Showing 1–25 of 38 results

Tri-DehazeGS: Scene--Medium Decoupled Gaussian Splatting with Transmittance-Aware Optimization

Authors: Kui Jiang, Yang Gu, Jiacheng Liu, Shiyu Liu, Youyu Chen, Hui Liu

Abstract: Recovering clean 3D scenes from hazy multi-view images is challenging because haze attenuates scene radiance and introduces atmospheric scattering. Recent scattering-aware Gaussian Splatting methods introduce physical haze models into reconstruction, but they often apply degradation in image space or bind medium-related variables to Gaussian primitives, whic… ▽ More Recovering clean 3D scenes from hazy multi-view images is challenging because haze attenuates scene radiance and introduces atmospheric scattering. Recent scattering-aware Gaussian Splatting methods introduce physical haze models into reconstruction, but they often apply degradation in image space or bind medium-related variables to Gaussian primitives, which can entangle clean scene radiance with atmospheric effects. Moreover, low-transmittance regions provide weakened supervision for Gaussian optimization, causing distant or dense-haze areas to be under-reconstructed. We argue that clean reconstruction under haze requires both scene--medium disentanglement and transmittance-aware optimization rebalancing. To this end, we propose Tri-DehazeGS, a scene--medium decoupled Gaussian Splatting framework. It represents the clean scene with Gaussian primitives, models the participating medium using an independent view-shared tri-plane field, and composes hazy observations through a physical scattering model. We further introduce Medium-Decoupled Transmittance Gradient Compensation (MD-TGC), which compensates haze-suppressed gradients after medium freezing without altering forward rendering. Experiments on real and synthetic haze benchmarks show that Tri-DehazeGS improves clean novel-view reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/aptx46/Tri-DehazeGS. △ Less

Submitted 10 September, 2026; originally announced September 2026.

Uncertainty-Aware End-to-End AI Weather Forecasting: Disentangling Observation and Model Contributions

Authors: Rodrigo Almeida, Noelia Otero, Jost Arndt, Simon Baur, Wojciech Samek, Jackie Ma

Abstract: …replacing the numerical weather prediction pipeline, including data assimilation, at a fraction of its cost. These systems are deterministic and issue no uncertainty. Here we render the Aardvark Weather model probabilistic by attaching one stochastic mechanism to each component: learned, input-dependent noise at the observation encoder, capturing aleatoric… ▽ More End-to-end weather forecasting systems produce skillful global gridded and station forecasts directly from raw Earth observations, replacing the numerical weather prediction pipeline, including data assimilation, at a fraction of its cost. These systems are deterministic and issue no uncertainty. Here we render the Aardvark Weather model probabilistic by attaching one stochastic mechanism to each component: learned, input-dependent noise at the observation encoder, capturing aleatoric uncertainty inherited from the observing system, and Monte Carlo dropout in the processor, capturing epistemic uncertainty in the learned dynamics. The resulting nested ensemble attributes forecast spread to the two sources through a law-of-total-variance decomposition, cross-checked by withholding observation streams. Probabilistic finetuning significantly improves the mean forecast, by 4.2% on average across variables and lead times. The ensemble is calibrated against ERA5 through the medium range (spread-skill ratio 0.98), keeps station RMSE within 2.4% of the deterministic model while beating it in CRPS at every lead time, and trails the operational ECMWF ensemble. The encoder branch behaves as observation-driven uncertainty. Component-attributed uncertainty makes end-to-end forecasts more transparent, a step toward observation-driven digital twins of the atmosphere. △ Less

Submitted 31 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 17 pages, 7 figures

VSTaI: Design and Characterization of Variable-Stiffness Tactile Interfaces Based on 3D-Printed Structured Fabrics

Authors: Yiting Mo, Xinyuan Mao, Jashan Preet Singh, Fernando Bello

Abstract: Realistic palpation training requires reliable rendering of soft tissue stiffness changes in real time, which is difficult to achieve with conventional simulators. This paper presents a compact, variable-stiffness tactile interface (VSTaI) based on vacuum-induced jamming of 3D-printed structured fabrics. A vacuum-sealed fabric layer is sandwiched between two… ▽ More Realistic palpation training requires reliable rendering of soft tissue stiffness changes in real time, which is difficult to achieve with conventional simulators. This paper presents a compact, variable-stiffness tactile interface (VSTaI) based on vacuum-induced jamming of 3D-printed structured fabrics. A vacuum-sealed fabric layer is sandwiched between two silicone layers, and stiffness is tuned by regulating internal pressure. Four fabric patterns with different geometric parameters were fabricated and evaluated using force-indentation tests under atmospheric and vacuum conditions. Across the tested pattern and geometry combinations, vacuum jamming increased stiffness significantly, producing an effective modulus from sub-megapascal to megapascal levels. Specifically, one configuration exhibited a stiffness increase of up to 140% under the jammed state. Circular chainmail patterns provided the most spatially uniform distribution of tactile stiffness, while denser geometries reached higher peak stiffness. VSTaI was also shown to exhibit excellent conformability to the underlying geometry. These results support structured-fabric jamming as a practical approach for shape-conformable, tunable-stiffness displays aimed at physical examination training. △ Less

Submitted 31 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Journal ref: Haptics: Understanding Touch; Technology and Systems; Applications and Interaction. EuroHaptics 2026. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 16594. Springer, Cham

ForestIR: Physics-Informed Forest Sound Simulation for Array-Based Bioacoustic Remote Sensing

