Object detection is a computer vision task in which the goal is to detect and locate objects of interest in an image or video. The task involves identifying the position and boundaries of objects in an image, and classifying the objects into different categories. It forms a crucial part of vision recognition, alongside image classification and retrieval.
In real-world deployment under strict real-time constraints, weather and imaging variations induce significant distribution shifts, severely degrading detectors. Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection aims to mitigate this issue, yet existing methods rarely investigate-at the level of problem formulation-the generalization capability of real-time detectors under such constrained inference budgets. To this end, we introduce Real-Time Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection (RT-SDGOD), which focuses on how real-time detectors can achieve cross-domain generalization under zero extra inference overhead by relying solely on training-time representation learning. We observe that, under domain shift, DETR-based real-time detectors mainly degrade through increased missed detections, rooted in limited and unstable object-level discriminative evidence. Based on this, we propose RT-SDGDet, a multi-evidence collaborative modeling framework for RT-SDGOD. The core idea is to enable multiple queries of the same object to collaboratively cover more sufficient discriminative evidence while maintaining the stability of such evidence modeling across views. Specifically, we use one-to-many (O2M) supervision to construct stable object-specific query groups, and further design Discriminative Evidence Diversity Learning (DEDL) and Dual-view Evidence Consistency Learning (DvECL) to expand object-level evidence coverage and improve evidence stability under appearance perturbations, respectively. Since all components are introduced only during training, our method incurs no extra inference overhead. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves better generalization performance than existing approaches across multiple unseen target domains.
Multimodal 3D object detection based on LiDAR and cameras has demonstrated excellent performance in ground-vehicle scenarios, but has not been explored for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platforms. In UAV top-down scenes, frequent groundobject occlusion dominated by tree canopies causes spatially varying and modality-dependent information degradation. Existing multimodal fusion frameworks neither explicitly model such ground-object occlusion nor embed occlusion awareness into the detection pipeline, limiting their performance in occluded UAV scenes. To address these challenges, we propose CAMF-Det, a closure-aware multimodal fusion framework for LiDAR-camera 3D object detection on UAV platforms, which derives dual-modal occlusion intensity through physics-inspired modeling and embeds them as priors throughout the detection pipeline. First, a dual-modal closure modeling module explicitly constructs occlusion intensity ground truth for both modalities offline via a Beer-Lambert-inspired formulation and building-mask correction. Second, using these ground-truth maps as supervision, a dual-modal prediction network converts the offline modeling results into online occlusion intensity predictions under single-frame inference. Third, both ground-truth and predicted occlusion intensity are injected into data augmentation, feature encoding, multimodal fusion, and detection head, enabling adaptive detection under spatially varying and modality-dependent information degradation. Experiments on two self-built UAV-based multimodal datasets, SI3D-DI and SI3D-DII, demonstrate that CAMF-Det achieves the best performance across all difficulty levels, with hard-level mAP$_{\mathrm{BEV}}$ improvements of 9.43% and 4.88% over the best competing methods, respectively. These results confirm the effectiveness of explicit occlusion prior modeling and exploitation for robust multimodal 3D detection in UAV scenes.
Reliable motion classification is critical for autonomous driving, as false dynamic predictions of static objects can cascade into unnecessary planner interventions. Unstable bounding box predictions can lead to spurious velocity estimates in tracking and falsely predicted trajectories. We present a deployment-friendly mitigation strategy that augments a 3D object detector with aleatoric uncertainty estimates and applies a two-sample z-test over short observation windows to separate true motion from jitter. Integrated into Autoware with minimal changes, the approach reuses existing data association for minimal compute overhead. Empirical results show parity with velocity thresholding on nuScenes, but substantially fewer false dynamic predictions and unnecessary stops in real-world test drives, explained by the presence of an intermediate jitter band in the recorded data that speed-only rules misclassify. This demonstrates that uncertainty-aware detection and lightweight statistical testing can deliver practical performance gains for autonomous driving in noisier real-world settings.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) object detection requires compact detectors that retain small-object details under onboard computation and memory constraints. Repeated downsampling inlightweight networks weakens shallow spatial information, while manually adding attention orfusion modules may increase cost without stable gains. This study analyzes YOLOX-Nano underedge-deployment constraints by combining a P2 high-resolution detection branch with a quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (QIEA) for lightweight structure screening. The search space isdefined by lightweight priority and task specificity, and the evaluation jointly considers accuracy,floating-point operations (FLOPs), latency, memory consumption, and recall. On VisDrone, theP2 branch increases APamall by 31.10% over the YOLOX-Nano baseline. Compared with NanoDet-Plus with similar model size, YOLOX-Nano+-P2 improves APs0.ss by 17.5% and APamal by 44.9%.The QIEA-selected candidate obtains the highest Recallso, but +P2 remains the strongest AP-oriented variant after full training. Full 100-epoch verification of Random-best, GA-best, andSA/QUBO-best candidates further shows that proxy rankings do not necessarily transfer to finalAPse9s. These results support using P2 as the main small-object enhancement path and QIEA as alightweight tool for candidate screening and accuracy-cost analysis. The source code, configurationfiles, diagnostic scripts, and summarized results are available at https://github.com/Ming23233/UAV-QIEA-Edge-Detection
