Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their hierarchical variants have achieved strong performance in Computational Pathology (CPath). However, most are pre-trained on single-resolution Whole Slide Images (WSIs), limiting their generalization across arbitrary resolutions. Gigapixel WSIs inherently contain diagnostic patterns at multiple scales, including cellular morphologies, tissue architectures, and global context, mirroring how expert pathologists examine WSIs. We introduce Multi-Resolution Pyramid Transformer (MRPT), a model that hierarchically aggregates multi-resolution information from cellular to tissue and WSI levels. MRPT employs a biologically meaningful Consecutive Cross-Resolution Attention (CCRA) mechanism to capture scale-independent interactions and enforces multi-resolution semantic consistency by aligning embeddings across resolutions, yielding robust and generalizable WSI representations. Pre-trained in a multi-resolution self-supervised manner on 624M patches, 2.4M regions, and 36K WSIs, MRPT learns rich coarse-to-fine histopathology features. Extensive experiments on 34 diverse datasets show that MRPT surpasses recent foundation models and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in cancer subtype classification, tissue phenotyping, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) for WSI understanding.

The preservation of aquatic biodiversity is critical in mitigating the effects of climate change. Aquatic scene understanding plays a pivotal role in aiding marine scientists in their decision-making processes. In this article, we introduce AquaticCLIP, a novel contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) model tailored for aquatic scene understanding. AquaticCLIP presents an underwater domain-specific learning framework that aligns images and texts in aquatic environments, enabling tasks such as segmentation, classification, detection, and object counting. By leveraging our large-scale underwater image-text paired dataset without the need for ground-truth (GT) annotations, our model enriches existing vision-language models (VLMs) in the aquatic domain. For this purpose, we construct a 2-million underwater image-text paired dataset using heterogeneous resources, including YouTube, Netflix, National Geographic (NatGeo), etc. To fine-tune AquaticCLIP, we propose a prompt-guided vision encoder (PGVE) that progressively aggregates patch features via learnable prompts, while a vision-guided mechanism enhances the language encoder by incorporating visual context. The model is optimized through a contrastive pretraining loss to align visual and textual modalities. AquaticCLIP achieves notable performance improvements in zero-shot settings across multiple underwater computer vision tasks, outperforming existing methods in both accuracy and robustness. Our model sets a new benchmark for vision-language applications in underwater environments. The code and dataset for AquaticCLIP are publicly available on GitHub at: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/AquaticCLIP

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional results across various Computational Pathology (CPath) tasks, such as Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification and survival prediction. These models utilize large-scale datasets to align images and text by incorporating language priors during pre-training. However, the separate training of text and vision encoders in current VLMs leads to only coarse-level alignment, failing to capture the fine-level dependencies between image-text pairs. This limitation restricts their generalization in many downstream CPath tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that enhances the capture of finer-level context through language priors, which better represent the fine-grained tissue morphological structures in histology images. We propose a Context-guided Vision-Language Model (ConVLM) that generates contextually relevant visual embeddings from histology images. ConVLM achieves this by employing context-guided token learning and token enhancement modules to identify and eliminate contextually irrelevant visual tokens, refining the visual representation. These two modules are integrated into various layers of the ConVLM encoders to progressively learn context-guided visual embeddings, enhancing visual-language interactions. The model is trained end-to-end using a context-guided token learning-based loss function. We conducted extensive experiments on 20 histopathology datasets, evaluating both Region of Interest (ROI)-level and cancer subtype WSI-level classification tasks. The results indicate that ConVLM significantly outperforms existing State-of-the-Art (SOTA) vision-language and foundational models. Our source code and pre-trained model is publicly available on: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/ConVLM

