Reliable autonomous driving systems require accurate detection of traffic participants. To this end, multi-modal fusion has emerged as an effective strategy. In particular, 4D radar and LiDAR fusion methods based on multi-frame radar point clouds have demonstrated the effectiveness in bridging the point density gap. However, they often neglect radar point clouds' inter-frame misalignment caused by object movement during accumulation and do not fully exploit the object dynamic information from 4D radar. In this paper, we propose MoRAL, a motion-aware multi-frame 4D radar and LiDAR fusion framework for robust 3D object detection. First, a Motion-aware Radar Encoder (MRE) is designed to compensate for inter-frame radar misalignment from moving objects. Later, a Motion Attention Gated Fusion (MAGF) module integrate radar motion features to guide LiDAR features to focus on dynamic foreground objects. Extensive evaluations on the View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset demonstrate that MoRAL outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest mAP of 73.30% in the entire area and 88.68% in the driving corridor. Notably, our method also achieves the best AP of 69.67% for pedestrians in the entire area and 96.25% for cyclists in the driving corridor.
Vision-language models (VLMs) offer flexible object detection through natural language prompts but suffer from performance variability depending on prompt phrasing. In this paper, we introduce a method for automated prompt refinement using a novel metric called the Contrastive Class Alignment Score (CCAS), which ranks prompts based on their semantic alignment with a target object class while penalizing similarity to confounding classes. Our method generates diverse prompt candidates via a large language model and filters them through CCAS, computed using prompt embeddings from a sentence transformer. We evaluate our approach on challenging object categories, demonstrating that our automatic selection of high-precision prompts improves object detection accuracy without the need for additional model training or labeled data. This scalable and model-agnostic pipeline offers a principled alternative to manual prompt engineering for VLM-based detection systems.
Big model has emerged as a new research paradigm that can be applied to various down-stream tasks with only minor effort for domain adaption. Correspondingly, this study tackles Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM). The previous studies declared that SAM is not workable for COD but this study reveals that SAM works if promoted properly, for which we devise a new framework to render point promotions: First, we develop the Promotion Point Targeting Network (PPT-net) to leverage multi-scale features in predicting the probabilities of camouflaged objects' presences at given candidate points over the image. Then, we develop a key point selection (KPS) algorithm to deploy both positive and negative point promotions contrastively to SAM to guide the segmentation. It is the first work to facilitate big model for COD and achieves plausible results experimentally over the existing methods on 3 data sets under 6 metrics. This study demonstrates an off-the-shelf methodology for COD by leveraging SAM, which gains advantage over designing professional models from scratch, not only in performance, but also in turning the problem to a less challenging task, that is, seeking informative but not exactly precise promotions.
The advent of convenient and efficient fully unmanned stores equipped with artificial intelligence-based automated checkout systems marks a new era in retail. However, these systems have inherent artificial intelligence security vulnerabilities, which are exploited via adversarial patch attacks, particularly in physical environments. This study demonstrated that adversarial patches can severely disrupt object detection models used in unmanned stores, leading to issues such as theft, inventory discrepancies, and interference. We investigated three types of adversarial patch attacks -- Hiding, Creating, and Altering attacks -- and highlighted their effectiveness. We also introduce the novel color histogram similarity loss function by leveraging attacker knowledge of the color information of a target class object. Besides the traditional confusion-matrix-based attack success rate, we introduce a new bounding-boxes-based metric to analyze the practical impact of these attacks. Starting with attacks on object detection models trained on snack and fruit datasets in a digital environment, we evaluated the effectiveness of adversarial patches in a physical testbed that mimicked a real unmanned store with RGB cameras and realistic conditions. Furthermore, we assessed the robustness of these attacks in black-box scenarios, demonstrating that shadow attacks can enhance success rates of attacks even without direct access to model parameters. Our study underscores the necessity for robust defense strategies to protect unmanned stores from adversarial threats. Highlighting the limitations of the current defense mechanisms in real-time detection systems and discussing various proactive measures, we provide insights into improving the robustness of object detection models and fortifying unmanned retail environments against these attacks.
