{"title":"Synth-Tracker: Recoverable and Traceable Defense Watermark Against Face Synthesis","authors":"Qingsong Zhang;Beijing Chen;Yuhui Zheng","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3608085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3608085","url":null,"abstract":"The fast development of face synthesis technology has brought an increasing number of face synthesis services. However, when such services are misused in malicious activities, the face synthesis service providers (FSSPs) may face serious legal risks. Therefore, this letter proposes a recoverable and traceable defense watermarking method to protect FSSPs. The method designs a decoupled data hiding framework to separate two embedding tasks, where the source image and operator’s ID are inserted into the synthesized image respectively by invertible neural network and convolutional neural network. Furthermore, a facial masking strategy is employed to exclude background information of source image for enhancing the imperceptibility. The proposed method enables forensic traceability for the FSSPs to track back to the malicious users and recover the original source images, building a chain of evidence and inferring the forger’s intent after forgery. Experimental results show that compared to the existing methods, the proposed method has superior performance in source image recovery and ID extraction. In addition, the plug-and-play design of the proposed method allows for seamless integration into current face synthesis services.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3715-3719"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145210100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ReTeNet: A Residual Encoder and Transformer Encoders Network for Stress Monitoring From Wearable Device","authors":"Md Santo Ali;Mohammod Abdul Motin;Sumaiya Kabir","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3607767","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3607767","url":null,"abstract":"Mental stress adversely impacts overall well-being, and chronic stress poses serious risks to both physical and mental health, necessitating the development of wearable-based stress monitoring tools. Blood volume pulse (BVP) sensors, widely integrated into commercially available wearable devices, offer a cost-effective and convenient solution for stress detection, but existing methods face challenges such as data imbalance, complex models unsuitable for real-time use, and limited generalizability. This study presents a lightweight residual-encoder and transformer-encoders network (ReTeNet) for stress monitoring using BVP signals. The proposed model is trained and evaluated on two datasets using a subject-independent, leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation strategy: the private RUET SPML dataset with 26 healthy subjects and the publicly available WESAD dataset with 15 healthy subjects. It achieves 93.59% accuracy, 95.60% F1-score, and 0.9569 AUC on the RUET SPML dataset, while attaining 98.23% accuracy, 97.58% F1-score, and 0.9953 AUC on the WESAD dataset. The model effectively distinguishes mental stress with high accuracy while maintaining a lightweight architecture, making it well-suited for wearable devices. Furthermore, its capability to maintain balanced performance across imbalanced datasets highlights its potential for reliable real-time stress monitoring.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3635-3639"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145141583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tianyu Zhang;Xiaojing Ping;Shunyi Zhao;Yuriy S. Shmaliy
{"title":"Bayesian Transfer Filtering via UFIR Adaptive Regularization","authors":"Tianyu Zhang;Xiaojing Ping;Shunyi Zhao;Yuriy S. Shmaliy","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3607235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3607235","url":null,"abstract":"The Bayesian approach resulting in the Kalman filter (KF), often struggle with model uncertainties, particularly when noise statistics are inaccurate. Inspired by transfer learning, this letter presents a novel Bayesian transfer filtering framework that significantly enhances estimation accuracy by incorporating the unbiased finite impulse response (UFIR) structure for adaptive regularization. To adaptively adjust the UFIR filtering estimate, the statistical significance of the transfer-regularization is learned and the variational Bayesian method is applied to learn the regularization factor directly from the data. It is shown that this adaptive strategy not only improves the interpretability and transferability but also removes the need for heuristic selection, which is a common limitation in traditional regularization-based transfer methods. Numerical simulations and water tank experiments collectively confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework under uncertain noise statistics.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3630-3634"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145141587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploring the Depth From EAST: Efficient Aggregated State-Space Tanh-Tuned Model for Underwater Object Detection","authors":"Yili Xu;Xuanxuan Xiao","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3606841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3606841","url":null,"abstract":"Underwater object detection faces severe challenges due to light attenuation, color distortion, and low contrast. This letter presents EAST-YOLO, an efficient architecture achieving 79.6% average mAP@0.5 across six underwater datasets—2.1% higher than YOLO11n—while maintaining 2.6 M parameters, 6.5 GFLOPs, and 70 FPS real-time performance. Three problem-driven modules address specific underwater challenges: VSS-Enhanced Block for visibility-limited global context modeling with <inline-formula><tex-math>$mathcal {O}(N)$</tex-math></inline-formula> complexity, Aggregated Pathway Block for refraction-robust multi-scale detection, and Tanh-Tuned Attention Block for spatially-adaptive feature modulation. Extensive evaluation on RUOD, DUO, URPC2020, UTDAC2020, DFUI, and AUDD datasets demonstrates EAST-YOLO’s effectiveness as a practical solution for resource-constrained underwater applications, with promising robustness across diverse degraded conditions.