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