Drone
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See Silhouettes in Motion with Neuromorphic Vision
2026-05-18 07:37:50Pei Zhang, Shijie Lin, Zhou Ge, Jinpeng Chen, Wei PuAbstract
Quasi-bimodal objects, such as text, road signs, and barcodes, play a basic yet vital role in daily visual communication. By boiling these down to clear silhouettes, binarization uses a minimal language to convey essential vision cues for maximum downstream efficiency. The catch is that frame-based imaging often struggles on mobile platforms like drones, self-driving cars, and underwater vehicles. In these dynamic scenes, rapid motion and harsh lighting can make it blind, causing severe motion blur and erasing crucial details. To overcome the limits, neuromorphic vision via event cameras, featuring microsecond-level temporal resolution and high dynamic range, steps in as a natural solution. Building upon this event-driven sensing paradigm, we introduce a simple yet effective dual-modal approach that harnesses the synergy between frames and events to achieve real-time, high-frame-rate binarization on CPU-only devices. Extensive evaluations present that it earns competitive performance against leading techniques in reducing motion blur, while delivering impressive improvements under challenging illumination. Besides, our asynchronous workflow bypasses event scarcity that breaks traditional time-binning reconstruction, maintaining clear target shapes even at extreme kilohertz frame rates. Its binary results further serve as reliable representations that facilitate a range of downstream tasks. This work paves the way towards lightweight perception and interaction in embodied intelligence on resource-constrained edge platforms.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17984
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CosFly-Track: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Dataset for UAV Visual Tracking via Multi-Constraint Trajectory Optimization
2026-05-18 02:49:58Xiangyue Wang, Hanxuan Chen, Songsheng Cheng, Ruilong Ren, Jie Zheng, Shuai Yuan, Tianle Zeng, Hanzhong Guo, Kangli Wang, Ji PeiAbstract
Recent aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) datasets have grown rapidly, but they primarily address goal-oriented navigation to static destinations, leaving UAV visual tracking -- continuously following a moving target while maintaining visibility -- largely without dedicated training data. We introduce CosFlyTrack, a large-scale multi-modal dataset and scalable generation pipeline for UAV visual tracking in urban environments. The dataset provides approximately 12,000 expert and perturbed UAV trajectories generated from 6,000 pedestrian paths, comprising 2.4 million timesteps (approximately 334 hours) with seven aligned data channels: RGB, metric depth, semantic segmentation, six-degree-of-freedom drone pose, target state with visibility flag, bilingual (Chinese-English) instructions, and trajectory-pair metadata. To generate high-quality expert trajectories, we develop MuCO, a multi-constraint optimizer that plans directly in continuous three-dimensional space with BVH-accelerated collision and visibility queries, jointly enforcing target visibility, viewpoint quality, collision avoidance, smoothness, and kinematic feasibility, avoiding the discretization artifacts and post-hoc smoothing of grid-based planners. Fine-tuning experiments on seven vision-language models show that CosFlyTrack improves tracking performance to 78.3 to 95.6 percent SR@1 meter, a 53 to 69 percentage point gain over zero-shot baselines, supporting the dataset as a training resource for dynamic target-following agents. The dataset is publicly available at this https URL evaluation scripts and pre-trained checkpoints are hosted at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17776
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Brain-inspired spike-timing plasticity for reliable label-efficient event-camera vision
2026-05-17 22:56:16Mohamad Yazan Sadoun, Sarah Sharif, Yaser Mike BanadAbstract
Deploying event-camera object detectors is constrained by per-frame labeling requirements and GPU compute demands. This work introduces three local spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) modules, including sequence, candidate, and tube-reliability modules, that operate on a single CPU thread without GPU support. On the FRED drone benchmark, the proposed framework spans three label-efficient supervision tiers. A strict zero-label detector achieves 53.8% mAP@30, approximately 26 train-derived bits achieve 76.9% mAP@30, and an STDP candidate-reliability gate achieves 78.60 +/- 0.42% mAP@30. Under acquisition-order drift, the cohort gate outperforms streaming k-means by 2.03 +/- 0.58 percentage points across 20 of 20 positive trials, while a no-drift control falsifies the effect. STDP reduces single-model variance by 6.6 times, and one trained gate matches a 44-seed ensemble bound. The gate transfers to Intel Lava with 89% top-2 agreement. On the EVUAV benchmark, a tube-level STDP layer reduces false alarms from 454 to 331e-4 at Pd >= 88%. Dense gradient-trained detectors cannot provide this combination of gradient training, dense matrix multiplication, and local plasticity-free operation by construction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17686
