HMPE:HeatMap Embedding for Efficient Transformer-Based Small Object Detection

Current Transformer-based methods for small object detection continue emerging, yet they have still exhibited significant shortcomings. This paper introduces HeatMap Position Embedding (HMPE), a novel Transformer Optimization technique that enhances object detection performance by dynamically integrating positional encoding with semantic detection information through heatmap-guided adaptive learning.We also innovatively visualize the HMPE method, offering clear visualization of embedded information for parameter fine-tuning.We then create Multi-Scale ObjectBox-Heatmap Fusion Encoder (MOHFE) and HeatMap Induced High-Quality Queries for Decoder (HIDQ) modules. These are designed for the encoder and decoder, respectively, to generate high-quality queries and reduce background noise queries.Using both heatmap embedding and Linear-Snake Conv(LSConv) feature engineering, we enhance the embedding of massively diverse small object categories and reduced the decoder multihead layers, thereby accelerating both inference and training.In the generalization experiments, our approach outperforme the baseline mAP by 1.9% on the small object dataset (NWPU VHR-10) and by 1.2% on the general dataset (PASCAL VOC). By employing HMPE-enhanced embedding, we are able to reduce the number of decoder layers from eight to a minimum of three, significantly decreasing both inference and training costs.

Exploring Generalizable Pre-training for Real-world Change Detection via Geometric Estimation

As an essential procedure in earth observation system, change detection (CD) aims to reveal the spatial-temporal evolution of the observation regions. A key prerequisite for existing change detection algorithms is aligned geo-references between multi-temporal images by fine-grained registration. However, in the majority of real-world scenarios, a prior manual registration is required between the original images, which significantly increases the complexity of the CD workflow. In this paper, we proposed a self-supervision motivated CD framework with geometric estimation, called "MatchCD". Specifically, the proposed MatchCD framework utilizes the zero-shot capability to optimize the encoder with self-supervised contrastive representation, which is reused in the downstream image registration and change detection to simultaneously handle the bi-temporal unalignment and object change issues. Moreover, unlike the conventional change detection requiring segmenting the full-frame image into small patches, our MatchCD framework can directly process the original large-scale image (e.g., 6K*4K resolutions) with promising performance. The performance in multiple complex scenarios with significant geometric distortion demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

SAR Object Detection with Self-Supervised Pretraining and Curriculum-Aware Sampling

Object detection in satellite-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery holds immense potential in tasks such as urban monitoring and disaster response. However, the inherent complexities of SAR data and the scarcity of annotations present significant challenges in the advancement of object detection in this domain. Notably, the detection of small objects in satellite-borne SAR images poses a particularly intricate problem, because of the technology's relatively low spatial resolution and inherent noise. Furthermore, the lack of large labelled SAR datasets hinders the development of supervised deep learning-based object detection models. In this paper, we introduce TRANSAR, a novel self-supervised end-to-end vision transformer-based SAR object detection model that incorporates masked image pre-training on an unlabeled SAR image dataset that spans more than $25,700$ km\textsuperscript{2} ground area. Unlike traditional object detection formulation, our approach capitalises on auxiliary binary semantic segmentation, designed to segregate objects of interest during the post-tuning, especially the smaller ones, from the background. In addition, to address the innate class imbalance due to the disproportion of the object to the image size, we introduce an adaptive sampling scheduler that dynamically adjusts the target class distribution during training based on curriculum learning and model feedback. This approach allows us to outperform conventional supervised architecture such as DeepLabv3 or UNet, and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning-based arhitectures such as DPT, SegFormer or UperNet, as shown by extensive evaluations on benchmark SAR datasets.

