Zhaoyang Wang
Current Organizations / Institutes
The organizations/institutes from the scholar's latest article
Research Subjects
Zhaoyang Wang has a total of 25 co-authors. Here are the top co-authors by number of shared publications:
- Wen Lu
Xidian University, Xi'an, China
6 shared publications - Xinbo Gao
Xidian University, Xi'an, China
6 shared publications - Jie Li
State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xian, China
5 shared publications - Maoguo Gong
Xidian University, Xi'an, China
5 shared publications - Lihuo He
School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xian, China
4 shared publications - Mingyang Zhang
School of Electronic Engineering, Key Laboratory of Collaborative Intelligence Systems, Ministry of Education, Xidian University, Xian, China
2 shared publications
Latest Publications
- 12 March 2026
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
- Vol. PP (15209210) , 1-15
FCA$^{2}$: Frame Compression-Aware Autoencoder for Modular and Fast Compressed Video Super-Resolution
State-of-the-art (SOTA) compressed video super-resolution (CVSR) models face persistent challenges, including prolonged inference time, complex training pipelines, and reliance on auxiliary information. As video frame rates continue to increase, the diminishing inter-frame differences further expose the limitations of traditional frame-to-frame information exploitation methods, which are inadequate for addressing current video super-resolution (VSR) demands. To overcome these challenges, we propose an efficient and scalable solution inspired by the structural and statistical similarities between hyperspectral images (HSI) and video data. Our approach introduces a compression-driven dimensionality reduction strategy that reduces computational complexity, accelerates inference, and enhances the extraction of temporal information across frames. The proposed modular architecture is designed for seamless integration with existing VSR frameworks, ensuring strong adaptability and transferability across diverse applications. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves performance on par with, or surpassing, the current SOTA models, while significantly reducing inference time. By addressing key bottlenecks in CVSR, our work offers a practical and efficient pathway for advancing VSR technology. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/handsomewzy/FCA2.
- 12 March 2026
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
- Vol. PP (15209210) , 1-15
FCA$^{2}$: Frame Compression-Aware Autoencoder for Modular and Fast Compressed Video Super-Resolution
State-of-the-art (SOTA) compressed video super-resolution (CVSR) models face persistent challenges, including prolonged inference time, complex training pipelines, and reliance on auxiliary information. As video frame rates continue to increase, the diminishing inter-frame differences further expose the limitations of traditional frame-to-frame information exploitation methods, which are inadequate for addressing current video super-resolution (VSR) demands. To overcome these challenges, we propose an efficient and scalable solution inspired by the structural and statistical similarities between hyperspectral images (HSI) and video data. Our approach introduces a compression-driven dimensionality reduction strategy that reduces computational complexity, accelerates inference, and enhances the extraction of temporal information across frames. The proposed modular architecture is designed for seamless integration with existing VSR frameworks, ensuring strong adaptability and transferability across diverse applications. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves performance on par with, or surpassing, the current SOTA models, while significantly reducing inference time. By addressing key bottlenecks in CVSR, our work offers a practical and efficient pathway for advancing VSR technology. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/handsomewzy/FCA2.
- 6 January 2026
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
- Vol. 36 (5) , 6689-6704
EyeSim-VQA: A Free-Energy-Guided Eye Simulation Framework for Video Quality Assessment
Modeling visual perception in a manner consistent with human subjective evaluation has become a central direction in both video quality assessment (VQA) and broader visual understanding tasks. While free-energy-guided self-repair mechanisms—reflecting human observational experience—have proven effective in image quality assessment, extending them to VQA remains non-trivial. In addition, biologically inspired paradigms such as holistic perception, local analysis, and gaze-driven scanning have achieved notable success in high-level vision tasks, yet their potential within the VQA context remains largely underexplored. To address these issues, we propose EyeSimVQA, a novel VQA framework that incorporates free-energy-based self-repair. It adopts a dual-branch architecture, with an aesthetic branch for global perceptual evaluation and a technical branch for fine-grained structural and semantic analysis. Each branch integrates specialized enhancement modules tailored to distinct visual inputs—resized full-frame images and patch-based fragments—to simulate adaptive repair behaviors. We also explore a principled strategy for incorporating high-level visual features without disrupting the original backbone. In addition, we design a biologically inspired prediction head that models sweeping gaze dynamics to better fuse global and local representations for quality prediction. Experiments on five public VQA benchmarks demonstrate that EyeSimVQA achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while offering improved interpretability through its biologically grounded design. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/handsomewzy/EyeSim-VQA.