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3809-3813"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145255889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A New Interpretation of the Time-Interleaved ADC Mismatch Problem: A Tracking-Based Hybrid Calibration Approach","authors":"Jiwon Sung;Jinseok Choi","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3607310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3607310","url":null,"abstract":"Time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters (TI-ADCs) can achieve high sampling rates by interleaving multiple sub-ADCs in parallel. Mismatch errors between the sub-ADCs, however, can significantly degrade the signal quality, which is a main performance bottleneck in TI-ADCs. In this letter, we present a hybrid calibration approach by interpreting the mismatch problem as a tracking problem, and use the extended Kalman filter for online estimation of the mismatch errors. After estimation, the input signal is reconstructed using a truncated fractional delay filter and a high-pass filter. Simulations demonstrate that our algorithm substantially outperforms the existing hybrid calibration method in both mismatch estimation and compensation.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3710-3714"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145210046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"LF-GS: 3D Gaussian Splatting for View Synthesis of Multi-View Light Field Images","authors":"Yixu Huang;Rui Zhong;Ségolène Rogge;Adrian Munteanu","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3606836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3606836","url":null,"abstract":"3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has emerged as a groundbreaking approach for view synthesis. However, when applied to light field image synthesis, the issue of a too narrow field of view (FOV) that leaves some areas uncovered, compounded by the problem of data sparsity, significantly compromises the quality of synthesized views using 3D-GS. To overcome these limitations, we present LF-GS, a specialized 3D-GS variant optimized for light field image synthesis. Our methodology incorporates two key innovations. First, by harnessing the unique advantage of light field sub-aperture images that provide dense geometric cues, our method enables the effective incorporation of enhanced depth and normal priors derived from light field images. This allows for more accurate depth than monocular depth estimation. Second, unlike other methods that struggle to control the generation of unreasonable Gaussians, we introduce adaptive regularization mechanisms. These mechanisms strategically regulate Gaussian opacity and spatial scale during optimization, thereby preventing model overfitting and preserving essential scene details. Comprehensive experiments on our newly constructed light field dataset demonstrate that LF-GS achieves significant quality improvements over 3D-GS.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3555-3559"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145090032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Learning Human-Object Interactions in Videos by State Space Models","authors":"Qiyue Li;Xuyang Li;Yuanqing Li;Jiapeng Yan","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3606840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3606840","url":null,"abstract":"Video-based human-object interaction (HOI) recognition aims at labeling human and object sequences with multiple human-object interaction classes. The efficiency of existing methods still requires improvement in terms of parameter and computational complexity, which restricts the application of video-based human-object interaction recognition. In this letter, we present HOI-Mamba, a novel approach for efficient video-based human-object interaction recognition with the state space model. HOI-Mamba transforms the spatial-temporal graph to the sequence and captures the human-object interaction features with bidirectional Mamba, which leads to superior performance with higher efficiency. Experimental results on two public human-object interaction video benchmarks demonstrate that HOI-Mamba achieves significant improvements over existing methods, e.g., achieving higher F1 Score for sub-activity recognition with fewer parameters and FLOPs than existing methods both on the CAD-120 dataset and the Something-Else dataset.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3670-3674"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145210039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chenyang Zhang;Shuzhan Hu;Chenxing Li;Yiping Duan;Xiaoming Tao
