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.
By Matheus F. Kovaleski, Lu\'is Garrote, Cristiano Premebida, J\'er\^ome Mendes, Jo\~ao Ruivo Paulo
arXiv:2412. 02831v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing accessibility of radiometric thermal imaging sensors for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers significant potential for advancing AI-driven aerial wildfire management.
By Bryce Hopkins, Leo ONeill, Michael Marinaccio, Mobin Habibpour, Eric Rowell, Russell Parsons, Sarah Flanary, Irtija Nazim, Carl Seielstad, Fatemeh Afghah
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.
By Thijs A. Eker, Ella P. Fokkinga, Jan Erik van Woerden, Elfi I. S. Hofmeijer, Sebastiaan P. Snel, Klamer Schutte, Friso G. Heslinga
Visible-infrared (VIS-IR) alignment is a key pre-training task for robust multi-sensor perception. Most existing methods use uniform patch-wise contrastive learning, but this can be unreliable in VIS-IR data because imaging-physics differences make some spatially paired regions inherently less comparable, and aligning them with equal strength hinders representation learning and downstream transfer.
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
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed on infrared (IR) remote sensing imagery in security-critical settings, yet their adversarial robustness remains unexamined. We present AirflowAttack, to our knowledge the first adversarial attack for IR remote-sensing VLMs and the first to weaponize thermal-airflow turbulence as the perturbation prior.