Object Detection

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Object detection asks models to identify what objects are present and where they appear, usually by predicting labeled bounding boxes in images or video. Common approaches include fast one-stage CNN detectors such as YOLO, proposal-based Faster R-CNN, and end-to-end transformer detectors such as DETR; feature pyramids and attention help handle objects at different scales. Work also explores oriented and 3D detection, sensor fusion, open-vocabulary recognition, and learning with limited or changing labels, with COCO, VisDrone, DOTA, KITTI, and nuScenes among the benchmarks used. A central challenge is transferring strong benchmark results to small, occluded, or unfamiliar objects and real-world conditions while keeping models efficient and evaluations reliable despite incomplete annotations.

Latest papers

624 papers51 papers in the last four weeks, down 25% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

May 29, 2026

LFA: Layer Feature Attention for Run-Time Introspection of 2D Object Detectors in Automated Driving

Reliable object detection is critical for automated driving, yet even state-of-the-art detectors inevitably make errors that can compromise safety. Introspection methods that predict detector failures enable safer deployment by triggering fallback mechanisms or alerting human operators. However, existing approaches rely solely on last-layer features or hand-crafted statistics, discarding valuable information from earlier layers that capture different levels of visual abstraction. We propose Layer Feature Attention (LFA), a lightweight introspection method that learns to aggregate features from multiple backbone layers through an attention mechanism. Our key insight is that detection errors manifest differently across feature hierarchies: low-level layers capture fine-grained details essential for detecting small or occluded objects, while high-level layers encode semantic information for scene understanding. LFA learns layer importance weights end-to-end, enabling both improved error prediction and interpretable analysis of which feature levels are most indicative of detector failures. Extensive experiments on KITTI and BDD100K demonstrate that LFA achieves state-of-the-art introspection performance, outperforming single-layer baselines across multiple detector architectures.

Mert Keser, Alois Knoll

Aumovio SE, Germany† · Technical University of Munich, Germany†‡

Autonomous Driving Perception Object Detection

May 29, 2026

Detect in Any Scene: An Agentic Framework for Object Detection with Experience-Aware Reasoning

Object detection in real-world scenarios remains challenging due to diverse image degradations and heterogeneous object distributions, which significantly hinder the generalization of existing detectors. Conventional approaches, including scene-specific representation learning and end-to-end pipeline design, are inherently limited by their reliance on predefined conditions and lack adaptability to dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose DetAS, an agentic detection framework that formulates object detection as a dynamic decision process. Instead of relying on static pipelines, DetAS leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a central agent to adaptively compose detection workflows by selecting from a toolbox of restoration modules and specialized detectors. Specifically, DetAS consists of two key components: Self-Adaptive Image Restoration, which dynamically determines whether and how to enhance images for downstream detection, and Multi-Expertise Detection, which integrates multiple domain-specialized detectors and resolves their predictions through instance-level reasoning. To further improve decision quality under fine-grained conditions, we introduce Self-Evolving Experience Harvesting and extend the framework to DetAS-X, which accumulates node-level decision experience from a small set of annotated data and enables experience-aware reasoning during inference. This mechanism allows the system to progressively refine its decision policy and adapt to diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on six challenging benchmarks demonstrate that DetAS-X significantly outperforms existing MLLM-based detectors, achieving an average improvement of 28.36% in F1 score, with up to 37.01% gain on DarkFace. These results demonstrate the promise of agentic detection and establish a solid foundation for its application in complex and dynamic environments.

Wenlun Zhang, Jun Yin, Kentaro Yoshioka

Keio University · Tsinghua University

Object Detection

May 28, 2026

AI for Maritime Security: Comparative Evaluation of CNN and Vision Transformer Architectures for Maritime Object Detection

This study aims to enhance maritime security by using advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) techniques. For this purpose, it was designed and assessed intelligent object detection systems that can detect the presence of ships on the sea surface under different real-time environments. To achieve this goal, a maritime image dataset with 6,468 images was used, covering different weather conditions like cloudy, foggy, rainy, and sunny environments. Six deep learning architectures were evaluated, including a base Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, four transfer learning models (Xception, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetV2L), and a Vision Transformer (ViT) model. The models were compared using multiple performance indicators, including accuracy, Type I and Type II errors, model size, and video processing time. The results show that model performance varies depending on computational constraints and deployment conditions. While lightweight architectures are suitable for resource-limited devices, the ViT achieved the best overall performance, reaching 100% accuracy with the lowest error rates and the fastest video processing time. The findings highlight the potential of AI-driven computer vision systems for maritime surveillance, border protection, and autonomous navigation.

Ismet Gocer, Zakirul Bhuiayn, Shakeel Ahmad +1

Southampton Solent University School of Technology and Maritime Industries Southampton, United Kingdom

Vision Transformer Object Detection Real-Time Object Detection Convolutional Neural Networks

May 28, 2026

GiPL: Generative augmented iterative Pseudo-Labeling for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection

Vision-language foundation models have shown promising zero-shot generalization for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD). However, they face two critical challenges in fine-tuning: insufficient support set utilization due to sparse single-instance annotations, and severe overfitting under extremely limited target-domain samples. To address these issues, this paper proposes GiPL, an efficient two-branch training framework. In the first branch, we design an iterative pseudo-label self-training paradigm, which performs zero-shot inference on the support set to generate reliable pseudo-annotations, fuses them with ground-truth labels, and iteratively optimizes the model to fully exploit support set data. In the second branch, we introduce generative data augmentation pipeline using large vision-language models, which synthesizes domain-aligned, multi-object annotated images to enrich training samples and suppress overfitting. Extensive experiments on three challenging CD-FSOD datasets (RUOD, CARPK, CarDD) under 1/5/10-shot settings demonstrate that GiPL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant performance gains. Code is available at CDiscover.

