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Computer vision

Explore arXiv computer-vision papers and cs.CV metadata. Search within the index for image segmentation, object detection and visual representation learning.

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1,013 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

The persistence of painting styles

Art is a deeply personal and expressive medium, where each artist brings their own style, technique, and cultural background into their work. Traditionally, identifying artistic styles has been the job of art historians or critics, relying on visual intuition and experience. However, with the advancement of mathematical tools, we can explore art through more structured lens. In this work, we show how persistent homology (PH), a method from topological data analysis, provides objective and interpretable insights on artistic styles. We show how PH can, with statistical certainty, differentiate between artists, both from different artistic currents and from the same one, and distinguish images of an artist from an AI-generated image in the artist's style.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Real-Time Neural Hair G-Buffer Anti-Aliasing

We propose a lightweight real-time method for reconstructing strand-based hair G-Buffers from severely undersampled rasterized inputs. Our pipeline first applies neural spatial reconstruction and temporal accumulation to recover hair coverage, i.e., fractional hair visibility within a pixel, and tangent. It then uses a tangent-guided reconstruction step to complete the position, which is subsequently used for physically based deferred hair shading. We evaluate our method across a diverse set of hairstyles, including straight, wavy, afro, and ponytail styles, under both static and dynamic scenarios. Our method achieves higher hair reconstruction quality than general industrial neural reconstruction solutions such as DLSS and FSR.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

Don't Let the Video Speak: Audio-Contrastive Preference Optimization for Audio-Visual Language Models

While Audio-Visual Language Models (AVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress over recent years, their reliability is bottlenecked by cross-modal hallucination. A particularly pervasive manifestation is video-driven audio hallucination: models routinely exploit visual shortcuts to hallucinate expected sounds, discarding true auditory evidence. To counteract this deeply ingrained visual dominance, we propose Audio-Contrastive Preference Optimization (ACPO). This dual-axis preference learning framework introduces an output-contrastive objective to penalize visual descriptions masquerading as audio facts, alongside an input-contrastive objective that swaps audio tracks to explicitly penalize generation invariant to the true auditory signal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACPO establishes highly faithful audio grounding and mitigates audio hallucination.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Mapping-Based Image Diffusion

In this work, we introduce a novel tensor-based functional for targeted image enhancement and denoising. Via explicit regularization, our formulation incorporates application dependent and contextual information using first principles. Few works in literature treat variational models that describe both application dependent information and contextual knowledge of the denoising problem. We prove the existence of a minimizer and present results on tensor symmetry constraints, convexity, and geometric interpretation of the proposed functional. We show that our framework excels in applications where nonlinear functions are present such as in gamma correction and targeted value range filtering. We also study general denoising performance where we show comparable results to dedicated PDE-based state of the art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CheXtriev: Anatomy-Centered Representation for Case-Based Retrieval of Chest Radiographs

We present CheXtriev, a graph-based, anatomy-aware framework for chest radiograph retrieval. Unlike prior methods focussed on global features, our method leverages graph transformers to extract informative features from specific anatomical regions. Furthermore, it captures spatial context and the interplay between anatomical location and findings. This contextualization, grounded in evidence-based anatomy, results in a richer anatomy-aware representation and leads to more accurate, effective and efficient retrieval, particularly for less prevalent findings. CheXtriv outperforms state-of-the-art global and local approaches by 18% to 26% in retrieval accuracy and 11% to 23% in ranking quality. The code is available at https://github.com/cvit-mip/chextriev.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

Non-Uniform Quantisation for 3DGS Compression

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful technique for novel view synthesis, yet its high bitrate requirements pose significant challenges for storage and transmission. To enable practical applications and ensure interoperability within the 3DGS ecosystem, standardised compression formats are essential. In this paper, we propose a novel non-uniform quantisation scheme specifically tailored for 3DGS models. Our approach adapts to the underlying data distribution by applying importance-weighted quantisation and eliminating post-voxelisation redundancy through importance weighted merging. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art compression performance. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is compatible with any point-cloud-based representation and is intended as a formal contribution to the upcoming MPEG 3DGS compression standardisation activities.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SegWave: Wavelet-Driven Segmentation of Tampered Regions

