arXiv Computer Vision

DroneGround: Open-Vocabulary Drone Payload Characterization Using Synthetic Data and Grounded Vision-Language Models

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 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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Model-Agnostic Open-Set Air-to-Air Visual Object Detection for Reliable UAV Perception

The paper introduces a model‑agnostic open‑set detection framework for air‑to‑air visual object detection on UAVs, addressing the limitations of closed‑set detectors under domain shifts and flight data corruption. It estimates semantic uncertainty through entropy modeling in the embedding space and employs spectral normalization and temperature scaling to improve open‑set discrimination. Experiments on the AOT aerial benchmark and real‑world flight tests show up to a 10% relative AUROC improvement over standard YOLO detectors, with background rejection further enhancing robustness without sacrificing accuracy.

By Spyridon Loukovitis, Anastasios Arsenos, Vasileios Karampinis, Athanasios Voulodimos
arXiv AI
4d ago

AerialDojo-200K: A Large-Scale Benchmark Suite for Open-World Aerial Object-Goal Search

AerialDojo-200K is a large-scale benchmark suite for open-world aerial object-goal search, featuring 42 simulation scenes across four families and 21 types, including urban, natural, infrastructure, and disaster environments. The dataset contains 205,732 task instances—over 100K semantic-goal and over 100K image-goal tasks—each with a collision-free reference trajectory and multi-view video recordings. A unified evaluation framework splits scenes into 21 in-distribution and 21 out-of-distribution sets, and preliminary tests on multimodal large language models show significant room for improvement in general-purpose aerial agents.

By Tongtong Feng, Xin Wang, Haoran Hou, Ren Wang, Weiran Wang, Shaokai Zhu, Ziqi Jia, Hao Wang, Yu-Wei Zhan, Zongyuan Wu, Jinghao Cui, Wenwu Zhu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

Memory-Augmented Multimodal Large Language Models for Small Object Understanding in Streaming Aerial Videos

Language-guided aerial perception aims to understand user-specified tiny targets in complex unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) scenes. In real UAV deployment, the UAV must respond while it flies, so such perception runs in an online streaming manner, where frames arrive sequentially and the model responds to each one without access to future frames.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

UniGeo: A Multi-modal Large Language Model for Text-Guided Cross-View Geo-Localization

UniGeo is a multimodal large language model designed for text-guided drone geo‑localization, enabling the identification of target regions in large image galleries from natural‑language descriptions. It integrates geo‑semantic understanding, cross‑view semantic generation, and candidate‑level verification within a shared vision‑language framework, establishing stable correspondences among local scene elements, spatial relations, and language. A multi‑stage training strategy progressively refines geo‑semantic learning, cross‑view mapping, and fine‑grained verification, yielding significant performance gains on GeoText‑1652, with R@10 and mAP improvements of 13.59 and 2.83 percentage points respectively.

By Jiahao Wen, Hang Yu, Zhedong Zheng