- 6 January 2026
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
- Vol. 36 (5) , 6689-6704
EyeSim-VQA: A Free-Energy-Guided Eye Simulation Framework for Video Quality Assessment
Modeling visual perception in a manner consistent with human subjective evaluation has become a central direction in both video quality assessment (VQA) and broader visual understanding tasks. While free-energy-guided self-repair mechanisms—reflecting human observational experience—have proven effective in image quality assessment, extending them to VQA remains non-trivial. In addition, biologically inspired paradigms such as holistic perception, local analysis, and gaze-driven scanning have achieved notable success in high-level vision tasks, yet their potential within the VQA context remains largely underexplored. To address these issues, we propose EyeSimVQA, a novel VQA framework that incorporates free-energy-based self-repair. It adopts a dual-branch architecture, with an aesthetic branch for global perceptual evaluation and a technical branch for fine-grained structural and semantic analysis. Each branch integrates specialized enhancement modules tailored to distinct visual inputs—resized full-frame images and patch-based fragments—to simulate adaptive repair behaviors. We also explore a principled strategy for incorporating high-level visual features without disrupting the original backbone. In addition, we design a biologically inspired prediction head that models sweeping gaze dynamics to better fuse global and local representations for quality prediction. Experiments on five public VQA benchmarks demonstrate that EyeSimVQA achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while offering improved interpretability through its biologically grounded design. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/handsomewzy/EyeSim-VQA.
- Open Access
DPTrack:Directional Kernel-Guided Prompt Learning for Robust Nighttime Aerial Tracking
Existing nighttime aerial trackers based on prompt learning rely solely on spatial localization supervision, which fails to provide fine-grained cues that point to target features and inevitably produces vague prompts. This limitation impairs the tracker's ability to accurately focus on the object features and results in trackers still performing poorly. To address this issue, we propose DPTrack, a prompt-based aerial tracker designed for nighttime scenarios by encoding the given object's attribute features into the directional kernel enriched with fine-grained cues to generate precise prompts. Specifically, drawing inspiration from visual bionics, DPTrack first hierarchically captures the object's topological structure, leveraging topological attributes to enrich the feature representation. Subsequently, an encoder condenses these topology-aware features into the directional kernel, which serves as the core guidance signal that explicitly encapsulates the object's fine-grained attribute cues. Finally, a kernel-guided prompt module built on channel-category correspondence attributes propagates the kernel across the features of the search region to pinpoint the positions of target features and convert them into precise prompts, integrating spatial gating for robust nighttime tracking. Extensive evaluations on established benchmarks demonstrate DPTrack's superior performance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/zzq-vipsl/DPTrack.
Open AccessDPTrack:Directional Kernel-Guided Prompt Learning for Robust Nighttime Aerial Tracking
Existing nighttime aerial trackers based on prompt learning rely solely on spatial localization supervision, which fails to provide fine-grained cues that point to target features and inevitably produces vague prompts. This limitation impairs the tracker's ability to accurately focus on the object features and results in trackers still performing poorly. To address this issue, we propose DPTrack, a prompt-based aerial tracker designed for nighttime scenarios by encoding the given object's attribute features into the directional kernel enriched with fine-grained cues to generate precise prompts. Specifically, drawing inspiration from visual bionics, DPTrack first hierarchically captures the object's topological structure, leveraging topological attributes to enrich the feature representation. Subsequently, an encoder condenses these topology-aware features into the directional kernel, which serves as the core guidance signal that explicitly encapsulates the object's fine-grained attribute cues. Finally, a kernel-guided prompt module built on channel-category correspondence attributes propagates the kernel across the features of the search region to pinpoint the positions of target features and convert them into precise prompts, integrating spatial gating for robust nighttime tracking. Extensive evaluations on established benchmarks demonstrate DPTrack's superior performance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/zzq-vipsl/DPTrack.