Verifying image authenticity is increasingly difficult, posing serious risks across journalism, law enforcement, and political domains. Most existing forensic methods rely on high-level visual artifacts and treat frame detection as a simple binary task. To address this, we propose SegWave, a hybrid framework that jointly leverages spatial and frequency-domain cues for image tampering detection. SegWave integrates a transformer-based architecture with the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to capture localized, multi-scale frequency inconsistencies indicative of manipulation. To further improve localization effectiveness, we introduce an Adaptive Sub-band Attention module (ASA) that dynamically highlights the informative high-frequency wavelet components. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SegWave consistently outperforms state-of-the-art tampering detection methods in challenging evaluation settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Tensor Variational Formulation of Gradient Energy Total Variation

We present a novel variational approach to a tensor-based total variation formulation which is called gradient energy total variation, GETV. We introduce the gradient energy tensor [6] into the GETV and show that the corresponding Euler-Lagrange (E-L) equation is a tensor-based partial differential equation of total variation type. Furthermore, we give a proof which shows that GETV is a convex functional. This approach, in contrast to the commonly used structure tensor, enables a formal derivation of the corresponding E-L equation. Experimental results suggest that GETV compares favourably to other state of the art variational denoising methods such as extended anisotropic diffusion (EAD)[1] and total variation (TV) [18] for gray-scale and colour images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

LV-ROVER-MLT: Low-Resource Maltese OCR by Synthetic Fine-Tuning and Multi-Stream Arbitration

Maltese has substantial text corpora and pretrained language models, but paragraph-scale OCR training data remains scarce; NOMOCRAT provides 57 verified annotated pages. LV-ROVER-MLT combines synthetic fine-tuning of Tesseract~5 with five complementary recognition streams and lexicon-gated word-level arbitration adapted to Maltese diacritics and hyphenation. In the DocEng~2026 Maltese OCR competition, the system placed first with held-out CER 0.0074; the next-ranked submission scored 0.0161 and NOMOCRAT scored 0.0163. The same approach produced a significant improvement over stock Tesseract on Luxembourgish, while the Hungarian result was inconclusive. A 36,803-pair Maltese OCR corpus constructed from EUR-Lex and Wikipedia provides an additional paragraph-level resource. Code, model weights, and corpus data are public.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

PorTEXTO: A European Portuguese Benchmark for Visual Text Extraction

European Portuguese (pt-PT) is largely absent from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) benchmarks, which skew toward high-resource languages. The few benchmarks that cover pt-PT focus on historical artifacts and literature. This work addresses modern OCR applications, introducing PorTEXTO, the first benchmark for contemporary and culturally relevant pt-PT visual text extraction. To ascertain quality, we employ an annotation pipeline combining transcriptions from a frontier LVLM with exhaustive review by native speakers. We observe a sharp performance drop from synthetic to real world samples in most models, and find that, currently, specialized multilingual data is a better driver for pt-PT performance than model size or resolution budget, motivating the release of open pt-PT OCR resources.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Learning with Volterra Neural Networks: A System Theoretic Perspective

Higher-order interaction components are important for signal, image, and video modeling, but explicit high-order operators often suffer from rapidly increasing parameter and computational costs. This paper presents kVNN, a learnable kernelized Volterra Neural operator for compact higher-order filtering. The motivation is to use kernelization to improve the efficiency of Volterra-type neural operators while providing a structured interpretation of their higher-order components. The proposed formulation combines the order-wise structure of Volterra filtering with learnable polynomial-kernel atoms, allowing different interaction orders to be represented by separate learnable centers and coefficients. This order-decoupled representation avoids explicit high-order tensor parameterization and can be implemented as a CNN-compatible layer. Experiments on representative vision tasks show that kVNN achieves a favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-off.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Efficient, Validation-Free Intrinsic Quality Estimation for Large-Scale Face Recognition Datasets

We propose Intrinsic Quality (IQ), a validation-free metric designed to estimate the inherent potential of face recognition (FR) datasets to produce high-performance models without the need for full-scale training. IQ integrates two components: (i) a Neighbor-Consistency Score that quantifies local identity label agreement via nearest neighbors, and (ii) Global Representation Subspace Complexity (Effective Rank, ER), which captures the underlying embedding geometry and dataset diversity. IQ allows for rapid evaluation using lightweight proxy models or data subsets, facilitating dataset diagnosis and curation prior to resource-intensive full-scale training. We describe an experimental protocol tailored to clean, noisy, and mixed-quality FR datasets, and outline evaluation methodologies to validate IQ's predictive power for downstream performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Diffusion Based Unpaired Data Learning for Inverse Problems