Authors: Xin Shen, Jennifer N. Kampe, Changwoo J. Lee, Braden Scherting, Panu Somervuo, Ari Lehtiö, Sandro von Brandenburg, Ossi Nokelainen, Otso Ovaskainen, David B. Dunson

Abstract: …and evaluation of array systems and configurations remains difficult since field recordings are costly, difficult to reproduce, and provide limited control over forest and atmospheric conditions. We present ForestIR, a physics-informed and reproducible simulation framework that links forest and environmental conditions to microphone-array recordings for bioa… ▽ More Microphone array-based passive acoustic monitoring is increasingly used for biodiversity sensing in forests. However, design and evaluation of array systems and configurations remains difficult since field recordings are costly, difficult to reproduce, and provide limited control over forest and atmospheric conditions. We present ForestIR, a physics-informed and reproducible simulation framework that links forest and environmental conditions to microphone-array recordings for bioacoustic remote sensing. Through a more realistic sound propagation method and a systematic control over array design and environmental factors, ForestIR provides a practical simulation framework for optimizing array-based monitoring systems, especially for sound source localization purposes. ForestIR generates source-microphone impulse responses (IRs) under user-controlled forest and atmospheric conditions, and renders synthetic array recordings by convolving test signals with controlled background noise. We evaluate and demonstrate realistic features of ForestIR through experiments based on localization sensitivity to forest layout and atmospheric conditions, and also comparison between simulated IRs with sine-sweep IR measurements from a field experiment. ForestIR provides a practical way to test how forest and ground conditions, atmospheric state, and array geometry affect bioacoustic localization, and can support microphone-array design, robustness testing, and synthetic-data generation for passive acoustic monitoring. △ Less

Submitted 7 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

GeoXplain: On-the-Fly Visual Explanations for Weather Foundation Models

Authors: Clemens Walter Koprolin, Leonardo Trentini, Benedikt Soja, Mennatallah El-Assady, Christina Humer

Abstract: …to inspect with static plots alone. GeoXplain is an interactive Python-based visualization toolkit for exploring geospatial attribution maps across climate variables, atmospheric pressure levels, and forecast time. The toolkit accepts attribution bundles containing attribution grids together with corresponding metadata and… ▽ More Weather and climate foundation models produce high-dimensional forecasts whose learned relationships are difficult to inspect with static plots alone. GeoXplain is an interactive Python-based visualization toolkit for exploring geospatial attribution maps across climate variables, atmospheric pressure levels, and forecast time. The toolkit accepts attribution bundles containing attribution grids together with corresponding metadata and renders them in a notebook widget or browser with map and globe modes, linked timelines, pressure-level controls, target annotations, and optional physical-field overlays. We frame GeoXplain as a model-agnostic earth-system visualization toolkit and present the GeoXplain Aurora Adapter as its first computation backend. The adapter computes explanations for the Aurora foundation model, either in a local GPU process, through a GPU listener, or through a SLURM-backed listener, while preserving the same Python call site for analysts. It currently supports gradient saliency, Integrated Gradients, RISE, ViT-CX, multi-frame saliency and Integrated Gradients rollouts, and retrieval of ERA5 overlays. GeoXplain can be installed as a PyPI package with pip install geoxplain. The code is open-source and available at https://github.com/clemenskoprolin/geoxplain. △ Less

Submitted 6 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 9 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to VISxClimate at IEEE VIS 2026

Fi-Gaussian: Frequency-Aware Implicit Gaussian Splatting for Single Image Dehazing

Authors: Yuhan Chen, Ying Fang, Guofa Li, Wenxuan Yu, Yicui Shi, Kunyang Huang, Wenbo Chu, Keqiang Li

Abstract: …physical scattering modeling. To address these issues, we propose Fi-Gaussian, a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting network for single image dehazing. Unlike explicit rendering methods that rely on 3D point clouds, our method employs implicit Gaussian splatting to adaptively model the underlying distribution of clear images as a continuous represent… ▽ More Single image dehazing continues to be hindered by the loss of high-frequency details and the difficulty of accurate physical scattering modeling. To address these issues, we propose Fi-Gaussian, a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting network for single image dehazing. Unlike explicit rendering methods that rely on 3D point clouds, our method employs implicit Gaussian splatting to adaptively model the underlying distribution of clear images as a continuous representation in 2D feature space. The core of the network is a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting module, which decouples low-frequency structural information and high-frequency texture information in the frequency domain and then performs adaptive Gaussian aggregation with complex-valued weights to recover fine details. In addition, a physics-driven scattering renormalization mechanism is introduced to estimate the transmission map and atmospheric light under the guidance of implicit Gaussian priors. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fi-Gaussian achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance and produces visually superior dehazed results, validating the effectiveness of implicit Gaussian splatting for low-level vision tasks. △ Less

Submitted 14 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Weather Synchronization in Digital Twin Environments for Shared VR Experience Using Commercial Metaverse Platforms

Authors: Masanori Ibara, Yuichi Hiroi, Takushi Kamegai, Yusuke Masubuchi, Kazuki Matsutani, Megumi Zaizen, Junya Morita, Takefumi Hiraki

