Effective Receptive Field Ordering Matters for Infrared Small Target Detection

In this work, we investigate a previously unexplored architectural dimension for infrared small target detection: the organization of effective receptive fields (ERFs) during feature refinement. Unlike existing approaches that primarily improve individual feature operators, we argue that ERF organization constitutes an architectural dimension independent of receptive field design itself, and formulate deep feature transformation as a progressive residual correction process, from which a theoretical framework for ERF scheduling is established. Specifically, we reveal that ERF refinement is governed by two fundamental properties: scale-frequency correspondence, which aligns different ERF scales with distinct residual frequency characteristics, and nonlinear non-commutativity, which makes different ERF orderings produce fundamentally different refinement trajectories. Together, these properties show that ERF organization, rather than ERF scale alone, governs refinement dynamics. Guided by these principles, we propose Receptive Field Ordering Network (RFONet), which realizes hierarchical ERF scheduling through a multigrid-inspired V-cycle strategy using only standard $3\times3$ convolutions. RFONet achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks with only 1.16M parameters and over 157 FPS inference speed. Beyond empirical performance, our theoretical analysis provides theoretical guarantees for stable residual refinement under perturbations, frequency shifts, and partial occlusions, which are consistently reflected in superior noise robustness and cross-dataset generalization. Finally, our framework reformulates ERF organization as a task-dependent optimization objective, providing a principled foundation for future adaptive receptive field scheduling.

PanoAir: A Panoramic Visual-Inertial SLAM with Cross-Time Real-World UAV Dataset

Accurate pose estimation is fundamental for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, where Visual-Inertial SLAM (VI-SLAM) provides a cost-effective solution for localization and mapping. However, existing VI-SLAM methods mainly rely on sensors with limited fields of view (FoV), which can lead to drift and even failure in complex UAV scenarios. Although panoramic cameras provide omnidirectional perception to improve robustness, panoramic VI-SLAM and corresponding real-world datasets for UAVs remain underexplored. To address this limitation, we first construct a real-world panoramic visual-inertial dataset covering diverse flight conditions, including varying illumination, altitudes, trajectory lengths, and motion dynamics. To achieve accurate and robust pose estimation under such challenging UAV scenarios, we propose a panoramic VI-SLAM framework that exploits the omnidirectional FoV via the proposed panoramic feature extraction and panoramic loop closure, enhancing feature constraints and ensuring global consistency. Extensive experiments on both the proposed dataset and public benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy, robustness, and consistency compared to existing approaches. Moreover, deployment on embedded platform validates its practical applicability, achieving comparable computational efficiency to PC implementations. The source code and dataset are publicly available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lG1Upn6yi-N6tYpEHAt6dfR1uhzNtWbT/view