Object detection is a computer vision task in which the goal is to detect and locate objects of interest in an image or video. The task involves identifying the position and boundaries of objects in an image, and classifying the objects into different categories. It forms a crucial part of vision recognition, alongside image classification and retrieval.
Nowadays, an increasing number of works fuse LiDAR and RGB data in the bird's-eye view (BEV) space for 3D object detection in autonomous driving systems. However, existing methods suffer from over-reliance on the LiDAR branch, with insufficient exploration of RGB information. To tackle this issue, we propose Fusion4CA, which is built upon the classic BEVFusion framework and dedicated to fully exploiting visual input with plug-and-play components. Specifically, a contrastive alignment module is designed to calibrate image features with 3D geometry, and a camera auxiliary branch is introduced to mine RGB information sufficiently during training. For further performance enhancement, we leverage an off-the-shelf cognitive adapter to make the most of pretrained image weights, and integrate a standard coordinate attention module into the fusion stage as a supplementary boost. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method achieves 69.7% mAP with only 6 training epochs and a mere 3.48% increase in inference parameters, yielding a 1.2% improvement over the baseline which is fully trained for 20 epochs. Extensive experiments in a simulated lunar environment further validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method. Our code will be released through Fusion4CA.
Rotated object detection in remote sensing imagery is hindered by three major bottlenecks: non-adaptive receptive field utilization, inadequate long-range multi-scale feature fusion, and discontinuities in angle regression. To address these issues, we propose Rotated Multi-Kernel RetinaNet (RMK RetinaNet). First, we design a Multi-Scale Kernel (MSK) Block to strengthen adaptive multi-scale feature extraction. Second, we incorporate a Multi-Directional Contextual Anchor Attention (MDCAA) mechanism into the feature pyramid to enhance contextual modeling across scales and orientations. Third, we introduce a Bottom-up Path to preserve fine-grained spatial details that are often degraded during downsampling. Finally, we develop an Euler Angle Encoding Module (EAEM) to enable continuous and stable angle regression. Extensive experiments on DOTA-v1.0, HRSC2016, and UCAS-AOD show that RMK RetinaNet achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art rotated object detectors while improving robustness in multi-scale and multi-orientation scenarios.
Multi-camera 3D object detection (MC3D) has attracted increasing attention with the growing deployment of multi-sensor physical agents, such as robots and autonomous vehicles. However, MC3D models still struggle to generalize to unseen platforms with new multi-camera configurations. Current solutions simply employ a meta-camera for unified representation but lack comprehensive consideration. In this paper, we revisit this issue and identify that the devil lies in spatial prior discrepancies across source and target configurations, including different intrinsics, extrinsics, and array layouts. To address this, we propose CoIn3D, a generalizable MC3D framework that enables strong transferability from source configurations to unseen target ones. CoIn3D explicitly incorporates all identified spatial priors into both feature embedding and image observation through spatial-aware feature modulation (SFM) and camera-aware data augmentation (CDA), respectively. SFM enriches feature space by integrating four spatial representations, such as focal length, ground depth, ground gradient, and Plücker coordinate. CDA improves observation diversity under various configurations via a training-free dynamic novel-view image synthesis scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoIn3D achieves strong cross-configuration performance on landmark datasets such as NuScenes, Waymo, and Lyft, under three dominant MC3D paradigms represented by BEVDepth, BEVFormer, and PETR.
The increasing demand for sustainable textile recycling requires robust automation solutions capable of handling deformable garments and detecting foreign objects in cluttered environments. This work presents a digital twin driven robotic sorting system that integrates grasp prediction, multi modal perception, and semantic reasoning for real world textile classification. A dual arm robotic cell equipped with RGBD sensing, capacitive tactile feedback, and collision-aware motion planning autonomously separates garments from an unsorted basket, transfers them to an inspection zone, and classifies them using state of the art Visual Language Models (VLMs). We benchmark nine VLM s from five model families on a dataset of 223 inspection scenarios comprising shirts, socks, trousers, underwear, foreign objects (including garments outside of the aforementioned classes), and empty scenes. The evaluation assesses per class accuracy, hallucination behavior, and computational performance under practical hardware constraints. Results show that the Qwen model family achieves the highest overall accuracy (up to 87.9 %), with strong foreign object detection performance, while lighter models such as Gemma3 offer competitive speed accuracy trade offs for edge deployment. A digital twin combined with MoveIt enables collision aware path planning and integrates segmented 3D point clouds of inspected garments into the virtual environment for improved manipulation reliability. The presented system demonstrates the feasibility of combining semantic VLM reasoning with conventional grasp detection and digital twin technology for scalable, autonomous textile sorting in realistic industrial settings.
Underwater object detection constitutes a pivotal endeavor within the realms of marine surveillance and autonomous underwater systems; however, it presents significant challenges due to pronounced visual impairments arising from phenomena such as light absorption, scattering, and diminished contrast. In response to these formidable challenges, this manuscript introduces a streamlined yet robust framework for underwater object detection, grounded in the YOLOv10 architecture. The proposed method integrates a Multi-Stage Adaptive Enhancement module to improve image quality, a Dual-Pooling Sequential Attention (DPSA) mechanism embedded into the backbone to strengthen multi-scale feature representation, and a Focal Generalized IoU Objectness (FGIoU) loss to jointly improve localization accuracy and objectness prediction under class imbalance. Comprehensive experimental evaluations conducted on the RUOD and DUO benchmark datasets substantiate that the proposed DPSA_FGIoU_YOLOv10n attains exceptional performance, achieving mean Average Precision (mAP) scores of 88.9% and 88.0% at IoU threshold 0.5, respectively. In comparison to the baseline YOLOv10n, this represents enhancements of 6.7% for RUOD and 6.2% for DUO, all while preserving a compact model architecture comprising merely 2.8M parameters. These findings validate that the proposed framework establishes an efficacious equilibrium among accuracy, robustness, and real-time operational efficiency, making it suitable for deployment in resource-constrained underwater settings.
