Computer vision

Detection, segmentation, depth and recognition research, plus the vision backbones that keep displacing the last generation.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Diffusion models as plug-and-play priors

The paper explores using denoising diffusion generative models as plug‑and‑play priors for high‑dimensional inference problems. By combining a pre‑trained diffusion prior with a differentiable auxiliary constraint, the authors enable approximate inference through iterative differentiation across multiple noisy versions of the data. This framework opens possibilities for conditional generation, image segmentation, and novel combinatorial optimization algorithms.

By Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Nebojsa Jojic, Dimitris Samaras
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Effectiveness of IoT and Deep Learning for Detection and Severity Assessment of Postelectrotermes militaris in Tea Plantations

The study presents an IoT-enabled acoustic monitoring system that uses a Raspberry Pi and high‑sensitivity microphone to capture audio from tea trunks, creating a dataset of 2,000 ten‑second samples (1,000 healthy, 1,000 infested). A CNN trained on Fourier‑derived spectrograms achieved 81.5% accuracy in classifying Postelectrotermes militaris infestations, and a weighted severity model combined CNN probability, acoustic amplitude, and proximity of infested plants to generate quantitative severity scores and geospatial maps. Field trials in Pundaluoya confirmed the system’s feasibility amid realistic environmental noise, offering plantation managers tools to identify high‑risk areas and prioritize inspections.

By D. K. C. Senevirathna, A. A. E. Nanayakkara, H. M. C. K. Kulathunga, J. K. D. P. Nadula, R. M. Mapatuna, Malithi Nawarathne, Jaliya L. Wijayaraja, P. D. Senanayake, Samitha Vidhanaarachchi, Kalpani Manathunga
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Anatomy-Aware Promptable Segmentation with Online Interactive Training for AUTOPET V

The paper introduces an anatomy-aware, promptable segmentation model for whole-body lesion detection in FDG and PSMA PET/CT scans, tailored for the AUTOPET V challenge. The approach builds on nnU-Net, employing a two-stage training process: an initial pre-training phase for strong baseline segmentation and an online interactive phase that refines predictions using scribble prompts. Anatomical context is integrated via organ supervision with a shared head predicting both lesions and organs, reducing false positives, while a tracer classifier directs studies to either a combined FDG+PSMA model or a PSMA-specific model. Cross-validation results show that organ-supervised training yields the most stable performance, the interactive stage consistently improves Dice scores, and PSMA-specific training delivers the best tracer-wise results.

By Pablo Lozano-Jimenez, Sergio Romero-Tapiador, Ruben Tolosana
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

What Can Low Resource Languages Learn From Each Other?

The paper examines OCR adaptation for low‑resource languages, noting that fine‑tuning often hits a performance ceiling in data‑scarce settings. It identifies that lower layers of language‑specific models learn redundant features while higher layers capture script nuances, leading to a structural inefficiency. To address this, the authors propose PSMC, a framework that pre‑trains a base model, specializes it per language, merges the experts via task arithmetic, and co‑trains a unified multilingual backbone, achieving about a 2% improvement in Word Recognition Rate across 10 Indian scripts without adding parameters.

By Achyuth P, Kahaan Shah, Chetan Arora
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

HyperVision: A Channel-Adaptive Ground-Based Hyperspectral Vision Pre-trained Backbone

HyperVision introduces the first ground‑based hyperspectral pre‑trained backbone, addressing challenges of varying spectral configurations, limited annotations, and dataset diversity. It employs a channel‑adaptive dynamic embedding to unify heterogeneous inputs, a multi‑source pseudo‑labeling strategy combining SAM2 spatial cues with HyperFree spectral details, and cross‑modal knowledge distillation from a pre‑trained RGB vision model. Trained on 15k images from 26 datasets, HyperVision achieves significant improvements—up to 16.3% relative gain in hyperspectral semantic segmentation, 2.1% in object tracking AUC, and 35.5% reduction in salient object detection MAE—while requiring only head‑only adaptation.