Jiacong Liu, Shu Luo, Yikai Qin +3

Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Synthetic Data Augmentation Few-Shot Domain Adaptation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Few-Shot Object Detection Few-Shot Learning Pseudo-Labeling+1

May 27, 2026

Lightweight SAR Ship Detection via Contrastive Distillation

Deep convolutional and transformer-based detectors achieve strong performance for SAR ship detection but are often computationally prohibitive for real-time or onboard deployment. Lightweight models offer improved efficiency yet struggle to capture the complex structural relationships inherent in SAR backscatter. Most existing SAR knowledge-distillation approaches rely on feature or logit matching, which enforces localized activation similarity while neglecting the geometric relationships among object representations. We propose a Structured Unified Relational knowledGE distillation framework for SAR Ship detection (SURGE) that transfers relational geometry from a powerful teacher detector to a compact student detector using a contrastive InfoNCE objective in a shared projection embedding space. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first transformer-based SAR ship detector knowledge distillation framework in SAR domain. The framework is architecture-agnostic in the sense that it provides a common region-level distillation interface for two-stage, one-stage and transformer-based detectors without modifying their deployed architectures. Experiments on the SSDD and HRSID benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method yields substantial improvements for two-stage detectors, achieving up to 6.2 mAP and 8.0 AP75 gains over baseline student and even surpassing teacher performance

Surendar Devasundaram, Banafsheh Saber Latibari, Abhijit Mahalanobis

University of Arizona · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering · Tucson, Arizona, USA

Efficient Object Detection Relational Knowledge Distillation Object Detection Synthetic Aperture Radar Knowledge Distillation Ship Detection

May 27, 2026

LV-OSD: Language-Vision-Complementary Open-Set Object Detection

Object detection is an important task in computer vision, which aims to detect the objects of interest. through the given category list or query images. In this work, we propose a new problem of language-visual-complementary open-set object detection (LV-OSD), i.e., using the flexible text-based and/or image-based prompts to specify the desired object categories. This setting is more common and practical in real-world applications. For this purpose, we design a dual-branch detection framework, LVDor, which can simultaneously accept both text and image prompts. Specifically, we first build the Multi-modal Prompts (MPr) containing various text descriptions and image samples for each category. Subsequently, to bridge the semantic gap among the input image, text prompts, and image prompts, we design a Target-guided Prompt Dynamic Weighting (TPDW) module. Guided by the prior information of the target image, this module dynamically produces the text and image prompts that best align with the target semantics, achieving precise alignment and effectively reducing the discrepancy between the two modalities, thereby accommodating the LV-OSD setting. We also propose a simple Prompt Random Masking (PRM) mechanism during training to simulate the arbitrary combination of text and/or image prompts in testing. Extensive experimental results verify our problem formulation's reasonability and our method's effectiveness. Prompts and code will be released publicly.

Yupeng Zhang, Ruize Han, Wei Feng +2

College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300350, China · Faculty of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Shenzhen 518107, Guangdong, China

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Object Detection Vision-Language Alignment Visual Prompt Learning Multimodal Object Detection

May 27, 2026

Intra-YOLO: A Small Object Detection Model for Caries and Molar-Incisor Hypomineralization in Intraoral Photography Based on Transfer Learning with Reinforcement Learning

This study developed a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for detecting caries and molar-incisor hypomineralization (MIH) in intraoral photographs. These lesions share similar appearances, making clinical differentiation challenging, especially given their small size and variability in imaging conditions.

Po-Lun Chwang, Po-Yu Chang, Wen-Liang Lin +3

Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan · Taipei Medical University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan · Wan Fang Hospital, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan

Medical Image Analysis Small Object Detection Object Detection Dental Imaging

May 26, 2026

LocateAnything: Fast and High-Quality Vision-Language Grounding with Parallel Box Decoding

Vision-language models (VLMs) commonly formulate visual grounding and detection as a coordinate-token generation problem, serializing each 2D box into multiple 1D tokens that are learned and decoded largely independently. This token-by-token decoding mismatches the coupled structure of box geometry and creates a practical inference bottleneck due to strictly sequential generation. We introduce LocateAnything, a unified generative grounding and detection framework based on Parallel Box Decoding (PBD). By decoding geometric elements such as bounding boxes and points as atomic units in a single step, LocateAnything preserves intra-box geometric coherence and unlocks substantial parallelism. We show that PBD improves both decoding throughput and localization accuracy. We further develop a scalable data engine and curate LocateAnything-Data, a large-scale dataset with more than 138 million training samples, substantially increasing data diversity for high-precision localization. Extensive evaluations show that LocateAnything advances the speed-accuracy frontier, achieving significantly higher decoding throughput while improving high-IoU localization quality across diverse benchmarks. The results highlight the complementary benefits of Parallel Box Decoding and large-scale training data in enabling efficient and precise unified visual grounding and detection.