- 13 October 2025
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters
- Vol. 23 (1545598X) , 1-5
Multiscale Window Attention Channel Enhanced for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution
Transformer-based methods for remote sensing image super-resolution (SR) face challenges in reconstructing high-frequency textures due to the interference from large flat regions, such as farmlands and water bodies. To address these limitations, we propose a channel-enhanced multiscale window attention mechanism, which is designed to minimize the impact of flat regions on high-frequency area reconstruction while effectively utilizing the intrinsic multiscale features of remote sensing images. To better capture the multiscale features of remote sensing images, we introduce a series of depthwise separable convolution kernels of varying sizes during the shallow feature extraction stage. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) scores across multiple remote sensing benchmark datasets and scaling factors, validating its effectiveness.
- 13 October 2025
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters
- Vol. 23 (1545598X) , 1-5
Multiscale Window Attention Channel Enhanced for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution
Transformer-based methods for remote sensing image super-resolution (SR) face challenges in reconstructing high-frequency textures due to the interference from large flat regions, such as farmlands and water bodies. To address these limitations, we propose a channel-enhanced multiscale window attention mechanism, which is designed to minimize the impact of flat regions on high-frequency area reconstruction while effectively utilizing the intrinsic multiscale features of remote sensing images. To better capture the multiscale features of remote sensing images, we introduce a series of depthwise separable convolution kernels of varying sizes during the shallow feature extraction stage. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) scores across multiple remote sensing benchmark datasets and scaling factors, validating its effectiveness.
- Open Access
EyeSim-VQA: A Free-Energy-Guided Eye Simulation Framework for Video Quality Assessment
Free-energy-guided self-repair mechanisms have shown promising results in image quality assessment (IQA), but remain under-explored in video quality assessment (VQA), where temporal dynamics and model constraints pose unique challenges. Unlike static images, video content exhibits richer spatiotemporal complexity, making perceptual restoration more difficult. Moreover, VQA systems often rely on pre-trained backbones, which limits the direct integration of enhancement modules without affecting model stability. To address these issues, we propose EyeSimVQA, a novel VQA framework that incorporates free-energy-based self-repair. It adopts a dual-branch architecture, with an aesthetic branch for global perceptual evaluation and a technical branch for fine-grained structural and semantic analysis. Each branch integrates specialized enhancement modules tailored to distinct visual inputs-resized full-frame images and patch-based fragments-to simulate adaptive repair behaviors. We also explore a principled strategy for incorporating high-level visual features without disrupting the original backbone. In addition, we design a biologically inspired prediction head that models sweeping gaze dynamics to better fuse global and local representations for quality prediction. Experiments on five public VQA benchmarks demonstrate that EyeSimVQA achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while offering improved interpretability through its biologically grounded design.
Open AccessEyeSim-VQA: A Free-Energy-Guided Eye Simulation Framework for Video Quality Assessment
Free-energy-guided self-repair mechanisms have shown promising results in image quality assessment (IQA), but remain under-explored in video quality assessment (VQA), where temporal dynamics and model constraints pose unique challenges. Unlike static images, video content exhibits richer spatiotemporal complexity, making perceptual restoration more difficult. Moreover, VQA systems often rely on pre-trained backbones, which limits the direct integration of enhancement modules without affecting model stability. To address these issues, we propose EyeSimVQA, a novel VQA framework that incorporates free-energy-based self-repair. It adopts a dual-branch architecture, with an aesthetic branch for global perceptual evaluation and a technical branch for fine-grained structural and semantic analysis. Each branch integrates specialized enhancement modules tailored to distinct visual inputs-resized full-frame images and patch-based fragments-to simulate adaptive repair behaviors. We also explore a principled strategy for incorporating high-level visual features without disrupting the original backbone. In addition, we design a biologically inspired prediction head that models sweeping gaze dynamics to better fuse global and local representations for quality prediction. Experiments on five public VQA benchmarks demonstrate that EyeSimVQA achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while offering improved interpretability through its biologically grounded design.