By Guanyiman Fu, Jingtao Li, Zihang Cheng, Zhuanfeng Li, Diqi Chen, Yan Xu, Xiangyu Liu, Fengchao Xiong, Jianfeng Lu, Chengrong Chen, Jun Zhou
Towards Data Science
Aug 30

Noisy Text in RAG: Typos, OCR, and the Gap Classical Spell-Check Leaves

The article discusses how noisy text—stemming from user typos, rapid transcription errors, and OCR character mistakes—poses challenges for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. It explains that traditional spell-checking only addresses one type of error, while embeddings are needed to handle the remaining noise. The piece highlights the need for more robust solutions in enterprise document intelligence.

By Kezhan Shi
Towards Data Science
Aug 29

RAG Is Not the Whole Toolkit: The NLP Techniques Real Problems Still Need

The article argues that Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is only one tool in NLP, and many real-world problems—such as request classification, free‑text matching, table reading, and OCR noise cleaning—are better served by simpler, cheaper techniques. It emphasizes the importance of selecting the appropriate method for each task and highlights the engineering challenge of knowing which technique to apply.

By Kezhan Shi
arXiv AI
Aug 28

From Reasoning to Pixels: Grounded Medical Multimodal LLMs for VQA and Segmentation

The paper introduces MedREAL, a unified framework that aligns linguistic reasoning with spatial grounding for medical visual question answering and segmentation. MedREAL employs Seg Anchored Reasoning Pooling (SARP) to extract semantic evidence from segmentation tokens and a Reasoning-to-Visual (R2V) fusion mechanism to integrate these features into a segmentation pipeline. Using the newly created MedRAVS-13K dataset, MedREAL achieves superior performance, reporting 68.49% gIoU and 70.47% cIoU, and generates evidence masks that consistently match textual diagnoses.

By Haowen Gu, Gensheng Pei, Junzhu Mao, Qiong Wang, Mingwu Ren, Yazhou Yao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Importance Scoring of Transformer Attention Heads in Learning Tabular Data

The paper introduces an importance‑scoring metric for multi‑head transformer attention heads applied to tabular data, a domain where transformers have been less studied. Experiments on 40 diverse tabular datasets show that removing heads with the lowest importance scores has minimal impact on performance, while removing the most important head first causes the largest drop. The study finds that important heads are distributed across layers and vary significantly across different tabular schemas, suggesting that the proposed score can help reduce redundancy and improve transformer efficiency.

By Ahmad Jad Allah, Kazi F. Akhter, Md. Kamrozzaman Bhuiyan, Manar D. Samad
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

DINOcular: Self-Supervised Visuospatial Representations

DINOcular is a self‑supervised framework that learns joint visuospatial representations from RGB‑D observations. It fuses depth‑derived geometric priors with a visual backbone using inter‑patch and intra‑patch fusion, allowing the model to encode both appearance and spatial structure efficiently. The resulting representation improves 3D awareness on multiple geometry benchmarks while staying competitive on standard RGB‑D semantic segmentation tasks.

By Farkhat Almukhamedov, Sami Azirar, Hermann Blum
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Systematic Literature Review of Machine Learning Models and Applications for Text Recognition

This systematic literature review examines 97 studies on optical character recognition (OCR) from 2015 to 2025, tracing the evolution of AI models, application domains, data types, and linguistic coverage. It identifies key OCR models, evaluates their performance, strengths, and limitations, and highlights unresolved challenges such as limited resources for underrepresented languages, high variability in handwritten text, and constraints in real‑time applications. The review proposes promising approaches—including self‑supervised learning, multimodal AI, AutoML, AI‑assisted postprocessing, TinyML, and joint corpora creation—to enhance OCR accuracy and address these challenges for industrial use.

By Nuzhat Khan, Ab Al-Hadi Ab Rahman, Shahriyar Masud Rizvi, Ibrahim Yousef Alshareef, Muhammad Nadzir Marsono, Muhammad Paend Bakht, Mohd Shahrizal Rusli, Shahidatul Sadiah
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

SOCO: Benchmarking Semantic Object Correspondence in Vision Foundation Models

SOCO is a new benchmark for Semantic Object Correspondence that introduces a taxonomy of correspondence types and provides consistent, functionally meaningful keypoint annotations across 100 categories and over 1M correspondence pairs. It also includes keypoint language descriptions, enabling evaluation of large vision‑language models and their fine‑grained part‑level understanding. Experiments show that vision foundation backbones encode strong semantic structure but transfer correspondences poorly across related categories, LVLMs excel at text‑prompted part localization but lag in visual‑reference matching, and correspondence performance predicts dense downstream tasks more strongly than ImageNet classification.