Background subtraction is a core problem in computer vision, widely used in video surveillance to segment moving foreground objects from video sequences. While deep learning approaches have shown strong performance—especially under dynamic backgrounds and sudden illumination changes—they typically rely on large-scale, high-quality labeled video datasets. Acquiring such data is time-consuming and expensive, making existing supervised or weakly supervised methods less suitable for real-time applications. Moreover, many of these methods suffer from performance degradation when applied to unseen video sequences. To address these challenges, we present UTGMP-BS algorithm: an Unsupervised Transformer-based pseudo-label Generator with a Message-Passing network for the Background Subtraction task. UTGMP-BS is a fully unsupervised framework designed to learn directly from unlabeled video sequences. It comprises two key components: a transformer-based pseudo-label generator, which produces initial pixel-level foreground and background labels using an encoder-decoder architecture and an L1 loss, and a message-passing network, which acts as a label-cleaner discriminator to refine the pseudo labels and enforce spatial consistency. These two branches engage in mutual learning through consecutive iterations, enhancing one another’s performance without any ground-truth supervision. The framework is trained using an alternating iterative learning strategy with binary cross-entropy loss, achieving robust background subtraction across varied scenes. Extensive experiments on six publicly available benchmark datasets demonstrate that UTGMP-BS achieves competitive results compared to existing State-of-The-Art (SOTA) methods.

We observe that the performance of SOTA visual trackers surprisingly strongly varies across different video attributes and datasets. No single tracker remains the best performer across all tracking attributes and datasets. To bridge this gap, for a given video sequence, we predict the “Best of the N Trackers”, called the BofN meta-tracker. At its core, a Tracking Performance Prediction Network (TP2N) selects a predicted best performing visual tracker for the given video sequence using only a few initial frames. We also introduce a frame-level BofN meta-tracker that keeps predicting the best performer after regular temporal intervals. The TP2N is based on self-supervised learning architectures MocoV2, SwAv, BT, and DINO; experiments show that DINO with ViT-S as a backbone performs the best. The video-level BofN meta-tracker outperforms, by a large margin, existing SOTA trackers on nine standard benchmarks – LaSOT, TrackingNet, GOT-10K, VOT2019, VOT2021, VOT2022, UAV123, OTB100, and WebUAV-3M. Further improvement is achieved by the frame-level BofN meta-tracker effectively handling variations in the tracking scenarios within long sequences. For instance, on GOT-10k, BofN meta-tracker average overlap is 88.7% and 91.1% with video and frame-level settings, respectively. The best performing tracker, RTS, achieves 85.20% AO. On VOT2022, BofN expected average overlap is 67.88% and 70.98% with video and frame level settings, compared to the best performing ARTrack, 64.12%. This work also presents an extensive evaluation of competitive tracking methods on all commonly used benchmarks, following their protocols. The code, the trained models, and the results will be made publicly available on https://github.com/BasitAlawode/Best_of_N_Trackers.

This paper presents a new dataset and general tracker enhancement method for Underwater Visual Object Tracking (UVOT). Despite its significance, underwater tracking has remained unexplored due to data inaccessibility. It poses distinct challenges; the underwater environment exhibits non-uniform lighting conditions, low visibility, lack of sharpness, low contrast, camouflage, and reflections from suspended particles. Performance of traditional tracking methods designed primarily for terrestrial or open-air scenarios drops in such conditions. We address the problem by proposing a novel underwater image enhancement algorithm designed specifically to boost tracking quality. The method has resulted in a significant performance improvement, of up to 5.0% AUC, of state-of-the-art (SOTA) visual trackers. To develop robust and accurate UVOT methods, large-scale datasets are required. To this end, we introduce a large-scale UVOT benchmark dataset consisting of 400 video segments and 275,000 manually annotated frames enabling underwater training and evaluation of deep trackers. The videos are labelled with several underwater-specific tracking attributes including watercolor variation, target distractors, camouflage, target relative size, and low visibility conditions. The UVOT400 dataset, tracking results, and the code are publicly available on: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/UWVOT400.

In Computational Pathology (CPath), the introduction of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has opened new avenues for research, focusing primarily on aligning image-text pairs at a single magnification level. However, this approach might not be sufficient for tasks like cancer subtype classification, tissue phenotyping, and survival analysis due to the limited level of detail that a single-resolution image can provide. Addressing this, we propose a novel multi-resolution paradigm leveraging Whole Slide Images (WSIs) to extract histology patches at multiple resolutions and generate corresponding textual descriptions through advanced CPath VLM. We introduce visual-textual alignment at multiple resolutions as well as cross-resolution alignment to establish more effective text-guided visual representations. Cross-resolution alignment using a multimodal encoder enhances the model's ability to capture context from multiple resolutions in histology images. Our model aims to capture a broader range of information, supported by novel loss functions, enriches feature representation, improves discriminative ability, and enhances generalization across different resolutions. Pre-trained on a comprehensive TCGA dataset with 34 million image-language pairs at various resolutions, our fine-tuned model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) counterparts across multiple datasets and tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in CPath. The code is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/MR-PLIP

Video background subtraction is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision that aims to segment all moving objects. Robust principal component analysis has been identified as a promising unsupervised paradigm for background subtraction tasks in the last decade thanks to its competitive performance in a number of benchmark datasets. Tensor robust principal component analysis variations have improved background subtraction performance further. However, because moving object pixels in the sparse component are treated independently and do not have to adhere to spatial-temporal structured-sparsity constraints, performance is reduced for sequences with dynamic backgrounds, camouflaged, and camera jitter problems. In this work, we present a spatial-temporal regularized tensor sparse RPCA algorithm for precise background subtraction. Within the sparse component, we impose spatial-temporal regularizations in the form of normalized graph-Laplacian matrices. To do this, we build two graphs, one across the input tensor spatial locations and the other across its frontal slices in the time domain. While maximizing the objective function, we compel the tensor sparse component to serve as the spatiotemporal eigenvectors of the graph-Laplacian matrices. The disconnected moving object pixels in the sparse component are preserved by the proposed graph-based regularizations since they both comprise of spatiotemporal subspace-based structure. Additionally, we propose a unique objective function that employs batch and online-based optimization methods to jointly maximize the background-foreground and spatial-temporal regularization components. Experiments are performed on six publicly available background subtraction datasets that demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared to several existing methods. Our source code will be available very soon.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently advanced the Visual Object Tracking (VOT) performance. In VLMs, a vision encoder is employed to obtain visual representation, and a text encoder is employed to estimate the textual embeddings using natural language descriptions. By aligning the visual and textual representations, the VLMs achieve robust performance in complex and diverse tracking scenarios, efficiently handling dynamic target appearances such as motion blur, occlusion, fast motion, and similar object distractors. However, the input textual description in many existing VLM-based trackers incorporates class and semantics details without any contextual information. This is addressed in some recent VLM-based State Of The Art (SOTA) trackers by implicitly predicting some important attributes of the target object and encoding them as textual descriptions within the tracking paradigm. However, the SOTA methods neglect the contextual relationship among the predicted attributes. In this work, we propose an Attention-based Image-Text alignment Tracker (AITrack) for robust VOT tasks. AITrack simplifies the process of VLM-based tracking using attention-based visual and textual alignment modules. AITrack utilizes a region-of-interest (ROI) text-guided encoder that leverages existing pre-trained language models to implicitly extract and encode textual features and a simple image encoder to encode visual features. A simple alignment module is implemented to combine both encoded visual and textual features, thereby inherently exposing the semantic relationship between the template and search frames with their surroundings, providing rich encodings for improved tracking performance. We employ a simple decoder that takes past predictions as spatiotemporal clues to effectively model the target appearance changes without the need for complex customized post-processings and prediction heads. Extensive experiments are performed on six publicly available VOT benchmark datasets demonstrating the strong capabilities of our AITtrack by gaining an average success rate of 2.0%. Our code will be publicly available on: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/AITrack.

The resource-limited nature of underwater vision equipment leads to poor, otherwise low-resolution information affecting the downstream underwater robotics and ocean engineering tasks. Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) methods have emerged, particularly Super-Resolution (SR), to tackle the aforementioned challenge by restoring the corresponding low-resolution image to a high-quality counterpart. Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently been employed for SR tasks thanks to their superior performance over mainstream convolution neural networks. The success of ViTs is largely due to their self-attention mechanism; however, they may encounter challenges in dealing with severe and unpredictable degradation in underwater imaging. In contrast, Multi-scale ViTs (MViTs) variants such as the Swin transformers have overcome that challenge by preserving long-range dependencies over multi-scale feature hierarchies through evolving channel capacity. MViTs tend to induce spatial efficiency through classical down-sampling, such as average pooling over key/values, which results in an inevitable loss of high-frequency components. To address this lack, in the current work, we propose a novel algorithm, SwinWave-SR, for efficient and accurate multi-scale SR for underwater images. Our proposed algorithm is based on Swin transformer consisting of a wavelet block to restrict the information drop by downsampling in an invertible fashion. Consequently, the key components are preserved to assist self-attention learning while reducing its computational cost simultaneously. To further complement it, we explore a prominent compression regime, namely the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH), to discover a lightweight sub-network with competitive performance to its original model by reducing computational costs up to 70.44%. Overall, SwinWave-SR improves peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) by 0.95 dB ∼ 2.23 dB compared to the state-of-the-art SwinIR while reducing the number of parameters by 29.56% and the calculation cost by 18.734%. Experimental results show that the proposed SwinWave-SR method outperforms the state-of-the-art SR methods on four benchmark underwater datasets and significantly improves PSNR and structural similarity index (SSIM).

By improving image quality and resolution, Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) models help advance understanding of underwater environments. Super-resolution techniques hold promise in addressing these issues by enhancing image details. The transformer architecture has recently gained considerable popularity in low-level vision tasks, including image super-resolution (SR). In this paper, we present a novel multi-distillation algorithm based on the swin transformer and wavelet transform (KDSWT) for underwater image super-resolution. A wavelet block is added to the swin transformer to alleviate the loss of detailed features because wavelet transforms can preserve the high-frequency components, subtle variations, and localized features that contribute to the overall richness in images. Based on a large dataset of high-resolution underwater images, a ViT-based student model is trained to learn the intricate features of underwater images from the teacher model. Using knowledge distillation, the student model learns to upscale input images and capture the domain-specific features essential to understanding underwater scenes. To address the computational cost issue in ViT, we introduce a lightweight network training strategy that combines multi-anchor distillation and progressive learning, enabling the lightweight network to achieve exceptional performance and the fastest inference time compared to recent lightweight state-of-art methods. Our experimental results show that KDSWT lightweight (student) significantly improves peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) over the (original) teacher model while decreasing the number of parameters by 54% and the calculation cost by 22%. Concurrently, KDSWT-SR excels beyond state-of-the-art SR techniques on three benchmark underwater datasets, leading to noteworthy improvements in both PSNR and structural similarity index (SSIM).

Deep learning methods have demonstrated encouraging performance on open-air visual object tracking (VOT) benchmarks, however, their strength remains unexplored on underwater video sequences due to the lack of challenging underwater VOT benchmarks. Apart from the open-air tracking challenges, videos captured in underwater environments pose additional challenges for tracking such as low visibility, poor video quality, distortions in sharpness and contrast, reflections from suspended particles, and non-uniform lighting. In the current work, we propose a new Underwater Tracking Benchmark (UTB180) dataset consisting of 180 sequences to facilitate the development of underwater deep trackers. The sequences in UTB180 are selected from both underwater natural and online sources with over 58,000 annotated frames. Video-level attributes are also provided to facilitate the development of robust trackers for specific challenges. We benchmark 15 existing pre-trained State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) trackers on UTB180 and compare their performance on another publicly available underwater benchmark. The trackers consistently perform worse on UTB180 showing that it poses more challenging scenarios. Moreover, we show that fine-tuning five high-quality SOTA trackers on UTB180 still does not sufficiently boost their tracking performance. Our experiments show that the UTB180 sequences pose a major burden on the SOTA trackers as compared to their open-air tracking performance. The performance gap reveals the need for a dedicated end-to-end underwater deep tracker that takes into account the inherent properties of underwater environments. We believe that our proposed dataset will be of great value to the tracking community in advancing the SOTA in underwater VOT. Our dataset is publicly available on Kaggle .