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Bayesian-Monte Carlo Schedule Updating for Construction Digital Twins: A Probabilistic Framework for Dynamic Project Forecasting
2026-05-17 19:09:37Atena Khoshkonesh, Mohsen Mohammadagha, Vinayak Kaushal, Navid EbrahimiAbstract
Construction projects frequently experience schedule delays and forecasting uncertainty due to variability in labor productivity, material availability, weather conditions, and project coordination. Conventional deterministic scheduling methods such as the Critical Path Method (CPM) assume fixed activity durations and therefore cannot adequately represent dynamic project uncertainty. This study presents a Bayesian-Monte Carlo probabilistic schedule updating framework for construction digital twin environments. The proposed methodology integrates stochastic activity-duration modeling, Bayesian recursive updating, Monte Carlo simulation, and uncertainty propagation within a unified computational framework for adaptive schedule forecasting. Activity durations are modeled using lognormal probability distributions and continuously updated through Bayesian inference as new project observations become available. Monte Carlo simulation is then used to propagate updated uncertainty throughout project networks and generate probabilistic completion-time forecasts, delay-risk estimates, and activity criticality measures. Simulation experiments using PSPLIB benchmark project networks demonstrate that the proposed framework improves forecasting accuracy and uncertainty representation compared with deterministic CPM and static probabilistic scheduling approaches. The framework further supports adaptive project forecasting through integration of BIM reports, drone observations, IoT telemetry, productivity logs, and site monitoring data.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17608
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DeTrack: A Benchmark and Altitude-Aware Dual World Model for Drone-embodied Tracking
2026-05-17 13:49:27Guyue Hu, Haoming Liu, Siyuan Song, Chenglong Li, Feng Chen, Jin TangAbstract
Aerial object tracking has broad applications in public safety, emergency rescue, wildlife monitoring, and related fields. However, existing aerial tracking benchmarks are mainly based on passive 2D video sequences captured from fixed camera locations or predefined flight paths, where drones are treated as passive cameras rather than embodied agents that actively perceive, interact, and control their motion in dynamic 3D scenes. In this paper, we define a new drone-embodied tracking task, termed DeTrack, which requires a drone to track a target in interactive 3D environments using online egocentric observations and active flight control in a closed loop. We build a large-scale benchmark containing 11,368 target trajectories across diverse scenes, rendering conditions, semantic regions, and moving distractors, together with evaluation metrics for target visibility, tracking accuracy, and trajectory success. We further propose AaDWorlds, an altitude-aware dual world model framework for drone-embodied tracking. AaDWorlds consists of an altitude-aware perception module and dual world models that imagine future states under both high- and low-altitude regimes. By combining pseudo altitude-aware observations and imagined future states, AaDWorlds alleviates the intrinsic altitude-mediated contradiction between target visibility and flight safety. Experiments on the DeTrack benchmark demonstrate that AaDWorlds improves closed-loop tracking performance across all evaluation metrics.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17451
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ATRACT: A Trustworthy Robotic Autonomous system to support Casualty Triage
2026-05-16 19:04:09Tasweer Ahmad, Rafael Pina, Sandip Pradhan, Arindam Sikdar, Mindula Illeperuma, Khizer Saeed, Peter Lee, Varuna De Silva, Ardhendu BeheraAbstract
At a time when drones are increasingly associated with hostile operations, we re-purpose them for humanitarian and life-saving applications. However, adapting search and rescue drones for battlefield triage remains extremely challenging; the technology must perform reliably to support frontline medics who are forced to operate under extreme uncertainty, restricted access, and significant personal risk. Due to growing vulnerabilities of casualty evacuation in conflicting zones, this paper presents ATRACT (A Trustworthy Robotic Autonomous system to support Casualty Triage), a novel human-in-the-loop decision support system to enable early battlefield triage during the critical post-trauma period. ATRACT integrates drone-captured video with wearable sensor input for multi-modal learning to support casualty-state assessment, thereby addressing the limitations of existing systems. Drone video captures fine-grained behavioural cues, such as pose, posture, while body-worn sensors provide complementary physiological signals, including heart rate, breathing rate, and movement. By combining