Shihao Wang, Shilong Liu, Yuanguo Kuang +10

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · NVIDIA · Princeton University +2

Efficient VLM Inference Vision-Language Grounding Parallel Decoding Object Detection Visual Grounding

May 26, 2026

Semantic Robustness Probing via Inpainting: An Interactive Tool for Safety-Critical Object Detection

Testing object detectors in safety-critical domains requires semantically meaningful probes beyond pixel-level corruptions. We present SemProbe, a tool for semantic robustness probing: users upload deployment images, create masks manually or automatically, select operational design domain-derived factors (or custom prompts), and run diffusion-based controlled inpainting. The system supports batch jobs, parallel seed/workflow variations, and configurable generation parameters. After each output, model inference runs automatically and displays annotated before/after comparisons with performance deltas. All probes are logged as structured artifacts, enabling traceable robustness evidence aligned with safety evaluation workflows. We demonstrate SemProbe on hand detection for dimension saws, targeting factors from insurance-oriented test criteria.

Nico Steckhan, Krutarth Prajapati, Weija Shao +1

Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA), Germany

Object Detection AI Safety

May 26, 2026

YOLO26-RipeLoc Lite: A lightweight architecture for tomato ripeness detection and picking point localization in greenhouse robotic harvesting

In greenhouse tomato production, automated harvesting requires accurate detection of ripe tomatoes, ripeness classification, and precise picking-point localization for robotic end-effectors. This paper proposes YOLO26-RipeLoc Lite, a lightweight deep learning architecture based on YOLO26 for simultaneous detection, ripeness classification, and center-point localization of greenhouse tomatoes. The model introduces three modifications: (1) a Lightweight Feature Pyramid Network (LFPN) with depthwise separable convolutions for efficient multi-scale fusion, (2) a Ripeness-Aware Attention Module (RAAM) with dual pooling and a learnable ripeness bias vector for enhanced color-texture discrimination, and (3) a Compact Detection Head (CDH) with shared convolutions and an integrated center-point regression branch for direct grasp planning. The model is evaluated on a custom dataset of 1,500 images with 6,227 instances (3,566 ripe, 2,661 unripe) from the SILAL greenhouse, Abu Dhabi, UAE. YOLO26-RipeLoc Lite achieves [email protected] of 92.9% (95.2% ripe, 90.6% unripe) with the highest precision (95.2%) among all evaluated architectures using only 2.38M parameters. Post-training BatchNorm pruning at 30% reduces parameters to ~1.8M with negligible accuracy loss. Ablation studies confirm that greenhouse-aware HSV augmentation provides the largest improvement (+2.02 pp mAP@50), backbone freezing achieves peak precision (93.8%), and 3-phase progressive unfreezing yields the best localization quality (mAP@50:95 of 64.6%). Comparisons with YOLOv8n/s, YOLO11n/s, YOLO12n/s, and YOLO26s confirm superior accuracy-efficiency: 2.9 pp higher precision than YOLO12n with 7.0% fewer parameters and integrated center-point localization for robotic end-effector guidance.

Rajmeet Singh, Manveen Kaur, Shahpour Alirezaee +1

Department of Mechanical Engineering Khalifa University Abu Dhabi, UAE · Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Windsor Windsor, Canada

Agricultural Image Analysis Robotic Grasping Object Detection Agricultural Robotics

May 26, 2026

Small Object Detection in Industrial Recycling: A New Dataset and YOLO Performance Evaluation

In this paper, we address the problem of detecting small, dense, and overlapping objects, a major challenge in computer vision. Our focus is on reviewing proposed methods based on deep learning supervised approaches. We provide a detailed comparison of these systems on a new dataset of more than 10k images and 120k instances, highlighting their performance, accuracy, and computational efficiency in the industrial recycling process use case. Through this comparative analysis, we identify the most reliable systems currently available and the specific challenges they are designed to tackle. Furthermore, we explore the benefits of data augmentation and synthetic images. Based on our analysis, we also propose potential future directions and innovative solutions that could enhance the effectiveness of small, dense and overlapped object detection systems. The scope of our investigations encompasses object detection, length measurement, and anomaly detection within the context of the recycling process. The anomaly detection strategy is robust against variations in image resolution and zoom levels, ensuring reliable performance in industrial applications. The repository of the proposed dataset, methods and evaluation codes can be found at: https://github.com/o-messai/SDOOD

Oussama Messai, Abbass Zein-Eddine, Abdelouahid Bentamou +4

Mines Saint-Etienne, CNRS, UMR 5307 LGF, F-42023 Saint-Etienne, France · Siléane Group, 12 Rue Louis Soulier, 42000 Saint-Etienne, France · Orano Group, Orano Recyclage La Hague – 50444 La Hague Cedex, France

Small Object Detection Object Detection

May 25, 2026

LRDDv3: High-Resolution Long-Range Drone Detection Dataset with Range Information and Thermal Data