The core challenge in Camouflage Object Detection (COD) lies in the indistinguishable similarity between targets and backgrounds in terms of color, texture, and shape. This causes existing methods to either lose edge details (such as hair-like fine structures) due to over-reliance on global semantic information or be disturbed by similar backgrounds (such as vegetation patterns) when relying solely on local features. We propose DRRNet, a four-stage architecture characterized by a "context-detail-fusion-refinement" pipeline to address these issues. Specifically, we introduce an Omni-Context Feature Extraction Module to capture global camouflage patterns and a Local Detail Extraction Module to supplement microstructural information for the full-scene context module. We then design a module for forming dual representations of scene understanding and structural awareness, which fuses panoramic features and local features across various scales. In the decoder, we also introduce a reverse refinement module that leverages spatial edge priors and frequency-domain noise suppression to perform a two-stage inverse refinement of the output. By applying two successive rounds of inverse refinement, the model effectively suppresses background interference and enhances the continuity of object boundaries. Experimental results demonstrate that DRRNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/jerrySunning/DRRNet.
In the realm of intelligent maritime navigation, object detection from a shipborne perspective is paramount. Despite the criticality, the paucity of maritime-specific data impedes the deployment of sophisticated visual perception techniques, akin to those utilized in autonomous vehicular systems, within the maritime context. To bridge this gap, we introduce Navigation12, a novel dataset annotated for 12 object categories under diverse maritime environments and weather conditions. Based upon this dataset, we propose HMPNet, a lightweight architecture tailored for shipborne object detection. HMPNet incorporates a hierarchical dynamic modulation backbone to bolster feature aggregation and expression, complemented by a matrix cascading poly-scale neck and a polymerization weight sharing detector, facilitating efficient multi-scale feature aggregation. Empirical evaluations indicate that HMPNet surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency, realizing a 3.3% improvement in mean Average Precision over YOLOv11n, the prevailing model, and reducing parameters by 23%.
Compact models can be effectively trained through Knowledge Distillation (KD), a technique that transfers knowledge from larger, high-performing teacher models. Two key challenges in Knowledge Distillation (KD) are: 1) balancing learning from the teacher's guidance and the task objective, and 2) handling the disparity in knowledge representation between teacher and student models. To address these, we propose Multi-Task Optimization for Knowledge Distillation (MoKD). MoKD tackles two main gradient issues: a) Gradient Conflicts, where task-specific and distillation gradients are misaligned, and b) Gradient Dominance, where one objective's gradient dominates, causing imbalance. MoKD reformulates KD as a multi-objective optimization problem, enabling better balance between objectives. Additionally, it introduces a subspace learning framework to project feature representations into a high-dimensional space, improving knowledge transfer. Our MoKD is demonstrated to outperform existing methods through extensive experiments on image classification using the ImageNet-1K dataset and object detection using the COCO dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance with greater efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, MoKD models also achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to models trained from scratch.
Enhancing the robustness of object detection systems under adverse weather conditions is crucial for the advancement of autonomous driving technology. This study presents a novel approach leveraging the diffusion model Instruct Pix2Pix to develop prompting methodologies that generate realistic datasets with weather-based augmentations aiming to mitigate the impact of adverse weather on the perception capabilities of state-of-the-art object detection models, including Faster R-CNN and YOLOv10. Experiments were conducted in two environments, in the CARLA simulator where an initial evaluation of the proposed data augmentation was provided, and then on the real-world image data sets BDD100K and ACDC demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in real environments. The key contributions of this work are twofold: (1) identifying and quantifying the performance gap in object detection models under challenging weather conditions, and (2) demonstrating how tailored data augmentation strategies can significantly enhance the robustness of these models. This research establishes a solid foundation for improving the reliability of perception systems in demanding environmental scenarios, and provides a pathway for future advancements in autonomous driving.
