Organizations: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA
Abstract
With modern defense applications increasingly relying on inexpensive, small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), a major challenge lies in designing intelligent and computationally efficient onboard Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) algorithms to carry out operational objectives. This is especially critical in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), where processing techniques such as ATR are often carried out post data collection, requiring onboard systems to bear the memory burden of storing the back-scattered signals. To alleviate this high cost, we propose an online, direct, edge-mapping technique which bypasses the image reconstruction step to classify scenes and targets. Furthermore, by reconstructing the scene as an edge-map we inherently promote sparsity, requiring fewer measurements and computational power than classic SAR reconstruction algorithms such as backprojection.
Thermal infrared (TIR) imaging is essential for UAV swarm operations in visually degraded environments. However, tracking tiny UAVs remains challenging due to limited appearance cues, frequent occlusions, and rapid maneuvers. Despite significant progress driven by benchmarks such as the Anti-UAV challenge, existing methods primarily prioritize accuracy while overlooking the computational constraints of real-time edge deployment. The standard Kalman Filter (KF) offers the efficiency required for edge devices, yet its constant-velocity assumption often breaks down under highly dynamic UAV motion and thermal sensor jitter. More sophisticated nonlinear estimators can improve robustness but often introduce additional computational costs. To address this gap, we propose an edge-aware online tracking pipeline centered on the Adaptive Kinematic Kalman Filter (AKKF), which augments the linear KF with state-dependent kinematic modeling while preserving real-time efficiency. Combined with transient false-positive suppression and kinematics-driven predictive coasting, the presented pipeline improves trajectory continuity under challenging TIR conditions. Experiments on the Beyond Strong Baseline (BSB) benchmark provide a starting point for edge-aware UAV tracking by jointly evaluating tracking performance and computational efficiency, offering insights toward future real-time deployment.
Online HD map construction is critical to prediction and planning in autonomous driving. We find that existing physical attacks against online map construction are limited by a cross-boundary compensation effect: after the target boundary is perturbed, another visible boundary may retain sufficient geometric cues for the model to recover the original road geometry. Based on this observation, we propose TwinIR, a new mechanism-guided physical attack methodology for online map construction. TwinIR jointly optimizes attack effectiveness and point sparsity, seeking the minimum number of attack points needed to suppress compensating geometric cues from surrounding boundaries. To reduce the perceptibility of multi-point attacks, TwinIR models camera responses to near-infrared illumination and maps optimized attack points to feasible physical placements, producing camera-visible interference with minimal visible-spectrum changes. Experiments on nuScenes across state-of-the-art online map construction models show that TwinIR reduces mAP by 8.18-8.96 percentage points under RSA and 2.84-5.62 points under ETA, while increasing the unreachable-goal rate by 25-28 points and the unsafe-planned-trajectory rate by 19-20 points over clean inputs. These attacks are also validated on a real-world testbed AV, where TwinIR successfully induces both road straightening and early-turn deformations while remaining inconspicuous in full-color views.
Modern satellite edge systems, including those performing remote sensing tasks such object detection and tracking, are characterized by severely limited bandwidth and intermittent connections, making continuous data transmission to the cloud impractical. Existing edge-cloud systems, however, either require heavy pre-processing before analysis, for instance, full decompression of imagery data, or transmit all compressed data regardless of relevance. To address these challenges, we design DynaFilter, a dynamic filtering technique that enables satellite edge devices to perform selective region-of-interest (RoI) inference directly in the compressed-domain, without full decompression. Our key insight is that low-level compression syntax, specifically DC coefficients/AC energy in JPEG images and motion vectors in video streams, exhibits strong correlations with high-level semantic queries. By establishing a precise mapping between cloud query semantics and multimodal compressed-domain features, DynaFilter enables the edge to identify and transmit only relevant data associated to RoIs. Extensive evaluations show that DynaFilter reduces the total volume of pixel data for decoding and subsequent inference by 1.6x-7.1x for images, and achieves 92.0% bandwidth savings for video streams compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, it decreases energy consumption by 43.1-88.6% on target devices and achieves a 1.6x-3.0x speedup in inference latency.