism and a bidirectional separation strategy to adaptively aggregate spatial and temporal motion clues from constrained surrounding contexts. (3) We mathematically formulate the deformable cross attention, constraining that the model focuses solely on the regions centered at the target person body. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three large-scale benchmark datasets. A remarkable highlight is that our method achieves an 84.8 mean Average Precision (mAP) on the challenging wrist joint, which significantly outperforms the 81.5 mAP achieved by the current state-of-the-art method on the PoseTrack2017 dataset.

Human pose estimation in videos remains a challenge, largely due to the reliance on extensive manual annotation of large datasets, which is expensive and labor-intensive. Furthermore, existing approaches often struggle to capture long-range temporal dependencies and overlook the complementary relationship between temporal pose heatmaps and visual features. To address these limitations, we introduce STDPose, a novel framework that enhances human pose estimation by learning spatiotemporal dynamics in sparsely-labeled videos. STDPose incorporates two key innovations: 1) A novel Dynamic-Aware Mask to capture long-range motion context, allowing for a nuanced understanding of pose changes. 2) A system for encoding and aggregating spatiotemporal representations and motion dynamics to effectively model spatiotemporal relationships, improving the accuracy and robustness of pose estimation. STDPose establishes a new performance benchmark for both video pose propagation (i.e., propagating pose annotations from labeled frames to unlabeled frames) and pose estimation tasks, across three large-scale evaluation datasets. Additionally, utilizing pseudo-labels generated by pose propagation, STDPose achieves competitive performance with only 26.7% labeled data.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in novel view synthesis, but their reliance on large, diverse, and often untraceable Web datasets has raised pressing concerns about image copyright protection. Current methods fall short in reliably identifying unauthorized image use, as they struggle to generalize across varied generation tasks and fail when the training dataset includes images from multiple sources with few identifiable (watermarked or poisoned) samples. In this paper, we present novel evidence that diffusion-generated images faithfully preserve the statistical properties of their training data, particularly reflected in their spectral features. Leveraging this insight, we introduce CoprGuard, a robust frequency domain watermarking framework to safeguard against unauthorized image usage in diffusion model training and fine-tuning. CoprGuard demonstrates remarkable effectiveness against a wide range of models, from naive diffusion models to sophisticated text-to-image models, and is robust even when watermarked images comprise a mere 1% of the training dataset. This robust and versatile approach empowers content owners to protect their intellectual property in the era of AI-driven image generation.

Human pose estimation, with its broad applications in action recognition and motion capture, has experienced significant advancements. However, current Transformer-based methods for video pose estimation often face challenges in managing redundant temporal information and achieving fine-grained perception because they only focus on processing low-resolution features. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-scale resolution framework that encodes spatiotemporal representations at varying granularities and executes fine-grained perception compensation. Furthermore, we employ a density peaks clustering method to dynamically identify and prioritize tokens that offer important semantic information. This strategy effectively prunes redundant feature tokens, especially those arising from multi-frame features, thereby optimizing computational efficiency without sacrificing semantic richness. Empirically, it sets new benchmarks for both performance and efficiency on three large-scale datasets. Our method achieves a 93.8% improvement in inference speed compared to the baseline, while also enhancing pose estimation accuracy, reaching 87.4 mAP on the PoseTrack2017 dataset.

Multi-face deepfake videos are becoming increasingly prevalent, often appearing in natural social settings that challenge existing detection methods. Most current approaches excel at single-face detection but struggle in multi-face scenarios, due to a lack of awareness of crucial contextual cues. In this work, we develop a novel approach that leverages human cognition to analyze and defend against multi-face deepfake videos. Through a series of human studies, we systematically examine how people detect deepfake faces in social settings. Our quantitative analysis reveals four key cues humans rely on: scene-motion coherence, inter-face appearance compatibility, interpersonal gaze alignment, and face-body consistency. Guided by these insights, we introduce \textsf{HICOM}, a novel framework designed to detect every fake face in multi-face scenarios. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that \textsf{HICOM} improves average accuracy by 3.3\% in in-dataset detection and 2.8\% under real-world perturbations. Moreover, it outperforms existing methods by 5.8\% on unseen datasets, demonstrating the generalization of human-inspired cues. \textsf{HICOM} further enhances interpretability by incorporating an LLM to provide human-readable explanations, making detection results more transparent and convincing. Our work sheds light on involving human factors to enhance defense against deepfakes.

