The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

双方图上的双簇是一项无监督的学习任务，同时将图形中的两种类型的对象簇（例如，在电影评论数据集中）中的用户和电影中簇。潜在块模型（LBM）已被提出为基于模型的双簇工具。但是，LBM的双簇结果通常由数据矩阵的行和列总和（即度）主导。我们提出了一个学位校正的潜在块模型（DC-LBM），以适应行和列簇的学位异质性，这极大地超过了Movielens数据集中的经典LBM和模拟数据。我们通过观察到在群集标签上的任何概率分配的M步骤中最大化目标函数来开发有效的变分期望最大化算法。我们证明了DC-LBM下变异估计器的标签一致性，只要行的平均预期行和列进入无穷大，预期的图密度就会达到零。

环境微生物（EMS）在我们周围普遍存在，对人类社会的生存和发展产生了重要影响。然而，对环境微生物（EM）数据的高标准和严格要求导致现有相关数据库的不足，更不用说具有GT图像的数据库。这个问题严重影响了相关实验的进展。因此，本研究开发了环境微生物数据集第六版（EMDS-6），其中包含21种EMS。每种类型的EM包含40个原件和40 GT图像，总共1680个EM图像。在这项研究中，为了测试EMDS-6的有效性。我们选择图像处理方法的经典算法，例如图像去噪，图像分割和目标检测。实验结果表明，EMDS-6可用于评估图像去噪，图像分割，图像特征提取，图像分类和对象检测方法的性能。

文本和视频之间交叉模态检索的任务旨在了解视觉和语言之间的对应关系。现有研究遵循基于文本和视频嵌入的测量文本视频相似度的趋势。在常见的做法中，通过将视频帧馈送到用于全球视觉特征提取的视频帧或仅通过使用图形卷积网络使用本地细粒度的框架区域来实现简单的语义关系来构造视频表示。然而，这些视频表示在学习视频表示中的视觉组件之间没有充分利用时空关系，从而无法区分具有相同视觉组件但具有不同关系的视频。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种视觉时空关系增强的网络（VSR-Net），这是一种新的跨模型检索框架，其考虑组件之间的空间视觉关系，以增强桥接文本 - 视频模型中的全局视频表示。具体地，使用多层时空变压器来编码视觉时空关系，以学习视觉关系特征。我们将全局视觉和细粒度的关系功能与两个嵌入空格上的文本功能对齐，用于交叉模态文本 - 视频检索。在MSR-VTT和MSVD数据集中进行了广泛的实验。结果表明了我们提出的模型的有效性。我们将发布促进未来研究的代码。

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) remains challenging due to the diversity of distortion and image content variation, which complicate the distortion patterns crossing different scales and aggravate the difficulty of the regression problem for BIQA. However, existing BIQA methods often fail to consider multi-scale distortion patterns and image content, and little research has been done on learning strategies to make the regression model produce better performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Progressive Multi-Task Image Quality Assessment (PMT-IQA) model, which contains a multi-scale feature extraction module (MS) and a progressive multi-task learning module (PMT), to help the model learn complex distortion patterns and better optimize the regression issue to align with the law of human learning process from easy to hard. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed PMT-IQA model, we conduct experiments on four widely used public datasets, and the experimental results indicate that the performance of PMT-IQA is superior to the comparison approaches, and both MS and PMT modules improve the model's performance.

As one of the most important psychic stress reactions, micro-expressions (MEs), are spontaneous and transient facial expressions that can reveal the genuine emotions of human beings. Thus, recognizing MEs (MER) automatically is becoming increasingly crucial in the field of affective computing, and provides essential technical support in lie detection, psychological analysis and other areas. However, the lack of abundant ME data seriously restricts the development of cutting-edge data-driven MER models. Despite the recent efforts of several spontaneous ME datasets to alleviate this problem, it is still a tiny amount of work. To solve the problem of ME data hunger, we construct a dynamic spontaneous ME dataset with the largest current ME data scale, called DFME (Dynamic Facial Micro-expressions), which includes 7,526 well-labeled ME videos induced by 671 participants and annotated by more than 20 annotators throughout three years. Afterwards, we adopt four classical spatiotemporal feature learning models on DFME to perform MER experiments to objectively verify the validity of DFME dataset. In addition, we explore different solutions to the class imbalance and key-frame sequence sampling problems in dynamic MER respectively on DFME, so as to provide a valuable reference for future research. The comprehensive experimental results show that our DFME dataset can facilitate the research of automatic MER, and provide a new benchmark for MER. DFME will be published via https://mea-lab-421.github.io.

Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems from various physical attacks. However, recent research generally focuses on short-distance applications (i.e., phone unlocking) while lacking consideration of long-distance scenes (i.e., surveillance security checks). In order to promote relevant research and fill this gap in the community, we collect a large-scale Surveillance High-Fidelity Mask (SuHiFiMask) dataset captured under 40 surveillance scenes, which has 101 subjects from different age groups with 232 3D attacks (high-fidelity masks), 200 2D attacks (posters, portraits, and screens), and 2 adversarial attacks. In this scene, low image resolution and noise interference are new challenges faced in surveillance FAS. Together with the SuHiFiMask dataset, we propose a Contrastive Quality-Invariance Learning (CQIL) network to alleviate the performance degradation caused by image quality from three aspects: (1) An Image Quality Variable module (IQV) is introduced to recover image information associated with discrimination by combining the super-resolution network. (2) Using generated sample pairs to simulate quality variance distributions to help contrastive learning strategies obtain robust feature representation under quality variation. (3) A Separate Quality Network (SQN) is designed to learn discriminative features independent of image quality. Finally, a large number of experiments verify the quality of the SuHiFiMask dataset and the superiority of the proposed CQIL.

Image Virtual try-on aims at replacing the cloth on a personal image with a garment image (in-shop clothes), which has attracted increasing attention from the multimedia and computer vision communities. Prior methods successfully preserve the character of clothing images, however, occlusion remains a pernicious effect for realistic virtual try-on. In this work, we first present a comprehensive analysis of the occlusions and categorize them into two aspects: i) Inherent-Occlusion: the ghost of the former cloth still exists in the try-on image; ii) Acquired-Occlusion: the target cloth warps to the unreasonable body part. Based on the in-depth analysis, we find that the occlusions can be simulated by a novel semantically-guided mixup module, which can generate semantic-specific occluded images that work together with the try-on images to facilitate training a de-occlusion try-on (DOC-VTON) framework. Specifically, DOC-VTON first conducts a sharpened semantic parsing on the try-on person. Aided by semantics guidance and pose prior, various complexities of texture are selectively blending with human parts in a copy-and-paste manner. Then, the Generative Module (GM) is utilized to take charge of synthesizing the final try-on image and learning to de-occlusion jointly. In comparison to the state-of-the-art methods, DOC-VTON achieves better perceptual quality by reducing occlusion effects.

This work focuses on unsupervised representation learning in person re-identification (ReID). Recent self-supervised contrastive learning methods learn invariance by maximizing the representation similarity between two augmented views of a same image. However, traditional data augmentation may bring to the fore undesirable distortions on identity features, which is not always favorable in id-sensitive ReID tasks. In this paper, we propose to replace traditional data augmentation with a generative adversarial network (GAN) that is targeted to generate augmented views for contrastive learning. A 3D mesh guided person image generator is proposed to disentangle a person image into id-related and id-unrelated features. Deviating from previous GAN-based ReID methods that only work in id-unrelated space (pose and camera style), we conduct GAN-based augmentation on both id-unrelated and id-related features. We further propose specific contrastive losses to help our network learn invariance from id-unrelated and id-related augmentations. By jointly training the generative and the contrastive modules, our method achieves new state-of-the-art unsupervised person ReID performance on mainstream large-scale benchmarks.

Due to their ability to offer more comprehensive information than data from a single view, multi-view (multi-source, multi-modal, multi-perspective, etc.) data are being used more frequently in remote sensing tasks. However, as the number of views grows, the issue of data quality becomes more apparent, limiting the potential benefits of multi-view data. Although recent deep neural network (DNN) based models can learn the weight of data adaptively, a lack of research on explicitly quantifying the data quality of each view when fusing them renders these models inexplicable, performing unsatisfactorily and inflexible in downstream remote sensing tasks. To fill this gap, in this paper, evidential deep learning is introduced to the task of aerial-ground dual-view remote sensing scene classification to model the credibility of each view. Specifically, the theory of evidence is used to calculate an uncertainty value which describes the decision-making risk of each view. Based on this uncertainty, a novel decision-level fusion strategy is proposed to ensure that the view with lower risk obtains more weight, making the classification more credible. On two well-known, publicly available datasets of aerial-ground dual-view remote sensing images, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results, demonstrating its effectiveness. The code and datasets of this article are available at the following address: https://github.com/gaopiaoliang/Evidential.