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have quickly become common in various airspaces, representing a wide range of applications from recreation flying to commercial photography and package delivery. With the increasing prevalence of UAVs, it becomes critical that both manned and unmanned aircraft can detect UAVs and other flying objects from long range to effectively track movement and ensure safe operation in shared spaces. While several datasets have been introduced for drone detection, the need for expanded high-quality data persists, especially in the area of high-resolution long-range drone data. To address this, we introduce a high-resolution dataset of 102,532 long-range RGB images of drones, sampled at 5 FPS from 128 distinct video clips taken mid flight during 17 different data collection days spread over 8 months to ensure a wide variety of lighting scenarios, flight locations, and background elements. The dataset boasts comprehensive drone range information across the dataset, as well as 29,630 IR images, all paired with RGB counterparts from the base dataset. As one of the first drone detection datasets to leverage 4K image resolution and paired 640x512 IR images, our work represents a significant advancement to enable the detection of drones at long range. For access to the complete dataset, please visit https://research.coe.drexel.edu/ece/imaple/lrddv3/

Knut Peterson, Zaid Mayers, Azmain Yousuf +5

iMaPLe Research Lab, Drexel University · University of Maine

Object Detection Aerial Object Detection

May 25, 2026

SAM3-Assisted Training of Lightweight YOLO Models for Precision Pig Farming

Deep learning-based object detection has revolutionized Precision Livestock Farming (PLF), yet a critical barrier remains: high-performance Foundation Models (such as SAM 3) are too computationally intensive for edge deployment, while lightweight models (like YOLO) require prohibitive manual annotation efforts. This work proposes a fully automated knowledge distillation pipeline that leverages the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) to generate zero-shot pseudo-labels for training efficient YOLOv8 detectors. By treating SAM 3 as an offline auto-annotator, we eliminate the manual labeling bottleneck, producing models capable of real-time inference on resource-constrained hardware. We systematically evaluate this approach on the PigLife dataset, comparing SAM 3-supervised models against human-annotated baselines. Results demonstrate that a SAM 3-trained YOLOv8m achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 79.4% without human intervention, while reducing inference latency by approximately 200

\times

compared to the teacher model. Furthermore, stratified analysis reveals that in low-occlusion scenarios, the automated pipeline achieves detection rates comparable to human benchmarks (

AP_{50} > 99\%

). These findings indicate that foundation models can serve as effective, zero-annotation-cost supervisors, enabling scalable edge computing solutions for smart agriculture.

Marcos Vinicius Mendes Faria, Thiago Borges Pereira, Isabella C. F. S. Condotta +2

Coordenadoria de Inform´atica, Instituto Federal do Esp´ırito Santo (IFES), Serra, ES · Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Edge Inference Pseudo-Labeling Object Detection Real-Time Object Detection Knowledge Distillation Precision Livestock Farming

May 24, 2026

BED-SAM2: Boundary-Enhanced-Depth SAM2 via Monocular Geometric Priors

Building upon the SAM2 vision foundation model for downstream segmentation, this study introduces Boundary Enhanced Depth (BED)-SAM2. The SAM2 Hiera encoder architecture is modified to directly encode monocular depth information from RGB images, thereby providing geometric cues that enhance object boundary delineation and facilitate the extraction of camouflaged object shapes. BED-SAM2 demonstrates competitive state-of-the-art performance across multiple salient and camouflaged object detection tasks with as few as five training epochs.

Tyler Rust, Dara McNally, Kyle O'Donnell +2

University of Delaware · University of South Florida · DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory

Image Segmentation Salient Object Detection Object Detection Segment Anything Models Semantic Segmentation Camouflaged Object Detection

May 24, 2026

YOLO26 vs. YOLOv8: A Comprehensive Architectural Benchmark of Next-Generation Real-Time Object Detection Models

This paper presents a rigorous empirical evaluation of Ultralytics YOLO26 against the YOLOv8 baseline, offering an independent real-world stress test of NMS-free architectures on non-COCO distributions. Engineered for edge deployment, YOLO26 introduces native end-to-end one-to-one label assignment, the removal of Distribution Focal Loss (DFL), and a spectral-constrained CSP-Muon backbone. We conducted a comprehensive, cross-scale comparative analysis across five model capacities, using the general object detection (Pascal VOC) and dense aerial small-object detection (VisDrone) datasets. Models are evaluated across accuracy (mAP_50 and mAP_50:95), model complexity, and hardware-specific CPU/GPU latency. Our findings revealed that while YOLO26 achieves a lower computational footprint and superior accuracy on Pascal VOC, with YOLO26-x reaching 0.635 mAP_50:95, this advantage narrows in dense aerial environments. On VisDrone, where over 75% of objects are under 2,000 pixels, both architectures struggle significantly, yielding a minimal performance gap (0.214 mAP_50:95 for YOLOv8-x vs. 0.224 mAP_50:95 for YOLO26-x). Crucially, hardware benchmarking demonstrates that YOLOv8 maintains a consistent edge in GPU inference latency across identical scales (e.g., 6.92 ms for YOLOv8-s vs. 8.38 ms for YOLO26-s), showing that NMS-free design does not inherently guarantee superiority in universal deployment. This work maps the operational boundaries of NMS-free frameworks to guide architecture selection based on dataset density, object scale, and hardware constraints.