Constructing spatial interaction (SI) networks from massive geographic flow data is an important method for understanding the correlation patterns and trends among regions. However, large-scale SI networks usually cause complex edge interleaving and a sharp increase in noise information. A network skeleton can represent the key structure of the corresponding complex network with generalized network data. However, the existing extraction methods only consider the topological information of networks and ignore spatial information, which may cause difficulty maintaining the spatial distribution characteristics and the exclusion of key spatial information. To address the issue, we have developed a skeleton extraction method for large-scale SI networks. First, the network nodes are divided into different clusters via adaptive spatial clustering. Second, an entropy weight method is used to define a comprehensive evaluation indicator of the network node importance, and the nodes in each cluster are sorted and selected according to the comprehensive evaluation indicator. Finally, the skeleton structure of the SI network is reconstructed according to the selected nodes and their adjacent edges. Compared with the existing methods for extracting network skeletons, the proposed method can maintain the spatial distribution characteristics of SI networks while preserving key topological features.

Mobile health (mHealth) applications have become increasingly valuable in preventive healthcare and in reducing the burden on healthcare organizations. The aim of this article is to investigate the factors that influence user acceptance of mHealth apps and identify the underlying structure that shapes users’ behavioral intention. An online study that employed factorial survey design with vignettes was conducted, and a total of 1,669 participants from eight countries across four continents were included in the study. Structural equation modeling was employed to quantitatively assess how various factors collectively contribute to users’ willingness to use mHealth apps. The results indicate that users’ digital literacy has the strongest impact on their willingness to use them, followed by their online habit of sharing personal information. Users’ concerns about personal privacy only had a weak impact. Furthermore, users’ demographic background, such as their country of residence, age, ethnicity, and education, has a significant moderating effect. Our findings have implications for app designers, healthcare practitioners, and policymakers. Efforts are needed to regulate data collection and sharing and promote digital literacy among the general population to facilitate the widespread adoption of mHealth apps.

Misinformation has been a persistent and harmful phenomenon affecting our society in various ways, including individuals' physical health and economic stability. With the rise of short video platforms and related applications, the spread of multi-modal misinformation, encompassing images, texts, audios, and videos have exacerbated these concerns. The introduction of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion has further complicated matters, giving rise to Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) and presenting new challenges in detecting and mitigating misinformation. Consequently, traditional approaches to misinformation detection and intervention have become inadequate in this evolving landscape. This paper explores the challenges posed by AIGC in the context of misinformation. It examines the issue from psychological and societal perspectives, and explores the subtle manipulation traces found in AIGC at signal, perceptual, semantic, and human levels. By scrutinizing manipulation traces such as signal manipulation, semantic inconsistencies, logical incoherence, and psychological strategies, our objective is to tackle AI-generated misinformation and provide a conceptual design of systematic explainable solution. Ultimately, we aim for this paper to contribute valuable insights into combating misinformation, particularly in the era of AIGC.

Attending selectively to emotion-eliciting stimuli is intrinsic to human vision. In this research, we investigate how emotion-elicitation features of images relate to human selective attention. We create the EMOtional attention dataset (EMOd). It is a set of diverse emotion-eliciting images, each with (1) eye-tracking data from 16 subjects, (2) image context labels at both object- and scene-level. Based on analyses of human perceptions of EMOd, we report an emotion prioritization effect: emotion-eliciting content draws stronger and earlier human attention than neutral content, but this advantage diminishes dramatically after initial fixation. We find that human attention is more focused on awe eliciting and aesthetic vehicle and animal scenes in EMOd. Aiming to model the above human attention behavior computationally, we design a deep neural network (CASNet II), which includes a channel weighting subnetwork that prioritizes emotion-eliciting objects, and an Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) structure that learns the relative importance of image regions at multiple scales. Visualizations and quantitative analyses demonstrate the model's ability to simulate human attention behavior, especially on emotion-eliciting content.

