Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) is important for low-altitude perception, unmanned-system warning, and security monitoring. However, weak targets in infrared imagery usually occupy only a few pixels and are easily submerged by cloud clutter, ground edges, and bright noise, making it difficult for lightweight segmentation-based methods to preserve local target structures while suppressing background interference.
arXiv:2608. 15790v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Crevasse mapping from uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery matters for glaciological research and for field safety in glaciated terrain.
By Steven Wallace, William D Harcourt, Richard Hann, Aiden Durrant, Somayajulu Sripada, Georgios Leontidis
arXiv:2506. 12697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Small-object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery requires preserving weak local evidence while using broader context to separate tiny foreground targets from cluttered backgrounds.
By Yuxiang Wang, Xuecheng Bai, Chuanzhi Xu, Ying Zhou, Weidong Cai
arXiv:2608. 17917v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Target Detection and Recognition (ATD/R) is critical for military decision support and (semi-)autonomous operations.
By Alma M. Liezenga, Lotte Nijskens, Henrik R. Baumann, Stefan Becker, Simon Bensberg, Niccol\`o Camarlinghi, H{\aa}vard R. Eiring, Alexander W. Johnsgaard, Tanel Liiv, Giuseppe Martino, Matteo Marturini, Matthias Rapp, Jan Erik van Woerden, Alexander Wolpert, Hugo J. Kuijf
arXiv:2608. 04121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-based guidance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) toward unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) supports cooperative aerial--ground robotics, but reliable continuous yaw estimation from onboard vision remains challenging because of sensing uncertainty, limited computation, and the need for interpretable control.
By Reza Ahmari, Ahmad Mohammadi, Vahid Hemmati, Nicholas Edmond, Hossein Z. Saghazadeh, Olusola Odeyomi, Parham Kebria, Abdollah Homaifar
arXiv:2603. 04277v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous aerial robots operating in GPS-denied or communication-degraded environments frequently lose access to camera metadata and telemetry, leaving onboard perception systems unable to recover the absolute metric scale of the scene.
By Yifei Chen, Chenqian Le, Jiayi Cheng, Xupeng Chen
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:2606. 00844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bounding-box regression is a fundamental component of object detection, playing a critical role in precise object localization.
By Vinay Edula, Priyanka Bagade
arXiv:2607. 18700v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The FathomNetCLEF 2026 competition combines underwater object detection and fine-grained marine species classification under a positive-unlabeled evaluation setting.
By Robert James Brock, Sebastian Maximilian Krupa, Jason Kahei Tam
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) object detection requires compact detectors that retain small-object details under onboard computation and memory constraints. Repeated downsampling inlightweight networks weakens shallow spatial information, while manually adding attention orfusion modules may increase cost without stable gains.
Classical image correspondence is solved at the level of sparse keypoints or dense pixels, but the systems that consume these matches - object-level mapping, topological navigation, scene-graph maintenance - reason about whole objects. Recent work narrows this gap by matchng directly at the level of instance segments: a class-agnostic segmenter partitions each image, and per-segment descriptors are obtained by pooling features from large 3D foundation models over the masks.
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