This study compares two fusion strategies for UAV detection using RGB and infrared imagery: early (image-level) fusion and late (decision-level) fusion. Extensive testing in varied lighting, backgrounds, distances, altitudes, and zoom levels shows that early fusion yields higher raw performance by integrating thermal data from the start, while late fusion offers a flexible workflow useful when sensors or frames are misaligned. The paper discusses both strengths and weaknesses of each approach and provides practical implementation recommendations.
This paper presents a novel strategy for UAV detection through visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) fusion, in order to improve accuracy and precision in harsh environments and weather conditions. In this...
arXiv:2609.12521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle facade inspection can combine red, green, and blue (RGB) imagery with thermal measurements to screen surface and subsurface ano...
The paper examines RGB‑infrared fusion for binary wildfire segmentation using UAV imagery on the FLAME3 dataset. It compares RGB and infrared baselines with three fusion strategies across U‑Net, DeepLabV3+, and SegFormer architectures. Results show thermal data dominates segmentation performance, and feature‑level fusion with transformer‑based models yields the best results.
FoCal is a new frequency‑oriented framework for aerial RGB–IR object detection that explicitly models cross‑modal interaction across different frequency components. It introduces a Frequency‑Aware Dual‑Domain Calibration module to consolidate low‑frequency structural cues while preserving high‑frequency modality‑specific details, and a Discrepancy‑Guided Spectral Modulation module that adaptively enhances, preserves, or attenuates the joint spectrum based on confidence‑weighted amplitude discrepancies. Experiments on DroneVehicle, ESCVehicle, and ATR‑UMOD show FoCal achieving high mAP scores (83.5%, 54.8%, 64.6%) with only 3.0 M parameters and 113.6 FPS, demonstrating a strong accuracy–efficiency trade‑off.
The paper presents a multi‑campaign UAV thermal image dataset for inert ordnance screening, comprising 5,855 labeled image pairs collected in Tennessee across diverse terrains and seasons. The authors trained YOLOV11l and RT‑DETR‑R50 models on 33 m and 15 m altitude data, achieving automated candidate detection, and provided practical guidelines for future humanitarian mine action surveys. The dataset and models aim to aid screening and prioritization for follow‑up technical surveys or EOD assessment, not to replace clearance operations.
arXiv:2608.29235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anti-UAV perception systems must remain reliable when sensor streams degrade under occlusion, fast motion, or modality-specific failure. Existing multi...
arXiv:2610.07705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased the importance of image-based UAV detection. Learning-based detectors are trained on...
arXiv:2603.16130v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Overexposure caused by strong daylight and oncoming headlights frequently overwhelms visible sensors, resulting in critical information loss in vis...
arXiv:2610.27018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Blurred vehicle contours and low contrast limit detection performance in infrared remote sensing imagery, while existing fusion methods may introduce p...
The paper explores using generative models to translate RGB UAV images into synthetic infrared (IR) images for training vehicle detectors in domains where real IR data is scarce. Various translators—supervised GANs, ControlNet-based diffusion models, and LoRA-ed foundation models—were trained on paired RGB-IR datasets and applied to unseen target datasets to generate synthetic IR data. The synthetic IR images, especially those produced by Stable Diffusion 3.5 with ControlNet, significantly improved detection performance on unseen IR test sets, outperforming RGB and grayscale baselines and narrowing the gap to real IR data.
arXiv:2610.00141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-based anti-UAV systems must function in poor visibility, yet most benchmarks use only clear-sky footage, and previous robustness studies treat a...
The paper investigates how processing parameters affect the accuracy of UAV photogrammetry. By testing 768 processing variants on ten datasets over 1.5 years, the study finds that the best configuration yields an RMSE of 16 mm, while the worst reaches 303 mm. Key factors include the number of ground control points, camera calibration corrections, and the use of Post‑Processing Kinematic GNSS for camera center determination, which together reduce systematic errors by more than half.