arXiv AI

Comparative Study of Out-of-the-Box Technology for Automatic Target Detection and Recognition

The paper evaluates out‑of‑the‑box object detection models for automatic target detection and recognition (ATD/R) in military settings. Six YOLO variants and two DETR variants were benchmarked on a new military dataset featuring vehicles, occlusions, and small targets, with performance measured in mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 across air‑to‑ground and ground‑to‑ground perspectives. Findings show larger models and DETR-based approaches perform best, fine‑tuning on the VisDrone dataset improves air‑to‑ground and small‑object performance, yet all models still struggle with small targets in air‑to‑ground scenarios.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

Beyond Benchmarks: Using VLMs to Reveal Systematic Classification Failures Under Real World Conditions

The paper investigates using Vision Language Models (VLMs) to accelerate verification and validation (V&V) of classification models by automatically detecting systematic errors. It introduces a VLM-based error slice detection (ESD) method that groups and labels errors, demonstrating its ability to identify perturbations in a non-military dataset and to cluster images by surroundings in a military context. The study highlights challenges such as underrepresentation of defence data in VLM training and limited contextual diversity, and suggests that while fully automated V&V is not yet feasible, VLMs could speed up the process in the future.

By Dieuwertje Alblas, Alma M. Liezenga, Jan Erik van Woerden, Fedor Taggenbrock, Dalia Aljawaheri, Klamer Schutte
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Chinese Rural Scenes: An Experimental Study on Real-Synthetic Data Mixing and Model Evaluation

Currently, autonomous driving object detection models face significant data scarcity and generalization challenges when navigating complex Chinese rural traffic scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel real-synthetic mixed object detection dataset tailored specifically for Chinese rural roads and systematically evaluate the performance of 13 mainstream detectors under different real-to-synthetic data ratios, thereby providing empirical evidence for model selection and data strategy design in rural autonomous driving scenarios.

arXiv AI
Jul 1

Real-Time Source-Free Object Detection

arXiv:2606. 31834v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world detectors for autonomous driving, surveillance, and robotics must handle domain-shifts under strict latency and memory constraints, yet existing source-free object detection (SFOD) methods rely on heavyweight architectures that prioritize accuracy alone.

By Sairam VCR, Varun Gopal, Poornima Jain, Vineeth N Balasubramanian, Muhammad Haris Khan
arXiv AI
Sep 2

CoLT-Drive: Counterfactual Long-Tail Benchmarking and Knowledge-Preserving Adaptation for Driving Affordance Prediction

The paper introduces CoLT-Drive, a 3,536-sample counterfactual long‑tail benchmark for evaluating decision‑level driving affordance prediction, which tests whether models can infer how rare objects affect an ego vehicle’s high‑level actions. It also proposes KPA, a knowledge‑preserving adaptation framework that combines structured prompting, expert merging, and a regime‑aware LoRA mixture‑of‑experts module to improve small VLMs on driving tasks. Experiments show KPA achieves 60.8% pair accuracy on CoLT‑Drive, outperforming the Qwen3‑VL‑2B baseline and LoRA SFT while keeping competitive in‑domain performance.

By Zhengxu Tang, Guofeng Cui, Ziyu Gong, Xiaozhou Zhang, Ruifeng Deng, Chengzhi Qi, Ke Chen, Sachin Patil, Tianjun Xiao, Langechuan Liu, Pichao Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Distance to Class Prototypes: Active Learning for Object Detection

The paper introduces a new active learning signal for object detection that relies on a supervised contrastive term added to the training objective. This term shapes an embedding space where distance reflects class membership, allowing an unlabeled detection to be scored by its distance from the predicted category’s region weighted by confidence—all from a single forward pass of one network. Experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS‑COCO show that this criterion outperforms the standard posterior and remains competitive with ensemble‑based methods while incurring only a modest 8.3% increase in parameters.

By Licheng Zhang, Zheng Gong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

Achieving Near-Zero-Overhead Multi-Model Hierarchical Classification in Real-Time Detection Pipelines

arXiv:2608. 11770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Edge-deployed vision systems in target recognition, surveillance, autonomous vehicles, and drone domains require hierarchical inference pipelines where a detection model identifies objects of interest and downstream classifiers provide fine-grained attribute analysis.

By Vaishnav Raju
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Rethinking Pre-Training and Augmentation for Zero-Shot Cross-City Object Detection

The paper proposes a modular training pipeline for zero‑shot cross‑city object detection that combines a multi‑dataset pre‑training strategy with class‑agnostic objectness distillation and a domain‑resilient augmentation stream featuring a Grayworld transformation. Applied to the RF‑DETR detector, the approach reduces cross‑city distribution gaps while using only 16 GB GPU memory, achieving a 24.29‑point mAP improvement and 1st place on the AI City Challenge Track 6 leaderboard. The authors provide code and data at the referenced GitHub repository.

By Long Hoang Pham, Quoc Pham-Nam Ho, Huy-Hung Nguyen, Duong Nguyen-Ngoc Tran, Ngoc Doan-Minh Huynh, Cu Quoc Le, Hoang-Khang Nguyen, Hyung-Min Jeon, Chi Dai Tran, Son Hong Phan, Duong Khac Vu, Trinh Le Ba Khanh, Jae Wook Jeon
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Federated Learning for Object Detection: Enabling Collaborative Drone Learning Without Centralizing Data

arXiv:2607. 02636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Object detection is a fundamental capability for AI-driven perception in safety-critical drone and edge-vision systems, including disaster response, operational security environments, infrastructure monitoring and defense applications.

By Daniel M. Jimenez-Gutierrez, Enrique Zuazua, Georgios Kellaris, Joaquin del Rio, Oleksii Sliusarenko, Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria