#01Aug 6, 2026
cs.CV
Toward Deployable Bangla Sign Language Recognition with Expert-Validated Data and a Lightweight Attention-Based Model
Saad Ahmed, Md Khalid Syfullaha
Deaf and hard-of-hearing people in Bangladesh communicate mainly through Bangla Sign Language (BdSL). Automatic BdSL recognition on personal devices could widen access to education and services. Existing systems use controlled-setting datasets without expert verification and heavyweight pretrained backbones unsuited to on-device use. We introduce RSBdSL38, 10,874 expert-validated images spanning all 38 BdSL hand signs, representing the 51 letters of the Bangla alphabet, recorded from real signers at three special-needs schools across Bangladesh. We propose a lightweight attention based convolutional network of 298,470 parameters, built from grouped bottleneck residual blocks, channel and spatial attention, a multi-scale depthwise hand-feature block, dual pooling, and Swish activations. Trained from scratch, it attains 96.37% accuracy (95.72% +- 0.54% over five seeds), within 1.08 percentage points of the best of nine ImageNet-pretrained efficient architectures under an identical protocol, using 8.5 to 68x fewer parameters and 1.3 to 21.7x fewer MACs. Retrained, it reaches 92.95 to 98.33% on six public BdSL benchmarks, 97.04% on a merged corpus, and 76.25% zero-shot on BdSL-38. Removing any architectural stage costs 7.61 to 89.30 points, against at most 3.17 for the training recipe. Grad-CAM with deletion-insertion and weight-randomization checks confirms that predictions follow the signing hand. A signer-independent split holding out 6 of 36 signers yields 85.18%. Quantized to 0.48 MB, it runs at 3.98 ms per image within a 15.5 MB footprint on a commodity smartphone. Together, RSBdSL38 and our from-scratch model turn benchmark accuracy into deployable accessibility at a fraction of pretrained-backbone cost; dataset, code, and models are released.
#02Aug 6, 2026
cs.CV
Domain-Grounded Candidate Selection for Agentic Image Editing: A Shadow Removal Case
Shilin Hu, Jingyi Xu, Dimitris Samaras and 1 more
Commercial vision-language models are reshaping computer vision, with visual priors broad enough to rival task-specific systems. This raises a natural question: do they reduce the need for classic, physics-informed low-level vision? We study this through shadow removal, a problem shaped by scene geometry, illumination, materials, and occluders, where paired shadow and shadow-free data are hard to collect at scale. We find that a commercial generative editor, used directly, can produce clean shadow-free edits that preserve surface texture and local appearance. However, this comes with a new failure mode: the same editor can regenerate scene content, hallucinate objects, or misread a shadow as material or geometry, producing plausible but physically wrong edits. We address this with an agentic candidate-selection pipeline: the editor generates a guided probe, an evaluator screens for major failures, retries when needed, samples multiple candidates, filters them, and selects a final result balancing shadow removal against scene preservation. Grounding this process in shadow-formation physics makes it more reliable: prompting the generator and evaluator to treat shadows as illumination effects caused by light occlusion, not material or object structure, measurably improves quality and consistency. On the ShadowRemovalRefine benchmark, our physics-oriented pipeline achieves a CDD of 0.0075, reducing CDD by at least 47% over the strongest prior method. These results suggest that commercial vision-language models do not replace classic low-level vision priors; instead, such priors remain useful for constraining and steering physically underconstrained generation.