The estimation of high-quality underwater images is an important step towards the development of computer vision systems in marine environments. This fundamental step contains numerous computer vision and robotics applications including marine exploration, robotics manipulation, navigation, object detection, tracking, and sea life monitoring. However, this pre-processing step becomes more challenging in the presence of back -scattering of underwater particles and attenuation issues, which lead to the formation of hazy underwater images. Vision transformers have recently demonstrated outstanding performance in many computer vision applications. Window-based Transformers (WT) show promising enhancement performance by computing self-attention within non-overlapping local windows. WT has been identified as an essential component in improving representation capabilities; however, it has received less attention in improving the performance of Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE). Therefore, we propose a novel end-to-end Underwater window -based Transformer Generative Adversarial Network (UwTGAN). Our proposed algorithm consists of two main components, including a transformer generator that generates a restored underwater image and a transformer discriminator that classifies the generated underwater image. Both components are equipped with Window -based Self-Attention Blocks (WSABs), which maximize efficiency by limiting self-attention computation to non-overlapping local windows and provide relatively low computational costs. WSAB-based transformer generators and discriminators are trained end-to-end. We formulated an efficient loss function to ensure that the variables are closely integrated. Extensive experimental evaluations are performed on four independent underwater image datasets. Our results demonstrate that the proposed UwTGAN algorithm has outperformed several state-of-the-art UIE methods in terms of both quantitative and qualitative metrics by a significant margin.

There is a surge in the total energy demand of the world due to the increase in the world's population and the ever-increasing human dependence on technology. Conventional non-renewable energy sources still contribute a larger amount to the total energy production. Due to their greenhouse gas emissions and environmental pollution, the substitution of these sources with renewable energy sources (RES) is desired. However, RES, such as wind energy, are uncertain, intermittent, and unpredictable. Hence, there is a need to optimize their usage when they are available. This can be carried out through a flexible operation of a microgrid system with the power grid to gradually reduce the contribution of the conventional sources in the power system using energy storage systems (ESS). To integrate the RES in a cost-effective approach, the ESS must be optimally sized and operated within its safe limitations. This study, therefore, presents a flexible method for the optimal sizing and operation of battery ESS (BESS) in a wind-penetrated microgrid system using the butterfly optimization (BO) algorithm. The BO algorithm was utilized for its simple and fast implementation and for its ability to obtain global optimization parameters. In the formulation of the optimization problem, the study considers the depth of discharge and life-cycle of the BESS. Simulation results for three different scenarios were studied, analyzed, and compared. The resulting optimized BESS connected scenario yielded the most cost-effective strategy among all scenarios considered.

In spite of the improvements achieved by the several denoising algorithms over the years, many of them still fail at preserving the fine details of the image after denoising. This is as a result of the smooth-out effect they have on the images. Most neural network-based algorithms have achieved better quantitative performance than the classical denoising algorithms. However, they also suffer from qualitative (visual) performance as a result of the smooth-out effect. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to address this shortcoming. We propose a deep collaborative filtering-based (Deep-CoFiB) algorithm for image denoising. This algorithm performs collaborative denoising of image patches in the sparse domain using a set of optimized neural network models. This results in a fast algorithm that is able to excellently obtain a trade-off between noise removal and details preservation. Extensive experiments show that the DeepCoFiB performed quantitatively (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) and qualitatively (visually) better than many of the state-of-the-art denoising algorithms.

