Abstract: We consider a quantum system that is being continuously monitored, giving rise to a measurement signal. From such a stream of data, information needs to be inferred about the underlying system's dynamics. Here we focus on hypothesis testing problems and put forward the usage of sequential strategies where the signal is analyzed in real time, allowing the experiment to be concluded as soon as the underlying hypothesis can be identified with a certified prescribed success probability. We analyze the performance of sequential tests by studying the stopping-time behavior, showing a considerable advantage over currently-used strategies based on a fixed predetermined measurement time.

Abstract: Achieving visually consistent colors across multiple images is important when images are used in photo albums, websites, and brochures. Unfortunately, only a handful of methods address multi-image color consistency compared to one-to-one color transfer techniques. Furthermore, existing methods do not incorporate high-level features that can assist graphic designers in their work. To address these limitations, we introduce a framework that builds upon a previous palette-based color consistency method and incorporates three high-level features: white balance, saliency, and color naming. We show how these features overcome the limitations of the prior multi-consistency workflow and showcase the user-friendly nature of our framework.

Abstract: Sketch-RGB cross-modality person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging task that aims to match a sketch portrait drawn by a professional artist with a full-body photo taken by surveillance equipment to deal with situations where the monitoring equipment is damaged at the accident scene. However, sketch portraits only provide highly abstract frontal body contour information and lack other important features such as color, pose, behavior, etc. The difference in saliency between the two modalities brings new challenges to cross-modality person ReID. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a novel dual-stream model for cross-modality person ReID, which is able to mine modality-invariant features to reduce the discrepancy between sketch and camera images end-to-end. More specifically, we propose a multi-spectrum image fusion (MSIF) method, which aims to exploit the image appearance changes brought by multiple spectrums and guide the network to mine modality-invariant commonalities during training. It only processes the spectrum of the input images without adding additional calculations and model complexity, which can be easily integrated into other models. Moreover, we introduce a joint structure via a generalized mean pooling (GMP) layer and a self-attention (SA) mechanism to balance background and texture information and obtain the regional features with a large amount of information in the image. To further shrink the intra-class distance, a weighted regularized triplet (WRT) loss is developed without introducing additional hyperparameters. The model was first evaluated on the PKU Sketch ReID dataset, and extensive experimental results show that the Rank-1/mAP accuracy of our method is 87.00%/91.12%, reaching the current state-of-the-art performance. To further validate the effectiveness of our approach in handling cross-modality person ReID, we conducted experiments on two commonly used IR-RGB datasets (SYSU-MM01 and RegDB). The obtained results show that our method achieves competitive performance. These results confirm the ability of our method to effectively process images from different modalities.

Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in single image super resolution have investigated the potential of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to improve performance. However, CNNs based models suffer from their limited fields and their inability to adapt to the input content. Recently, Transformer based models were presented, which demonstrated major performance gains in Natural Language Processing and Vision tasks while mitigating the drawbacks of CNNs. Nevertheless, Transformer computational complexity can increase quadratically for high-resolution images, and the fact that it ignores the original structures of the image by converting them to the 1D structure can make it problematic to capture the local context information and adapt it for real-time applications. In this paper, we present, SRFormer, an efficient yet powerful Transformer-based architecture, by making several key designs in the building of Transformer blocks and Transformer layers that allow us to consider the original structure of the image (i.e., 2D structure) while capturing both local and global dependencies without raising computational demands or memory consumption. We also present a Gated Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Feature Fusion module to aggregate the features of different stages of Transformer blocks by focusing on inter-spatial relationships while adding minor computational costs to the network. We have conducted extensive experiments on several super-resolution benchmark datasets to evaluate our approach. SRFormer demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods from both Transformer and Convolutional networks, with an improvement margin of 0.1∼0.53dB . Furthermore, while SRFormer has almost the same model size, it outperforms SwinIR by 0.47% and inference time by half the time of SwinIR. The code will be available on GitHub.

Abstract: Deployments of real-world object detection systems often experience a degradation in performance over time due to concept drift. Systems that leverage thermal cameras are especially susceptible because the respective thermal signatures of objects and their surroundings are highly sensitive to environmental changes. In this study, two types of weather-aware latent conditioning methods are investigated. The proposed method aims to guide two object detectors, (YOLOv5 and Deformable DETR) to become weather-aware. This is achieved by leveraging an auxiliary branch that predicts weather-related information while conditioning intermediate layers of the object detector. While the conditioning methods proposed do not directly improve the accuracy of baseline detectors, it can be observed that conditioned networks manage to extract a weather-related signal from the thermal images, thus resulting in a decreased miss rate at the cost of increased false positives. The extracted signal appears noisy and is thus challenging to regress accurately. This is most likely a result of the qualitative nature of the thermal sensor; thus, further work is needed to identify an ideal method for optimizing the conditioning branch, as well as to further improve the accuracy of the system.

Abstract: A novel technique for visualizing multispectral images is proposed. Inspired by how prisms work, our method spreads spectral information over a chromatic noise pattern. This is accomplished by populating the pattern with pixels representing each measurement band at a count proportional to its measured intensity. The method is advantageous because it allows for lightweight encoding and visualization of spectral information
while maintaining the color appearance of the stimulus. A four alternative forced choice (4AFC) experiment was conducted to validate the method’s information-carrying capacity in displaying metameric stimuli of varying colors and spectral basis functions. The scores ranged from 100% to 20% (less than chance given the 4AFC task), with many conditions falling somewhere in between at statistically significant intervals. Using this data, color and texture difference metrics can be evaluated and optimized to predict the legibility of the visualization technique.