Data Augmentation For Small Object using Fast AutoAugment

In recent years, there has been tremendous progress in object detection performance. However, despite these advances, the detection performance for small objects is significantly inferior to that of large objects. Detecting small objects is one of the most challenging and important problems in computer vision. To improve the detection performance for small objects, we propose an optimal data augmentation method using Fast AutoAugment. Through our proposed method, we can quickly find optimal augmentation policies that can overcome degradation when detecting small objects, and we achieve a 20% performance improvement on the DOTA dataset.

Lightweight Object Detection Using Quantized YOLOv4-Tiny for Emergency Response in Aerial Imagery

This paper presents a lightweight and energy-efficient object detection solution for aerial imagery captured during emergency response situations. We focus on deploying the YOLOv4-Tiny model, a compact convolutional neural network, optimized through post-training quantization to INT8 precision. The model is trained on a custom-curated aerial emergency dataset, consisting of 10,820 annotated images covering critical emergency scenarios. Unlike prior works that rely on publicly available datasets, we created this dataset ourselves due to the lack of publicly available drone-view emergency imagery, making the dataset itself a key contribution of this work. The quantized model is evaluated against YOLOv5-small across multiple metrics, including mean Average Precision (mAP), F1 score, inference time, and model size. Experimental results demonstrate that the quantized YOLOv4-Tiny achieves comparable detection performance while reducing the model size from 22.5 MB to 6.4 MB and improving inference speed by 44\%. With a 71\% reduction in model size and a 44\% increase in inference speed, the quantized YOLOv4-Tiny model proves highly suitable for real-time emergency detection on low-power edge devices.

Context-aware TFL: A Universal Context-aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Temporal Forgery Localization

Most research efforts in the multimedia forensics domain have focused on detecting forgery audio-visual content and reached sound achievements. However, these works only consider deepfake detection as a classification task and ignore the case where partial segments of the video are tampered with. Temporal forgery localization (TFL) of small fake audio-visual clips embedded in real videos is still challenging and more in line with realistic application scenarios. To resolve this issue, we propose a universal context-aware contrastive learning framework (UniCaCLF) for TFL. Our approach leverages supervised contrastive learning to discover and identify forged instants by means of anomaly detection, allowing for the precise localization of temporal forged segments. To this end, we propose a novel context-aware perception layer that utilizes a heterogeneous activation operation and an adaptive context updater to construct a context-aware contrastive objective, which enhances the discriminability of forged instant features by contrasting them with genuine instant features in terms of their distances to the global context. An efficient context-aware contrastive coding is introduced to further push the limit of instant feature distinguishability between genuine and forged instants in a supervised sample-by-sample manner, suppressing the cross-sample influence to improve temporal forgery localization performance. Extensive experimental results over five public datasets demonstrate that our proposed UniCaCLF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art competing algorithms.

DINO-CoDT: Multi-class Collaborative Detection and Tracking with Vision Foundation Models

Collaborative perception plays a crucial role in enhancing environmental understanding by expanding the perceptual range and improving robustness against sensor failures, which primarily involves collaborative 3D detection and tracking tasks. The former focuses on object recognition in individual frames, while the latter captures continuous instance tracklets over time. However, existing works in both areas predominantly focus on the vehicle superclass, lacking effective solutions for both multi-class collaborative detection and tracking. This limitation hinders their applicability in real-world scenarios, which involve diverse object classes with varying appearances and motion patterns. To overcome these limitations, we propose a multi-class collaborative detection and tracking framework tailored for diverse road users. We first present a detector with a global spatial attention fusion (GSAF) module, enhancing multi-scale feature learning for objects of varying sizes. Next, we introduce a tracklet RE-IDentification (REID) module that leverages visual semantics with a vision foundation model to effectively reduce ID SWitch (IDSW) errors, in cases of erroneous mismatches involving small objects like pedestrians. We further design a velocity-based adaptive tracklet management (VATM) module that adjusts the tracking interval dynamically based on object motion. Extensive experiments on the V2X-Real and OPV2V datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both detection and tracking accuracy.

Hallucination at a Glance: Controlled Visual Edits and Fine-Grained Multimodal Learning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on vision-language tasks but still struggle with fine-grained visual differences, leading to hallucinations or missed semantic shifts. We attribute this to limitations in both training data and learning objectives. To address these issues, we propose a controlled data generation pipeline that produces minimally edited image pairs with semantically aligned captions. Using this pipeline, we construct the Micro Edit Dataset (MED), containing over 50K image-text pairs spanning 11 fine-grained edit categories, including attribute, count, position, and object presence changes. Building on MED, we introduce a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) framework with a feature-level consistency loss that promotes stable visual embeddings under small edits. We evaluate our approach on the Micro Edit Detection benchmark, which includes carefully balanced evaluation pairs designed to test sensitivity to subtle visual variations across the same edit categories. Our method improves difference detection accuracy and reduces hallucinations compared to strong baselines, including GPT-4o. Moreover, it yields consistent gains on standard vision-language tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining targeted data and alignment objectives for enhancing fine-grained visual reasoning in MLLMs.

