Papers for
security camera operators
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Video models keep object identities better under occlusion and overlaps
Learning to Reason with Persistent Object States for Video Instance Segmentation
Abstract: Video segmentation models maintain object identities by carrying instance information across frames. Under prolonged occlusion, reappearance, or interactions between similar instances, however, an unreliable update can overwrite a valid history and cause persistent identity drift. We introduce POSReasoner, a trainable, plug-and-play framework that explicitly decides when an observation should change an object's state. Each persistent state records identity, confidence, and absence history. A sparse state-observation graph supports Propose-Verify reasoning: provisional associations are revisited using object history, predicted presence, and competition among identities. The verified decisions determine whether to retain, update, reactivate, or suppress each state, while a learned gate controls the evidence written back to memory. Only verified transitions update the persistent state used in subsequent frames. POSReasoner uses standard video annotations and keeps the base model frozen, enabling integration with diverse VOS and VIS architectures. Experiments across long-term VOS and VIS benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong baselines, with the largest gains under occlusion and object reappearance.
Lightweight network improves brightness and color in low light images
IDM-Net: A Lightweight Illumination-Decoupled Modulation Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Abstract: Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) remains challenging for lightweight models because illumination restoration and color fidelity are difficult to optimize simultaneously in the RGB color space. Although recent color-decoupled methods separate luminance and chrominance representations, they primarily optimize luminance as an enhancement target, leaving its potential as an explicit guidance prior largely unexplored during feature reconstruction. To address this limitation, we propose IDM-Net, a lightweight Illumination-Decoupled Modulation Network for low-light image enhancement. IDM-Net adopts a dual-encoder architecture consisting of a structure encoder that extracts multi-scale appearance features from the RGB image and a lightweight illumination encoder that learns illumination priors from the decoupled luminance (Y) channel. To effectively exploit these priors, we introduce an Illumination-Guided Modulation (IGM) module that injects multi-scale illumination cues into the decoder through spatially adaptive affine modulation, enabling accurate brightness restoration while preserving natural color consistency. Furthermore, we design a lightweight Feature Refinement Block (FRB) to progressively suppress degradation artifacts and recover fine-grained image details during reconstruction. Extensive experiments on multiple standard low-light image enhancement benchmarks demonstrate that IDM-Net achieves competitive performance among lightweight LLIE methods while maintaining an excellent balance between restoration quality and computational efficiency.
Deep vision systems warn of failure using temporal instability cues
Visual Tripwires: Anticipating Failure in Deep Vision Systems
Abstract: Deep vision systems remain vulnerable to corruption, occlusion, and distribution shift despite strong benchmark performance. Existing reliability methods typically evaluate uncertainty at individual time steps and do not explicitly model how a system progresses toward failure. We introduce Visual Tripwires, a predictive reliability framework that uses temporal instability in model behaviour to anticipate impending failure. Our central hypothesis is that predictive degradation develops progressively through measurable changes in latent representations, prediction trajectories, and attention structure. Visual Tripwires captures these changes using representation drift, prediction oscillation, trajectory curvature, and attention entropy. A lightweight tripwire predictor aggregates these signals over a temporal window to estimate the probability of failure within a future prediction horizon. Experiments across multiple datasets, architectures, and progressive perturbation settings show that the proposed instability signals emerge before predictive degradation and provide earlier and more accurate failure warnings than conventional uncertainty estimation methods. These results demonstrate that temporal instability contains useful information about future model reliability and provides a practical basis for early warning in deep vision systems.
Spatiotemporal flux probing captures fast videos with few photons
Spatiotemporal Flux Probing for Single-Photon Videography
Abstract: We address the problem of recovering high-speed videos from dynamic scenes under extreme photon sparsity. Existing methods rely on aggregating photon detections in local spatiotemporal windows to improve signal-to-noise ratio; however, this local grouping discards global structure and fails in low-light regimes where photon detections are sparse in space and time. In this work, we show that the information needed to recover both motion and illumination is encoded in correlations over the full space-time pattern of photon arrivals. Building on this insight, we develop a spatiotemporal flux probing theory and an algorithm that estimates the Fourier coefficients of the underlying intensity directly from the photon stream. We demonstrate that our approach (1) recovers fast motion and temporal illumination dynamics with substantially fewer photons than prior methods, (2) enables velocity-selective videography that automatically refocuses video onto specific detected motions, and (3) generalizes across sensing modalities including single-photon, event, and spike cameras.