- 6 January 2025
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
- Vol. 34 (10577149) , 263-278
Diffusion Model-Based Visual Compensation Guidance and Visual Difference Analysis for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
Existing free-energy guided No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) methods continue to face challenges in effectively restoring complexly distorted images. The features guiding the main network for quality assessment lack interpretability, and efficiently leveraging high-level feature information remains a significant challenge. As a novel class of state-of-the-art (SOTA) generative model, the diffusion model exhibits the capability to model intricate relationships, enhancing image restoration effectiveness. Moreover, the intermediate variables in the denoising iteration process exhibit clearer and more interpretable meanings for high-level visual information guidance. In view of these, we pioneer the exploration of the diffusion model into the domain of NR-IQA. We design a novel diffusion model for enhancing images with various types of distortions, resulting in higher quality and more interpretable high-level visual information. Our experiments demonstrate that the diffusion model establishes a clear mapping relationship between image reconstruction and image quality scores, which the network learns to guide quality assessment. Finally, to fully leverage high-level visual information, we design two complementary visual branches to collaboratively perform quality evaluation. Extensive experiments are conducted on seven public NR-IQA datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms SOTA methods for NR-IQA. The codes will be available at https://github.com/handsomewzy/DiffV2IQA.
- 6 January 2025
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
- Vol. 34 (10577149) , 263-278
Diffusion Model-Based Visual Compensation Guidance and Visual Difference Analysis for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
Existing free-energy guided No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) methods continue to face challenges in effectively restoring complexly distorted images. The features guiding the main network for quality assessment lack interpretability, and efficiently leveraging high-level feature information remains a significant challenge. As a novel class of state-of-the-art (SOTA) generative model, the diffusion model exhibits the capability to model intricate relationships, enhancing image restoration effectiveness. Moreover, the intermediate variables in the denoising iteration process exhibit clearer and more interpretable meanings for high-level visual information guidance. In view of these, we pioneer the exploration of the diffusion model into the domain of NR-IQA. We design a novel diffusion model for enhancing images with various types of distortions, resulting in higher quality and more interpretable high-level visual information. Our experiments demonstrate that the diffusion model establishes a clear mapping relationship between image reconstruction and image quality scores, which the network learns to guide quality assessment. Finally, to fully leverage high-level visual information, we design two complementary visual branches to collaboratively perform quality evaluation. Extensive experiments are conducted on seven public NR-IQA datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms SOTA methods for NR-IQA. The codes will be available at https://github.com/handsomewzy/DiffV2IQA.
- 29 November 2024
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
- Vol. 35 (4) , 3557-3572
Spatial-Spectral Aggregation Transformer With Diffusion Prior for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution
Constrained by imaging systems, hyperspectral images (HSIs) always have a low spatial resolution. Deep learning-based HSI super-resolution methods have achieved impressive results through learning the nonlinear mapping between low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) images. However, most of them take the LR image or its upsampled version through bicubic interpolation as input, leading to low-quality features and limited details captured by the network. As a powerful generative model, diffusion model has the ability to learn both contextual semantics and textual details from distinct timesteps, enabling the effective exploration of spatial-spectral distributions in high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose a novel method that extracts high-quality prior information from original images to assist in super-resolution through pretraining a diffusion model. Specifically, we first train a diffusion model using original HSI patches in a self-supervised manner and then obtain prior features from the pretrained denoising U-Net decoder. To efficiently incorporate the prior features into the super-resolution model, we propose an adaptive fusion module based on spatial and spectral attention mechanisms, which enhances features in both dimensions while preserving the original characteristics. Additionally, to leverage the complementarity of spatial and spectral information, we design a spatial-spectral aggregation Transformer module that incorporates an adaptive interaction module to facilitate information exchange across different dimensions, thereby enhancing the representation capability. Extensive experiments on three public hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves excellent super-resolution performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative quality and visual results.
