arXiv Machine Learning

Can Vision Models Read the Radar Display? On the Feasibility of Radar Imagery for Air Traffic Complexity Estimation

arXiv:2608. 11810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air traffic controllers perceive traffic complexity through the radar display, suggesting that a computer vision model operating on the same imagery may provide a natural architecture for modeling controller-perceived complexity; however, whether radar imagery is a viable input format for deep learning vision models remains unclear.

arXiv AI
Aug 10

Probing Visual Concepts in Lightweight Vision-Language Models for Automated Driving

arXiv:2603. 06054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in automated driving applications is becoming increasingly common, with the aim of leveraging their reasoning and generalisation capabilities to handle long-tail scenarios.

By Nikos Theodoridis, Reenu Mohandas, Ganesh Sistu, Anthony Scanlan, Ciar\'an Eising, Tim Brophy
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Lightweight Adaptation of General-Purpose VLMs for Multispectral and SAR Image Understanding

The paper presents a lightweight method to adapt general‑purpose vision‑language models (VLMs) for multispectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image understanding. By rendering each observation as five optical views and one SAR view, naming them in the prompt, and applying LoRA to the language network and selected visual transformer blocks, the authors enable VLMs to process band composites, spectral indices, and radar backscatter without retraining a new foundation model. On a balanced six‑class land‑cover benchmark from BigEarthNet‑v2, the adapted Qwen3‑VL achieves a micro F1 of 0.8275, and the same protocol improves four other VLMs and transfers to flood verification and captioning tasks. "whyItMatters":"The study shows that existing VLMs can be repurposed for multispectral and SAR tasks through simple input rendering and compact LoRA adaptation, avoiding the need for dedicated encoders and domain pretraining."

By Shanji Liu, Kelu Yao, Junxiao Xue, Chenghui Lv, Xiangyang Miao, Yekai Huang, Yaying Chen, Chao Li
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

Lightweight Adaptation of General-Purpose VLMs for Multispectral and SAR Image Understanding

The paper demonstrates a lightweight method to adapt general-purpose vision‑language models (VLMs) for multispectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image understanding. By rendering each observation as five optical views and one SAR view, naming them in the prompt, and applying LoRA to the language network and selected visual transformer blocks, the authors enable VLMs to process band composites, spectral indices, and radar backscatter without retraining a new foundation model. On a balanced six‑class land‑cover benchmark from BigEarthNet‑v2, the adapted Qwen3‑VL achieves a micro F1 score of 0.8275, and the same protocol improves four other VLMs and transfers to flood verification and captioning tasks.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

4D Radar Perception Algorithms for Autonomous Driving: A Review

The review surveys 4D millimeter‑wave radar perception algorithms for autonomous driving, covering signal processing, object detection, semantic segmentation, motion estimation, occupancy prediction, and dynamic scene reconstruction. It organizes the field by perception tasks, discusses radar fundamentals, data representations, and quality‑enhancement methods, and compares radar‑only learning, multimodal fusion, and cross‑modal supervision. The paper also summarizes datasets, annotations, evaluation protocols, and outlines common challenges and future research directions.

By Xumin Wu, Jun Zhou, Jilin Mei, Chen Min, Yu Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 26

A Human-Factors Guided Cognitive Model of Visuospatial Complexity in Embodied Active Vision

The paper introduces a new framework for analyzing multimodal data—visual, auditory, and spatial—by focusing on the complexity of embodied perception and interaction in dynamic, naturalistic settings. It expands upon prior visual complexity work to categorize diverse attributes (quantitative, structural, dynamic, auditory, interactional) that together describe multimodal complexity. The authors illustrate how this model can characterize visuospatial complexity in everyday driving and suggest its use for creating and evaluating benchmark datasets that prioritize cognitive human factors.

By Vasiliki Kondyli, Jakob Suchan, Mehul Bhatt
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

On Learning Spatial Structure from Pre-Beamforming Per-Antenna Range-Doppler Radar Measurements

This study explores whether spatial structure can be learned directly from pre-beamforming per-antenna range-Doppler (RD) radar measurements, bypassing traditional beamforming steps. Using a 6‑TX × 8‑RX automotive radar with a chirp‑sequence FMCW transmit scheme, the authors train a dual‑chirp shared‑weight encoder on raw RD tensors and evaluate spatial recoverability via bird’s‑eye‑view occupancy maps. Experiments across different transmit configurations (A‑only, B‑only, A+B) and receive apertures demonstrate that meaningful spatial structure is indeed recoverable through learned spatial mixing, without hand‑crafted signal‑processing stages.

By George Sebastian, Philipp Berthold, Bianca Forkel, Leon Pohl, Mirko Maehlisch