By Olaf D\"unkel, Basavaraj Sunagad, Haoran Wang, David T. Hoffmann, Christian Theobalt, Adam Kortylewski
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Reconstructing Humans and Objects in Interaction using Large Reconstruction Models

The paper introduces MILO, a framework that uses Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) to reconstruct detailed 3D human‑object interactions from a single image. By treating the LRM mesh as a geometric scaffold, MILO segments it into human and object parts, fits a parametric body model to the human component, and optionally aligns an object template to the object component. The approach achieves higher reconstruction accuracy than existing baselines across multiple benchmarks and interaction scenarios.

By Agniv Chatterjee, Georgios Pavlakos
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

SSMB: Self-Supervised Local Feature Detection under Motion Blur

SSMB is a self‑supervised keypoint detector designed for motion‑blurred images that does not rely on handcrafted detectors or external pseudo‑labels. It introduces a Local Discriminability Enhancement module to recover fine‑grained local detail after global feature mixing, and is trained in two stages: geometric pretraining on synthetic shapes and blur‑aware training on real sharp‑blur pairs using a multi‑component self‑supervised objective. Extensive experiments show that SSMB outperforms both supervised and self‑supervised baselines on keypoint detection, image matching, relative pose estimation, and visual localization under motion blur, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance.

By Zhenjun Zhao, Fabio Bellavia, Wenting Wang, Fan Zhu, Jiajun Wu, Suryansh Kumar, Mingqiang Wei, Haoang Li, Javier Civera
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

UFO-DETR: Frequency-Guided End-to-End Detector for UAV Tiny Objects

UFO-DETR is an end‑to‑end object detection framework designed for UAV imagery, addressing challenges such as scale variation, dense distribution, and the prevalence of tiny targets. It employs an LSKNet backbone to optimize receptive fields and reduce parameters, integrates DAttention and AIFI modules for flexible multi‑scale spatial modeling, and introduces a DynFreq‑C3 module that enhances small target detection via cross‑space frequency feature enhancement. Experiments demonstrate that UFO‑DETR outperforms RT‑DETR‑L in detection accuracy while improving computational efficiency, making it suitable for UAV edge computing.

By Yuankai Chen, Kai Lin, Qihong Wu, Xinxuan Yang, Jiashuo Lai, Ruoen Chen, Haonan Shi, Minfan He, Meihua Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

DPA-I2P: Depth-Guided Projective Alignment for Image-to-Point-Cloud Registration in Autonomous Driving

The paper introduces DPA-I2P, a depth-guided projective alignment method for image-to-point-cloud registration in autonomous driving. It employs Ray-Conditioned Metric Depth Encoding and Projection-Consistent Vision Lifting to align depth and visual cues geometrically, and uses Cross-Modal Query Pruning to enhance matching stability. Experiments on KITTI and nuScenes show significant reductions in rotation and translation errors compared to existing implicit baselines.

By Wenxin Zhang, Hang Li, Zhiwei Xu, Qiankun Dong, Gang Wang, Tao Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

DOD-SA: Infrared-Visible Decoupled Object Detection with Single-Modality Annotations

The paper introduces DOD-SA, a framework for infrared-visible object detection that uses only single-modality annotations. It employs a Collaborative Teacher-Student Network with a single-modality branch and a dual-modality decoupled branch to transfer knowledge across modalities, and a Progressive and Self‑Tuning Training Strategy to refine pseudo‑labels. A Pseudo Label Assigner is also designed to align labels between modalities during training.

By Hang Jin, Chenqiang Gao, Junjie Guo, Fangcen Liu, Qinyao Chang, Kanghui Tian, Deyu Meng