Small object detection under complex backgrounds remains a challenging task due to severe feature degradation, weak semantic representation, and inaccurate localization caused by downsampling operations and background interference. Existing detection frameworks are mainly designed for general objects and often fail to explicitly address the unique characteristics of small objects, such as limited structural cues and strong sensitivity to localization errors. In this paper, we propose a multi-level feature enhancement and global relation modeling framework tailored for small object detection. Specifically, a Residual Haar Wavelet Downsampling module is introduced to preserve fine-grained structural details by jointly exploiting spatial-domain convolutional features and frequency-domain representations. To enhance global semantic awareness and suppress background noise, a Global Relation Modeling module is employed to capture long-range dependencies at high-level feature stages. Furthermore, a Cross-Scale Hybrid Attention module is designed to establish sparse and aligned interactions across multi-scale features, enabling effective fusion of high-resolution details and high-level semantic information with reduced computational overhead. Finally, a Center-Assisted Loss is incorporated to stabilize training and improve localization accuracy for small objects. Extensive experiments conducted on the large-scale RGBT-Tiny benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art detectors under both IoU-based and scale-adaptive evaluation metrics. These results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework for small object detection in complex environments.
While formal robustness verification has seen significant success in image classification, scaling these guarantees to object detection remains notoriously difficult due to complex non-linear coordinate transformations and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) metrics. We introduce IoUCert, a novel formal verification framework designed specifically to overcome these bottlenecks in foundational anchor-based object detection architectures. Focusing on the object localisation component in single-object settings, we propose a coordinate transformation that enables our algorithm to circumvent precision-degrading relaxations of non-linear box prediction functions. This allows us to optimise bounds directly with respect to the anchor box offsets which enables a novel Interval Bound Propagation method that derives optimal IoU bounds. We demonstrate that our method enables, for the first time, the robustness verification of realistic, anchor-based models including SSD, YOLOv2, and YOLOv3 variants against various input perturbations.
Cloud-edge collaboration enhances machine perception by combining the strengths of edge and cloud computing. Edge devices capture raw data (e.g., 3D point clouds) and extract salient features, which are sent to the cloud for deeper analysis and data fusion. However, efficiently and reliably transmitting features between cloud and edge devices remains a challenging problem. We focus on point cloud-based object detection and propose a task-driven point cloud compression and reliable transmission framework based on source and channel coding. To meet the low-latency and low-power requirements of edge devices, we design a lightweight yet effective feature compaction module that compresses the deepest feature among multi-scale representations by removing task-irrelevant regions and applying channel-wise dimensionality reduction to task-relevant areas. Then, a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-adaptive channel encoder dynamically encodes the attribute information of the compacted features, while a Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) encoder ensures reliable transmission of geometric information. At the cloud side, an SNR-adaptive channel decoder guides the decoding of attribute information, and the LDPC decoder corrects geometry errors. Finally, a feature decompaction module restores the channel-wise dimensionality, and a diffusion-based feature upsampling module reconstructs shallow-layer features, enabling multi-scale feature reconstruction. On the KITTI dataset, our method achieved a 172-fold reduction in feature size with 3D average precision scores of 93.17%, 86.96%, and 77.25% for easy, moderate, and hard objects, respectively, over a 0 dB SNR wireless channel. Our source code will be released on GitHub at: https://github.com/yuanhui0325/T-PCFC.
Hallucinations remain a persistent challenge for vision-language models (VLMs), which often describe nonexistent objects or fabricate facts. Existing detection methods typically operate after text generation, making intervention both costly and untimely. We investigate whether hallucination risk can instead be predicted before any token is generated by probing a model's internal representations in a single forward pass. Across a diverse set of vision-language tasks and eight modern VLMs, including Llama-3.2-Vision, Gemma-3, Phi-4-VL, and Qwen2.5-VL, we examine three families of internal representations: (i) visual-only features without multimodal fusion, (ii) vision-token representations within the text decoder, and (iii) query-token representations that integrate visual and textual information before generation. Probes trained on these representations achieve strong hallucination-detection performance without decoding, reaching up to 0.93 AUROC on Gemma-3-12B, Phi-4-VL 5.6B, and Molmo 7B. Late query-token states are the most predictive for most models, while visual or mid-layer features dominate in a few architectures (e.g., ~0.79 AUROC for Qwen2.5-VL-7B using visual-only features). These results demonstrate that (1) hallucination risk is detectable pre-generation, (2) the most informative layer and modality vary across architectures, and (3) lightweight probes have the potential to enable early abstention, selective routing, and adaptive decoding to improve both safety and efficiency.
Recognition of daily activities is a critical element for effective Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems, particularly to monitor the well-being and support the independence of older adults in indoor environments. However, developing robust activity recognition systems faces significant challenges, including intra-class variability, inter-class similarity, environmental variability, camera perspectives, and scene complexity. This paper presents a multi-modal approach for the recognition of activities of daily living tailored for older adults within AAL settings. The proposed system integrates visual information processed by a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with 3D human pose data analyzed by a Graph Convolutional Network. Contextual information, derived from an object detection module, is fused with the 3D CNN features using a cross-attention mechanism to enhance recognition accuracy. This method is evaluated using the Toyota SmartHome dataset, which consists of real-world indoor activities. The results indicate that the proposed system achieves competitive classification accuracy for a range of daily activities, highlighting its potential as an essential component for advanced AAL monitoring solutions. This advancement supports the broader goal of developing intelligent systems that promote safety and autonomy among older adults.