Zero-Shot Distracted Driver Detection via Vision Language Models with Double Decoupling

Distracted driving is a major cause of traffic collisions, calling for robust and scalable detection methods. Vision-language models (VLMs) enable strong zero-shot image classification, but existing VLM-based distracted driver detectors often underperform in real-world conditions. We identify subject-specific appearance variations (e.g., clothing, age, and gender) as a key bottleneck: VLMs entangle these factors with behavior cues, leading to decisions driven by who the driver is rather than what the driver is doing. To address this, we propose a subject decoupling framework that extracts a driver appearance embedding and removes its influence from the image embedding prior to zero-shot classification, thereby emphasizing distraction-relevant evidence. We further orthogonalize text embeddings via metric projection onto Stiefel manifold to improve separability while staying close to the original semantics. Experiments demonstrate consistent gains over prior baselines, indicating the promise of our approach for practical road-safety applications.

HitoMi-Cam: A Shape-Agnostic Person Detection Method Using the Spectral Characteristics of Clothing

While convolutional neural network (CNN)-based object detection is widely used, it exhibits a shape dependency that degrades performance for postures not included in the training data. Building upon our previous simulation study published in this journal, this study implements and evaluates the spectral-based approach on physical hardware to address this limitation. Specifically, this paper introduces HitoMi-Cam, a lightweight and shape-agnostic person detection method that uses the spectral reflectance properties of clothing. The author implemented the system on a resource-constrained edge device without a GPU to assess its practical viability. The results indicate that a processing speed of 23.2 frames per second (fps) (253x190 pixels) is achievable, suggesting that the method can be used for real-time applications. In a simulated search and rescue scenario where the performance of CNNs declines, HitoMi-Cam achieved an average precision (AP) of 93.5%, surpassing that of the compared CNN models (best AP of 53.8%). Throughout all evaluation scenarios, the occurrence of false positives remained minimal. This study positions the HitoMi-Cam method not as a replacement for CNN-based detectors but as a complementary tool under specific conditions. The results indicate that spectral-based person detection can be a viable option for real-time operation on edge devices in real-world environments where shapes are unpredictable, such as disaster rescue.

Thermally Activated Dual-Modal Adversarial Clothing against AI Surveillance Systems

Adversarial patches have emerged as a popular privacy-preserving approach for resisting AI-driven surveillance systems. However, their conspicuous appearance makes them difficult to deploy in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a thermally activated adversarial wearable designed to ensure adaptability and effectiveness in complex real-world environments. The system integrates thermochromic dyes with flexible heating units to induce visually dynamic adversarial patterns on clothing surfaces. In its default state, the clothing appears as an ordinary black T-shirt. Upon heating via an embedded thermal unit, hidden adversarial patterns on the fabric are activated, allowing the wearer to effectively evade detection across both visible and infrared modalities. Physical experiments demonstrate that the adversarial wearable achieves rapid texture activation within 50 seconds and maintains an adversarial success rate above 80\% across diverse real-world surveillance environments. This work demonstrates a new pathway toward physically grounded, user-controllable anti-AI systems, highlighting the growing importance of proactive adversarial techniques for privacy protection in the age of ubiquitous AI surveillance.

Privacy Beyond Pixels: Latent Anonymization for Privacy-Preserving Video Understanding