State-of-the-art LiDAR-camera 3D object detectors usually focus on feature fusion. However, they neglect the factor of depth while designing the fusion strategy. In this work, we are the first to observe that different modalities play different roles as depth varies via statistical analysis and visualization. Based on this finding, we propose a Depth-Aware Hybrid Feature Fusion (DepthFusion) strategy that guides the weights of point cloud and RGB image modalities by introducing depth encoding at both global and local levels. Specifically, the Depth-GFusion module adaptively adjusts the weights of image Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features in multi-modal global features via depth encoding. Furthermore, to compensate for the information lost when transferring raw features to the BEV space, we propose a Depth-LFusion module, which adaptively adjusts the weights of original voxel features and multi-view image features in multi-modal local features via depth encoding. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our DepthFusion method surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our DepthFusion is more robust to various kinds of corruptions, outperforming previous methods on the nuScenes-C dataset.
Generalizing an object detector trained on a single domain to multiple unseen domains is a challenging task. Existing methods typically introduce image or feature augmentation to diversify the source domain to raise the robustness of the detector. Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based augmentation techniques have been proven to be effective, but they require that the detector's backbone has the same structure as the image encoder of VLM, limiting the detector framework selection. To address this problem, we propose Language-Driven Dual Style Mixing (LDDS) for single-domain generalization, which diversifies the source domain by fully utilizing the semantic information of the VLM. Specifically, we first construct prompts to transfer style semantics embedded in the VLM to an image translation network. This facilitates the generation of style diversified images with explicit semantic information. Then, we propose image-level style mixing between the diversified images and source domain images. This effectively mines the semantic information for image augmentation without relying on specific augmentation selections. Finally, we propose feature-level style mixing in a double-pipeline manner, allowing feature augmentation to be model-agnostic and can work seamlessly with the mainstream detector frameworks, including the one-stage, two-stage, and transformer-based detectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across various benchmark datasets, including real to cartoon and normal to adverse weather tasks. The source code and pre-trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/qinhongda8/LDDS.
Fabric defect detection confronts two fundamental challenges. First, conventional non-maximum suppression disrupts gradient flow, which hinders genuine end-to-end learning. Second, acquiring pixel-level annotations at industrial scale is prohibitively costly. Addressing these limitations, we propose a differentiable NMS framework for fabric defect detection that achieves superior localization precision through end-to-end optimization. We reformulate NMS as a differentiable bipartite matching problem solved through the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, maintaining uninterrupted gradient flow throughout the network. This approach specifically targets the irregular morphologies and ambiguous boundaries of fabric defects by integrating proposal quality, feature similarity, and spatial relationships. Our entropy-constrained mask refinement mechanism further enhances localization precision through principled uncertainty modeling. Extensive experiments on the Tianchi fabric defect dataset demonstrate significant performance improvements over existing methods while maintaining real-time speeds suitable for industrial deployment. The framework exhibits remarkable adaptability across different architectures and generalizes effectively to general object detection tasks.
Perception is a core capability of automated vehicles and has been significantly advanced through modern sensor technologies and artificial intelligence. However, perception systems still face challenges in complex real-world scenarios. To improve robustness against various external factors, multi-sensor fusion techniques are essential, combining the strengths of different sensor modalities. With recent developments in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X communication, sensor fusion can now extend beyond a single vehicle to a cooperative multi-agent system involving Connected Automated Vehicle (CAV) and intelligent infrastructure. This paper presents VALISENS, an innovative multi-sensor system distributed across multiple agents. It integrates onboard and roadside LiDARs, radars, thermal cameras, and RGB cameras to enhance situational awareness and support cooperative automated driving. The thermal camera adds critical redundancy for perceiving Vulnerable Road User (VRU), while fusion with roadside sensors mitigates visual occlusions and extends the perception range beyond the limits of individual vehicles. We introduce the corresponding perception module built on this sensor system, which includes object detection, tracking, motion forecasting, and high-level data fusion. The proposed system demonstrates the potential of cooperative perception in real-world test environments and lays the groundwork for future Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) applications.