Abstract: …that integrates real-time environmental data from ``The GEAR'' smart building with the Cluster metaverse platform, enabling shared VR experiences with authentic atmospheric immersion. Our system processes temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed, and solar radiation measurements to generate corresponding virtual environmental effects includin… ▽ More Digital twin technology creates bidirectional synchronization between physical and virtual environments, yet current implementations fail to provide authentic environmental experiences that enhance user presence in shared virtual spaces. While digital twin environments using commercial metaverse platforms for IoT sensor data visualization have been proposed, translating environmental information into meaningful sensory experiences remains largely unexplored, particularly lacking approaches for weather conditions that significantly influence spatial perception. We developed a weather synchronization system that integrates real-time environmental data from ``The GEAR'' smart building with the Cluster metaverse platform, enabling shared VR experiences with authentic atmospheric immersion. Our system processes temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed, and solar radiation measurements to generate corresponding virtual environmental effects including dynamic sky rendering, precipitation particles, and ambient audio modulation. Performance evaluation demonstrated practical response times of 0.8-1.0 seconds for weather data transmission and reflection in the virtual environment. This work establishes a foundation for seamless physical-digital space integration, potentially enhancing remote collaboration efficiency and facilitating more dynamic discussions in shared virtual workspaces. △ Less

Submitted 20 April, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: 4 pages, presented at IEEE ISEMV 2025

PhotoFlow: Agentic 3D Virtual Photography Missions

Authors: Jiarui Guo, Haojia Wei, Yiming Zhang, Yifei Liu, Yuning Gong, Hongjie Zhang, Xue Yang, Zhihang Zhong

Abstract: …3D scene with no preselected camera pose or reference image, infer a suitable shot from scene information and a language intent, choose executable camera parameters, and render the final photograph. Recent progress in vision-language models makes this kind of spatial agent increasingly plausible, but the task stresses two capabilities that remain hard to eva… ▽ More Virtual photography asks an agent to enter a prepared 3D scene with no preselected camera pose or reference image, infer a suitable shot from scene information and a language intent, choose executable camera parameters, and render the final photograph. Recent progress in vision-language models makes this kind of spatial agent increasingly plausible, but the task stresses two capabilities that remain hard to evaluate together: complex 3D spatial understanding and abstract aesthetic judgment. We introduce PhotoFlow, a Director-Reviewer-Reflector agent for closed-loop camera search. The Director builds a soft photographic blueprint and proposes diverse candidate cameras; the Reviewer combines rule checks, visual critique, and pairwise incumbent selection; and the Reflector converts failures into region memory, dead-zone suppression, and high-explore relocation. We also introduce VPhotoBench, a benchmark of 47 open-license Blender scenes and 141 language-conditioned photography missions spanning subject placement, relational composition, and atmosphere/style. On held-out experiments, PhotoFlow achieves the strongest external quality-alignment composite and success rate among one-shot prediction, single-chain reflection, anchor-bank selection, and random search under a six-round rendering budget. To our knowledge, this is the first work to make language-conditioned virtual photography in arbitrary Blender scenes an executable agent task, and our results show that an LLM-centered spatial agent can already produce strong photographs in a setting designed to challenge both 3D reasoning and aesthetic choice. △ Less

Submitted 22 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

No Epoch Like the Present: Robust Climate Emulation Requires Out-of-Distribution Generalisation

Authors: Bradley Stanley-Clamp, Anson Lei, Hannah M. Christensen, Ingmar Posner

Abstract: …understand, evaluate, and design climate emulators. In this work, we first confirm that climate change drives a statistically significant and progressively growing shift in atmospheric state distributions, rendering standard evaluation protocols insufficient. We empirically establish that seasonal variation serves as a… ▽ More Climate emulation is an out-of-distribution (OOD) projection task. This is precisely the challenge where modern Machine Learning (ML) methods are most prone to failure. Consequently, while current ML emulators trained on present climate achieve high in-distribution performance, their future reliability under the inevitable distribution shifts of a changing climate remains a critical, poorly understood blind spot. Addressing this challenge requires a fundamental shift in how we understand, evaluate, and design climate emulators. In this work, we first confirm that climate change drives a statistically significant and progressively growing shift in atmospheric state distributions, rendering standard evaluation protocols insufficient. We empirically establish that seasonal variation serves as an effective proxy for these long-term climate shifts, providing access to $\textit{real-world}$ distribution shifts without recourse to heuristics like synthetic perturbations. Motivated by this link, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that leverages seasonal shifts as a rigorous, zero-overhead testbed for emulator robustness. Our systematic characterisation confirms that current state-of-the-art hybrid-ML emulators degrade significantly under these realistic shifts. Finally, we chart a path forward by identifying compositional generalisation, the ability to form novel combinations from observed elementary components, as a principled route towards robust climate emulation. We demonstrate that physically motivated decompositions substantially improve OOD performance with only modest trade-offs against in-distribution performance, providing an avenue towards ML-driven climate emulators robust to an unknown future. △ Less

Submitted 21 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: 36 pages, 12 figures

HADAR-Based Thermal Infrared Hyperspectral Image Restoration

Authors: Cheng Dai, Jiale Lin, Bingxuan Song, Yifei Chen, Jiashuo Chen, Xin Yuan, Fanglin Bao