{"title":"Brain-Inspired Video Quality Assessment via Visual-EEG Feature Alignment","authors":"Chenyang Zhang;Shuzhan Hu;Chenxing Li;Yiping Duan;Xiaoming Tao","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3606204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3606204","url":null,"abstract":"Video quality assessment (VQA) is crucial in applications such as video calls, real-time meetings, and surveillance, where video quality directly impacts user experience greatly. Traditional objective methods like SSIM and PSNR fail to capture the subjective perception of video quality, while subjective Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment metrics like Mean Opinion Score (MOS) are not scalable for large-scale automated VQA tasks. To overcome these limitations, deep learning approaches have emerged, but mostly focusing only on a single video modality, extracting low-level visual features such as color and texture. Recently, electroencephalography (EEG) has been shown to align with users’ subjective experiences, offering valuable insights into neural responses to visual content. Hence, in this letter, we propose a brain-inspired deep learning framework for VQA that aligns EEG and video features. We build a video distortion dataset annotated with both MOS and EEG signals to analyze the impact of video distortions on EEG responses and subjective ratings. We then employ an adaptive EEG feature learning network to extract EEG features linked to video distortions, and propose a video quality prediction network that aligns both video and EEG features using a three-stage training strategy. Our method outperforms existing techniques, showing strong alignment with human subjective ratings. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of EEG in enhancing VQA with a more human-centric approach.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3665-3669"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145210040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Token Aggregation and Selection Hashing for Efficient Underwater Image Retrieval","authors":"Shishi Qiao;Benqian Lin;Guanren Bu;Shuai Yuan;Haiyong Zheng","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3605283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3605283","url":null,"abstract":"The scarcity of large-scale annotated data poses significant challenges for underwater visual analysis. Deep hashing methods offer promising solutions for efficient large-scale image retrieval tasks due to their exceptional computational and storage efficiency. However, underwater images suffer from inherent degradation (e.g., low contrast, color distortion), complex background noise, and fine-grained semantic distinctions, severely hindering the discriminability of learned hash codes. To address these issues, we propose Token Aggregation and Selection Hashing (TASH), the first deep hashing framework specifically designed for underwater image retrieval. Built upon a teacher-student self-distillation Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture, TASH incorporates three key innovations: (1) An Underwater Image Augmentation (UIA) module that simulates realistic degradation patterns (e.g., color shifts) to augment the student branch’s input, explicitly enhancing model robustness to the diverse distortions encountered underwater; (2) A Multi-layer Token Aggregation (MTA) module that fuses features across layers, capturing hierarchical contextual information crucial for overcoming low contrast and resolving ambiguities in degraded underwater scenes; and (3) An Attention-based Token Selection (ATS) module that dynamically identifies and emphasizes the most discriminative tokens, eliminating the effect of background noise and enabling extracting subtle yet critical visual cues for distinguishing fine-grained underwater species. The resulting discriminative real-valued features are compressed into compact binary codes via a dedicated hash layer. Extensive experiments on two underwater datasets demonstrate that TASH significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, establishing new benchmarks for efficient and accurate underwater image retrieval.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3545-3549"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145090031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Tracking Method for Dense Targets Within Resolvable Group Based on Collective Feature Correction","authors":"Guoqing Qi;Shuai Ke;Yinya Li;Andong Sheng","doi":"10.1109/LSP.2025.3605294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LSP.2025.3605294","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the multi-target tracking problem for a dense but resolvable group, and designs a method that uses the velocity estimation of the group to correct the initialization of trajectories and optimize the trajectories identification for the sub-targets within the group. First, an extended target tracking algorithm based on the elliptical random hypersurface model (RHM) is adopted to obtain the overall motion state of the group. Second, the overall velocity estimation, i.e., the collective feature of the group, is used as a prior pseudo measurement information to assist in generating the newborn target state more accurately. Next, an adaptive Generalized Labeled Multi-Bernoulli (GLMB) algorithm is used to estimate the motion states of the dense targets within the group, and the sub-target motion states are modified by integrating the overall velocity estimation of the group. The simulation results verify that the velocity correction algorithm proposed in this paper can significantly improve the tracking performance of the dense group targets, and provide a theoretical guidance for the engineering applications in the group target tracking.","PeriodicalId":13154,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Signal Processing Letters","volume":"32 ","pages":"3520-3524"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145061938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}