We introduce a novel formulation of visual privacy preservation for video foundation models that operates entirely in the latent space. While spatio-temporal features learned by foundation models have deepened general understanding of video content, sharing or storing these extracted visual features for downstream tasks inadvertently reveals sensitive personal information like skin color, gender, or clothing. Current privacy preservation methods focus on input-pixel-level anonymization, which requires retraining the entire utility video model and results in task-specific anonymization, making them unsuitable for recent video foundational models. To address these challenges, we introduce a lightweight Anonymizing Adapter Module (AAM) that removes private information from video features while retaining general task utility. AAM can be applied in a plug-and-play fashion to frozen video encoders, minimizing the computational burden of finetuning and re-extracting features. Our framework employs three newly designed training objectives: (1) a clip-level self-supervised privacy objective to reduce mutual information between static clips, (2) a co-training objective to retain utility across seen tasks, and (3) a latent consistency loss for generalization on unseen tasks. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a significant 35% reduction in privacy leakage while maintaining near-baseline utility performance across various downstream tasks: Action Recognition (Kinetics400, UCF101, HMDB51), Temporal Action Detection (THUMOS14), and Anomaly Detection (UCF-Crime). We also provide an analysis on anonymization for sensitive temporal attribute recognition. Additionally, we propose new protocols for assessing gender bias in action recognition models, showing that our method effectively mitigates such biases and promotes more equitable video understanding.

Investigation of Using Non-Contact Electrodes for Fetal ECG Monitoring

Regular physiological monitoring of maternal and fetal parameters is indispensable for ensuring safe outcomes during pregnancy and parturition. Fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) assessment is crucial to detect fetal distress and developmental anomalies. Given challenges of prenatal care due to the lack of medical professionals and the limit of accessibility, especially in remote and resource-poor areas, we develop a fECG monitoring system using novel non-contact electrodes (NCE) to record the fetal/maternal ECG (f/mECG) signals through clothes, thereby improving the comfort during measurement. The system is designed to be incorporated inside a maternity belt with data acquisition, data transmission module as well as novel NCEs. Thorough characterizations were carried out to evaluate the novel NCE against traditional wet electrodes (i.e., Ag/AgCl electrodes), showing comparable performance. A successful {preliminary pilot feasibility study} conducted with pregnant women (n = 10) between 25 and 32 weeks of gestation demonstrates the system's performance, usability and safety.

Learning to Track Any Points from Human Motion

Human motion, with its inherent complexities, such as non-rigid deformations, articulated movements, clothing distortions, and frequent occlusions caused by limbs or other individuals, provides a rich and challenging source of supervision that is crucial for training robust and generalizable point trackers. Despite the suitability of human motion, acquiring extensive training data for point tracking remains difficult due to laborious manual annotation. Our proposed pipeline, AnthroTAP, addresses this by proposing an automated pipeline to generate pseudo-labeled training data, leveraging the Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) model. We first fit the SMPL model to detected humans in video frames, project the resulting 3D mesh vertices onto 2D image planes to generate pseudo-trajectories, handle occlusions using ray-casting, and filter out unreliable tracks based on optical flow consistency. A point tracking model trained on AnthroTAP annotated dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance on the TAP-Vid benchmark, surpassing other models trained on real videos while using 10,000 times less data and only 1 day in 4 GPUs, compared to 256 GPUs used in recent state-of-the-art.

The Meeseeks Mesh: Spatially Consistent 3D Adversarial Objects for BEV Detector

3D object detection is a critical component in autonomous driving systems. It allows real-time recognition and detection of vehicles, pedestrians and obstacles under varying environmental conditions. Among existing methods, 3D object detection in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) has emerged as the mainstream framework. To guarantee a safe, robust and trustworthy 3D object detection, 3D adversarial attacks are investigated, where attacks are placed in 3D environments to evaluate the model performance, e.g. putting a film on a car, clothing a pedestrian. The vulnerability of 3D object detection models to 3D adversarial attacks serves as an important indicator to evaluate the robustness of the model against perturbations. To investigate this vulnerability, we generate non-invasive 3D adversarial objects tailored for real-world attack scenarios. Our method verifies the existence of universal adversarial objects that are spatially consistent across time and camera views. Specifically, we employ differentiable rendering techniques to accurately model the spatial relationship between adversarial objects and the target vehicle. Furthermore, we introduce an occlusion-aware module to enhance visual consistency and realism under different viewpoints. To maintain attack effectiveness across multiple frames, we design a BEV spatial feature-guided optimization strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can reliably suppress vehicle predictions from state-of-the-art 3D object detectors, serving as an important tool to test robustness of 3D object detection models before deployment. Moreover, the generated adversarial objects exhibit strong generalization capabilities, retaining its effectiveness at various positions and distances in the scene.