Chidera G. Oguine, Kanyifeechukwu J. Oguine, Obiozor M. Oguine +1

University of Abuja, Nigeria · Vanderbilt University, USA · University of Notre Dame, USA

Edge Inference Object Detection Real-Time Object Detection

May 23, 2026

From Full Boards to Tiny Defects: Scale-Aware Tile Inference with Topology-Aware Merging for High-Resolution PCB Defect Detection

High-resolution printed circuit board (PCB) inspection suffers from resolution collapse when full-board images are resized to standard detector inputs: micro-scale defects shrink to a few pixels and are missed. Tile-based inference preserves local detail but introduces boundary artefacts at tile edges, causing split detections and false negatives. We present a systematic comparison of five inference strategies evaluated on two high-resolution PCB defect datasets, PCB-Defect (230 images, 1704 annotations) and HRIPCB (693 images, 2 953 annotations), spanning six defect classes. We show that training-inference scale consistency is critical: a detector trained on full images collapses to mAP@50 = 0.01 under tile inference, while the same architecture trained on 640*640 tile crops achieves 0.72 and 0.94 on the two datasets respectively. We further exploited Topology-Aware Tile Merging (TA-TM), a training-free post-processing method that builds a tile-adjacency graph and adjusts boundary-sensitive detection scores using neighbour-tile agreement before global NMS. Across both datasets, adding 128 px tile overlap raises boundary-zone recall from ~26-63% to ~70-100%, TA-TM achieves the best mAP@50 on both benchmarks, and tile inference recovers 46-100% of small defects missed entirely by full-image methods. Results are consistent across datasets, confirming the generalizability of the proposed strategy. TA-TM requires no retraining and is architecture-agnostic, making it directly applicable to existing PCB inspection pipelines.

Mohammad Alijanpour Shalmani, Alale Rezvani Boroujeni, Ali Amini +1

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 4000 Central Florida Blvd., Orlando, FL 32816 · Dept. of Marketing, 4000 Central Florida Blvd., Orlando, FL 32816 · Centre of Real Time Computer Systems, Faculty of Informatics, Kaunas University of Technology, K. Donelaičio g. 73, Kaunas, Lithuania, 44249

Small Object Detection Industrial Inspection Object Detection

May 23, 2026

Calibrating Probabilistic Object Detectors with Annotator Disagreement

High degrees of disagreement among annotators can exist for ambiguous objects, e.g. in medical images, underscoring the challenges of establishing ground truth annotations in object detection tasks. Despite this, all existing object detectors implicitly require access to ground truth annotations for either training or evaluation. The fundamental questions we target are: How can we learn an object detector with multiple annotators' annotations but without objective ground truth annotations due to object ambiguity, and how can we enable the learned detector to express meaningful model predictive uncertainties in detecting ambiguous objects? To answer these questions, we present an interpretable approach to calibrate probabilistic object detectors, where the calibration goal is to align the class confidence and bounding box variance estimates to the annotators' annotation distribution. We introduce an efficient yet effective framework to calibrate probabilistic object detectors by designing four evaluation metrics to measure calibration errors regarding classification and localization, and proposing a train-time calibration and post-hoc calibrator, all without the need to access any ground truth. This framework is generalizable to many existing probabilistic object detectors, such as the YOLO families and two-stage detectors. Empirical results with real-world and synthetic datasets of medical and natural images demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework with three popular object detectors.

Zhi Qin Tan, Owen Addison, Yunpeng Li

Faculty of Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

Annotator Disagreement Object Detection Uncertainty Calibration

May 23, 2026

AdaFuse-Det: Adaptive Cross-Modal Fusion of Event Cameras for Robust Object Detection in Low-Light RGB Imagery

Detecting objects reliably under extreme low-light conditions is an open problem in computer vision, with practical urgency in applications ranging from nighttime surveillance to search-and-rescue robotics. Conventional RGB cameras degrade sharply at low photon flux, while event cameras which record asynchronous per-pixel brightness changes at microsecond resolution and high dynamic range provide complementary structural cues that are largely illumination-invariant. We present AdaFuse-Det, a dual-stream framework that fuses CLAHE-enhanced RGB frames with voxelized event tensors through an Adaptive Cross-Modal Fusion (ACMF) module grounded in minimum-variance linear estimation theory. We formally show that the learned attention map asymptotically recovers the Gauss-Markov optimal fusion weights, and establish event conservation and temporal resolution bounds for the voxelization stage. On the LLE-VOS benchmark, AdaFuse-Det achieves a Recall of

65.54\%

, Precision of

53.85\%

, and F1-Score of

59.12\%

under severe illumination degradation, outperforming single-modality detectors in recall by a margin that reflects the theoretically predicted illumination-adaptation behavior.

Raju Imandi, Chethana B, Bharatesh Chakravarthi +3

SRM University AP, India · Aptiv, Bengaluru, India · Arizona State University, USA +2

Event-Based Object Detection Object Detection Multimodal Fusion Multimodal Sensor Fusion RGB-Event Sensor Fusion

May 23, 2026

Lake Detection and Water Quality Estimation in Sentinel-2 Data

With climate change and increasing human pressure on natural landscapes, inland water resources are becoming progressively scarcer, more vulnerable, and more difficult to manage sustainably. Reliable and automated methods for detecting, monitoring, and assessing surface water bodies are therefore of growing scientific and practical importance. In this paper, we investigate and compare three distinct machine learning architectures for water body identification and monitoring. Their performance is evaluated through quantitative metrics and real-world examples. Furthermore, a direct comparison with classical NDWI thresholding is conducted on a representative test image to highlight differences between data-driven and index-based approaches. This analysis allows us to identify the best-performing model in terms of accuracy, robustness, and practical applicability. Beyond detection, a major challenge for meaningful water quality assessment lies in the consistent and interpretable visualization of spectral water indices. Standard color mapping techniques are often inadequate or potentially misleading for environmental applications. To address this gap, we propose a suite of meaningful color schemes adapted for water quality indices, facilitating clearer interpretation, comparison, and decision-making for human users.