DenSe-AdViT: A novel Vision Transformer for Dense SAR Object Detection

Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved remarkable results in object detection for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, owing to its exceptional ability to extract global features. However, it struggles with the extraction of multi-scale local features, leading to limited performance in detecting small targets, especially when they are densely arranged. Therefore, we propose Density-Sensitive Vision Transformer with Adaptive Tokens (DenSe-AdViT) for dense SAR target detection. We design a Density-Aware Module (DAM) as a preliminary component that generates a density tensor based on target distribution. It is guided by a meticulously crafted objective metric, enabling precise and effective capture of the spatial distribution and density of objects. To integrate the multi-scale information enhanced by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the global features derived from the Transformer, Density-Enhanced Fusion Module (DEFM) is proposed. It effectively refines attention toward target-survival regions with the assist of density mask and the multiple sources features. Notably, our DenSe-AdViT achieves 79.8% mAP on the RSDD dataset and 92.5% on the SIVED dataset, both of which feature a large number of densely distributed vehicle targets.

Small Object Detection with YOLO: A Performance Analysis Across Model Versions and Hardware

This paper provides an extensive evaluation of YOLO object detection models (v5, v8, v9, v10, v11) by com- paring their performance across various hardware platforms and optimization libraries. Our study investigates inference speed and detection accuracy on Intel and AMD CPUs using popular libraries such as ONNX and OpenVINO, as well as on GPUs through TensorRT and other GPU-optimized frameworks. Furthermore, we analyze the sensitivity of these YOLO models to object size within the image, examining performance when detecting objects that occupy 1%, 2.5%, and 5% of the total area of the image. By identifying the trade-offs in efficiency, accuracy, and object size adaptability, this paper offers insights for optimal model selection based on specific hardware constraints and detection requirements, aiding practitioners in deploying YOLO models effectively for real-world applications.

CFIS-YOLO: A Lightweight Multi-Scale Fusion Network for Edge-Deployable Wood Defect Detection

Wood defect detection is critical for ensuring quality control in the wood processing industry. However, current industrial applications face two major challenges: traditional methods are costly, subjective, and labor-intensive, while mainstream deep learning models often struggle to balance detection accuracy and computational efficiency for edge deployment. To address these issues, this study proposes CFIS-YOLO, a lightweight object detection model optimized for edge devices. The model introduces an enhanced C2f structure, a dynamic feature recombination module, and a novel loss function that incorporates auxiliary bounding boxes and angular constraints. These innovations improve multi-scale feature fusion and small object localization while significantly reducing computational overhead. Evaluated on a public wood defect dataset, CFIS-YOLO achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) of 77.5\%, outperforming the baseline YOLOv10s by 4 percentage points. On SOPHON BM1684X edge devices, CFIS-YOLO delivers 135 FPS, reduces power consumption to 17.3\% of the original implementation, and incurs only a 0.5 percentage point drop in mAP. These results demonstrate that CFIS-YOLO is a practical and effective solution for real-world wood defect detection in resource-constrained environments.

SO-DETR: Leveraging Dual-Domain Features and Knowledge Distillation for Small Object Detection

Detection Transformer-based methods have achieved significant advancements in general object detection. However, challenges remain in effectively detecting small objects. One key difficulty is that existing encoders struggle to efficiently fuse low-level features. Additionally, the query selection strategies are not effectively tailored for small objects. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient model, Small Object Detection Transformer (SO-DETR). The model comprises three key components: a dual-domain hybrid encoder, an enhanced query selection mechanism, and a knowledge distillation strategy. The dual-domain hybrid encoder integrates spatial and frequency domains to fuse multi-scale features effectively. This approach enhances the representation of high-resolution features while maintaining relatively low computational overhead. The enhanced query selection mechanism optimizes query initialization by dynamically selecting high-scoring anchor boxes using expanded IoU, thereby improving the allocation of query resources. Furthermore, by incorporating a lightweight backbone network and implementing a knowledge distillation strategy, we develop an efficient detector for small objects. Experimental results on the VisDrone-2019-DET and UAVVaste datasets demonstrate that SO-DETR outperforms existing methods with similar computational demands. The project page is available at https://github.com/ValiantDiligent/SO_DETR.