3D object detection is the backbone of perception for automated vehicles (AV) and broader intelligent transportation systems applications. Long-range detection is challenging because sensing evidence is sparse; yet this ``long-range'' scenario is routine in traffic. Although >30m is often labeled long-range in computer vision, on roadways it affords only approx. 1-2s for perception and decision-making. Under such extreme sparsity, two core challenges arise. First, early multimodal fusion tends to discard sparsity information and inject noise from empty or falsely occupied cells, degrading long-range recall. Second, context-agnostic uniform channel supervision favors dense and near-range samples, leaving far and small objects under-optimized, delaying the earliest detection of distant objects. We propose ``Ask The Neighbor'' (ATN3D), a LiDAR-Radar framework tailored for sparse-range conditions. ATN3D introduces (i) Density-aware early fusion with cross-modal gating that conditions fusion on per-voxel density/sparsity and Radar evidence, (ii) Occupancy-gated neighborhood aggregation with circular kernels to aggregate only from credible cells, (iii) Evidence-conditioned channel self-attention to adapt channel weights with weather/range, and (iv) a Range-aware loss that re-balances classification and localization by distance, aligning training with distance-stratified evaluation. On the VoD benchmark across clear and foggy conditions, ATN3D surpasses strong baselines: +3.55% mAP in clear weather and +8.41% mAP under simulated heavy fog; for >30m objects, gains are +3.33% (clear) and +2.09% (heavy fog). These results indicate earlier and more reliable long-range detections under sparse sensing in on-road traffic.
Modern object detectors achieve strong performance on standard benchmarks, yet their robustness to contextual variation remains insufficiently understood. Prior evaluations largely rely on aggregate metrics such as AP on uncontrolled distribution shifts, which can obscure how performance degrades under context change. We introduce ContextShift, a controlled benchmark that systematically manipulates object--context relationships while preserving object appearance. Built on COCO 2017, it isolates context as an independent variable through geometric transformations and synthetic and natural background substitutions, including a continuous compatibility axis based on normalized pointwise mutual information (NPMI). Across diverse detector architectures, we observe a consistent degradation pattern: false negatives increase by up to 227% and prediction volume decreases by up to 44%, while false positives remain stable or decline. This suppression behavior is not captured by aggregate metrics such as AP, which can mask substantial recall loss and changes in prediction dynamics. Further analysis suggests that degradation is driven less by reduced confidence than by a reduced formation of valid detection candidates. Moreover, performance along the statistical compatibility axis is non-monotonic, peaking at intermediate NPMI and degrading toward both extremes, indicating that statistical co-occurrence does not correlate linearly with effective visual context. Finally, we show that context-aware augmentation improves robustness: every augmented variant outperforms the dataset-only baseline on both original and manipulated test images, partially recovering performance lost to prediction-suppression failures by exposing models to object--context decoupling during training.
Extracting building polygon contours from high-resolution remote sensing images is a fundamental task for various mapping applications. However, the presence of varying imaging conditions and complex building structures, makes automatic contour extraction extremely challenging. Mainstream approaches for building extraction often rely on pixel-level segmentation followed by multiple post-processing steps to produce building contour, which can be computationally intensive and prone to errors. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end method named PolyBuild, which can directly extract building vector polygons from high-resolution remote sensing images without the need for any post-processing operations. The proposed method leverages two primary modules: an Initial Contour Generation Module (ICGM) and a Contour Optimization Module (COM). The ICGM is designed to generate an initial building contour by utilizing concatenated sub-region center features for each building instance. It performs simultaneous object detection and initial contour extraction by generating bounding boxes and using the center features of four sub-regions to represent each building. The Contour Optimization Module (COM) further refines the generated building contours by iteratively integrating Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features and contour positional information in a Transformer-based decoder. The hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture effectively captures both local and global spatial relationships within the building contour, ensuring high-quality boundary delineation. Extensive experiments are conducted on three building datasets to evaluate the performance of PolyBuild. The results demonstrate that PolyBuild significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including mask-based and contour-based approaches.
