Streamlining the Development of Active Learning Methods in Real-World Object Detection

Active learning (AL) for real-world object detection faces computational and reliability challenges that limit practical deployment. Developing new AL methods requires training multiple detectors across iterations to compare against existing approaches. This creates high costs for autonomous driving datasets where the training of one detector requires up to 282 GPU hours. Additionally, AL method rankings vary substantially across validation sets, compromising reliability in safety-critical transportation systems. We introduce object-based set similarity ($\mathrm{OSS}$), a metric that addresses these challenges. $\mathrm{OSS}$ (1) quantifies AL method effectiveness without requiring detector training by measuring similarity between training sets and target domains using object-level features. This enables the elimination of ineffective AL methods before training. Furthermore, $\mathrm{OSS}$ (2) enables the selection of representative validation sets for robust evaluation. We validate our similarity-based approach on three autonomous driving datasets (KITTI, BDD100K, CODA) using uncertainty-based AL methods as a case study with two detector architectures (EfficientDet, YOLOv3). This work is the first to unify AL training and evaluation strategies in object detection based on object similarity. $\mathrm{OSS}$ is detector-agnostic, requires only labeled object crops, and integrates with existing AL pipelines. This provides a practical framework for deploying AL in real-world applications where computational efficiency and evaluation reliability are critical. Code is available at https://mos-ks.github.io/publications/.

Gradient-based multi-focus image fusion with focus-aware saliency enhancement

Multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) aims to yield an all-focused image from multiple partially focused inputs, which is crucial in applications cover sur-veillance, microscopy, and computational photography. However, existing methods struggle to preserve sharp focus-defocus boundaries, often resulting in blurred transitions and focused details loss. To solve this problem, we propose a MFIF method based on significant boundary enhancement, which generates high-quality fused boundaries while effectively detecting focus in-formation. Particularly, we propose a gradient-domain-based model that can obtain initial fusion results with complete boundaries and effectively pre-serve the boundary details. Additionally, we introduce Tenengrad gradient detection to extract salient features from both the source images and the ini-tial fused image, generating the corresponding saliency maps. For boundary refinement, we develop a focus metric based on gradient and complementary information, integrating the salient features with the complementary infor-mation across images to emphasize focused regions and produce a high-quality initial decision result. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms 12 state-of-the-art methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. We have realized codes in https://github.com/Lihyua/GICI

Differential Morphological Profile Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation of overhead remote sensing imagery enables applications in mapping, urban planning, and disaster response. State-of-the-art segmentation networks are typically developed and tuned on ground-perspective photographs and do not directly address remote sensing challenges such as extreme scale variation, foreground-background imbalance, and large image sizes. We explore the incorporation of the differential morphological profile (DMP), a multi-scale shape extraction method based on grayscale morphology, into modern segmentation networks. Prior studies have shown that the DMP can provide critical shape information to Deep Neural Networks to enable superior detection and classification performance in overhead imagery. In this work, we extend prior DMPNet work beyond classification and object detection by integrating DMP features into three state-of-the-art convolutional and transformer semantic segmentation architectures. We utilize both direct input, which adapts the input stem of feature extraction architectures to accept DMP channels, and hybrid architectures, a dual-stream design that fuses RGB and DMP encoders. Using the iSAID benchmark dataset, we evaluate a variety of DMP differentials and structuring element shapes to more effectively provide shape information to the model. Our results show that while non-DMP models generally outperform the direct-input variants, hybrid DMP consistently outperforms direct-input and is capable of surpassing a non-DMP model on mIoU, F1, and Recall.