DiffMOD: Progressive Diffusion Point Denoising for Moving Object Detection in Remote Sensing

Moving object detection (MOD) in remote sensing is significantly challenged by low resolution, extremely small object sizes, and complex noise interference. Current deep learning-based MOD methods rely on probability density estimation, which restricts flexible information interaction between objects and across temporal frames. To flexibly capture high-order inter-object and temporal relationships, we propose a point-based MOD in remote sensing. Inspired by diffusion models, the network optimization is formulated as a progressive denoising process that iteratively recovers moving object centers from sparse noisy points. Specifically, we sample scattered features from the backbone outputs as atomic units for subsequent processing, while global feature embeddings are aggregated to compensate for the limited coverage of sparse point features. By modeling spatial relative positions and semantic affinities, Spatial Relation Aggregation Attention is designed to enable high-order interactions among point-level features for enhanced object representation. To enhance temporal consistency, the Temporal Propagation and Global Fusion module is designed, which leverages an implicit memory reasoning mechanism for robust cross-frame feature integration. To align with the progressive denoising process, we propose a progressive MinK optimal transport assignment strategy that establishes specialized learning objectives at each denoising level. Additionally, we introduce a missing loss function to counteract the clustering tendency of denoised points around salient objects. Experiments on the RsData remote sensing MOD dataset show that our MOD method based on scattered point denoising can more effectively explore potential relationships between sparse moving objects and improve the detection capability and temporal consistency.

Vision-Language Model for Object Detection and Segmentation: A Review and Evaluation

Vision-Language Model (VLM) have gained widespread adoption in Open-Vocabulary (OV) object detection and segmentation tasks. Despite they have shown promise on OV-related tasks, their effectiveness in conventional vision tasks has thus far been unevaluated. In this work, we present the systematic review of VLM-based detection and segmentation, view VLM as the foundational model and conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks for the first time: 1) The evaluation spans eight detection scenarios (closed-set detection, domain adaptation, crowded objects, etc.) and eight segmentation scenarios (few-shot, open-world, small object, etc.), revealing distinct performance advantages and limitations of various VLM architectures across tasks. 2) As for detection tasks, we evaluate VLMs under three finetuning granularities: \textit{zero prediction}, \textit{visual fine-tuning}, and \textit{text prompt}, and further analyze how different finetuning strategies impact performance under varied task. 3) Based on empirical findings, we provide in-depth analysis of the correlations between task characteristics, model architectures, and training methodologies, offering insights for future VLM design. 4) We believe that this work shall be valuable to the pattern recognition experts working in the fields of computer vision, multimodal learning, and vision foundation models by introducing them to the problem, and familiarizing them with the current status of the progress while providing promising directions for future research. A project associated with this review and evaluation has been created at https://github.com/better-chao/perceptual_abilities_evaluation.

Multi-Robot Coordination with Adversarial Perception

This paper investigates the resilience of perception-based multi-robot coordination with wireless communication to online adversarial perception. A systematic study of this problem is essential for many safety-critical robotic applications that rely on the measurements from learned perception modules. We consider a (small) team of quadrotor robots that rely only on an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and the visual data measurements obtained from a learned multi-task perception module (e.g., object detection) for downstream tasks, including relative localization and coordination. We focus on a class of adversarial perception attacks that cause misclassification, mislocalization, and latency. We propose that the effects of adversarial misclassification and mislocalization can be modeled as sporadic (intermittent) and spurious measurement data for the downstream tasks. To address this, we present a framework for resilience analysis of multi-robot coordination with adversarial measurements. The framework integrates data from Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) and the learned perception model for robust relative localization and state estimation in the presence of adversarially sporadic and spurious measurements. The framework allows for quantifying the degradation in system observability and stability in relation to the success rate of adversarial perception. Finally, experimental results on a multi-robot platform demonstrate the real-world applicability of our methodology for resource-constrained robotic platforms.