We introduce M$^3$CAD, a novel benchmark designed to advance research in generic cooperative autonomous driving. M$^3$CAD comprises 204 sequences with 30k frames, spanning a diverse range of cooperative driving scenarios. Each sequence includes multiple vehicles and sensing modalities, e.g., LiDAR point clouds, RGB images, and GPS/IMU, supporting a variety of autonomous driving tasks, including object detection and tracking, mapping, motion forecasting, occupancy prediction, and path planning. This rich multimodal setup enables M$^3$CAD to support both single-vehicle and multi-vehicle autonomous driving research, significantly broadening the scope of research in the field. To our knowledge, M$^3$CAD is the most comprehensive benchmark specifically tailored for cooperative multi-task autonomous driving research. We evaluate the state-of-the-art end-to-end solution on M$^3$CAD to establish baseline performance. To foster cooperative autonomous driving research, we also propose E2EC, a simple yet effective framework for cooperative driving solution that leverages inter-vehicle shared information for improved path planning. We release M$^3$CAD, along with our baseline models and evaluation results, to support the development of robust cooperative autonomous driving systems. All resources will be made publicly available on https://github.com/zhumorui/M3CAD
Open-vocabulary video visual relationship detection aims to detect objects and their relationships in videos without being restricted by predefined object or relationship categories. Existing methods leverage the rich semantic knowledge of pre-trained vision-language models such as CLIP to identify novel categories. They typically adopt a cascaded pipeline to first detect objects and then classify relationships based on the detected objects, which may lead to error propagation and thus suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose Mutual EnhancemenT of Objects and Relationships (METOR), a query-based unified framework to jointly model and mutually enhance object detection and relationship classification in open-vocabulary scenarios. Under this framework, we first design a CLIP-based contextual refinement encoding module that extracts visual contexts of objects and relationships to refine the encoding of text features and object queries, thus improving the generalization of encoding to novel categories. Then we propose an iterative enhancement module to alternatively enhance the representations of objects and relationships by fully exploiting their interdependence to improve recognition performance. Extensive experiments on two public datasets, VidVRD and VidOR, demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Underwater object detection using sonar imagery has become a critical and rapidly evolving research domain within marine technology. However, sonar images are characterized by lower resolution and sparser features compared to optical images, which seriously degrades the performance of object detection.To address these challenges, we specifically propose a Detection Transformer (DETR) architecture optimized with a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach called NAS-DETR for object detection in sonar images. First, an improved Zero-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method based on the maximum entropy principle is proposed to identify a real-time, high-representational-capacity CNN-Transformer backbone for sonar image detection. This method enables the efficient discovery of high-performance network architectures with low computational and time overhead. Subsequently, the backbone is combined with a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and a deformable attention-based Transformer decoder to construct a complete network architecture. This architecture integrates various advanced components and training schemes to enhance overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on two Representative datasets, while maintaining minimal overhead in real-time efficiency and computational complexity. Furthermore, correlation analysis between the key parameters and differential entropy-based fitness function is performed to enhance the interpretability of the proposed framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the field of sonar object detection to integrate the DETR architecture with a NAS search mechanism.
Event-based object detection has gained increasing attention due to its advantages such as high temporal resolution, wide dynamic range, and asynchronous address-event representation. Leveraging these advantages, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising approach, offering low energy consumption and rich spatiotemporal dynamics. To further enhance the performance of event-based object detection, this study proposes a novel hybrid spike vision Transformer (HsVT) model. The HsVT model integrates a spatial feature extraction module to capture local and global features, and a temporal feature extraction module to model time dependencies and long-term patterns in event sequences. This combination enables HsVT to capture spatiotemporal features, improving its capability to handle complex event-based object detection tasks. To support research in this area, we developed and publicly released The Fall Detection Dataset as a benchmark for event-based object detection tasks. This dataset, captured using an event-based camera, ensures facial privacy protection and reduces memory usage due to the event representation format. We evaluated the HsVT model on GEN1 and Fall Detection datasets across various model sizes. Experimental results demonstrate that HsVT achieves significant performance improvements in event detection with fewer parameters.