A biologically inspired separable learning vision model for real-time traffic object perception in Dark

Fast and accurate object perception in low-light traffic scenes has attracted increasing attention. However, due to severe illumination degradation and the lack of reliable visual cues, existing perception models and methods struggle to quickly adapt to and accurately predict in low-light environments. Moreover, there is the absence of available large-scale benchmark specifically focused on low-light traffic scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a physically grounded illumination degradation method tailored to real-world low-light settings and construct Dark-traffic, the largest densely annotated dataset to date for low-light traffic scenes, supporting object detection, instance segmentation, and optical flow estimation. We further propose the Separable Learning Vision Model (SLVM), a biologically inspired framework designed to enhance perception under adverse lighting. SLVM integrates four key components: a light-adaptive pupillary mechanism for illumination-sensitive feature extraction, a feature-level separable learning strategy for efficient representation, task-specific decoupled branches for multi-task separable learning, and a spatial misalignment-aware fusion module for precise multi-feature alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SLVM achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced computational overhead. Notably, it outperforms RT-DETR by 11.2 percentage points in detection, YOLOv12 by 6.1 percentage points in instance segmentation, and reduces endpoint error (EPE) of baseline by 12.37% on Dark-traffic. On the LIS benchmark, the end-to-end trained SLVM surpasses Swin Transformer+EnlightenGAN and ConvNeXt-T+EnlightenGAN by an average of 11 percentage points across key metrics, and exceeds Mask RCNN (with light enhancement) by 3.1 percentage points. The Dark-traffic dataset and complete code is released at https://github.com/alanli1997/slvm.

VisioFirm: Cross-Platform AI-assisted Annotation Tool for Computer Vision

AI models rely on annotated data to learn pattern and perform prediction. Annotation is usually a labor-intensive step that require associating labels ranging from a simple classification label to more complex tasks such as object detection, oriented bounding box estimation, and instance segmentation. Traditional tools often require extensive manual input, limiting scalability for large datasets. To address this, we introduce VisioFirm, an open-source web application designed to streamline image labeling through AI-assisted automation. VisioFirm integrates state-of-the-art foundation models into an interface with a filtering pipeline to reduce human-in-the-loop efforts. This hybrid approach employs CLIP combined with pre-trained detectors like Ultralytics models for common classes and zero-shot models such as Grounding DINO for custom labels, generating initial annotations with low-confidence thresholding to maximize recall. Through this framework, when tested on COCO-type of classes, initial prediction have been proven to be mostly correct though the users can refine these via interactive tools supporting bounding boxes, oriented bounding boxes, and polygons. Additionally, VisioFirm has on-the-fly segmentation powered by Segment Anything accelerated through WebGPU for browser-side efficiency. The tool supports multiple export formats (YOLO, COCO, Pascal VOC, CSV) and operates offline after model caching, enhancing accessibility. VisioFirm demonstrates up to 90\% reduction in manual effort through benchmarks on diverse datasets, while maintaining high annotation accuracy via clustering of connected CLIP-based disambiguate components and IoU-graph for redundant detection suppression. VisioFirm can be accessed from \href{https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm}{https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm}.

AD-DINOv3: Enhancing DINOv3 for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection with Anomaly-Aware Calibration

Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) seeks to identify anomalies from arbitrary novel categories, offering a scalable and annotation-efficient solution. Traditionally, most ZSAD works have been based on the CLIP model, which performs anomaly detection by calculating the similarity between visual and text embeddings. Recently, vision foundation models such as DINOv3 have demonstrated strong transferable representation capabilities. In this work, we are the first to adapt DINOv3 for ZSAD. However, this adaptation presents two key challenges: (i) the domain bias between large-scale pretraining data and anomaly detection tasks leads to feature misalignment; and (ii) the inherent bias toward global semantics in pretrained representations often leads to subtle anomalies being misinterpreted as part of the normal foreground objects, rather than being distinguished as abnormal regions. To overcome these challenges, we introduce AD-DINOv3, a novel vision-language multimodal framework designed for ZSAD. Specifically, we formulate anomaly detection as a multimodal contrastive learning problem, where DINOv3 is employed as the visual backbone to extract patch tokens and a CLS token, and the CLIP text encoder provides embeddings for both normal and abnormal prompts. To bridge the domain gap, lightweight adapters are introduced in both modalities, enabling their representations to be recalibrated for the anomaly detection task. Beyond this baseline alignment, we further design an Anomaly-Aware Calibration Module (AACM), which explicitly guides the CLS token to attend to anomalous regions rather than generic foreground semantics, thereby enhancing discriminability. Extensive experiments on eight industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that AD-DINOv3 consistently matches or surpasses state-of-the-art methods.The code will be available at https://github.com/Kaisor-Yuan/AD-DINOv3.