Iulia Pleşu, Alexandra Băicoianu, Ioana Cristina Plajer

Transilvania University of Braşov, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Romania

Scientific Visualization Remote Sensing Object Detection

May 23, 2026

FDDet: Achieving Data-Efficient Food Defect Detection Under Real-World Scenarios

Food defect detection is critical for automated quality control, yet existing studies lack unified benchmarks and suffer from data scarcity. We introduce FDD-48, a comprehensive dataset with fine-grained annotations across 13 food types and 48 defect categories under diverse real-world conditions. To improve detection with limited labeled data, we propose FDDet, a semi-supervised framework featuring two key components: (1) BBoxMixUp, a data augmentation technique that mixes same-category defect regions to reduce spurious feature associations, and (2) CGPC (Consistency-Guided Pseudo-Label Calibration), which filters pseudo-labels based on intra-sample consistency. Experiments show FDDet significantly outperforms mainstream detectors on FDD-48, demonstrating its effectiveness for food defect detection under data-limited scenarios.

Ruihao Xu, Yong Liu, Yansong Tang

Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University

Object Detection Semi-Supervised Learning Data-Efficient Learning Anomaly Detection

May 23, 2026

ViViD-5K: Vineyard vision dataset for field-based berry detection and segmentation and grape cluster closure estimation

Cluster closure, defined as the progressive filling of gaps between the berries in a grape bunch, is a key trait in vineyard management, impacting disease risk. However, traditional visual scoring methods are labor-intensive, subjective, and lack temporal resolution. Existing datasets rarely support fine-grained berry-level analysis, limiting the development of robust deep learning models. In this work, we present ViViD-5k, a large-scale in-field Vineyard Vision Dataset containing 5,000 images with dense annotations, including over 648,000 berry centroids and cluster segmentation masks spanning 13 grape varieties. Building on this dataset, we introduce GrapeSAM, a two-stage visual pipeline that combines point-based berry localization with prompt-based segmentation using Segment Anything, followed by transformer-based cluster segmentation. The pipeline enables automated, in-field estimation of cluster closure with minimal supervision. Quantitative results demonstrate strong segmentation and counting accuracy across diverse conditions, while visualizations confirm robustness on both in-domain and out-of-domain samples. This work provides a scalable and objective alternative to manual compactness scoring and supports high-throughput grape phenotyping with enhanced spatial detail.

Xiangzhi Tong, Chengrui Zhang, Mac Flaherty +5

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, NY, USA. · Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK. · Horticulture Section, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. +1

Agricultural Image Analysis Plant Phenotyping Instance Segmentation Object Detection

May 22, 2026

Hoeffding Concept Bottleneck Models with Applications to Overhead Images

Explainability of deep learning algorithms is critical for computer-vision applications with high-stakes decisions. Concept bottleneck models (CBM) have recently shown promising performance to provide explainable and accurate predictions for classification problems, based on a bottleneck of high-level concepts. Existing CBM methods rely on a linear aggregation of the concept scores to compute predictions. However, a large number of concepts is often used in this linear approach, which undermines explainability and favors information leakage. In general, the underlying relation between concepts and output logits is not linear. Therefore, we introduce Hoeffding Concept Bottleneck Models (HCBM), which build on the Hoeffding functional decomposition of gradient-boosted trees to provide non-linear and sparse aggregations of concept scores, and generate compact predictions using prime implicants. HCBM have strong theoretical properties of robustness to interconcept leakage, and outperform sparse linear CBM in practice, as shown in extensive experiments. Beyond classification, HCBM can be adapted to object detection, and we focus on a challenging case with overhead images to show the high performance of HCBM in these settings.

Clément Bénard, Manon Arfib, Christophe Labreuche +1

Thales cortAIx-Labs, Palaiseau, France · Université Paris-Saclay, CentraleSupélec, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

Concept Bottleneck Models Explainable Image Classification Object Detection

May 22, 2026

DualMem: Bypassing the Objectness Bottleneck for Calibrated Unknown-Stream Filtering in Open-World Object Detection

Open-world object detection (OWOD) requires detectors to localize known classes while identifying unknown objects for future incremental learning. We find that the unknown prediction streams of strong OWOD detectors are heavily polluted: on M-OWODB, across PROB, OW-DETR, and HypOW, future-task positive unknowns make up less than 10% of unknown predictions, whereas background false positives account for 46-71%. We show that this is not a missing-information problem, but an information bottleneck at the objectness head. On PROB Task 1, a linear probe on the 256-D decoder query achieves an AUROC of 0.908 for positive-versus-negative unknown discrimination, but the final one-dimensional objectness scalar drops to 0.642. A frozen SigLIP feature, without access to the detector, independently recovers much of this proposal-level separability at the filtering stage (AUROC = 0.871). Motivated by this finding, we propose DualMem, a calibrated post-hoc filter that assumes a small image-disjoint annotated calibration split of held-out future-task objects and performs a non-parametric likelihood ratio test in frozen SigLIP feature space. DualMem uses a k-nearest-neighbor positive memory to protect future-task objects and a negative memory to suppress background-like proposals. Its decision threshold is chosen by Neyman-Pearson calibration, giving users an explicit trade-off between false-unknown suppression and novel recall. Across PROB, OW-DETR, and HypOW on M-OWODB Task 1, DualMem reduces background-type false unknown proposals per image by 44.9%-66.3%, with a mean reduction of 56.6%. On PROB Task 1, it more than doubles the reduction achieved by a natural K-means prototype baseline, while leaving known-class mAP unchanged because known detections bypass the filter.

