SFFNet: Synergistic Feature Fusion Network With Dual-Domain Edge Enhancement for UAV Image Object Detection

Object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images remains a highly challenging task, primarily caused by the complexity of background noise and the imbalance of target scales. Traditional methods easily struggle to effectively separate objects from intricate backgrounds and fail to fully leverage the rich multi-scale information contained within images. To address these issues, we have developed a synergistic feature fusion network (SFFNet) with dual-domain edge enhancement specifically tailored for object detection in UAV images. Firstly, the multi-scale dynamic dual-domain coupling (MDDC) module is designed. This component introduces a dual-driven edge extraction architecture that operates in both the frequency and spatial domains, enabling effective decoupling of multi-scale object edges from background noise. Secondly, to further enhance the representation capability of the model's neck in terms of both geometric and semantic information, a synergistic feature pyramid network (SFPN) is proposed. SFPN leverages linear deformable convolutions to adaptively capture irregular object shapes and establishes long-range contextual associations around targets through the designed wide-area perception module (WPM). Moreover, to adapt to the various applications or resource-constrained scenarios, six detectors of different scales (N/S/M/B/L/X) are designed. Experiments on two challenging aerial datasets (VisDrone and UAVDT) demonstrate the outstanding performance of SFFNet-X, achieving 36.8 AP and 20.6 AP, respectively. The lightweight models (N/S) also maintain a balance between detection accuracy and parameter efficiency. The code will be available at https://github.com/CQNU-ZhangLab/SFFNet.

Modality-Specific Hierarchical Enhancement for RGB-D Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) is challenging due to high target-background similarity, and recent methods address this by complementarily using RGB-D texture and geometry cues. However, RGB-D COD methods still underutilize modality-specific cues, which limits fusion quality. We believe this is because RGB and depth features are fused directly after backbone extraction without modality-specific enhancement. To address this limitation, we propose MHENet, an RGB-D COD framework that performs modality-specific hierarchical enhancement and adaptive fusion of RGB and depth features. Specifically, we introduce a Texture Hierarchical Enhancement Module (THEM) to amplify subtle texture variations by extracting high-frequency information and a Geometry Hierarchical Enhancement Module (GHEM) to enhance geometric structures via learnable gradient extraction, while preserving cross-scale semantic consistency. Finally, an Adaptive Dynamic Fusion Module (ADFM) adaptively fuses the enhanced texture and geometry features with spatially varying weights. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that MHENet surpasses 16 state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Code is available at https://github.com/afdsgh/MHENet.

Cost-Efficient Multi-Scale Fovea for Semantic-Based Visual Search Attention

Semantics are one of the primary sources of top-down preattentive information. Modern deep object detectors excel at extracting such valuable semantic cues from complex visual scenes. However, the size of the visual input to be processed by these detectors can become a bottleneck, particularly in terms of time costs, affecting an artificial attention system's biological plausibility and real-time deployability. Inspired by classical exponential density roll-off topologies, we apply a new artificial foveation module to our novel attention prediction pipeline: the Semantic-based Bayesian Attention (SemBA) framework. We aim at reducing detection-related computational costs without compromising visual task accuracy, thereby making SemBA more biologically plausible. The proposed multi-scale pyramidal field-of-view retains maximum acuity at an innermost level, around a focal point, while gradually increasing distortion for outer levels to mimic peripheral uncertainty via downsampling. In this work we evaluate the performance of our novel Multi-Scale Fovea, incorporated into \textit{SemBA}, on target-present visual search. We also compare it against other artificial foveal systems, and conduct ablation studies with different deep object detection models to assess the impact of the new topology in terms of computational costs. We experimentally demonstrate that including the new Multi-Scale Fovea module effectively reduces inherent processing costs while improving SemBA's scanpath prediction accuracy. Remarkably, we show that SemBA closely approximates human consistency while retaining the actual human fovea's proportions.

