#01Nov 6, 2026
cs.CV
Impact of color in computer and human-based object recognition under occlusion
Courtney M. King, Elissa Aminoff, Daniel D. Leeds
Partial occlusions challenge object recognition in both human and computer vision (CV), but the impact is largely dependent on the occlusion and model design. Properties relating to color are particularly important in biological recognition and frequently leveraged for camouflage, however there are still open questions about what makes them effective and how they translate to CV. This work studies partial occlusions that create camouflage, including those that blend in with target objects or with scenes, which alter object representations in distinct ways. Experiments evaluate recognition performance on both human participants and models ranging from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to transformers, and additional analysis is performed on models to uncover trends in processing and object representations under multiple occlusion types. Novel metrics offer explainability of model behavior under occlusion: non-occlusion precision (NOP) and non-occlusion recall (NOR) measure alignment of model activations with and without occlusion, and activation in occlusion (AIO) measures the percentage of activations that occur in occluded regions. Findings show that human recognition, and most transformers, are negatively impacted by generated camouflaging occluders, with scene-based camouflage performing worse than object-based. Classical CNNs show a strong opposite trend, performing the worst on neutral-colored occlusions, suggesting that contextually-related colors, particularly scene-based, benefit object recognition rather than disrupting shape or boundary cues. Additionally, generated camouflaging occluders for training augmentation improves robustness to unseen camouflage for selected CNN model, and occlusion metrics suggest trends about learned mechanisms. Findings have interesting implications for alignment in human and computer vision, model vulnerabilities, and explainability.
#02Nov 5, 2026
eess.IV
Measurement-Aware Multimodal LLM for No-Reference Low-Dose CT Quality Assessment
Kerem Basim, Tolga Demiroglu, Mehmet Ozan Unal and 2 more
No-reference image quality assessment (IQA) of low-dose CT predicts the score that radiologists would assign to a slice without a full-dose reference, as needed to compare dose protocols and denoisers. Trained CT IQA networks agree well with radiologists but output only a score, whereas multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can explain a score but perform poorly on CT when only prompted. We propose a measurement-aware MLLM, built on Qwen3.8-27B, that rates a slice from its image together with six image-domain measurements of noise, sharpness, high-frequency content and streaks, given to the language model as percentiles in text. On the LDCT-IQA 2023 test set, it reaches an Overall score of 2.735, on par with the retrained challenge winner (2.735) and MedSigLIP-FiLM (2.713), and substantially above its base MLLM used as a zero-shot agent. Shuffling the measurements at test time reduces the score by 0.048, mostly through noise, but the same measurements also lead the model to assign higher scores to over-smoothed denoised images.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
eSharp: Diffusion-based Sharp Monocular Metric Event-to-Depth Estimation
Qiushi Dai, Aniket Dashpute, Yuhao Liu and 3 more
Depth perception is fundamental for autonomous navigation, industrial inspection, and mixed-reality systems. It often operates under strict constraints on power and form factor. In such cases, monocular depth estimation (MDE) is often used. Even as recent advances continue to improve monocular depth quality, conventional frame-based MDE systems remain challenged by fast motion and high-dynamic-range scenes. This work introduces eSharp, an MDE framework that addresses these problems using an event camera. eSharp repurposes pretrained diffusion priors for event-only MDE and produces accurate metric depth with unparalleled sharpness on real data. Real-world event datasets provide only sparse LiDAR depth maps for ground-truth supervision, making dense prediction challenging. We address this limitation through cross-modal distillation, using LiDAR-calibrated dense pseudo-labels generated from a spatially co-registered frame camera to train eSharp. Experiments show that eSharp outperforms prior event-to-depth baselines in both metric-depth accuracy and spatial fidelity, establishing diffusion models as a promising foundation for event-driven 3D perception.
#04Nov 6, 2026
cs.CV
MotionCore: A Latent Neural Simulator for Video Generation with Rigid-Body Dynamics
Zheng Wang, Zhengwei Gong, Yuanzhi Liang and 1 more
Video generation models can produce highly realistic videos while generating physically inconsistent object motion. This limitation suggests that visual modeling alone may not provide a transferable representation of physical dynamics. We introduce MotionCore, a framework for learning physical dynamics via a learnable partial differential equation solver and focuses on rigid-body motion. We introduce a latent neural simulator learning to predict the evolution of object-level physical states from observed motion. Its predictions are then converted into spatially aligned latent controls for a controllable video diffusion model. The generator serves as a visual interface: it provides appearance and scene detail, while the learned dynamics model specifies the physical trajectory. To preserve this trajectory through the interface, MotionCore combines a diffusion-matching objective with a low-capacity decodability constraint on object identity and position. We evaluate MotionCore on public physical-consistency benchmarks and on paired data with known trajectories. Results indicate that MotionCore improves physical consistency and trajectory obedience in the evaluated rigid-body settings, while maintaining comparable visual quality. A controlled ablation protocol compares learned dynamics with an analytic prior and studies the choice of latent evolution processor.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Extrapolation Matters: Sparse-Only Depth Completion Beyond LiDAR Coverage
Maximilian Jansen, Gasser Elazab, Praveen Kulkarni
Extrapolation beyond LiDAR coverage is an important yet under-evaluated challenge of depth completion. In real camera--LiDAR systems, partial sensor overlap, occlusions, and limited field coverage often leave large image regions weakly observed or completely unobserved by LiDAR. Thus, we investigate depth completion in this beyond-coverage regime using only sparse supervision from raw single-sweep LiDAR, without dense depth labels, LiDAR accumulation, or pseudo-LiDAR generation. Our approach leverages a frozen monocular depth foundation model, lightweight per-frame alignment to sparse LiDAR geometry, and a refinement module that fuses the aligned prior with sparse LiDAR anchors to predict dense metric depth. To regularize learning under raw sparse supervision, we introduce a high-frequency normal-consistency loss defined as the image-space gradient of the per-pixel normal cosine discrepancy. This term penalizes spatial variation in scalar angular error; it does not directly match changes in neighboring normal vectors. We further introduce an evaluation protocol that explicitly separates LiDAR-supported and beyond-coverage regions, revealing extrapolative behavior that conventional depth-completion metrics can obscure. Our method achieves strong depth accuracy beyond LiDAR coverage while remaining competitive in LiDAR-covered regions, providing a practical way to deploy monocular foundation priors in multi-sensor systems.