Learning a General Model: Folding Clothing with Topological Dynamics

The high degrees of freedom and complex structure of garments present significant challenges for clothing manipulation. In this paper, we propose a general topological dynamics model to fold complex clothing. By utilizing the visible folding structure as the topological skeleton, we design a novel topological graph to represent the clothing state. This topological graph is low-dimensional and applied for complex clothing in various folding states. It indicates the constraints of clothing and enables predictions regarding clothing movement. To extract graphs from self-occlusion, we apply semantic segmentation to analyze the occlusion relationships and decompose the clothing structure. The decomposed structure is then combined with keypoint detection to generate the topological graph. To analyze the behavior of the topological graph, we employ an improved Graph Neural Network (GNN) to learn the general dynamics. The GNN model can predict the deformation of clothing and is employed to calculate the deformation Jacobi matrix for control. Experiments using jackets validate the algorithm's effectiveness to recognize and fold complex clothing with self-occlusion.

DetReIDX: A Stress-Test Dataset for Real-World UAV-Based Person Recognition

Person reidentification (ReID) technology has been considered to perform relatively well under controlled, ground-level conditions, but it breaks down when deployed in challenging real-world settings. Evidently, this is due to extreme data variability factors such as resolution, viewpoint changes, scale variations, occlusions, and appearance shifts from clothing or session drifts. Moreover, the publicly available data sets do not realistically incorporate such kinds and magnitudes of variability, which limits the progress of this technology. This paper introduces DetReIDX, a large-scale aerial-ground person dataset, that was explicitly designed as a stress test to ReID under real-world conditions. DetReIDX is a multi-session set that includes over 13 million bounding boxes from 509 identities, collected in seven university campuses from three continents, with drone altitudes between 5.8 and 120 meters. More important, as a key novelty, DetReIDX subjects were recorded in (at least) two sessions on different days, with changes in clothing, daylight and location, making it suitable to actually evaluate long-term person ReID. Plus, data were annotated from 16 soft biometric attributes and multitask labels for detection, tracking, ReID, and action recognition. In order to provide empirical evidence of DetReIDX usefulness, we considered the specific tasks of human detection and ReID, where SOTA methods catastrophically degrade performance (up to 80% in detection accuracy and over 70% in Rank-1 ReID) when exposed to DetReIDXs conditions. The dataset, annotations, and official evaluation protocols are publicly available at https://www.it.ubi.pt/DetReIDX/

Point Cloud Recombination: Systematic Real Data Augmentation Using Robotic Targets for LiDAR Perception Validation

The validation of LiDAR-based perception of intelligent mobile systems operating in open-world applications remains a challenge due to the variability of real environmental conditions. Virtual simulations allow the generation of arbitrary scenes under controlled conditions but lack physical sensor characteristics, such as intensity responses or material-dependent effects. In contrast, real-world data offers true sensor realism but provides less control over influencing factors, hindering sufficient validation. Existing approaches address this problem with augmentation of real-world point cloud data by transferring objects between scenes. However, these methods do not consider validation and remain limited in controllability because they rely on empirical data. We solve these limitations by proposing Point Cloud Recombination, which systematically augments captured point cloud scenes by integrating point clouds acquired from physical target objects measured in controlled laboratory environments. Thus enabling the creation of vast amounts and varieties of repeatable, physically accurate test scenes with respect to phenomena-aware occlusions with registered 3D meshes. Using the Ouster OS1-128 Rev7 sensor, we demonstrate the augmentation of real-world urban and rural scenes with humanoid targets featuring varied clothing and poses, for repeatable positioning. We show that the recombined scenes closely match real sensor outputs, enabling targeted testing, scalable failure analysis, and improved system safety. By providing controlled yet sensor-realistic data, our method enables trustworthy conclusions about the limitations of specific sensors in compound with their algorithms, e.g., object detection.