RayMamba: Ray-Aligned Serialization for Long-Range 3D Object Detection

Long-range 3D object detection remains challenging because LiDAR observations become highly sparse and fragmented in the far field, making reliable context modeling difficult for existing detectors. To address this issue, recent state space model (SSM)-based methods have improved long-range modeling efficiency. However, their effectiveness is still limited by generic serialization strategies that fail to preserve meaningful contextual neighborhoods in sparse scenes. To address this issue, we propose RayMamba, a geometry-aware plug-and-play enhancement for voxel-based 3D detectors. RayMamba organizes sparse voxels into sector-wise ordered sequences through a ray-aligned serialization strategy, which preserves directional continuity and occlusion-related context for subsequent Mamba-based modeling. It is compatible with both LiDAR-only and multimodal detectors, while introducing only modest overhead. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 demonstrate consistent improvements across strong baselines. In particular, RayMamba achieves up to 2.49 mAP and 1.59 NDS gain in the challenging 40--50 m range on nuScenes, and further improves VoxelNeXt on Argoverse 2 from 30.3 to 31.2 mAP.

DeCo-DETR: Decoupled Cognition DETR for efficient Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Open-vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) enables models to recognize objects beyond predefined categories, but existing approaches remain limited in practical deployment. On the one hand, multimodal designs often incur substantial computational overhead due to their reliance on text encoders at inference time. On the other hand, tightly coupled training objectives introduce a trade-off between closed-set detection accuracy and open-world generalization. Thus, we propose Decoupled Cognition DETR (DeCo-DETR), a vision-centric framework that addresses these challenges through a unified decoupling paradigm. Instead of depending on online text encoding, DeCo-DETR constructs a hierarchical semantic prototype space from region-level descriptions generated by pre-trained LVLMs and aligned via CLIP, enabling efficient and reusable semantic representation. Building upon this representation, the framework further disentangles semantic reasoning from localization through a decoupled training strategy, which separates alignment and detection into parallel optimization streams. Extensive experiments on standard OVOD benchmarks demonstrate that DeCo-DETR achieves competitive zero-shot detection performance while significantly improving inference efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of decoupling semantic cognition from detection, offering a practical direction for scalable OVOD systems.

Adversarial Robustness Analysis of Cloud-Assisted Autonomous Driving Systems

Autonomous vehicles increasingly rely on deep learning-based perception and control, which impose substantial computational demands. Cloud-assisted architectures offload these functions to remote servers, enabling enhanced perception and coordinated decision-making through the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). However, this paradigm introduces cross-layer vulnerabilities, where adversarial manipulation of perception models and network impairments in the vehicle-cloud link can jointly undermine safety-critical autonomy. This paper presents a hardware-in-the-loop IoV testbed that integrates real-time perception, control, and communication to evaluate such vulnerabilities in cloud-assisted autonomous driving. A YOLOv8-based object detector deployed on the cloud is subjected to whitebox adversarial attacks using the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD), while network adversaries induce delay and packet loss in the vehicle-cloud loop. Results show that adversarial perturbations significantly degrade perception performance, with PGD reducing detection precision and recall from 0.73 and 0.68 in the clean baseline to 0.22 and 0.15 at epsilon= 0.04. Network delays of 150-250 ms, corresponding to transient losses of approximately 3-4 frames, and packet loss rates of 0.5-5 % further destabilize closed-loop control, leading to delayed actuation and rule violations. These findings highlight the need for cross-layer resilience in cloud-assisted autonomous driving systems.

EAGLE: Edge-Aware Graph Learning for Proactive Delivery Delay Prediction in Smart Logistics Networks

Modern logistics networks generate rich operational data streams at every warehouse node and transportation lane -- from order timestamps and routing records to shipping manifests -- yet predicting delivery delays remains predominantly reactive. Existing predictive approaches typically treat this problem either as a tabular classification task, ignoring network topology, or as a time-series anomaly detection task, overlooking the spatial dependencies of the supply chain graph. To bridge this gap, we propose a hybrid deep learning framework for proactive supply chain risk management. The proposed method jointly models temporal order-flow dynamics via a lightweight Transformer patch encoder and inter-hub relational dependencies through an Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network (E-GAT), optimized via a multi-task learning objective. Evaluated on the real-world DataCo Smart Supply Chain dataset, our framework achieves consistent improvements over baseline methods, yielding an F1-score of 0.8762 and an AUC-ROC of 0.9773. Across four independent random seeds, the framework exhibits a cross-seed F1 standard deviation of only 0.0089 -- a 3.8 times improvement over the best ablated variant -- achieving the strongest balance of predictive accuracy and training stability among all evaluated models.