Power utilities, developers, and investors are pushing towards larger penetrations of wind and solar energy-based power generation in their existing energy mix. This study, specifically, looks towards wind power deployment in Saudi Arabia. For profitable development of wind power, accurate knowledge of wind speed both in spatial and time domains is critical. The wind speed is the most fluctuating and intermittent parameter in nature compared to all the meteorological variables. This uncertain nature of wind speed makes wind power more difficult to predict ahead of time. Wind speed is dependent on meteorological factors such as pressure, temperature, and relative humidity and can be predicted using these meteorological parameters. The forecasting of wind speed is critical for grid management, cost of energy, and quality power supply. This study proposes a short-term, multi-dimensional prediction of wind speed based on Long-Short Term Memory Networks (LSTM). Five models are developed by training the networks with measured hourly mean wind speed values from1980 to 2019 including exogenous inputs (temperature and pressure). The study found that LSTM is a powerful tool for a short-term prediction of wind speed. However, the accuracy of LSTM may be compromised with the inclusion of exogenous features in the training sets and the duration of prediction ahead.

Over the years, progressive improvements in denoising performance have been achieved by several image denoising algorithms that have been proposed. Despite this, many of these state-of-the-art algorithms tend to smooth out the denoised image resulting in the loss of some image details after denoising. Many also distort images of lower resolution resulting in a partial or complete structural loss. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by proposing a collaborative filtering-based (CoFiB) denoising algorithm. Our proposed algorithm performs weighted sparse domain collaborative denoising by taking advantage of the fact that similar patches tend to have similar sparse representations in the sparse domain. This gives our algorithm the intelligence to strike a balance between image detail preservation and noise removal. Our extensive experiments showed that our proposed CoFiB algorithm does not only preserve the image details but also perform excellently for images of any given resolution where many denoising algorithms tend to struggle, specifically at low resolutions.

Recently, deep learning methods such as the convolutional neural networks have gained prominence in the area of image denoising. This is owing to their proven ability to surpass state-of-the-art classical image denoising algorithms such as block-matching and 3D filtering algorithm. Deep denoising convolutional neural networks use many feed-forward convolution layers with added regularization methods of batch normalization and residual learning to speed up training and improve denoising performance significantly. However, this comes at the expense of a huge number of trainable parameters. In this paper, we show that by employing an enhanced dense-sparse-dense network training procedure to the deep denoising convolutional neural networks, comparable denoising performance level can be achieved at a significantly reduced number of trainable parameters. We derive motivation from the fact that networks trained using the dense-sparse-dense approach have been shown to attain performance boost with reduced number of parameters. The proposed reduced deep denoising convolutional neural networks network is an efficient denoising model with significantly reduced parameters and comparable performance to the deep denoising convolutional neural networks. Additionally, denoising was achieved at significantly reduced processing time.

In this paper, we focused on the design of an adaptive backstepping controller (adaptive-BSC) for direct power control (DPC) of a three-phase PWM rectifier. In the proposed system, it is desired to control both the output DC voltage of the rectifier and the reactive power simultaneously by making them track desired respective values. This was done by having independent virtual control signals for both the output voltage and the reactive power. The adaptive control signals were gotten from the dynamic equations of the three-phase system. For comparison, both the BSC and adaptive-BSC equations were developed. Numerical simulations were performed on both of them on a 5kW system. The proposed adaptive-BSC was designed to work under more challenging system variations as compared with the BSC as it has to estimate the value of the unknown system load. Despite this, it still performed better than its BSC counterpart.

The recent application of deep learning (DL) to various tasks has seen the performance of classical techniques surpassed by their DL-based counterparts. As a result, DL has equally seen application in the removal of noise from images. In particular, the use of deep feed-forward convolutional neural networks (DnCNNs) has been investigated for denoising. It utilizes advances in DL techniques such as deep architecture, residual learning, and batch normalization to achieve better denoising performance when compared with the other classical state-of-the-art denoising algorithms. However, its deep architecture resulted in a huge set of trainable parameters. Meta-optimization is a training approach of enabling algorithms to learn to train themselves by themselves. Training algorithms using meta-optimizers have been shown to enable algorithms to achieve better performance when compared to the classical gradient descent-based training approach. In this work, we investigate the application of the meta-optimization training approach to the DnCNN denoising algorithm to enhance its denoising capability. Our preliminary experiments on simpler algorithms reveal the prospects of utilizing the meta-optimization training approach towards the enhancement of the DnCNN denoising capability.