#03Aug 6, 2026
cs.CV
CFGPNet: Cross-Attention-Based Fused Gradient Programmed Network Framework for Multispectral Object Detection
Nima Hatami, Karim Faez, Saeed Sharifian and 1 more
RGB--T object detection exploits the complementary strengths of visible and infrared imagery, supporting robust perception in low-light, adverse-weather, and complex multi-scale environments. However, existing methods still suffer from insufficient cross-modal interaction, unstable fusion from modality distribution gaps, and the high computational cost of heavy attention-based architectures. To address these issues, CFGPNet is proposed, a Cross-Attention-Based Fused Gradient Programmed Network framework for multispectral object detection. CFGPNet uses an improved GELAN backbone with RepViT-style re-parameterized blocks to strengthen feature representation while preserving computational efficiency. A Cross Computation Efficient Attention (CrossCEA) module is introduced to enhance cross-modal feature interaction and reduce redundant information transfer between visible and thermal branches. To generate compact and discriminative fused representations, an Attention Selection and Aggregation Fusion (ASAF) network combines dense feature aggregation with selective attention-based emphasis. Moreover, a programmable-gradient auxiliary branch is integrated into each CFGPNet variant to improve gradient delivery and optimization quality. Experiments on five public multispectral benchmarks, FLIR, M3FD, LLVIP, VEDAI, and MFAD, demonstrate that CFGPNet achieves strong and consistent performance across diverse scenes, object scales, and modality balances. In particular, the framework attains 80.7% mAP50 / 45.0% mAP50:95 on FLIR, 89.9% / 63.4% on M3FD, and 97.8% / 68.9% on LLVIP. It also reaches 83.3% / 56.9% on VEDAI and 83.4% / 61.8% on MFAD. These results show that CFGPNet is an effective, practical solution offering useful accuracy--efficiency trade-offs across three model scales. The code, data, and fine-tuned models are available at https://github.com/NimaHatami99/CFGPNet.
#04Aug 6, 2026
cs.CV
BendTwin: Robust Dense-to-Sparse Physical Reconstruction with Bending-Aware Differentiable Spring-Mass Models
Yixiong Jing, Qi Wang, Lin Chen and 6 more
Reconstructing objects with mechanical properties from video observations enables physically consistent dynamic prediction, benefiting robotics planning and interaction. Existing spring--mass based physical driven reconstruction approaches offer efficient and differentiable physical reconstruction, but they typically rely on axial springs alone. Such formulations oversimplify the underlying structural mechanics and can become mechanically under-constrained when the physical graph is coarsened, limiting their ability to preserve stable local deformation. We present BendTwin, a bending-aware differentiable spring--mass framework for video-based reconstruction and future prediction of deformable objects. BendTwin introduces bending stiffness and damping over local surface triplets, penalizing deviations from rest angles and regularizing higher-order deformation. These bending constraints improve mechanical stability while preserving the simplicity of spring--mass system. Experiments show that BendTwin consistently outperforms the axial-only PhysTwin baseline. Ablation studies further demonstrate that the bending constraints maintain system stability across different downsampling ratios and consistently improve upon the original PhysTwin formulation. Overall, BendTwin provides an effective approach for constructing mechanically faithful digital twins from sparse-view RGB-D videos.
#05Aug 6, 2026
cs.CV
HOPE: Hand-Object Pressure Estimation from Monocular Videos
Subin Jeon, Byungjun Kim, Hanbyul Joo
Estimating physical pressure from vision is essential for understanding contact-rich hand-object interaction. However, prior vision-based pressure estimation methods are largely limited to planar surfaces and single image input, making them difficult to apply to dynamic hand-object interaction with diverse objects. We instead formulate pressure estimation as a hand-centric video prediction problem with monocular video as input. This formulation predicts temporally evolving per-vertex normal pressure and contact directly on the hand mesh, yielding a unified output space independent of object shape and sensor layout. Building on this formulation, we propose \textbf{HOPE}, a framework with two key components. First, we lift tactile-glove pressure, planar-sensor pressure, and distance-based hand-object contact annotations into a shared hand vertex space, allowing bare-hand contact data to regularize pressure learning where metric labels are unavailable. Second, we introduce a vertex-anchored video transformer that treats each vertex as a persistent token, aggregates visual features and hand pose over time, and uses a contact-gated pressure head to enforce that pressure vanishes without contact. Experiments on OpenTouch, PressureVisionDB, and hand-object contact benchmarks validate HOPE across object-pressure, surface-pressure, and contact-supervised HOI settings. Despite using metric pressure supervision primarily from gloved-hand videos, HOPE generalizes to bare-hand egocentric and in-the-wild videos, producing joint contact and pressure predictions beyond the scope of contact-only or planar-pressure baselines.