Tianfang Zhang

Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) decomposes an observation matrix into low-rank background and sparse object components. This capability has enabled its application in tasks ranging from image restoration to segmentation. However, traditional RPCA models suffer from computational burdens caused by matrix operations, reliance on finely tuned hyperparameters, and rigid priors that limit adaptability in dynamic scenarios. To solve these limitations, we propose RPCANet++, a sparse object segmentation framework that fuses the interpretability of RPCA with efficient deep architectures. Our approach unfolds a relaxed RPCA model into a structured network comprising a Background Approximation Module (BAM), an Object Extraction Module (OEM), and an Image Restoration Module (IRM). To mitigate inter-stage transmission loss in the BAM, we introduce a Memory-Augmented Module (MAM) to enhance background feature preservation, while a Deep Contrast Prior Module (DCPM) leverages saliency cues to expedite object extraction. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that RPCANet++ achieves state-of-the-art performance under various imaging scenarios. We further improve interpretability via visual and numerical low-rankness and sparsity measurements. By combining the theoretical strengths of RPCA with the efficiency of deep networks, our approach sets a new baseline for reliable and interpretable sparse object segmentation.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) mark a revolutionary advance in neural networks with their token mixer’s powerful global context capability. However, the pairwise token affinity and complex matrix operations limit its deployment on resource-constrained scenarios and real-time applications, such as mobile devices, although considerable efforts have been made in previous works. In this paper, we introduce CAS-ViT: Convolutional Additive Self-attention Vision Transformers, to achieve a balance between efficiency and performance in mobile applications. Firstly, we argue that the capability of token mixers to obtain global contextual information hinges on multiple information interactions, such as spatial and channel domains. Subsequently, we construct a novel additive similarity function following this paradigm and present an efficient implementation named Convolutional Additive Token Mixer (CATM). This simplification leads to a significant reduction in computational overhead. We evaluate CAS-ViT across a variety of vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our experiments, conducted on GPUs, ONNX, and iPhones, demonstrate that CAS-ViT achieves a competitive performance when compared to other state-of-the-art backbones, establishing it as a viable option for efficient mobile vision applications.

Deep learning (DL) networks have achieved remarkable performance in infrared small target detection (ISTD). However, these structures exhibit a deficiency in interpretability and are widely regarded as black boxes, as they disregard domain knowledge in ISTD. To alleviate this issue, this work proposes an interpretable deep network for detecting infrared dim targets, dubbed RPCANet. Specifically, our approach formulates the ISTD task as sparse target extraction, low-rank background estimation, and image reconstruction in a relaxed Robust Principle Component Analysis (RPCA) model. By unfolding the iterative optimization updating steps into a deep-learning framework, time-consuming and complex matrix calculations are replaced by theory-guided neural networks. RPCANet detects targets with clear interpretability and preserves the intrinsic image feature, instead of directly transforming the detection task into a matrix decomposition problem. Extensive experiments substantiate the effectiveness of our deep unfolding framework and demonstrate its trustworthy results, surpassing baseline methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Compressive Sensing (CS) techniques enable accurate signal reconstruction with few measurements. Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) have recently been shown to increase the efficiency of CS by emulating iterative CS optimization procedures by neural networks. However, most of these DUNs suffer from redundant update procedures or complex matrix operations, which can impair their reconstruction performances. Here we propose the optimization-inspired Cumulative Transmission Network (CT-Net), a DUN approach for natural image CS. We formulate an optimization procedure introducing an auxiliary variable similar to Half Quadratic Splitting (HQS). Unfolding this procedure defines the basic structure of our neural architecture, which is then further refined. A CT-Net is composed of Reconstruction Fidelity Modules (RFMs) for minimizing the reconstruction error and Constraint Gradient Approximation (CGA) modules for approximating (the gradient of) sparsity constraints instead of relying on an analytic solutions such as soft-thresholding. Furthermore, a lightweight Cumulative Transmission (CT) between CGAs in each reconstruction stage is proposed to facilitate a better feature representation. Experiments on several widely used natural image benchmarks illustrate the effectiveness of CT-Net with significant performance improvements and fewer network parameters compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The experiments also demonstrate the scene and noise robustness of the proposed method.

Infrared small target detection techniques remain a challenging task due to the complex background. To overcome this problem, by exploring context information, this research presents a data-driven approach called Attention-Guided Pyramid Context Network (AGPCNet). Specifically, we design Attention-Guided Context Block (AGCB) and perceive pixel correlations within and between patches at specific scales via Local Semantic Association (LSA) and Global Context Attention (GCA) respectively. Then the contextual information from multiple scales is fused by Context Pyramid Module (CPM) to achieve better feature representation. In the upsampling stage, we fuse the low and deep semantics through Asymmetric Fusion Module (AFM) to retain more information about small targets. The experimental results illustrate that AGPCNet has achieved state-of-the-art performance on three available infrared small target datasets.

Deep unfolding networks (DUNs) have proven to be a viable approach to compressive sensing (CS). In this work, we propose a DUN called low-rank CS network (LR-CSNet) for natural image CS. Real-world image patches are often well-represented by low-rank approximations. LR-CSNet exploits this property by adding a low-rank prior to the CS optimization task. We derive a corresponding iterative optimization procedure using variable splitting, which is then translated to a new DUN architecture. The architecture uses low-rank generation modules (LRGMs), which learn low-rank matrix factorizations, as well as gradient descent and proximal mappings (GDPMs), which are proposed to extract high-frequency features to refine image details. In addition, the deep features generated at each reconstruction stage in the DUN are transferred between stages to boost the performance. Our extensive experiments on three widely considered datasets demonstrate the promising performance of LR-CSNet compared to state-of-the-art methods in natural image CS.

Infrared search and track (IRST) system is widely used in many fields, however, it’s still a challenging task to detect infrared small targets in complex background. This paper proposed a novel detection method called self-regularized weighted sparse (SRWS) model. The algorithm is designed for the hypothesis that data may come from multi-subspaces. And the overlapping edge information (OEI), which can detect the background structure information, is applied to constrain the sparse item and enhance the accuracy. Furthermore, the self-regularization item is applied to mine the potential information in background, and extract clutter from multi-subspaces. Therefore, the infrared small target detection problem is transformed into an optimization problem. By combining the optimization function with alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), we explained the solution method of SRWS and optimized its iterative convergence condition. A series of experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

The infrared search and track (IRST) system has been widely used, and the field of infrared small target detection has also received much attention. Based on this background, this paper proposes a novel infrared small target detection method based on non-convex optimization with Lp-norm constraint (NOLC). The NOLC method strengthens the sparse item constraint with Lp-norm while appropriately scaling the constraints on low-rank item, so the NP-hard problem is transformed into a non-convex optimization problem. First, the infrared image is converted into a patch image and is secondly solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). In this paper, an efficient solver is given by improving the convergence strategy. The experiment shows that NOLC can accurately detect the target and greatly suppress the background, and the advantages of the NOLC method in detection efficiency and computational efficiency are verified.