People often prefer videos over images in research and applications, believing that videos are more effective for eliciting human emotions and building machine intelligence. However, our research shows that this assumption is not always correct when it comes to evoking emotions in human observers. In this article, we compare thirteen emotions and two perceptions elicited by short videos (2-6 second, silent video clips) versus static frames extracted from the videos. We show that static frames and videos elicit most emotions similarly, but static frames elicit negative emotions more strongly than videos. We test two complementary explanations: differential activation of suspense and the peak-end rule. These findings help us to computationally model human reactions more faithfully with fewer video frames. Our interdisciplinary results have important implications for methods, theory, and applications in diverse fields, including social psychology, computer vision, mass media, and marketing.

Man is by nature a social animal. One important facet of human evolution is through narrative imagination, be it fictional or factual, and to tell the tale to other individuals. The factual narrative, such as news, journalism, field report, etc., is based on real-world events and often requires extensive human efforts to create. In the era of big data where video capture devices are commonly available everywhere, a massive amount of raw videos (including life-logging, dashcam or surveillance footage) are generated daily. As a result, it is rather impossible for humans to digest and analyze these video data. This paper reviews the problem of computational narrative generation where a goal-driven narrative (in the form of text with or without video) is generated from a single or multiple long videos. Importantly, the narrative generation problem makes itself distinguished from the existing literature by its focus on a comprehensive understanding of user goal, narrative structure and open-domain input. We tentatively outline a general narrative generation framework and discuss the potential research problems and challenges in this direction. Informed by the real-world impact of narrative generation, we then illustrate several practical use cases in Video Logging as a Service platform which enables users to get more out of the data through a goal-driven intelligent storytelling AI agent.

Human attributes prediction in visual media is a well-researched topic with a major focus on human faces. However, face images are often of high privacy concern as they can reveal an individual's identity. How to balance this trade-off between privacy and utility is a key problem among researchers and practitioners. In this study, we make one of the first attempts to investigate the human attributes (emotion, age, and gender) prediction under the different de-identification (eyes, lower-face, face, and head obfuscation) privacy scenarios. We first constructed the Diversity in People and Context Dataset (DPaC). We then performed a human study with eye-tracking on how humans recognize facial attributes without the presence of face and context. Results show that in an image, situational context is informative of a target's attributes. Motivated by our human study, we proposed a multi-tasking deep learning model - Context-Guided Human Attributes Prediction (CHAPNet), for human attributes prediction under privacy-preserving conditions. Extensive experiments on DPaC and three commonly used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of CHAPNet in leveraging the situational context for a better interpretation of a target's attributes without the full presence of the target's face. Our research demonstrates the feasibility of visual analytics under de-identification for privacy.

Participation on social media platforms has many benefits but also poses substantial threats. Users often face an unintended loss of privacy, are bombarded with mis-/disinformation, or are trapped in filter bubbles due to over-personalized content. These threats are further exacerbated by the rise of hidden AI-driven algorithms working behind the scenes to shape users' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviour. We investigate how multimedia researchers can help tackle these problems to level the playing field for social media users. We perform a comprehensive survey of algorithmic threats on social media and use it as a lens to set a challenging but important research agenda for effective and real-time user nudging. We further implement a conceptual prototype and evaluate it with experts to supplement our research agenda. This paper calls for solutions that combat the algorithmic threats on social media by utilizing machine learning and multimedia content analysis techniques but in a transparent manner and for the benefit of the users.