XSeg: A Large-scale X-ray Contraband Segmentation Benchmark For Real-World Security Screening

X-ray contraband detection is critical for public safety. However, current methods primarily rely on bounding box annotations, which limit model generalization and performance due to the lack of pixel-level supervision and real-world data. To address these limitations, we introduce XSeg. To the best of our knowledge, XSeg is the largest X-ray contraband segmentation dataset to date, including 98,644 images and 295,932 instance masks, and contains the latest 30 common contraband categories. The images are sourced from public datasets and our synthesized data, filtered through a custom data cleaning pipeline to remove low-quality samples. To enable accurate and efficient annotation and reduce manual labeling effort, we propose Adaptive Point SAM (APSAM), a specialized mask annotation model built upon the Segment Anything Model (SAM). We address SAM's poor cross-domain generalization and limited capability in detecting stacked objects by introducing an Energy-Aware Encoder that enhances the initialization of the mask decoder, significantly improving sensitivity to overlapping items. Additionally, we design an Adaptive Point Generator that allows users to obtain precise mask labels with only a single coarse point prompt. Extensive experiments on XSeg demonstrate the superior performance of APSAM.

MonoSAOD: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Sparsely Annotated Label

Monocular 3D object detection has achieved impressive performance on densely annotated datasets. However, it struggles when only a fraction of objects are labeled due to the high cost of 3D annotation. This sparsely annotated setting is common in real-world scenarios where annotating every object is impractical. To address this, we propose a novel framework for sparsely annotated monocular 3D object detection with two key modules. First, we propose Road-Aware Patch Augmentation (RAPA), which leverages sparse annotations by augmenting segmented object patches onto road regions while preserving 3D geometric consistency. Second, we propose Prototype-Based Filtering (PBF), which generates high-quality pseudo-labels by filtering predictions through prototype similarity and depth uncertainty. It maintains global 2D RoI feature prototypes and selects pseudo-labels that are both feature-consistent with learned prototypes and have reliable depth estimates. Our training strategy combines geometry-preserving augmentation with prototype-guided pseudo-labeling to achieve robust detection under sparse supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code is available at https://github.com/VisualAIKHU/MonoSAOD .

Safety-Aligned 3D Object Detection: Single-Vehicle, Cooperative, and End-to-End Perspectives

Perception plays a central role in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), underpinning not only conventional modular driving stacks, but also cooperative perception systems and recent end-to-end driving models. While deep learning has greatly improved perception performance, its statistical nature makes perfect predictions difficult to attain. Meanwhile, standard training objectives and evaluation benchmarks treat all perception errors equally, even though only a subset is safety-critical. In this paper, we investigate safety-aligned evaluation and optimization for 3D object detection that explicitly characterize high-impact errors. Building on our previously proposed safety-oriented metric, NDS-USC, and safety-aware loss function, EC-IoU, we make three contributions. First, we present an expanded study of single-vehicle 3D object detection models across diverse neural network architectures and sensing modalities, showing that gains under standard metrics such as mAP and NDS may not translate to safety-oriented criteria represented by NDS-USC. With EC-IoU, we reaffirm the benefit of safety-aware fine-tuning for improving safety-critical detection performance. Second, we conduct an ego-centric, safety-oriented evaluation of AV-infrastructure cooperative object detection models, underscoring its superiority over vehicle-only models and demonstrating a safety impact analysis that illustrates the potential contribution of cooperative models to "Vision Zero." Third, we integrate EC-IoU into SparseDrive and show that safety-aware perception hardening can reduce collision rate by nearly 30% and improve system-level safety directly in an end-to-end perception-to-planning framework. Overall, our results indicate that safety-aligned perception evaluation and optimization offer a practical path toward enhancing CAV safety across single-vehicle, cooperative, and end-to-end autonomy settings.