Abstract: …underlying thermal physics. Here, we propose HAIR (HADAR-based Image Restoration) as a physics-driven framework for ground-based TIR-HSI restoration. HAIR utilizes the HADAR rendering equation (HRE) and combines it with the… ▽ More Thermal-infrared (TIR) hyperspectral imagery (HSI) provides critical scene information for various applications. However, its practical utility is severely limited by unique sensor degradations beyond the capabilities of existing restoration methods, which are ignorant of underlying thermal physics. Here, we propose HAIR (HADAR-based Image Restoration) as a physics-driven framework for ground-based TIR-HSI restoration. HAIR utilizes the HADAR rendering equation (HRE) and combines it with the atmospheric downwelling radiative transfer equation (RTE) to model TIR-HSI using temperature, emissivity, and texture (TeX) physical triplets. This physical model leads to a TeX decompose-synthesize strategy that guarantees physical consistency and spatio-spectral noise resilience, in stark contrast to existing approaches. Moreover, our framework uses a forward-modeled atmospheric downwelling reference, along with spectral smoothness of emissivity and blackbody radiation, to enable spectral calibration and generation that would otherwise be elusive. Our extensive experiments on the outdoor DARPA Invisible Headlights dataset and in-lab FTIR measurements show that HAIR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across denoising, inpainting, spectral calibration, and spectral super-resolution, establishing a benchmark in objective accuracy and visual quality. △ Less

Submitted 13 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: 17 pages, 18 figures

DOC-GS: Dual-Domain Observation and Calibration for Reliable Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Hantang Li, Qiang Zhu, Xiandong Meng, Debin Zhao, Xiaopeng Fan

Abstract: …as the unobservability of Gaussian primitive reliability. Unreliable Gaussians are insufficiently constrained during optimization and accumulate as haze-like degradations in rendered images. Motivated by this observation, we propose a unified Dual-domain Observation and Calibration (DOC-GS) framework that models and corrects Gaussian reliability through the… ▽ More Sparse-view reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is fundamentally ill-posed due to insufficient geometric supervision, often leading to severe overfitting and the emergence of structural distortions and translucent haze-like artifacts. While existing approaches attempt to alleviate this issue via dropout-based regularization, they are largely heuristic and lack a unified understanding of artifact formation. In this paper, we revisit sparse-view 3DGS reconstruction from a new perspective and identify the core challenge as the unobservability of Gaussian primitive reliability. Unreliable Gaussians are insufficiently constrained during optimization and accumulate as haze-like degradations in rendered images. Motivated by this observation, we propose a unified Dual-domain Observation and Calibration (DOC-GS) framework that models and corrects Gaussian reliability through the synergy of optimization-domain inductive bias and observation-domain evidence. Specifically, in the optimization domain, we characterize Gaussian reliability by the degree to which each primitive is constrained during training, and instantiate this signal via a Continuous Depth-Guided Dropout (CDGD) strategy, where the dropout probability serves as an explicit proxy for primitive reliability. This imposes a smooth depth-aware inductive bias to suppress weakly constrained Gaussians and improve optimization stability. In the observation domain, we establish a connection between floater artifacts and atmospheric scattering, and leverage the Dark Channel Prior (DCP) as a structural consistency cue to identify and accumulate anomalous regions. Based on cross-view aggregated evidence, we further design a reliability-driven geometric pruning strategy to remove low-confidence Gaussians. △ Less

Submitted 8 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: 10 pages, 5 figures

R-PGA: Robust Physical Adversarial Camouflage Generation via Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Tianrui Lou, Siyuan Liang, Jiawei Liang, Yuze Gao, Xiaochun Cao

Abstract: …remain brittle in complex dynamic scenarios, failing to generalize across diverse geometric (e.g., viewing configurations) and radiometric (e.g., dynamic illumination, atmospheric scattering) variations. We attribute this deficiency to two fundamental limitations in simulation and optimization. First, the reliance on coarse, oversimplified simulations (e.g.,… ▽ More Physical adversarial camouflage poses a severe security threat to autonomous driving systems by mapping adversarial textures onto 3D objects. Nevertheless, current methods remain brittle in complex dynamic scenarios, failing to generalize across diverse geometric (e.g., viewing configurations) and radiometric (e.g., dynamic illumination, atmospheric scattering) variations. We attribute this deficiency to two fundamental limitations in simulation and optimization. First, the reliance on coarse, oversimplified simulations (e.g., via CARLA) induces a significant domain gap, confining optimization to a biased feature space. Second, standard strategies targeting average performance result in a rugged loss landscape, leaving the camouflage vulnerable to configuration shifts.To bridge these gaps, we propose the Relightable Physical 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based Attack framework (R-PGA). Technically, to address the simulation fidelity issue, we leverage 3DGS to ensure photo-realistic reconstruction and augment it with physically disentangled attributes to decouple intrinsic material from lighting. Furthermore, we design a hybrid rendering pipeline that leverages precise Relightable 3DGS for foreground rendering, while employing a pre-trained image translation model to synthesize plausible relighted backgrounds that align with the relighted foreground.To address the optimization robustness issue, we propose the Hard Physical Configuration Mining (HPCM) module, designed to actively mine worst-case physical configurations and suppress their corresponding loss peaks. This strategy not only diminishes the overall loss magnitude but also effectively flattens the rugged loss landscape, ensuring consistent adversarial effectiveness and robustness across varying physical configurations. △ Less

Submitted 27 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Under review

ENC-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Electronic Navigational Chart Understanding

Authors: Ao Cheng, Xingming Li, Xuanyu Ji, Xixiang He, Qiyao Sun, Chunping Qiu, Runke Huang, Qingyong Hu

