The Second Challenge on Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) remains a challenging problem for existing object detectors and few-shot learning approaches, particularly when generalizing across distinct domains. As part of NTIRE 2026, we hosted the second CD-FSOD Challenge to systematically evaluate and promote progress in detecting objects in unseen target domains under limited annotation conditions. The challenge received strong community interest, with 128 registered participants and a total of 696 submissions. Among them, 31 teams actively participated, and 19 teams submitted valid final results. Participants explored a wide range of strategies, introducing innovative methods that push the performance frontier under both open-source and closed-source tracks. This report presents a detailed overview of the NTIRE 2026 CD-FSOD Challenge, including a summary of the submitted approaches and an analysis of the final results across all participating teams. Challenge Codes: https://github.com/ohMargin/NTIRE2026_CDFSOD.

Dataset and Benchmark for Enhancing Critical Retained Foreign Object Detection

Critical retained foreign objects (RFOs), including surgical instruments like sponges and needles, pose serious patient safety risks and carry significant financial and legal implications for healthcare institutions. Detecting critical RFOs using artificial intelligence remains challenging due to their rarity and the limited availability of chest X-ray datasets that specifically feature critical RFOs cases. Existing datasets only contain non-critical RFOs, like necklace or zipper, further limiting their utility for developing clinically impactful detection algorithms. To address these limitations, we introduce "Hopkins RFOs Bench", the first and largest dataset of its kind, containing 144 chest X-ray images of critical RFO cases collected over 18 years from the Johns Hopkins Health System. Using this dataset, we benchmark several state-of-the-art object detection models, highlighting the need for enhanced detection methodologies for critical RFO cases. Recognizing data scarcity challenges, we further explore image synthetic methods to bridge this gap. We evaluate two advanced synthetic image methods, DeepDRR-RFO, a physics-based method, and RoentGen-RFO, a diffusion-based method, for creating realistic radiographs featuring critical RFOs. Our comprehensive analysis identifies the strengths and limitations of each synthetic method, providing insights into effectively utilizing synthetic data to enhance model training. The Hopkins RFOs Bench and our findings significantly advance the development of reliable, generalizable AI-driven solutions for detecting critical RFOs in clinical chest X-rays.