Yingjun Xiao, Xi Chen, Gang Fang +1

a · School of Artificial Intelligence, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China · b +3

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Open-Set Recognition Likelihood Ratio Testing Object Detection

May 22, 2026

MDS-DETR: DETR with Masked Duplicate Suppressor

The DEtection TRansformer (DETR) is a powerful end-to-end object detector, yet its one-to-one matching strategy suffers from slow convergence and low recall. A common approach to address this issue is to use one-to-many label assignment to provide more positive samples. However, existing methods that use one-to-many matching as an auxiliary objective lead to increased training costs, with their auxiliary decoders discarded during inference. To address this limitation, we propose MDS-DETR, which leverages both one-to-one and one-to-many supervision within a single decoder. Specifically, we introduce a Masked Duplicate Suppressor (MDS) that injects asymmetry into self-attention via confidence-based causal masking. MDS filters out the duplicates generated by the one-to-many supervised layer, enables explainable, duplicate-free predictions in a fully end-to-end framework. MDS-DETR outperforms existing one-to-many DETR variants such as MS-DETR, MR.DETR and Relation-DETR, without relying on any additional queries or auxiliary decoders. Under a 12-epoch training schedule on MS COCO with a ResNet-50 backbone, MDS-DETR achieves a +2.8 mAP improvement over Deformable-DETR with only a 5% increase in training time, and outperforms the state-of-the-art MR.DETR by +0.3 mAP while being even 20% faster in training. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/DChoLee/MDS-DETR.

Chanho Lee, Seunghee Koh, Yunho Jeon +1

Samsung Research, Seoul 06765, South Korea · Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 34141, South Korea · Department of Artificial Intelligence Software, Hanbat National University, Daejeon 34158, South Korea

Detection Transformer Object Detection

May 22, 2026

DefocusTrackerAI -- A Generalized Framework for the Automatic Detection of Defocused Particle Images

The present work introduces DefocusTrackerAI, a generalized deep-learning framework for the automatic detection and position estimation of defocused particle images from any kind of optical configuration without compromising uncertainty and recall, intended as a follow-up of the open-source project DefocusTracker. We selected the deep neural network architecture from the direct comparison of two well-known object detection models, Faster R-CNN and YOLOv9, trained on a diverse and feature-rich synthetic image set containing astigmatic and non-astigmatic defocused particle images of varying diameters. The model evaluation on synthetic data showed that, first, YOLOv9 outperforms Faster R-CNN, achieving higher recall and lower uncertainty, particularly at high particle image densities; and second, that YOLOv9 provides enhanced spatial resolution, with uncertainty values between 0.1 and 0.4 pixels for particle image densities N_s up to 0.5, outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms. We demonstrated that our models are able to detect astigmatic and non-astigmatic defocused particle images in multiple optical setups with varying lighting conditions. In addition, we successfully applied our models on real DPT experiments, including fluorescence and shadowgraph data, showing that they can be used beyond conventional DPT applications, including the tracking of sprays and droplets. A pre-trained, ready-to-use version of DefocusTrackerAI based on YOLOv9 is available at https://gitlab.com/goncalo.coutinho/defocustrackerAI-main/-/tree/7e0f11f649ebad50e20dca5b9545f26ca303ebe0 and can be used for automatic detection of defocused particle images of any kind with high accuracy. In combination with a suitable calibration approach for the depth position, it can be used as an effective first step for three-dimensional defocusing particle tracking.

Gonçalo Coutinho, Ana S. Moita, António L. N. Moreira +1

IN+ Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, Instituto Superior T´ecnico, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal · CINAMIL - Military Academy Research Center, Militart Academy, Portugal · IN+ Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, Instituto Superior T´ecnico, University of Lisbon, Lisbon,Portugal +1

Object Detection

May 21, 2026

Decoupling Ego-Motion from Target Dynamics via Dual-Interval Motion Cues for UAV Detection

Object detection from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is challenged by severe ego-motion, camera jitter, and large scale variations. While modern detectors perform well on static images, their direct application to UAV video often fails, particularly for small objects in dynamic scenes. Existing motion-based methods either rely on computationally expensive optical flow or use single-interval differencing, which is sensitive to jitter and limited in capturing diverse motion patterns. We propose a vision-only motion-guided detection framework that decouples target motion from camera-induced disturbances. A homography-based Global Motion Compensation (GMC) first aligns adjacent frames. We then introduce a Dual-Interval Motion Extraction strategy that captures both short-term and long-term motion cues. To integrate these cues, a lightweight Motion-Guided Attention (MGA) module enhances feature representations within a Feature Pyramid Network. Experiments on the VisDrone-VID dataset demonstrate consistent improvements over a strong YOLOv8 baseline under severe ego-motion. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of the dual-interval design and the proposed motion-guided attention mechanism.