Abstract: …interpret them. Unlike natural images or conventional charts, ENCs encode regulations, bathymetry, and route constraints via standardized vector symbols, scale-dependent rendering, and precise geometric structure -- requiring specialized maritime expertise for interpretation. We introduce ENC-Bench, the first benchmark dedicated to professional ENC understan… ▽ More Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs) are the safety-critical backbone of modern maritime navigation, yet it remains unclear whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can reliably interpret them. Unlike natural images or conventional charts, ENCs encode regulations, bathymetry, and route constraints via standardized vector symbols, scale-dependent rendering, and precise geometric structure -- requiring specialized maritime expertise for interpretation. We introduce ENC-Bench, the first benchmark dedicated to professional ENC understanding. ENC-Bench contains 20,490 expert-validated samples from 840 authentic National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ENCs, organized into a three-level hierarchy: Perception (symbol and feature recognition), Spatial Reasoning (coordinate localization, bearing, distance), and Maritime Decision-Making (route legality, safety assessment, emergency planning under multiple constraints). All samples are generated from raw S-57 data through a calibrated vector-to-image pipeline with automated consistency checks and expert review. We evaluate 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs such as GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5, Qwen3-VL, InternVL-3, and GLM-4.5V, under a unified zero-shot protocol. The best model achieves only 47.88% accuracy, with systematic challenges in symbolic grounding, spatial computation, multi-constraint reasoning, and robustness to lighting and scale variations. By establishing the first rigorous ENC benchmark, we open a new research frontier at the intersection of specialized symbolic reasoning and safety-critical AI, providing essential infrastructure for advancing MLLMs toward professional maritime applications. △ Less

Submitted 23 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Accepted to CVPR 2026, Project page: https://qingyonghu.github.io/ENC-Bench/

Full Dynamic Range Sky-Modelling For Image Based Lighting

Authors: Ian J. Maquignaz

Abstract: …arts, immersive virtual reality and a wide range of scientific and engineering applications. To alleviate the burden of physical-capture, physically-simulation and volumetric rendering, sky-models have been proposed as fast, flexible, and cost-saving alternatives. In recent years, sky-models have been extended through deep learning to be more comprehensive a… ▽ More Accurate environment maps are a key component to modelling real-world outdoor scenes. They enable captivating visual arts, immersive virtual reality and a wide range of scientific and engineering applications. To alleviate the burden of physical-capture, physically-simulation and volumetric rendering, sky-models have been proposed as fast, flexible, and cost-saving alternatives. In recent years, sky-models have been extended through deep learning to be more comprehensive and inclusive of cloud formations, but recent work has demonstrated these models fall short in faithfully recreating accurate and photorealistic natural skies. Particularly at higher resolutions, DNN sky-models struggle to accurately model the 14EV+ class-imbalanced solar region, resulting in poor visual quality and scenes illuminated with skewed light transmission, shadows and tones. In this work, we propose Icarus, an all-weather sky-model capable of learning the exposure range of Full Dynamic Range (FDR) physically captured outdoor imagery. Our model allows conditional generation of environment maps with intuitive user-positioning of solar and cloud formations, and extends on current state-of-the-art to enable user-controlled texturing of atmospheric formations. Through our evaluation, we demonstrate Icarus is interchangeable with FDR physically captured outdoor imagery or parametric sky-models, and illuminates scenes with unprecedented accuracy, photorealism, lighting directionality (shadows), and tones in Image Based Lightning (IBL). △ Less

Submitted 5 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

3D Roadway Scene Object Detection with LIDARs in Snowfall Conditions

Authors: Ghazal Farhani, Taufiq Rahman, Syed Mostaquim Ali, Andrew Liu, Mohamed Zaki, Dominique Charlebois, Benoit Anctil

Abstract: …LiDARs demonstrate good performance in clean and clear weather conditions, their performance significantly deteriorates in adverse weather conditions such as those involving atmospheric precipitation. This may render perception capabilities of autonomous systems that use LiDAR data in learning based models to perform o… ▽ More Because 3D structure of a roadway environment can be characterized directly by a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors, they can be used to obtain exceptional situational awareness for assitive and autonomous driving systems. Although LiDARs demonstrate good performance in clean and clear weather conditions, their performance significantly deteriorates in adverse weather conditions such as those involving atmospheric precipitation. This may render perception capabilities of autonomous systems that use LiDAR data in learning based models to perform object detection and ranging ineffective. While efforts have been made to enhance the accuracy of these models, the extent of signal degradation under various weather conditions remains largely not quantified. In this study, we focus on the performance of an automotive grade LiDAR in snowy conditions in order to develop a physics-based model that examines failure modes of a LiDAR sensor. Specifically, we investigated how the LiDAR signal attenuates with different snowfall rates and how snow particles near the source serve as small but efficient reflectors. Utilizing our model, we transform data from clear conditions to simulate snowy scenarios, enabling a comparison of our synthetic data with actual snowy conditions. Furthermore, we employ this synthetic data, representative of different snowfall rates, to explore the impact on a pre-trained object detection model, assessing its performance under varying levels of snowfall △ Less

Submitted 25 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Comments: 2024 IEEE 27th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), pp. 1441--1448, Sept. 2024