Image captioning is gaining significance in multiple applications such as content-based visual search and chat-bots. Much of the recent progress in this field embraces a data-driven approach without deep consideration of human behavioural characteristics. In this paper, we focus on human-centered automatic image captioning. Our study is based on the intuition that different people will generate a variety of image captions for the same scene, as their knowledge and opinion about the scene may differ. In particular, we first perform a series of human studies to investigate what influences human description of a visual scene. We identify three main factors: a person's knowledge level of the scene, opinion on the scene, and gender. Based on our human study findings, we propose a novel human-centered algorithm that is able to generate human-like image captions. We evaluate the proposed model through traditional evaluation metrics, diversity metrics, and human-based evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model on generating diverse human-like image captions.

Despite the recent success in face recognition and object classification, in the field of human gaze prediction, computer models are still struggling to accurately mimic human attention. One main reason is that visual attention is a complex human behavior influenced by multiple factors, ranging from low-level features (e.g., color, contrast) to high-level human perception (e.g., objects interactions, object sentiment), making it difficult to model computationally. In this work, we investigate the relation between object sentiment and human attention. We first introduce a new evaluation metric (AttI) for measuring human attention that focuses on human fixation consensus. A series of empirical data analyses with AttI indicate that emotion-evoking objects receive attention favor, especially when they co-occur with emotionally-neutral objects, and this favor varies with different image complexity. Based on the empirical analyses, we design a deep neural network for human attention prediction which allows the attention bias on emotion-evoking objects to be encoded in its feature space. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate its superior performance, especially on metrics that evaluate relative importance of salient regions. This research provides the clearest picture to date on how object sentiments influence human attention, and it makes one of the first attempts to model this phenomenon computationally.

Privacy concerns with social media have recently been under the spotlight, due to a few incidents on user data leakage on social networking platforms. With the current advances in machine learning and big data, computer algorithms often act as a first-step filter for privacy breaches, by automatically selecting content with sensitive information, such as photos that contain faces or vehicle license plate. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm to protect the sensitive attributes against machines, meanwhile keeping the changes imperceptible to humans. In particular, we first conducted a series of human studies to investigate multiple factors that influence human sensitivity to the visual changes. We discover that human sensitivity is influenced by multiple factors, from low-level features such as illumination, texture, to high-level attributes like object sentiment and semantics. Based on our human data, we propose for the first time the concept of human sensitivity map. With the sensitivity map, we design a human-sensitivity-aware image perturbation model, which is able to modify the computational classification results of sensitive attributes while preserving the remaining attributes. Experiments on real world data demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model on human-imperceptible privacy protection.

Image sentiment influences visual perception. Emotion-eliciting stimuli such as happy faces and poisonous snakes are generally prioritized in human attention. However, little research has evaluated the interrelationships of image sentiment and visual saliency. In this paper, we present the first study to focus on the relation between emotional properties of an image and visual attention. We first create the EMOtional attention dataset (EMOd). It is a diverse set of emotion-eliciting images, and each image has (1) eye-tracking data collected from 16 subjects, (2) intensive image context labels including object contour, object sentiment, object semantic category, and high-level perceptual attributes such as image aesthetics and elicited emotions. We perform extensive analyses on EMOd to identify how image sentiment relates to human attention. We discover an emotion prioritization effect: for our images, emotion-eliciting content attracts human attention strongly, but such advantage diminishes dramatically after initial fixation. Aiming to model the human emotion prioritization computationally, we design a deep neural network for saliency prediction, which includes a novel subnetwork that learns the spatial and semantic context of the image scene. The proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets, by effectively capturing the relative importance of human attention within an image. The code, models, and dataset are available online at https://nus-sesame.top/emotionalattention/.

Visual realism is defined as the extent to which an image appears to people as a photo rather than computer generated. Assessing visual realism is important in applications like computer graphics rendering and photo retouching. However, current realism evaluation approaches use either labor-intensive human judgments or automated algorithms largely dependent on comparing renderings to reference images. We develop a reference-free computational framework for visual realism prediction to overcome these constraints. First, we construct a benchmark dataset of 2,520 images with comprehensive human annotated attributes. From statistical modeling on this data, we identify image attributes most relevant for visual realism. We propose both empirically-based (guided by our statistical modeling of human data) and deep convolutional neural network models to predict visual realism of images. Our framework has the following advantages: (1) it creates an interpretable and concise empirical model that characterizes human perception of visual realism; (2) it links computational features to latent factors of human image perception.

