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.
Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) and long QT syndrome (LQTS) are inherited arrhythmia syndromes associated with sudden cardiac death. Deep learning shows promise for ECG interpretation, but multi-class inherited arrhythmia classification with clinically grounded interpretability remains underdeveloped. Our objective was to develop and validate a lead-aware deep learning framework for multi-class (ARVC vs LQTS vs control) and binary inherited arrhythmia classification, and to determine optimal strategies for integrating ECG foundation models within arrhythmia screening tools. We assembled a 13-center Canadian cohort (645 patients; 1,344 ECGs). We evaluated four ECG foundation models using three transfer learning approaches: linear probing, fine-tuning, and combined strategies. We developed lead-aware spatial attention networks (LASAN) and assessed integration strategies combining LASAN with foundation models. Performance was compared against the established foundation model baselines. Lead-group masking quantified disease-specific lead dependence. Fine-tuning outperformed linear probing and combined strategies across all foundation models (mean macro-AUROC 0.904 vs 0.825). The best lead-aware integrations achieved near-ceiling performance (HuBERT-ECG hybrid: macro-AUROC 0.990; ARVC vs control AUROC 0.999; LQTS vs control AUROC 0.994). Lead masking demonstrated physiologic plausibility: V1-V3 were most critical for ARVC detection (4.54% AUROC reduction), while lateral leads were preferentially important for LQTS (2.60% drop). Lead-aware architectures achieved state-of-the-art performance for inherited arrhythmia classification, outperforming all existing published models on both binary and multi-class tasks while demonstrating clinically aligned lead dependence. These findings support potential utility for automated ECG screening pending validation.
Unlabeled LiDAR logs, in autonomous driving applications, are inherently a gold mine of dense 3D geometry hiding in plain sight - yet they are almost useless without human labels, highlighting a dominant cost barrier for autonomous-perception research. In this work we tackle this bottleneck by leveraging temporal-geometric consistency across LiDAR sweeps to lift and fuse cues from text and 2D vision foundation models directly into 3D, without any manual input. We introduce an unsupervised multi-modal pseudo-labeling method relying on strong geometric priors learned from temporally accumulated LiDAR maps, alongside with a novel iterative update rule that enforces joint geometric-semantic consistency, and vice-versa detecting moving objects from inconsistencies. Our method simultaneously produces 3D semantic labels, 3D bounding boxes, and dense LiDAR scans, demonstrating robust generalization across three datasets. We experimentally validate that our method compares favorably to existing semantic segmentation and object detection pseudo-labeling methods, which often require additional manual supervision. We confirm that even a small fraction of our geometrically consistent, densified LiDAR improves depth prediction by 51.5% and 22.0% MAE in the 80-150 and 150-250 meters range, respectively.
The increasing production of waste, driven by population growth, has created challenges in managing and recycling materials effectively. Manual waste sorting is a common practice; however, it remains inefficient for handling large-scale waste streams and presents health risks for workers. On the other hand, existing automated sorting approaches still struggle with the high variability, clutter, and visual complexity of real-world waste streams. The lack of real-world datasets for waste sorting is a major reason automated systems for this problem are underdeveloped. Accordingly, we introduce SortWaste, a densely annotated object detection dataset collected from a Material Recovery Facility. Additionally, we contribute to standardizing waste detection in sorting lines by proposing ClutterScore, an objective metric that gauges the scene's hardness level using a set of proxies that affect visual complexity (e.g., object count, class and size entropy, and spatial overlap). In addition to these contributions, we provide an extensive benchmark of state-of-the-art object detection models, detailing their results with respect to the hardness level assessed by the proposed metric. Despite achieving promising results (mAP of 59.7% in the plastic-only detection task), performance significantly decreases in highly cluttered scenes. This highlights the need for novel and more challenging datasets on the topic.
RGB-based camouflaged object detection struggles in real-world scenarios where color and texture cues are ambiguous. While hyperspectral image offers a powerful alternative by capturing fine-grained spectral signatures, progress in hyperspectral camouflaged object detection (HCOD) has been critically hampered by the absence of a dedicated, large-scale benchmark. To spur innovation, we introduce HyperCOD, the first challenging benchmark for HCOD. Comprising 350 high-resolution hyperspectral images, It features complex real-world scenarios with minimal objects, intricate shapes, severe occlusions, and dynamic lighting to challenge current models. The advent of foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) presents a compelling opportunity. To adapt the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for HCOD, we propose HyperSpectral Camouflage-aware SAM (HSC-SAM). HSC-SAM ingeniously reformulates the hyperspectral image by decoupling it into a spatial map fed to SAM's image encoder and a spectral saliency map that serves as an adaptive prompt. This translation effectively bridges the modality gap. Extensive experiments show that HSC-SAM sets a new state-of-the-art on HyperCOD and generalizes robustly to other public HSI datasets. The HyperCOD dataset and our HSC-SAM baseline provide a robust foundation to foster future research in this emerging area.
Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology has been heavily researched and sought after, yet there are no SAE Level 5 AVs available today in the marketplace. We contend that over-reliance on machine learning technology is the main reason. Use of automated commonsense reasoning technology, we believe, can help achieve SAE Level 5 autonomy. In this paper, we show how automated common- sense reasoning technology can be deployed in situations where there are not enough data samples available to train a deep learning-based AV model that can handle certain abnormal road scenarios. Specifically, we consider two situations where (i) a traffic signal is malfunctioning at an intersection and (ii) all the cars ahead are slowing down and steering away due to an unexpected obstruction (e.g., animals on the road). We show that in such situations, our commonsense reasoning-based solution accurately detects traffic light colors and obstacles not correctly captured by the AV's perception model. We also provide a pathway for efficiently invoking commonsense reasoning by measuring uncertainty in the computer vision model and using commonsense reasoning to handle uncertain sce- narios. We describe our experiments conducted using the CARLA simulator and the results obtained. The main contribution of our research is to show that automated commonsense reasoning effectively corrects AV-based object detection misclassifications and that hybrid models provide an effective pathway to improving AV perception.
Foundation models for vision are predominantly trained on RGB data, while many safety-critical applications rely on non-visible modalities such as infrared (IR) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR). We study whether a single flow-matching foundation model pre-trained primarily on RGB images can be repurposed as a cross-spectral translator using only a few co-measured examples, and whether the resulting synthetic data can enhance downstream detection. Starting from FLUX.1 Kontext, we insert low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules and fine-tune them on just 100 paired images per domain for two settings: RGB to IR on the KAIST dataset and RGB to SAR on the M4-SAR dataset. The adapted model translates RGB images into pixel-aligned IR/SAR, enabling us to reuse existing bounding boxes and train object detection models purely in the target modality. Across a grid of LoRA hyperparameters, we find that LPIPS computed on only 50 held-out pairs is a strong proxy for downstream performance: lower LPIPS consistently predicts higher mAP for YOLOv11n on both IR and SAR, and for DETR on KAIST IR test data. Using the best LPIPS-selected LoRA adapter, synthetic IR from external RGB datasets (LLVIP, FLIR ADAS) improves KAIST IR pedestrian detection, and synthetic SAR significantly boosts infrastructure detection on M4-SAR when combined with limited real SAR. Our results suggest that few-shot LoRA adaptation of flow-matching foundation models is a promising path toward foundation-style support for non-visible modalities.
In the manufacturing industry, computer vision systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) are widely used to reduce costs and increase production. Training these AI models requires a large amount of training data that is costly to acquire and annotate, especially in high-variance, low-volume manufacturing environments. A popular approach to reduce the need for real data is the use of synthetic data that is generated by leveraging computer-aided design (CAD) models available in the industry. However, in the agricultural industry these models are not readily available, increasing the difficulty in leveraging synthetic data. In this paper, we present different techniques for substituting CAD files to create synthetic datasets. We measure their relative performance when used to train an AI object detection model to separate stones and potatoes in a bin picking environment. We demonstrate that using highly representative 3D models acquired by scanning or using image-to-3D approaches can be used to generate synthetic data for training object detection models. Finetuning on a small real dataset can significantly improve the performance of the models and even get similar performance when less representative models are used.
We present a novel approach for egocentric action recognition that leverages 2D point tracks as an additional motion cue. While most existing methods rely on RGB appearance, human pose estimation, or their combination, our work demonstrates that tracking randomly sampled image points across video frames can substantially improve recognition accuracy. Unlike prior approaches, we do not detect hands, objects, or interaction regions. Instead, we employ CoTracker to follow a set of randomly initialized points through each video and use the resulting trajectories, together with the corresponding image frames, as input to a Transformer-based recognition model. Surprisingly, our method achieves notable gains even when only the initial frame and its associated point tracks are provided, without incorporating the full video sequence. Experimental results confirm that integrating 2D point tracks consistently enhances performance compared to the same model trained without motion information, highlighting their potential as a lightweight yet effective representation for egocentric action understanding.
Detecting tiny objects plays a vital role in remote sensing intelligent interpretation, as these objects often carry critical information for downstream applications. However, due to the extremely limited pixel information and significant variations in object density, mainstream Transformer-based detectors often suffer from slow convergence and inaccurate query-object matching. To address these challenges, we propose D$^3$R-DETR, a novel DETR-based detector with Dual-Domain Density Refinement. By fusing spatial and frequency domain information, our method refines low-level feature maps and utilizes their rich details to predict more accurate object density map, thereby guiding the model to precisely localize tiny objects. Extensive experiments on the AI-TOD-v2 dataset demonstrate that D$^3$R-DETR outperforms existing state-of-the-art detectors for tiny object detection.
To fully exploit depth cues in Camouflaged Object Detection (COD), we present DGA-Net, a specialized framework that adapts the Segment Anything Model (SAM) via a novel ``depth prompting" paradigm. Distinguished from existing approaches that primarily rely on sparse prompts (e.g., points or boxes), our method introduces a holistic mechanism for constructing and propagating dense depth prompts. Specifically, we propose a Cross-modal Graph Enhancement (CGE) module that synthesizes RGB semantics and depth geometric within a heterogeneous graph to form a unified guidance signal. Furthermore, we design an Anchor-Guided Refinement (AGR) module. To counteract the inherent information decay in feature hierarchies, AGR forges a global anchor and establishes direct non-local pathways to broadcast this guidance from deep to shallow layers, ensuring precise and consistent segmentation. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate that our proposed DGA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art COD methods.