Personalized Image Generation from an Author Writing Style

Authors: Sagar Gandhi, Vishal Gandhi

Abstract: …- as input to a Large Language Model (LLM, Claude 3.7 Sonnet). The LLM interprets the AWS to generate three distinct, descriptive text-to-image prompts, which are then rendered by a diffusion model (Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium). We evaluated our approach using 49 author styles from Reddit data, with human evaluators assessing the stylistic match and visual d… ▽ More Translating nuanced, textually-defined authorial writing styles into compelling visual representations presents a novel challenge in generative AI. This paper introduces a pipeline that leverages Author Writing Sheets (AWS) - structured summaries of an author's literary characteristics - as input to a Large Language Model (LLM, Claude 3.7 Sonnet). The LLM interprets the AWS to generate three distinct, descriptive text-to-image prompts, which are then rendered by a diffusion model (Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium). We evaluated our approach using 49 author styles from Reddit data, with human evaluators assessing the stylistic match and visual distinctiveness of the generated images. Results indicate a good perceived alignment between the generated visuals and the textual authorial profiles (mean style match: $4.08/5$), with images rated as moderately distinctive. Qualitative analysis further highlighted the pipeline's ability to capture mood and atmosphere, while also identifying challenges in representing highly abstract narrative elements. This work contributes a novel end-to-end methodology for visual authorial style personalization and provides an initial empirical validation, opening avenues for applications in creative assistance and cross-modal understanding. △ Less

Submitted 4 July, 2025; originally announced July 2025.

DehazeGS: Seeing Through Fog with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Jinze Yu, Yiqun Wang, Aiheng Jiang, Zhengda Lu, Jianwei Guo, Yong Li, Hongxing Qin, Xiaopeng Zhang

Abstract: …synthesis methods are typically designed for high-quality and clean input images. However, in foggy scenes, scattering and attenuation can significantly degrade the quality of rendering. Although NeRF-based dehazing approaches have been developed, their reliance on deep fully connected neural networks and per-ray sampling strategies leads to high computation… ▽ More Current novel view synthesis methods are typically designed for high-quality and clean input images. However, in foggy scenes, scattering and attenuation can significantly degrade the quality of rendering. Although NeRF-based dehazing approaches have been developed, their reliance on deep fully connected neural networks and per-ray sampling strategies leads to high computational costs. Furthermore, NeRF's implicit representation limits its ability to recover fine-grained details from hazy scenes. To overcome these limitations, we propose learning an explicit Gaussian representation to explain the formation mechanism of foggy images through a physically forward rendering process. Our method, DehazeGS, reconstructs and renders fog-free scenes using only multi-view foggy images as input. Specifically, based on the atmospheric scattering model, we simulate the formation of fog by establishing the transmission function directly onto Gaussian primitives via depth-to-transmission mapping. During training, we jointly learn the atmospheric light and scattering coefficients while optimizing the Gaussian representation of foggy scenes. At inference time, we remove the effects of scattering and attenuation in Gaussian distributions and directly render the scene to obtain dehazed views. Experiments on both real-world and synthetic foggy datasets demonstrate that DehazeGS achieves state-of-the-art performance. visualizations are available at https://jz-y-cn.github.io/DehazeGS/ △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2026; v1 submitted 7 January, 2025; originally announced January 2025.

Comments: 9 pages,5 figures. Accepted by AAAI2026. visualizations are available at https://jz-y-cn.github.io/DehazeGS/

Learning Physically Interpretable Atmospheric Models from Data with WSINDy

Authors: Seth Minor, Daniel A. Messenger, Vanja Dukic, David M. Bortz

Abstract: The multiscale and turbulent nature of Earth's atmosphere has historically… ▽ More The multiscale and turbulent nature of Earth's atmosphere has historically rendered accurate weather modeling a hard problem. Recently, there has been an explosion of interest surrounding data-driven approaches to weather modeling, which in many cases show improved forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency when compared to traditional methods. However, many of the current data-driven approaches employ highly parameterized neural networks, often resulting in uninterpretable models and limited gains in scientific understanding. In this work, we address the interpretability problem by explicitly discovering partial differential equations governing atmospheric phenomena, identifying symbolic mathematical models with direct physical interpretations. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, in particular, the Weak form Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (WSINDy) algorithm can learn effective atmospheric models from both simulated and assimilated data. Our approach adapts the standard WSINDy algorithm to work with high-dimensional fluid data of arbitrary spatial dimension. △ Less

Submitted 5 July, 2025; v1 submitted 1 January, 2025; originally announced January 2025.

MSC Class: 35D30; 86-08; 86-10

Optimized Quality of Service prediction in FSO Links over South Africa using Ensemble Learning

Authors: S. O. Adebusola, P. A. Owolawi, J. S. Ojo, P. S. Maswikaneng

Abstract: …these benefits, free-space optical communications are severely impacted by harsh weather situations like mist, precipitation, blizzard, fume, soil, and drizzle debris in the atmosphere, all of which have an impact on the Quality of Service (QoS) rendered by the systems. The primary goal of this article is to optimize t… ▽ More Fibre optic communication system is expected to increase exponentially in terms of application due to the numerous advantages over copper wires. The optical network evolution presents several advantages such as over long-distance, low-power requirement, higher carrying capacity and high bandwidth among others Such network bandwidth surpasses methods of transmission that include copper cables and microwaves. Despite these benefits, free-space optical communications are severely impacted by harsh weather situations like mist, precipitation, blizzard, fume, soil, and drizzle debris in the atmosphere, all of which have an impact on the Quality of Service (QoS) rendered by the systems. The primary goal of this article is to optimize the QoS using the ensemble learning models Random Forest, ADaBoost Regression, Stacking Regression, Gradient Boost Regression, and Multilayer Neural Network. To accomplish the stated goal, meteorological data, visibility, wind speed, and altitude were obtained from the South Africa Weather Services archive during a ten-year period (2010 to 2019) at four different locations: Polokwane, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, and George. We estimated the data rate, power received, fog-induced attenuation, bit error rate and power penalty using the collected and processed data. The RMSE and R-squared values of the model across all the study locations, Polokwane, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, and George, are 0.0073 and 0.9951, 0.0065 and 0.9998, 0.0060 and 0.9941, and 0.0032 and 0.9906, respectively. The result showed that using ensemble learning techniques in transmission modeling can significantly enhance service quality and meet customer service level agreements and ensemble method was successful in efficiently optimizing the signal to noise ratio, which in turn enhanced the QoS at the point of reception. △ Less