Remote-sensing and UAV applications need models that generalize across platforms and viewpoints without task-specific training. Yet training-free pipelines often falter on oriented geometry, scale/rotation variation, and crowded ports or airfields, and rarely unify detection and segmentation. We introduce ZODS-RS, a training-free, closed-form pipeline that outputs horizontal boxes (HBB) and instance masks. Built on DINOv3 dense features and SAM-style proposals, ZODS-RS chains: PP (prototype purification via Tyler covariance), R-SEM (rotation-scale equivariant matching with separable kernels and global Hungarian assignment), and UAM (uncertainty-aware pixelwise merging with adaptive priors and optional negative prototypes). A lightweight CWLA fuses multiple DINOv3 layers. On FAIR1M (HBB) we obtain $\mathrm{mAP}_{0.50:0.95}=\mathbf{13.06}$ and $\mathrm{AP}_S=\mathbf{2.93}$ \emph{(class-averaged over ship/airplane)}; on xView (HBB) we report $\mathrm{mAP}=\mathbf{16.69}$. On our UAV dataset, ZODS-RS achieves mask $\mathrm{mIoU}=\mathbf{31.10}$ and improves small-object AP by $\mathbf{+30.70}$ over Grounded-SAM on a single 5090. This work offers a unified, \emph{no-training} solution for horizontal-box detection plus instance segmentation in aerial imagery; provides explicit closed-form formulations for PP/R-SEM/UAM tightly coupled with DINOv3; and demonstrates \emph{consistent} gains on small and crowded targets and under cross-domain shifts while keeping deployment simple.
Coastline detection in remote sensing imagery is commonly formulated as a pixel-wise segmentation problem, where the final coastline is extracted from a predicted mask through post-processing. This formulation relegates coastline geometry, the primary representation used in coastal change analysis, to a secondary artifact rather than the learning objective. In practice, coastlines are defined by geomorphic proxies such as vegetation lines, dune toes, or cliff edges, rather than an instantaneous land-water boundary often used in pixel-based segmentation approaches. In this work, we revisit coastline extraction from a representation perspective and formulate the task as geometric boundary localization. We use the New Zealand Coastal Change Dataset (NZCCD) and high-resolution aerial imagery from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) to develop CoastlineVLM-7B, a vision-language model (VLM) built on the GeoChat-7B/LLaVA-1.5 architecture that jointly performs coastline presence detection, proxy-type classification, and coastline grounding. The model directly predicts a coastline as a polyline rather than a dense segmentation mask. We evaluate CoastlineVLM-7B against segmentation baselines under strict one-pixel boundary supervision. Results show that geometry-based metrics are more suitable for assessing coastline localization quality than pixel-overlap metrics such as Intersection over Union (IoU). CoastlineVLM-7B improves global geometric alignment with reference coastlines, reducing Hausdorff distance from 37.74 m to 31.84 m and Earth Mover's Distance from 21.12 m to 17.32 m. These results indicate that output representation is a critical design choice in coastline extraction, and that geometry-oriented learning, combined with the semantic reasoning capabilities of vision-language models, aligns well with how coastlines are defined and evaluated in operational coastal monitoring.
Code-generating large language models (LLMs) increasingly produce visual artifacts such as charts, web pages, and slides by writing programs that are executed by non-differentiable renderers, committing to code before observing the render. As a result, otherwise executable code often yields artifacts with visually salient defects, including overlapping elements, clipped text, broken alignment, low contrast, and overflow. We study visual-feedback self-distillation for code-generated visual artifacts. We propose Visual-SDPO, a self-distillation policy-optimization framework that treats rendered visual feedback as privileged context for a weight-sharing teacher and distills this feedback into a coding student. To make supervision spatially targeted rather than uniform, we introduce Visual-Grounded Code Credit Weighting, which traces each detected defect back to the code statements responsible for the affected elements and amplifies the distillation signal on those statements. A sequence-level GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) term complements the dense token-level objective by rewarding executable, visually high-quality rollouts, while failed executions remain learnable through the self-distillation path by passing execution errors as privileged context to the teacher. We instantiate Visual-SDPO for chart, web/UI, and slide generation with a unified Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct backbone. Across chart-to-code, UI-to-code, and slide-generation benchmarks (ChartMimic, Design2Code, and AeSlides), Visual-SDPO improves over the zero-shot base by more than 10 absolute points in the primary metric and over GRPO by at least 2.4 points, with fewer training steps and no added inference-time cost.