arXiv AI By Tanel Liiv, Sander Soodla, Nzamba Bignoumba, Alma M. Liezenga, Toomas Pruuden

Training with synthetic data for drone detection in thermal imagery

Read the original on arXiv AI →

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

RGB-to-IR image translation for infrared vehicle detection in unseen UAV domains

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

A Framework for Low-Effort Training Data Generation for Urban Semantic Segmentation

The paper introduces a framework that adapts a diffusion model to a target urban domain using only imperfect pseudo‑labels, enabling the generation of high‑fidelity, target‑aligned images from semantic maps of any synthetic dataset. By filtering poor generations, correcting image‑label misalignments, and standardising semantics, the method transforms low‑effort synthetic data into competitive real‑domain training sets. Experiments on five synthetic and two real datasets show up to +8.0 %pt mIoU improvement over state‑of‑the‑art translation methods, demonstrating that rapidly constructed synthetic datasets can match the performance of high‑effort, manually designed ones.

By Damjan Kal\v{s}an, Denis Zavadski, Tim K\"uchler, Haebom Lee, Stefan Roth, Carsten Rother
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 7

AirflowAttack: Thermal-Airflow Adversarial Perturbations against Infrared Remote-Sensing Vision-Language Models

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.