Submitted 11 November, 2024; originally announced November 2024.

Parsimonious Dynamic Mode Decomposition: A Robust and Automated Approach for Optimally Sparse Mode Selection in Complex Systems

Authors: Arpan Das, Pier Marzocca, Oleg Levinski

Abstract: …on a diverse range of datasets, including standing wave signals, identifying hidden dynamics, fluid dynamics simulations (flow past a cylinder and transonic buffet), and atmospheric sea-surface temperature (SST) data. ParsDMD addresses a significant limitation of the traditional sparsity-promoting DMD (spDMD), which requires manual tuning of sparsity paramet… ▽ More This paper introduces the Parsimonious Dynamic Mode Decomposition (parsDMD), a novel algorithm designed to automatically select an optimally sparse subset of dynamic modes for both spatiotemporal and purely temporal data. By incorporating time-delay embedding and leveraging Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), parsDMD ensures robustness against noise and effectively handles complex, nonlinear dynamics. The algorithm is validated on a diverse range of datasets, including standing wave signals, identifying hidden dynamics, fluid dynamics simulations (flow past a cylinder and transonic buffet), and atmospheric sea-surface temperature (SST) data. ParsDMD addresses a significant limitation of the traditional sparsity-promoting DMD (spDMD), which requires manual tuning of sparsity parameters through a rigorous trial-and-error process to balance between single-mode and all-mode solutions. In contrast, parsDMD autonomously determines the optimally sparse subset of modes without user intervention, while maintaining minimal computational complexity. Comparative analyses demonstrate that parsDMD consistently outperforms spDMD by providing more accurate mode identification and effective reconstruction in noisy environments. These advantages render parsDMD an effective tool for real-time diagnostics, forecasting, and reduced-order model construction across various disciplines. △ Less

Submitted 29 November, 2024; v1 submitted 21 October, 2024; originally announced October 2024.

Comments: 42 pages, 16 Figures

StyleCity: Large-Scale 3D Urban Scenes Stylization

Authors: Yingshu Chen, Huajian Huang, Tuan-Anh Vu, Ka Chun Shum, Sai-Kit Yeung

Abstract: …Besides texture stylization, we further adopt a generative diffusion model to synthesize a style-consistent omnidirectional sky image, which offers a more immersive atmosphere and assists the semantic stylization process. The stylized neural texture field can be baked into an arbitrary-resolution texture, enabling seamless integration into conventional… ▽ More Creating large-scale virtual urban scenes with variant styles is inherently challenging. To facilitate prototypes of virtual production and bypass the need for complex materials and lighting setups, we introduce the first vision-and-text-driven texture stylization system for large-scale urban scenes, StyleCity. Taking an image and text as references, StyleCity stylizes a 3D textured mesh of a large-scale urban scene in a semantics-aware fashion and generates a harmonic omnidirectional sky background. To achieve that, we propose to stylize a neural texture field by transferring 2D vision-and-text priors to 3D globally and locally. During 3D stylization, we progressively scale the planned training views of the input 3D scene at different levels in order to preserve high-quality scene content. We then optimize the scene style globally by adapting the scale of the style image with the scale of the training views. Moreover, we enhance local semantics consistency by the semantics-aware style loss which is crucial for photo-realistic stylization. Besides texture stylization, we further adopt a generative diffusion model to synthesize a style-consistent omnidirectional sky image, which offers a more immersive atmosphere and assists the semantic stylization process. The stylized neural texture field can be baked into an arbitrary-resolution texture, enabling seamless integration into conventional rendering pipelines and significantly easing the virtual production prototyping process. Extensive experiments demonstrate our stylized scenes' superiority in qualitative and quantitative performance and user preferences. △ Less

Submitted 16 July, 2024; v1 submitted 16 April, 2024; originally announced April 2024.

Comments: Accepted by ECCV2024. Project page: https://chenyingshu.github.io/stylecity3d/

Into the Fog: Evaluating Robustness of Multiple Object Tracking

Authors: Nadezda Kirillova, M. Jehanzeb Mirza, Horst Bischof, Horst Possegger

Abstract: …shown remarkable performance when trained and evaluated on current benchmarks. However, these benchmarks primarily consist of clear weather scenarios, overlooking adverse atmospheric conditions such as fog, haze, smoke and dust. As a result, the robustness of trackers against these challenging conditions remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introdu… ▽ More State-of-the-art Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) approaches have shown remarkable performance when trained and evaluated on current benchmarks. However, these benchmarks primarily consist of clear weather scenarios, overlooking adverse atmospheric conditions such as fog, haze, smoke and dust. As a result, the robustness of trackers against these challenging conditions remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce physics-based volumetric fog simulation method for arbitrary MOT datasets, utilizing frame-by-frame monocular depth estimation and a fog formation optical model. We enhance our simulation by rendering both homogeneous and heterogeneous fog and propose to use the dark channel prior method to estimate atmospheric light, showing promising results even in night and indoor scenes. We present the leading benchmark MOTChallenge (third release) augmented with fog (smoke for indoor scenes) of various intensities and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of MOT methods, revealing their limitations under fog and fog-like challenges. △ Less

Submitted 13 November, 2024; v1 submitted 12 April, 2024; originally announced April 2024.

