arXiv Computer Vision

AVID: A Weakly Aligned RGB-Infrared Dataset and Perturbation Benchmark for Tiny Aerial Targets

AVID is a new benchmark dataset for detecting tiny aerial targets, comprising 32,040 RGB‑infrared frame pairs from 115 videos with 35,952 bird and drone annotations at 320×256 resolution. The dataset focuses on very small objects, with 68.1% of targets having a geometric‑mean bounding‑box side of 8–16 pixels and 99.0% meeting the COCO small‑object criterion. It introduces metrics for cross‑modal alignment and an AVID‑C extension that simulates seven families of image degradation at five severity levels to study the impact of scale, degradation, and alignment on detection performance.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 7

Towards benchmarking Western Bluebird detection in the wild

The paper introduces a new benchmark dataset of over 6,000 high‑resolution images for detecting and segmenting Western bluebirds in natural, cluttered scenes. Experiments show that supervised detectors such as Faster R‑CNN and RT‑DETR outperform open‑vocabulary models in zero‑shot settings, though fine‑tuned YOLO‑World can compete. Segmentation results favor Mask R‑CNN for mask quality, while YOLOv8‑Seg offers the best precision and speed. The study also identifies multiple factors—scale, brightness, contrast, clutter, blur, crowding, and session variation—as contributors to detection failures.

By Estela Monserrat Arriaga Santana, Julian Rosas Scull, Ibeth P. Alarc\'on, Bibiana Montoya, Aylin Sosa Mej\'ia, Hugo Jair Escalante
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

DeepForestVisionV2: Ecology-Driven Taxonomy Expansion for Camera-Trap Monitoring in African Tropical Forests

arXiv:2606.20223v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Camera-trap monitoring in African tropical forests increasingly extends beyond closed-canopy interiors to riverbanks, clearings, and park edges. Am...

By Hugo Magaldi, Theau d'Audiffret, Etienne Francois Akomo-Okoue, Bala Amarasekaran, Naomi Anderson, Claire Auger, Noemie Cappelle, Daniel Cornelis, Raphael Cornette, Tobias Deschner, Gabriel Dubus, Davy Fonteyn, Rosa M. Garriga, Jennifer Hatlauf, Innocent Kasekendi, Raymond Katumba, Aram Kazandjian, Alfred Ngomanda, Stephan Ntie, Simone Pika, Xavier Rufray, Harold Rugonge, John Justice Tibesigwa, Peter van Lunteren, Hadrien Vanthomme, Joeri A. Zwerts, Sabrina Krief
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 8

MultiFly: A Real-World Multimodal Aerial Dataset with Annotation-Efficient Label Transfer and Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency

arXiv:2610.10359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce MultiFly, a real-world, low-altitude UAV dataset for semantic perception across RGB, thermal, LiDAR, and radar modalities. MultiFly prov...

By Markus Gross, Andreas Greiner, Taehyoung Kim, Sivasubiramaniam Subbiah, Toma\v{z} Coti\v{c}, Sai Bharadwaj Matha, Conrad Christoph, Oussema Dhaouadi, Simon Zieher, Surya Vijaya Kumar, Gordon Elger, Henri Mee{\ss}, Olaf Wysocki, Paul Spannaus, Daniel Cremers
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Understanding Dynamic Scenes at Gigapixel Scale: Wide-Area Spatio-Temporal Perception from UAVs

The paper introduces the Wide-area Spatio-temporal Scene Understanding (WSTU) problem, which demands simultaneous wide-area coverage, per-target resolution, and temporal continuity—capabilities lacking in existing datasets. To address this, the authors present HARD, an ultra‑high‑resolution (12768×9564) UAV dataset annotated for object detection, multi‑object tracking, and scene‑level visual question answering. They also propose a latency‑aware metric, streaming‑HOTA (s‑HOTA), and show through baseline experiments that high resolution and processing latency significantly impact detection, tracking, and VQA performance, revealing gaps in current methods for WSTU.

By Yuhang Zhu, Meiyi Zhu, Yunkai Dang, Zhangnan Li, Yuxuan Wang, Wenbin Li, Hongbing Pan
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Training with synthetic data for drone detection in thermal imagery

The paper explores a synthetic-first training approach for detecting drones in medium- and long-wave infrared imagery, combining synthetic scene generation with fine-tuning on real data. It demonstrates that synthetic data can establish initial object representations, but real infrared data is crucial to close domain gaps and improve reliability. The study finds that aligning datasets has a greater impact on performance than increasing model size, and that semantic alignment in feature space is the strongest predictor of success, with radiometric factors like entropy and dynamic range also contributing.

By Tanel Liiv, Sander Soodla, Nzamba Bignoumba, Alma M. Liezenga, Toomas Pruuden
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

CSCWD: Cross-Scale Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation for Lightweight Tiny Object Detection on Edge Devices

The paper introduces Cross-Scale Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation (CSCWD), a training-time framework that transfers high‑resolution spatial representations from a YOLO11m‑P2 teacher to a lightweight YOLO11n student without changing the student’s inference architecture. CSCWD aligns teacher P2 features with student P3 while also applying same‑scale distillation at deeper pyramid levels, yielding a 2.92‑point mAP@0.5 improvement over the baseline and a 2.09‑point gain over same‑scale distillation alone. In zero‑shot tests on DUT‑Anti‑UAV and on a Raspberry Pi 5, the 2.58‑million‑parameter student reaches 50.32% mAP@0.5 at 82.32 ms latency (12.15 fps) with negligible runtime or memory increase.

By Amir Zamani, Zeinab Ghasemi-Naraghi
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 23

WildDepth-v2: A Synchronized RGB--LiDAR--Radar Dataset and Benchmark for Metric Depth, Motion, and Tracking of Wildlife

WildDepth‑v2 expands the original RGB‑LiDAR WildDepth dataset by adding 37 RGB‑LiDAR‑4D‑radar sequences, a frozen hidden test set for RGB‑only depth estimation and RGB‑plus‑sparse‑LiDAR depth completion, and metric 3D trajectories derived from 2D tracks using LiDAR, radar, or monocular depth. The dataset demonstrates that object‑level radar calibration improves monocular depth accuracy (AbsRel 0.120 vs. 0.198) and that once‑per‑track radar scaling reduces 3D position error four‑fold, matching the performance of LiDAR calibration. Additionally, transferring radar Doppler onto LiDAR yields denser motion masks, lowers LiDAR accumulation error, and provides radial speed estimates. whyItMatters":"The dataset supplies the first imaging‑radar wildlife recordings and a benchmark that enables metric depth, motion, and tracking research in ecological contexts, filling a gap where monocular video lacks scale and existing wildlife datasets lack metric ground truth."

By Muhammad Aamir, Sangyun Shin, Naoya Muramatsu, Matthew Wijers, Amir Patel, Andrew Loveridge, Andrew Markham