Object detection is a fundamental capability for AI-driven perception in safety-critical drone and edge-vision systems, including disaster response, operational security environments, infrastructure monitoring and defense applications. Robust model performance in such environments depends on large, continuously updated datasets. However, training high-performing detectors typically requires centralizing aerial imagery, which raises privacy, regulatory, storage, and bandwidth challenges. This is especially problematic in distributed drone deployments, where visual data is generated onboard and is often impractical or undesirable to transfer to a centralized infrastructure. In this work, we apply Federated Learning (FL) for object detection, enabling drones to improve a shared model while keeping image data local and private. We implement a federated object detection pipeline using the Sherpa.ai FL platform on the KIIT-MiTA dataset, and compare it with Single-drone and Centralized baselines using mean Average Precision (mAP) at IoU thresholds of 0.50 and 0.50-0.95. In our experiments, the proposed FL approach remains close to Centralized training while dramatically improving over Single-drone training, with the best lightweight model (YOLO26 nano), suitable for deployment even on very limited edge infrastructure, achieving relative gains of 52.89% and 67.80% in mAP@0.50 and mAP@0.50:0.95, respectively. These results show that FL enables scalable, high-performing, and privacy-preserving object detection across distributed drone fleets without data centralization.
3D object detection models trained in one server plays an important role in autonomous driving, robotics manipulation, and augmented reality scenarios. However, most existing methods face severe privacy concern when deployed on a multi-robot perception network to explore large-scale 3D scene. Meanwhile, it is highly challenging to employ conventional federated learning methods on 3D object detection scenes, due to the 3D data heterogeneity and limited communication bandwidth. In this paper, we take the first attempt to propose a novel Federated 3D object detection framework (i.e., Fed3D), to enable distributed learning for 3D object detection with privacy preservation. Specifically, considering the irregular input 3D object in local robot and various category distribution between robots could cause local heterogeneity and global heterogeneity, respectively. We then propose a local-global class-aware loss for the 3D data heterogeneity issue, which could balance gradient back-propagation rate of different 3D categories from local and global aspects. To reduce communication cost on each round, we develop a federated 3D prompt module, which could only learn and communicate the prompts with few learnable parameters. To the end, several extensive experiments on federated 3D object detection show that our Fed3D model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with lower communication cost when providing the limited local training data.
Recent innovations in deep learning have significantly enhanced the diagnosis of medical images, although they are based on the use of centralized data storage that pose severe threats to patient privacy and medical data security. To address this issue, this research proposes a Federated Learning (FL) model that is coupled with an optimized YOLOv8 network to detect the kidney stones on a computed tomography (CT) image and at the same time, protect privacy of the patients. The suggested system can help various medical organizations to jointly train a common model without exchanging the information about the patients. This is to ensure that data protection laws like GDPR and HIPAA are adhered to. The residual feature fusion and DropBlock regularization among other architectural improvements are also included in YOLOv8 to enhance detection robustness and minimize overfitting. Experimental analysis carried out on a distributed CT dataset demonstrated that the federated YOLOv8 model has a mAP at 50 of 0.733 and is able to keep the data confidential. Moreover, its lean design facilitates fast edge deployment and real-time inference across a clinical setting. Altogether, these findings indicate that Federated Learning is a safe and efficient solution to AI-assisted diagnosis in contemporary healthcare when combined with the use of sophisticated object detection models.
Najiyya Younas, Omar Abdulkader, Yaser Ali Shah +3
Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery is challenging because high-altitude viewpoints produce severe scale variation, weak structural cues, and tight computational budgets. Existing lightweight detectors usually fuse multi-scale features after downsampling, where boundary and texture details have already been attenuated and heterogeneous feature streams may be spatially misaligned. To address these issues, we propose CollabOD, a collaborative detection framework that preserves structural details, aligns cross-path features before fusion, and keeps the detection head lightweight at inference time. CollabOD combines a Dual-Path Fusion Stem, a Dense Aggregation Block, a Bilateral Reweighting Module, and a Unified Detail-Aware Head to strengthen localization-oriented representation while limiting extra computation. On VisDrone, CollabOD obtains 52.4 AP50, 30.8 AP75, and 29.9 AP50:95 with 65.5 GFLOPs; on UAVDT it reaches 31.2 AP50 and 17.4 AP50:95; and on AI-TOD it reaches 45.4 AP50 and 20.0 AP50:95 at 137 FPS. The code is available at: https://github.com/Bai-Xuecheng/CollabOD.