Journal ref: BMVC 2024

SynFog: A Photo-realistic Synthetic Fog Dataset based on End-to-end Imaging Simulation for Advancing Real-World Defogging in Autonomous Driving

Authors: Yiming Xie, Henglu Wei, Zhenyi Liu, Xiaoyu Wang, Xiangyang Ji

Abstract: To advance research in learning-based defogging algorithms, various synthetic fog datasets have been developed. However, existing datasets created using the Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM) or real-time rendering engines often struggle to produce photo-realistic foggy images that accurately mimic the actual imaging p… ▽ More To advance research in learning-based defogging algorithms, various synthetic fog datasets have been developed. However, existing datasets created using the Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM) or real-time rendering engines often struggle to produce photo-realistic foggy images that accurately mimic the actual imaging process. This limitation hinders the effective generalization of models from synthetic to real data. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end simulation pipeline designed to generate photo-realistic foggy images. This pipeline comprehensively considers the entire physically-based foggy scene imaging process, closely aligning with real-world image capture methods. Based on this pipeline, we present a new synthetic fog dataset named SynFog, which features both sky light and active lighting conditions, as well as three levels of fog density. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained on SynFog exhibit superior performance in visual perception and detection accuracy compared to others when applied to real-world foggy images. △ Less

Submitted 25 March, 2024; originally announced March 2024.

Enhancing Visibility in Nighttime Haze Images Using Guided APSF and Gradient Adaptive Convolution

Authors: Yeying Jin, Beibei Lin, Wending Yan, Yuan Yuan, Wei Ye, Robby T. Tan

Abstract: …paper, we enhance the visibility from a single nighttime haze image by suppressing glow and enhancing low-light regions. To handle glow effects, our framework learns from the rendered glow pairs. Specifically, a light source aware network is proposed to detect light sources of night images, followed by the APSF (… ▽ More Visibility in hazy nighttime scenes is frequently reduced by multiple factors, including low light, intense glow, light scattering, and the presence of multicolored light sources. Existing nighttime dehazing methods often struggle with handling glow or low-light conditions, resulting in either excessively dark visuals or unsuppressed glow outputs. In this paper, we enhance the visibility from a single nighttime haze image by suppressing glow and enhancing low-light regions. To handle glow effects, our framework learns from the rendered glow pairs. Specifically, a light source aware network is proposed to detect light sources of night images, followed by the APSF (Atmospheric Point Spread Function)-guided glow rendering. Our framework is then trained on the rendered images, resulting in glow suppression. Moreover, we utilize gradient-adaptive convolution, to capture edges and textures in hazy scenes. By leveraging extracted edges and textures, we enhance the contrast of the scene without losing important structural details. To boost low-light intensity, our network learns an attention map, then adjusted by gamma correction. This attention has high values on low-light regions and low values on haze and glow regions. Extensive evaluation on real nighttime haze images, demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a PSNR of 30.38dB, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 13% on GTA5 nighttime haze dataset. Our data and code is available at https://github.com/jinyeying/nighttime_dehaze. △ Less

Submitted 21 January, 2024; v1 submitted 3 August, 2023; originally announced August 2023.

Comments: Accepted to ACM'MM2023, https://github.com/jinyeying/nighttime_dehaze

Journal ref: Published in ACM'MM2023

PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking

Authors: Yang Zheng, Adam W. Harley, Bokui Shen, Gordon Wetzstein, Leonidas J. Guibas

Abstract: …Toward the goal of naturalism, we animate deformable characters using real-world motion capture data, we build 3D scenes to match the motion capture environments, and we render camera viewpoints using trajectories mined via structure-from-motion on real videos. We create combinatorial diversity by randomizing character appearance, motion profiles, materials… ▽ More We introduce PointOdyssey, a large-scale synthetic dataset, and data generation framework, for the training and evaluation of long-term fine-grained tracking algorithms. Our goal is to advance the state-of-the-art by placing emphasis on long videos with naturalistic motion. Toward the goal of naturalism, we animate deformable characters using real-world motion capture data, we build 3D scenes to match the motion capture environments, and we render camera viewpoints using trajectories mined via structure-from-motion on real videos. We create combinatorial diversity by randomizing character appearance, motion profiles, materials, lighting, 3D assets, and atmospheric effects. Our dataset currently includes 104 videos, averaging 2,000 frames long, with orders of magnitude more correspondence annotations than prior work. We show that existing methods can be trained from scratch in our dataset and outperform the published variants. Finally, we introduce modifications to the PIPs point tracking method, greatly widening its temporal receptive field, which improves its performance on PointOdyssey as well as on two real-world benchmarks. Our data and code are publicly available at: https://pointodyssey.com △ Less

Submitted 27 July, 2023; originally announced July 2023.