Self-supervised structured object representation learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful technique for learning visual representations. While recent SSL approaches achieve strong results in global image understanding, they are limited in capturing the structured representation in scenes. In this work, we propose a self-supervised approach that progressively builds structured visual representations by combining semantic grouping, instance level separation, and hierarchical structuring. Our approach, based on a novel ProtoScale module, captures visual elements across multiple spatial scales. Unlike common strategies like DINO that rely on random cropping and global embeddings, we preserve full scene context across augmented views to improve performance in dense prediction tasks. We validate our method on downstream object detection tasks using a combined subset of multiple datasets (COCO and UA-DETRAC). Experimental results show that our method learns object centric representations that enhance supervised object detection and outperform the state-of-the-art methods, even when trained with limited annotated data and fewer fine-tuning epochs.

A Neuromorphic Incipient Slip Detection System using Papillae Morphology

Detecting incipient slip enables early intervention to prevent object slippage and enhance robotic manipulation safety. However, deploying such systems on edge platforms remains challenging, particularly due to energy constraints. This work presents a neuromorphic tactile sensing system based on the NeuroTac sensor with an extruding papillae-based skin and a spiking convolutional neural network (SCNN) for slip-state classification. The SCNN model achieves 94.33% classification accuracy across three classes (no slip, incipient slip, and gross slip) in slip conditions induced by sensor motion. Under the dynamic gravity-induced slip validation conditions, after temporal smoothing of the SCNN's final-layer spike counts, the system detects incipient slip at least 360 ms prior to gross slip across all trials, consistently identifying incipient slip before gross slip occurs. These results demonstrate that this neuromorphic system has stable and responsive incipient slip detection capability.

MOCHA: Multi-modal Objects-aware Cross-arcHitecture Alignment

We introduce MOCHA (Multi-modal Objects-aware Cross-arcHitecture Alignment), a knowledge distillation approach that transfers region-level multimodal semantics from a large vision-language teacher (e.g., LLaVa) into a lightweight vision-only object detector student (e.g., YOLO). A translation module maps student features into a joint space, where the training of the student and translator is guided by a dual-objective loss that enforces both local alignment and global relational consistency. Unlike prior approaches focused on dense or global alignment, MOCHA operates at the object level, enabling efficient transfer of semantics without modifying the teacher or requiring textual input at inference. We validate our method across four personalized detection benchmarks under few-shot regimes. Results show consistent gains over baselines, with a +10.1 average score improvement. Despite its compact architecture, MOCHA reaches performance on par with larger multimodal models, proving its suitability for real-world deployment.

FusionCounting: Robust visible-infrared image fusion guided by crowd counting via multi-task learning

Most visible and infrared image fusion (VIF) methods focus primarily on optimizing fused image quality. Recent studies have begun incorporating downstream tasks, such as semantic segmentation and object detection, to provide semantic guidance for VIF. However, semantic segmentation requires extensive annotations, while object detection, despite reducing annotation efforts compared with segmentation, faces challenges in highly crowded scenes due to overlapping bounding boxes and occlusion. Moreover, although RGB-T crowd counting has gained increasing attention in recent years, no studies have integrated VIF and crowd counting into a unified framework. To address these challenges, we propose FusionCounting, a novel multi-task learning framework that integrates crowd counting into the VIF process. Crowd counting provides a direct quantitative measure of population density with minimal annotation, making it particularly suitable for dense scenes. Our framework leverages both input images and population density information in a mutually beneficial multi-task design. To accelerate convergence and balance tasks contributions, we introduce a dynamic loss function weighting strategy. Furthermore, we incorporate adversarial training to enhance the robustness of both VIF and crowd counting, improving the model's stability and resilience to adversarial attacks. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that FusionCounting not only enhances image fusion quality but also achieves superior crowd counting performance.