Abstract: The adaptation capability to a wide range of domains is crucial for scene text spotting models when deployed to real-world conditions. However, existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches usually incorporate scene text detection and recognition simply by pretraining on natural scene text datasets, which do not directly exploit the intermediate feature representations between multiple domains. Here, we investigate the problem of domain-adaptive scene text spotting, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly adapt to target domains rather than being specialized for a specific domain or scenario. Further, we investigate a transformer baseline called Swin-TESTR to focus on solving scene-text spotting for both regular and arbitrary-shaped scene text along with an exhaustive evaluation. The results clearly demonstrate the potential of intermediate representations to achieve significant performance on text spotting benchmarks across multiple domains (e.g. language, synth-to-real, and documents). both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Abstract: This manuscript presents a review of state-of-the-art techniques proposed in the literature for multimodal image registration, addressing instances where images from different modalities need to be precisely aligned in the same reference system. This scenario arises when the images to be registered come from different modalities, among the visible and thermal spectral bands, 3D-RGB, or flash-no flash, or NIR-visible. The review spans different techniques from classical approaches to more modern ones based on deep learning, aiming to highlight the particularities required at each step in the registration pipeline when dealing with multimodal images. It is noteworthy that medical images are excluded from this review due to their specific characteristics, including the use of both active and passive sensors or the non-rigid nature of the body contained in the image.

Abstract: Global visual localization estimates the absolute pose of a camera using a single image, in a previously mapped area. Obtaining the pose from a single image enables many robotics and augmented/virtual reality applications. Inspired by latest advances in deep learning, many existing approaches directly learn and regress 6 DoF pose from an input image. However, these methods do not fully utilize the underlying scene geometry for pose regression. The challenge in monocular relocalization is the minimal availability of supervised training data, which is just the corresponding 6 DoF poses of the images. In this letter, we propose to utilize these minimal available labels (i.e., poses) to learn the underlying 3D geometry of the scene and use the geometry to estimate the 6 DoF camera pose. We present a learning method that uses these pose labels and rigid alignment to learn two 3D geometric representations ( X, Y, Z coordinates ) of the scene, one in camera coordinate frame and the other in global coordinate frame. Given a single image, it estimates these two 3D scene representations, which are then aligned to estimate a pose that matches the pose label. This formulation allows for the active inclusion of additional learning constraints to minimize 3D alignment errors between the two 3D scene representations, and 2D re-projection errors between the 3D global scene representation and 2D image pixels, resulting in improved localization accuracy. During inference, our model estimates the 3D scene geometry in camera and global frames and aligns them rigidly to obtain pose in real-time. We evaluate our work on three common visual localization datasets, conduct ablation studies, and show that our method exceeds state-of-the-art regression methods' pose accuracy on all datasets.

Abstract: Remote sensing applications, impacted by acquisition season and sensor variety, require high-resolution images. Transformer-based models improve satellite image super-resolution but are less effective than convolutional neural networks (CNNs) at extracting local details, crucial for image clarity. This paper introduces SWViT-RRDB, a new deep learning model for satellite imagery super-resolution. The SWViT-RRDB, combining transformer with convolution and attention blocks, overcomes the limitations of existing models by better representing small objects in satellite images. In this model, a pipeline of residual fusion group (RFG) blocks is used to combine the multi-headed self-attention (MSA) with residual in residual dense block (RRDB). This combines global and local image data for better super-resolution. Additionally, an overlapping cross-attention block (OCAB) is used to enhance fusion and allow interaction between neighboring pixels to maintain long-range pixel dependencies across the image. The SWViT-RRDB model and its larger variants outperform state-of-the-art (SoTA) models on two different satellite datasets in terms of PSNR and SSIM.

Abstract: Guided image processing techniques are widely used to extract meaningful information from a guiding image and facilitate the enhancement of the guided one. This paper specifically addresses the challenge of guided thermal image super-resolution, where a low-resolution thermal image is enhanced using a high-resolution visible spectrum image. We propose a new strategy that enhances outcomes from current guided super-resolution methods. This is achieved by transforming the initial guiding data into a representation resembling a thermal-like image, which is more closely in sync with the intended output. Experimental results with upscale factors of 8 and 16, demonstrate the outstanding performance of our approach in guided thermal image super-resolution obtained by mapping the original guiding information to a thermal-like image representation.