UCOD-DPL: Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection via Dynamic Pseudo-label Learning

Unsupervised Camoflaged Object Detection (UCOD) has gained attention since it doesn't need to rely on extensive pixel-level labels. Existing UCOD methods typically generate pseudo-labels using fixed strategies and train 1 x1 convolutional layers as a simple decoder, leading to low performance compared to fully-supervised methods. We emphasize two drawbacks in these approaches: 1). The model is prone to fitting incorrect knowledge due to the pseudo-label containing substantial noise. 2). The simple decoder fails to capture and learn the semantic features of camouflaged objects, especially for small-sized objects, due to the low-resolution pseudo-labels and severe confusion between foreground and background pixels. To this end, we propose a UCOD method with a teacher-student framework via Dynamic Pseudo-label Learning called UCOD-DPL, which contains an Adaptive Pseudo-label Module (APM), a Dual-Branch Adversarial (DBA) decoder, and a Look-Twice mechanism. The APM module adaptively combines pseudo-labels generated by fixed strategies and the teacher model to prevent the model from overfitting incorrect knowledge while preserving the ability for self-correction; the DBA decoder takes adversarial learning of different segmentation objectives, guides the model to overcome the foreground-background confusion of camouflaged objects, and the Look-Twice mechanism mimics the human tendency to zoom in on camouflaged objects and performs secondary refinement on small-sized objects. Extensive experiments show that our method demonstrates outstanding performance, even surpassing some existing fully supervised methods. The code is available now.

EV-Flying: an Event-based Dataset for In-The-Wild Recognition of Flying Objects

Monitoring aerial objects is crucial for security, wildlife conservation, and environmental studies. Traditional RGB-based approaches struggle with challenges such as scale variations, motion blur, and high-speed object movements, especially for small flying entities like insects and drones. In this work, we explore the potential of event-based vision for detecting and recognizing flying objects, in particular animals that may not follow short and long-term predictable patters. Event cameras offer high temporal resolution, low latency, and robustness to motion blur, making them well-suited for this task. We introduce EV-Flying, an event-based dataset of flying objects, comprising manually annotated birds, insects and drones with spatio-temporal bounding boxes and track identities. To effectively process the asynchronous event streams, we employ a point-based approach leveraging lightweight architectures inspired by PointNet. Our study investigates the classification of flying objects using point cloud-based event representations. The proposed dataset and methodology pave the way for more efficient and reliable aerial object recognition in real-world scenarios.

MS-YOLO: A Multi-Scale Model for Accurate and Efficient Blood Cell Detection

Complete blood cell detection holds significant value in clinical diagnostics. Conventional manual microscopy methods suffer from time inefficiency and diagnostic inaccuracies. Existing automated detection approaches remain constrained by high deployment costs and suboptimal accuracy. While deep learning has introduced powerful paradigms to this field, persistent challenges in detecting overlapping cells and multi-scale objects hinder practical deployment. This study proposes the multi-scale YOLO (MS-YOLO), a blood cell detection model based on the YOLOv11 framework, incorporating three key architectural innovations to enhance detection performance. Specifically, the multi-scale dilated residual module (MS-DRM) replaces the original C3K2 modules to improve multi-scale discriminability; the dynamic cross-path feature enhancement module (DCFEM) enables the fusion of hierarchical features from the backbone with aggregated features from the neck to enhance feature representations; and the light adaptive-weight downsampling module (LADS) improves feature downsampling through adaptive spatial weighting while reducing computational complexity. Experimental results on the CBC benchmark demonstrate that MS-YOLO achieves precise detection of overlapping cells and multi-scale objects, particularly small targets such as platelets, achieving an mAP@50 of 97.4% that outperforms existing models. Further validation on the supplementary WBCDD dataset confirms its robust generalization capability. Additionally, with a lightweight architecture and real-time inference efficiency, MS-YOLO meets clinical deployment requirements, providing reliable technical support for standardized blood pathology assessment.

FRED: The Florence RGB-Event Drone Dataset

Small, fast, and lightweight drones present significant challenges for traditional RGB cameras due to their limitations in capturing fast-moving objects, especially under challenging lighting conditions. Event cameras offer an ideal solution, providing high temporal definition and dynamic range, yet existing benchmarks often lack fine temporal resolution or drone-specific motion patterns, hindering progress in these areas. This paper introduces the Florence RGB-Event Drone dataset (FRED), a novel multimodal dataset specifically designed for drone detection, tracking, and trajectory forecasting, combining RGB video and event streams. FRED features more than 7 hours of densely annotated drone trajectories, using 5 different drone models and including challenging scenarios such as rain and adverse lighting conditions. We provide detailed evaluation protocols and standard metrics for each task, facilitating reproducible benchmarking. The authors hope FRED will advance research in high-speed drone perception and multimodal spatiotemporal understanding.

Cross-DINO: Cross the Deep MLP and Transformer for Small Object Detection

Small Object Detection (SOD) poses significant challenges due to limited information and the model's low class prediction score. While Transformer-based detectors have shown promising performance, their potential for SOD remains largely unexplored. In typical DETR-like frameworks, the CNN backbone network, specialized in aggregating local information, struggles to capture the necessary contextual information for SOD. The multiple attention layers in the Transformer Encoder face difficulties in effectively attending to small objects and can also lead to blurring of features. Furthermore, the model's lower class prediction score of small objects compared to large objects further increases the difficulty of SOD. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach called Cross-DINO. This approach incorporates the deep MLP network to aggregate initial feature representations with both short and long range information for SOD. Then, a new Cross Coding Twice Module (CCTM) is applied to integrate these initial representations to the Transformer Encoder feature, enhancing the details of small objects. Additionally, we introduce a new kind of soft label named Category-Size (CS), integrating the Category and Size of objects. By treating CS as new ground truth, we propose a new loss function called Boost Loss to improve the class prediction score of the model. Extensive experimental results on COCO, WiderPerson, VisDrone, AI-TOD, and SODA-D datasets demonstrate that Cross-DINO efficiently improves the performance of DETR-like models on SOD. Specifically, our model achieves 36.4% APs on COCO for SOD with only 45M parameters, outperforming the DINO by +4.4% APS (36.4% vs. 32.0%) with fewer parameters and FLOPs, under 12 epochs training setting. The source codes will be available at https://github.com/Med-Process/Cross-DINO.