Data is important in many deep learning-based inverse problem solvers. However, obtaining sufficient paired data in many scenarios remains highly challenging, while unpaired data is cheap. To maximize data utilization, this paper proposes LUD-DIF, a diffusion-based approach for solving inverse problems with unpaired data. Starting from the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of the joint distribution, we decouple it into two independent diffusion processes under the weak-coupling assumption. The method provides theoretical support from a variational inference perspective, derives the loss function, quantitatively analyzes the error bound introduced by the assumption, and offers a theorem-motivated heuristic for hyperparameter selection. Experimental results demonstrate that LUD-DIF achieves outstanding performance on multiple image inverse problems, validating its effectiveness and generalization capability in unpaired inverse problem settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Ov3R: Open-Vocabulary Semantic 3D Reconstruction from RGB Videos

We present Ov3R, a novel framework for open-vocabulary semantic 3D reconstruction from RGB video streams, designed to advance Spatial AI. The system features two key components: CLIP3R, a CLIP-informed 3D reconstruction module that predicts dense point maps from overlapping clips while embedding object-level semantics; and 2D-3D OVS, a 2D-3D open-vocabulary semantic module that lifts 2D features into 3D by learning fused descriptors integrating spatial, geometric, and semantic cues. Unlike prior methods, Ov3R incorporates CLIP semantics directly into the reconstruction process, enabling globally consistent geometry and fine-grained semantic alignment. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both dense 3D reconstruction and open-vocabulary 3D segmentation, marking a step forward toward real-time, semantics-aware Spatial AI.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Static Visual Tokens: Structured Sequential Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Current multimodal LLMs encode images as static visual prefixes and rely on text-based reasoning, lacking goal-driven and adaptive visual access. Inspired by human visual perception-where attention is selectively and sequentially shifted from the most informative regions to secondary cues-we propose Structural Sequential Visual CoT SSV-CoT. First, a question-relevant saliency map identifies and organizes key visual regions, explicitly modeling the spatial distribution of visual importance. Second, reasoning is performed following this discriminative order, inducing a curriculum-like semantic progression from primary to secondary cues. This method is trained end-to-end, using text cot and answer supervision, without relying on region-level annotations or specialized external tools. Experiments on diverse visual reasoning benchmarks show gains, validating structured and sequential visual cognition.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A survey of AI-generated voices and their detection

The ability of artificial intelligence (AI) models to generate highly realistic human voices has advanced rapidly. These technologies power accessibility tools, virtual assistants and creative applications, but they also enable harmful uses, including impersonation, fraud and disinformation. Recent incidents of voice cloning scams targeting businesses and political leaders underscore the urgent need for robust safeguards. Unlike image and video deepfakes, the detection of synthetic voices poses unique challenges due to the complexity of phonetics, prosody and auditory perception. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of AI voice generation and detection methods, encompassing both the technical foundations and the latest state-of-the-art advances. This study also identifies key open challenges, benchmark resources and future directions to make this survey useful for future researchers.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Visual Framing for News Stance Detection via Image Generation

Article-level news stance detection aims to identify the perspective of news articles toward social issues. Despite advances in stance detection and its importance for trustworthy media environments, news articles pose distinct challenges because their stances are often implicit, subtly conveyed through journalistic framing, and embedded in long, structurally complex texts. To address these challenges, we introduce VFStance, which leverages visual framing to make implicit stance cues more explicit via image generation. In evaluation experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of VFStance over existing methods and the contribution of visual framing to its performance. Finally, a controlled user study (N=200) in a snippet-based news consumption setting further demonstrates that VFStance can make stance signals visually salient and highlights its potential use beyond automated stance detection.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Scalable FPGA Framework for Real-Time Denoising in High-Throughput Imaging: A DRAM-Optimized Pipeline using High-Level Synthesis

High-throughput imaging workflows, such as Parallel Rapid Imaging with Spectroscopic Mapping (PRISM), generate data at rates that exceed conventional real-time processing capabilities. We present a scalable FPGA-based preprocessing pipeline for real-time denoising, implemented via High-Level Synthesis (HLS) and optimized for DRAM-backed buffering. Our architecture performs frame subtraction and averaging directly on streamed image data, minimizing latency through burst-mode AXI4 interfaces. The resulting kernel operates below the inter-frame interval, enabling inline denoising and reducing dataset size for downstream CPU/GPU analysis. Validated under PRISM-scale acquisition, this modular FPGA framework offers a practical solution for latency-sensitive imaging workflows in spectroscopy and microscopy.

cs.AR↗