Liuyang Wang, Feitian Zhang

Robotics and Control Laboratory, Department of Robotics, School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, and the State Key Laboratory of Turbulence and Complex Systems, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China · Great Bay University, Guangdong 523808, China

Video Object Detection Object Detection Aerial Object Detection UAV Detection

May 21, 2026

Making the Discrete Continuous: Synthetic RAW Augmentations for Fine-Grained Evaluation of Person Detection Performance in Low Light

Real-world deployment of AI vision models is both fueled and limited by the data available for training and testing. Real datasets are sparse and uneven: long-tailed or unbalanced distributions hinder generalization, and the low number of samples in low density regions makes it hard to run evaluations. Synthetic data can fill these gaps, providing us with a way to sample the input space more continuously and improve data coverage for benchmarks. Focusing on the autonomous driving safety-critical case of pedestrian detection in the dark, we show how synthetic low-light samples can be used to better characterize the performance of a state-of-the-art object detection model as a function of the scene illumination. We use a synthetic RAW image augmentation technique to generate low-light samples that match the noise model of the camera sensor. Performance metrics on real and synthetic low-light data are similar, indicating that the AI model finds it hard to distinguish between them.

Valeria Pais, Malena Mendilaharzu, Daniele Faccio +3

University of Glasgow · Chapel Ln, Glasgow G11 6EW, UK · Dotphoton +2

Synthetic Data Augmentation Autonomous Driving Perception Object Detection Synthetic Data Evaluation

May 21, 2026

Detection of Virus and Small Cell Patches in Foci Images Using Switchable Convolution and Feature Pyramid Networks

Accurate detection and counting of virus patches in focus-forming unit (FFU) images, also known as foci images, are important for quantifying viral infection and analyzing cellular structures. This task is challenging because biomedical targets often vary substantially in size, density, contrast, and shape. In this paper, we propose an enhanced YOLOv2-based detector that integrates a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) to improve multi-scale feature representation. We also incorporate a switchable atrous convolution mechanism to adapt the receptive field for fine-grained targets in dense microscopy images. The proposed method is evaluated on biomedical foci image datasets for virus patch and small cell patch detection. For small cell patch detection, the model achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 40.5% at a 25% Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold. For FFU virus patch detection, the model achieves an mAP of 68%. These results indicate that combining FPN-based feature fusion with switchable convolution improves the suitability of YOLOv2 for specialized biomedical object detection tasks

Amrita Singh, Snehasis Mukherjee

Small Object Detection Object Detection Convolutional Neural Networks Microscopy Image Analysis

May 21, 2026

Impact of Atmospheric Turbulence and Pointing Error on Earth Observation

Earth Observation (EO) imagery is often degraded by atmospheric turbulence and pointing jitter; yet, these effects are rarely considered in datasets used to train AI-based detection models. Based on prior work, this paper presents an enhanced image simulator that enables the incorporation of vertical-path atmospheric turbulence and satellite pointing jitter, arising from platform and sensor vibrations, to generate physically realistic distorted images. As a case study, vessel detection is evaluated using YOLOv8 and RetinaNet on images generated by the proposed simulator under different levels of turbulence and pointing errors. Results show that YOLOv8 recall decreases from 91% under ideal conditions to 60% in the presence of weak turbulence, and falls below 40% under strong turbulence or jitter. In contrast, RetinaNet demonstrates greater robustness, maintaining approximately 75% recall across degraded conditions. These results highlight the importance of incorporating realistic physical degradations into EO training datasets to ensure reliable performance of AI-based models in operational environments, as demonstrated in maritime surveillance applications.

Celia Sánchez-de-Miguel, Antonio M. Mercado-Martínez, Beatriz Soret +2

TELMA, University of Malaga Malaga, Spain

Image Corruption Robustness Remote Sensing Ship Detection Object Detection

May 20, 2026

SAM-Sode: Towards Faithful Explanations for Tiny Bacteria Detection

Interpretability in object detection provides crucial confidence support for clinical auxiliary diagnosis. However, in tiny bacteria detection, traditional explanation methods often suffer from blurred foreground boundaries and diffuse feature attribution due to the extreme sparsity of target morphological features and severe interference from complex backgrounds. Such limitations hinder the provision of logically coherent morphological evidence. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel eXplainable AI (XAI) framework, SAM-Sode. The framework innovatively transforms initial feature attribution maps into geometry-aware prompts, leveraging the prior knowledge of the foundation model (SAM3) to achieve spatial refinement and morphological reconstruction of the explanatory mappings. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-constraint mechanism based on physical significance and geometric alignment to perform instance-level denoising, generating coherent explanations that better align with human expert intuition. Experimental results on our self-constructed bacteria dataset with complex circuit backgrounds (containing 2,524 images) and other public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method effectively suppresses background redundancy and significantly enhances the decision-making transparency of tiny object detection.

Wanying Tan, Shuo Yan, Dazhi Huang +7

Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China · The Second Affiliated Hospital, Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou,2026 China +2

Explainable Artificial Intelligence Small Object Detection Explainable Object Detection Object Detection