Automated assessment of visual sentiment has many applications, such as monitoring social media and facilitating online advertising. In current research on automated visual sentiment assessment, images are mainly input and processed as a whole. However, human attention is biased, and a focal region with high acuity can disproportionately influence visual sentiment. To investigate how attention influences visual sentiment, we conducted experiments that reveal critical insights into human perception. We discover that negative sentiments are elicited by the focal region without a notable influence of contextual information, whereas positive sentiments are influenced by both focal and contextual information. Building on these insights, we create new deep convolutional neural networks for sentiment prediction that have additional channels devoted to encoding focal information. On two benchmark datasets, the proposed models demonstrate superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive visualizations and statistical analyses indicate that the focal channels are more effective on images with focal objects, especially for images that also elicit negative sentiments.

In many sub-fields, researchers collect datasets of human ground truth that are used to create a new algorithm. For example, in research on image perception, datasets have been collected for topics such as what makes an image aesthetic or memorable. Despite high costs for human data collection, datasets are infrequently reused beyond their own fields of interest. Moreover, the algorithms built from them are domain-specific (predict a small set of attributes) and usually unconnected to one another. In this paper, we present a paradigm for building generalized and expandable models of human image perception. First, we fuse multiple fragmented and partially-overlapping datasets through data imputation. We then create a theoretically-structured statistical model of human image perception that is fit to the fused datasets. The resulting model has many advantages. (1) It is generalized, going beyond the content of the constituent datasets, and can be easily expanded by fusing additional datasets. (2) It provides a new ontology usable as a network to expand human data in a cost-effective way. (3) It can guide the design of a generalized computational algorithm for multi-dimensional visual perception. Indeed, experimental results show that a model-based algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on predicting visual sentiment, visual realism and interestingness. Our paradigm can be used in various visual tasks (e.g., video summarization).

Assessing the visual realism of images is increasingly becoming an essential aspect of fields ranging from computer graphics (CG) rendering to photo manipulation. In this paper we systematically evaluate factors underlying human perception of visual realism and use that information to create an automated assessment of visual realism. We make the following unique contributions. First, we established a benchmark dataset of images with empirically determined visual realism scores. Second, we identified attributes potentially related to image realism, and used correlational techniques to determine that realism was most related to image naturalness, familiarity, aesthetics, and semantics. Third, we created an attributes-motivated, automated computational model that estimated image visual realism quantitatively. Using human assessment as a benchmark, the model was below human performance, but outperformed other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Computer-generated (CG) face images are common in video games, advertisements, and other media. CG faces vary in their degree of realism, a factor that impacts viewer reactions. Therefore, efficient control of visual realism of face images is important. Efficient control is enabled by a deep understanding of visual realism perception: the extent to which viewers judge an image as a real photograph rather than a CG image. Across two experiments, we explored the processes involved in visual realism perception of face images. In Experiment 1, participants made visual realism judgments on original face images, inverted face images, and images of faces that had the top and bottom halves misaligned. In Experiment 2, participants made visual realism judgments on original face images, scrambled faces, and images that showed different parts of faces. Our findings indicate that both holistic and piecemeal processing are involved in visual realism perception of faces, with holistic processing becoming more dominant when resolution is lower. Our results also suggest that shading information is more important than color for holistic processing, and that inversion makes visual realism judgments harder for realistic images but not for unrealistic images. Furthermore, we found that eyes are the most influential face part for visual realism, and face context is critical for evaluating realism of face parts. To the best of our knowledge, this work is a first realism-centric study attempting to bridge the human perception of visual realism on face images with general face perception tasks.