#01Aug 31, 2026
cs.CV
VeriCam: A Verification Baseline for the Classification of Unknown Data
Lucas Wojcik, Gabriel E. Lima, Sergio M. Silva and 2 more
The advent of foundation models have enabled a new era in zero-shot classification. Yet, key challenges persist. Despite their impressive generalization power that leverages the immense pre-training knowledge, both foundation models for image and text as well as vision-text hybrids lack the representational power needed for fine-grained, minutiae-based class separation that some real-world tasks require. To address the current gaps in the literature, we propose VeriCam, a pipeline designed to learn highly specialized features that enable classification of unknown classes in unseen data. VeriCam works by leveraging the representation power of image models trained for the verification task, where the model develops an intricate feature space that incorporates fine-grained details. By training a model to discriminate between pairs of images from the same and different classes, a relational graph is constructed, representing the class relationships between data points. We then present two approaches for graph clustering: a naive algorithm and a specific setup for the Leiden graph clustering algorithm. The pipeline is validated on the LPLCv2 dataset, which comprises real-world traffic surveillance images. We show that the dataset carries an inherent capture device bias that is posed as a generalization challenge for downstream License Plate recognition tasks such as OCR. As such, we dynamically identify capture devices with a label-agnostic approach, enabling the construction of a fair and unbiased benchmark. In the cross-device scenario, our pipeline reaches an F1-Score of 93.45 in the verification baseline and a V-Measure score of 80.13 in the clustering step. All code is publicly available at https://github.com/lmlwojcik/VeriCam
#02Aug 31, 2026
cs.CV
Driving on Memory
Christian Löwens, Thorben Funke, Alexandru Paul Condurache
End-to-end autonomous driving models plan future trajectories from raw sensor input. While earlier driving benchmarks often measured deviation from the human trajectory, current benchmarks such as NAVSIM and Bench2Drive evaluate models with richer simulation-based metrics intended to capture safe and compliant driving. A high benchmark score should reflect that a model can understand the scene in front of it and act accordingly. But how much of that score specifically comes from reacting to the dynamic part of that scene? To probe this, we remove a model's camera input and replace it with memories from prior drives at the same location. The retrieved memories can provide persistent scene information, including road layout and location-conditioned regularities, but not the current traffic state. Surprisingly, memory is nearly sufficient on NAVSIM, reaching or even exceeding the performance of leading end-to-end methods without actually observing the evaluated scene. Our results suggest that a high NAVSIM score does not require a planner to react to the current traffic scene and should be treated with caution. This effect is benchmark-dependent: driving from memory causes substantially larger performance drops on Bench2Drive and RealEngine. We provide our code at https://github.com/boschresearch/MemoryDrivoR .
#03Aug 31, 2026
cs.CV
Audio-Driven Adversarial Defense for 3D Talking Face Generation with totally Visual Fidelity Preservation
Rui-Qing Sun, Chen-Hao Cui, Hui-Yang Zhao and 3 more
The rapid development of generative portrait models has raised growing concerns about privacy leakage and identity misuse. In particular, audio-driven 3D talking face generation can reconstruct a reusable 3D portrait of a target person from a monocular video and animate it with arbitrary speech, making realistic identity impersonation alarmingly practical. Existing proactive defenses mainly operate in the visual domain by injecting subtle perturbations into acial regions to disrupt identity acquisition. However, such perturbations often compromise visual quality due to the strong structural priors and social sensitivity of human faces, and are easily weakened by common real-world transformations such as resizing. To overcome these limitations, we propose an imperceptible audio defense for audio-driven 3D talking face generation by shifting protection from the visual modality to the audio modality. Specifically,we exploit psychoacoustic masking to hide protective perturbations within perceptually masked frequency regions of the speech signal, thereby reducing perceptual distortion while suppressing reliable facial animation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method effectively degrades 3D talking face generation while preserving favorable perceptual quality. These findings highlight psychoacoustically guided audio perturbations as a practical and promising direction for privacy-preserving portrait protection.
#04Aug 31, 2026
cs.CV
FaceSnap: Real-Time Personalized Lightstage Facial Performance Capture
Rukhshanda Hussain, Noé Artru, Emeline Got and 6 more
Lightstage facial capture produces production-quality digital humans, but it is resource and labor-intensive. Multi-camera setups, hours of computation, and massive data storage create bottlenecks that hinder iterative workflows. This paper introduces FaceSnap, an end-to-end framework that streamlines capture via a two-stage approach. First, a one-time multi-view optimization from a range-of-motion sequence builds a personalized model encoding both geometry and expression-dependent appearance. This model then enables high-fidelity real-time facial performance capture from a single monocular lightstage camera, with no further multi-view capture required. FaceSnap jointly estimates geometry and dynamic 4K texture at 83 fps. The 4K texture is produced by a novel personalized residual upscaler that recovers subject-specific high-frequency detail, which generic upscalers fail to capture. FaceSnap achieves geometric accuracy competitive with full per-frame multi-view optimization while outperforming feed-forward methods trained on production-quality 3D data, all from a single camera view. Finally, we introduce Multi4D, a public benchmark for evaluating 4D facial reconstruction methods in lightstage environments, enabling topology-invariant geometric comparison across methods.
#05Aug 31, 2026
cs.CV
Multimodal Shared Latent Representation of Narration, Microscope and iOCT Images for Phase Recognition in Vitreoretinal Surgery
Onur Izmitlioglu, Shervin Dehghani, Tarek Ghannoum and 2 more
Surgical phase recognition is key to context-aware computer-assisted feedback in vitreoretinal procedures, yet the scarcity of synchronized multimodal intraoperative data, particularly microscope views and intraoperative OCT, limits approaches that aim to replicate the multimodal integration surgeons perform naturally. Surgical narration, by contrast, is abundantly available online and offers rich semantic supervision. Prior work has mainly explored pairwise contrastive learning (e.g., intraoperative OCT-microscope or microscope-narration), leaving the joint modeling of all three modalities largely unexplored. We introduce a framework that uses microscope views as a shared anchor to bridge surgical narrations and intraoperative OCT (iOCT) without requiring a fully synchronized tri-modal dataset, leveraging real microscope-narration videos and a synthetic dataset of synchronized microscope video and tool-aligned iOCT pairs. Contrastive alignment transfers structural priors from the synthetic domain to real videos lacking iOCT, and a dual-head MS-TCN++ integrates the resulting embeddings for joint macro- and micro-phase prediction. Evaluated on real vitreoretinal surgeries, our framework improves macro-phase recognition over a zero-shot baseline (mean F1 0.38 to 0.53) and provides an exploratory route to estimating fine-grained instrument-tissue measurements that are not directly observable in real microscope video alone; these micro-phase estimates are validated quantitatively on synthetic data and shown only qualitatively on real surgery. To our knowledge, this is the first work to unify microscope view, iOCT B-scans, and surgical narrations in a shared latent space for surgical phase recognition.