Tiny object detection plays a vital role in drone surveillance, remote sensing, and autonomous systems, enabling the identification of small targets across vast landscapes. However, existing methods suffer from inefficient feature leverage and high computational costs due to redundant feature processing and rigid query allocation. To address these challenges, we propose Dome-DETR, a novel framework with Density-Oriented Feature-Query Manipulation for Efficient Tiny Object Detection. To reduce feature redundancies, we introduce a lightweight Density-Focal Extractor (DeFE) to produce clustered compact foreground masks. Leveraging these masks, we incorporate Masked Window Attention Sparsification (MWAS) to focus computational resources on the most informative regions via sparse attention. Besides, we propose Progressive Adaptive Query Initialization (PAQI), which adaptively modulates query density across spatial areas for better query allocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dome-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance (+3.3 AP on AI-TOD-V2 and +2.5 AP on VisDrone) while maintaining low computational complexity and a compact model size. Code will be released upon acceptance.
In this paper, we examine a key limitation in query-based detectors for temporal action detection (TAD), which arises from their direct adaptation of originally designed architectures for object detection. Despite the effectiveness of the existing models, they struggle to fully address the unique challenges of TAD, such as the redundancy in multi-scale features and the limited ability to capture sufficient temporal context. To address these issues, we propose a multi-dilated gated encoder and central-adjacent region integrated decoder for temporal action detection transformer (DiGIT). Our approach replaces the existing encoder that consists of multi-scale deformable attention and feedforward network with our multi-dilated gated encoder. Our proposed encoder reduces the redundant information caused by multi-level features while maintaining the ability to capture fine-grained and long-range temporal information. Furthermore, we introduce a central-adjacent region integrated decoder that leverages a more comprehensive sampling strategy for deformable cross-attention to capture the essential information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiGIT achieves state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS14, ActivityNet v1.3, and HACS-Segment. Code is available at: https://github.com/Dotori-HJ/DiGIT
Autonomous vehicle perception systems have traditionally relied on costly LiDAR sensors to generate precise environmental representations. In this paper, we propose a camera-only perception framework that produces Bird's Eye View (BEV) maps by extending the Lift-Splat-Shoot architecture. Our method combines YOLOv11-based object detection with DepthAnythingV2 monocular depth estimation across multi-camera inputs to achieve comprehensive 360-degree scene understanding. We evaluate our approach on the OpenLane-V2 and NuScenes datasets, achieving up to 85% road segmentation accuracy and 85-90% vehicle detection rates when compared against LiDAR ground truth, with average positional errors limited to 1.2 meters. These results highlight the potential of deep learning to extract rich spatial information using only camera inputs, enabling cost-efficient autonomous navigation without sacrificing accuracy.
Infrared object tracking plays a crucial role in Anti-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Anti-UAV) applications. Existing trackers often depend on cropped template regions and have limited motion modeling capabilities, which pose challenges when dealing with tiny targets. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective infrared tiny-object tracker that enhances tracking performance by integrating global detection and motion-aware learning with temporal priors. Our method is based on object detection and achieves significant improvements through two key innovations. First, we introduce frame dynamics, leveraging frame difference and optical flow to encode both prior target features and motion characteristics at the input level, enabling the model to better distinguish the target from background clutter. Second, we propose a trajectory constraint filtering strategy in the post-processing stage, utilizing spatio-temporal priors to suppress false positives and enhance tracking robustness. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches across multiple metrics in challenging infrared UAV tracking scenarios. Notably, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in the 4th Anti-UAV Challenge, securing 1st place in Track 1 and 2nd place in Track 2.