Food plays a vital role in human health, and accurate nutrition estimation is crucial for guiding healthy dietary choices. Traditional biochemical-based assessment methods are often inefficient, costly, and impractical for daily use. With the continuous progress in computer vision, some vision-based nutrition estimation approaches have emerged, typically relying on RGB images alone or in combination with depth images to infer nutritional information. These methods have achieved promising performance and garnered considerable attention. However, these methods often ignore visually imperceptible ingredients such as oil, sugar, and salt, which may significantly influence the estimation of nutritional content. Besides, existing methods lack explicit mechanisms for modeling nutrient-specific information and guiding attention toward nutrition-relevant semantics. To solve the above two issues, we propose a novel ingredients-guided and nutrients-prompted nutrition estimation method. Our method adopts multi-scale feature fusion and integrates RGB and depth modalities to enhance visual representation learning. To account for invisible ingredients, we introduce an ingredients-guided strategy, which enhances the sensitivity to non-visible nutritional factors. Moreover, a nutrient-prompt mechanism is introduced to explicitly guide the focus of the model toward nutrient-relevant attributes during estimation. We validate our method on Nutrition5k, where it consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its efficacy.

Federated learning collaboratively trains machine learning models among different clients while keeping data privacy and has become the mainstream for breaking data silos. However, the non-independently and identically distribution (i.e., Non-IID) characteristic of different image domains among different clients reduces the benefits of federated learning and has become a bottleneck problem restricting the accuracy and generalization of federated models. In this work, we propose a novel federated image segmentation method based on style transfer, FedST, by using a denoising diffusion probabilistic model to achieve feature disentanglement and image synthesis of cross-domain image data between multiple clients. Thus it can share style features among clients while protecting structure features of image data, which effectively alleviates the influence of the Non-IID phenomenon. Experiments prove that our method achieves superior segmentation performance compared to state-of-art methods among four different Non-IID datasets in objective and subjective assessment. The code is available at https://github.com/YoferChen/FedST.

The general aim of multi-focus image fusion is to gather focused regions of different images to generate a unique all-in-focus fused image. Deep learning based methods become the mainstream of image fusion by virtue of its powerful feature representation ability. However, most of the existing deep learning structures failed to balance fusion quality and end-to-end implementation convenience. End-to-end decoder design often leads to unrealistic result because of its non-linear mapping mechanism. On the other hand, generating an intermediate decision map achieves better quality for the fused image, but relies on the rectification with empirical post-processing parameter choices. In this work, to handle the requirements of both output image quality and comprehensive simplicity of structure implementation, we propose a cascade network to simultaneously generate decision map and fused result with an end-to-end training procedure. It avoids the dependence on empirical post-processing methods in the inference stage. To improve the fusion quality, we introduce a gradient aware loss function to preserve gradient information in output fused image. In addition, we design a decision calibration strategy to decrease the time consumption in the application of multiple images fusion. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare with 19 different state-of-the-art multi-focus image fusion structures with 6 assessment metrics. The results prove that our designed structure can generally ameliorate the output fused image quality, while implementation efficiency increases over 30\% for multiple images fusion.