- 29 November 2024
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
- Vol. 35 (4) , 3557-3572
Spatial-Spectral Aggregation Transformer With Diffusion Prior for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution
Constrained by imaging systems, hyperspectral images (HSIs) always have a low spatial resolution. Deep learning-based HSI super-resolution methods have achieved impressive results through learning the nonlinear mapping between low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) images. However, most of them take the LR image or its upsampled version through bicubic interpolation as input, leading to low-quality features and limited details captured by the network. As a powerful generative model, diffusion model has the ability to learn both contextual semantics and textual details from distinct timesteps, enabling the effective exploration of spatial-spectral distributions in high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose a novel method that extracts high-quality prior information from original images to assist in super-resolution through pretraining a diffusion model. Specifically, we first train a diffusion model using original HSI patches in a self-supervised manner and then obtain prior features from the pretrained denoising U-Net decoder. To efficiently incorporate the prior features into the super-resolution model, we propose an adaptive fusion module based on spatial and spectral attention mechanisms, which enhances features in both dimensions while preserving the original characteristics. Additionally, to leverage the complementarity of spatial and spectral information, we design a spatial-spectral aggregation Transformer module that incorporates an adaptive interaction module to facilitate information exchange across different dimensions, thereby enhancing the representation capability. Extensive experiments on three public hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves excellent super-resolution performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative quality and visual results.
- Open Access
- 4 October 2024
- Published by MDPI AG in Remote Sensing
- Vol. 16 (19) , 3695
Multi-Window Fusion Spatial-Frequency Joint Self-Attention for Remote-Sensing Image Super-Resolution
Remote-sensing images typically feature large dimensions and contain repeated texture patterns. To effectively capture finer details and encode comprehensive information, feature-extraction networks with larger receptive fields are essential for remote-sensing image super-resolution tasks. However, mainstream methods based on stacked Transformer modules suffer from limited receptive fields due to fixed window sizes, impairing long-range dependency capture and fine-grained texture reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a spatial-frequency joint attention network based on multi-window fusion (MWSFA). Specifically, our approach introduces a multi-window fusion strategy, which merges windows with similar textures to allow self-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies effectively, therefore expanding the receptive field of the feature extractor. Additionally, we incorporate a frequency-domain self-attention branch in parallel with the original Transformer architecture. This branch leverages the global characteristics of the frequency domain to further extend the receptive field, enabling more comprehensive self-attention calculations across different frequency bands and better utilization of consistent frequency information. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real remote-sensing datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior visual reconstruction effects and higher evaluation metrics compared to other super-resolution methods.
- 4 October 2024
- Published by MDPI AG in Remote Sensing
- Vol. 16 (19) , 3695
Open AccessMulti-Window Fusion Spatial-Frequency Joint Self-Attention for Remote-Sensing Image Super-Resolution
Remote-sensing images typically feature large dimensions and contain repeated texture patterns. To effectively capture finer details and encode comprehensive information, feature-extraction networks with larger receptive fields are essential for remote-sensing image super-resolution tasks. However, mainstream methods based on stacked Transformer modules suffer from limited receptive fields due to fixed window sizes, impairing long-range dependency capture and fine-grained texture reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a spatial-frequency joint attention network based on multi-window fusion (MWSFA). Specifically, our approach introduces a multi-window fusion strategy, which merges windows with similar textures to allow self-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies effectively, therefore expanding the receptive field of the feature extractor. Additionally, we incorporate a frequency-domain self-attention branch in parallel with the original Transformer architecture. This branch leverages the global characteristics of the frequency domain to further extend the receptive field, enabling more comprehensive self-attention calculations across different frequency bands and better utilization of consistent frequency information. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real remote-sensing datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior visual reconstruction effects and higher evaluation metrics compared to other super-resolution methods.