two modalities, ATRACT provides evidence to support the early judgement of medics when direct access to the casualty is delayed, risky, or restricted. To mitigate the data realism gap pertaining to injured actions, a conditional variational autoencoder is devised for data augmentation. Experimental results on our drone captured dataset show that proposed pipeline achieves 85.7% accuracy for action classification; while our lightweight CNN visual encoder remains competitive with stronger pre-trained video backbones. Overall, the results support ATRACT as a practically meaningful step towards remote triage in contested environments, where multi-modal sensing, human oversight and trustworthy decision support can improve casualty prioritisation, and lessen the exposure of frontline medics.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17123
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Thermal-Only Crowd Counting with Deployment-Time Privacy Protection
2026-05-16 15:21:34Yifei Qian, Zhongliang Guo, Chun Tong Lei, Bowen Deng, Chun Pong Lau, Xiaopeng Hong, Michael P. PoundAbstract
While RGB-Thermal crowd counting has shown promise, the paradigm faces critical limitations: RGB data raises privacy concerns in public surveillance, and multi-modal misalignment degrades fusion performance. We propose the first thermal-only framework specifically designed for privacy-conscious crowd counting, eliminating RGB dependency at inference time and substantially reducing the privacy exposure associated with continuous RGB capture in public surveillance deployments. To mitigate thermal ambiguity, we leverage depth-to-RGB diffusion models as a cross-modal bridge, extracting discriminative features that enhance thermal representations. Critically, we demonstrate that single-step LCM denoising yields features most faithful to the structural content of the depth conditioning signal, while multi-step approaches progressively decouple features from the conditioning input and accumulate errors that degrade counting accuracy. Experiments on RGBT-CC and DroneRGBT datasets show our method achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art RGB-T fusion methods, while requiring only thermal input during inference, eliminating the need for continuous RGB capture that constitutes the primary privacy concern in real-world surveillance deployment. The code will be made publicly available.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17042
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WorldVLN: Autoregressive World Action Model for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation
2026-05-15 13:55:39Baining Zhao, Jiacheng Xu, Weicheng Feng, Xin Zhang, Zhaolu Wang, Haoyang Wang, Shilong Ji, Ziyou Wang, Jianjie Fang, Zhiheng Zheng, Weichen Zhang, Yu Shang, Wei Wu, Chen Gao, Xinlei Chen, Yong LiAbstract
Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow natural-language instructions through closed-loop perception and action in 3D environments. We argue that aerial VLN can be formulated as a prediction-driven world-action problem: the agent should anticipate latent world evolution and act according to the predicted consequences. To this end, we propose WorldVLN, the first autoregressive world action model for aerial VLN. Unlike full-sequence video-generation world models that generate an entire visual clip, WorldVLN adapts a latent autoregressive video backbone to predict short-horizon world-state transitions and directly decodes them into executable waypoint actions. After each action segment is executed, newly received observations are encoded back into the autoregressive context, enabling closed-loop world-action prediction. We further introduce a two-stage training framework that first grounds the video prior in instruction-conditioned navigation dynamics and then develops Action-aware GRPO, the first reinforcement learning method tailored to autoregressive WAMs, to optimize waypoint decisions through their downstream rollout consequences. On public outdoor and indoor benchmarks, WorldVLN consistently outperforms existing Vision-Language-Action baselines with 12\%+ success-rate gains and larger advantages on challenging cases. It further transfers zero-shot to real drone deployment, suggesting that the proposed WorldVLN offers a promising route for spatial action tasks. Demos and code are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15964
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A Topology-Aware Spatiotemporal Handover Framework for Continuous Multi-UAV Tracking
2026-05-15 09:38:09Jianlin Ye, Christos Kyrkou, Panayiotis KoliosAbstract
The integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) offers synoptic visibility for traffic monitoring, yet scalable deployment is hindered by trajectory fragmentation, where vehicle identity persistence is lost across multi-UAV Fields of View (FOV). While state-of-the-art frameworks excel in optimizing local trajectory extraction and stability for single-drone imagery, they often function as isolated data silos that generate disjointed trajectories, thereby precluding network-level analysis such as Origin-Destination estimation. This paper presents a real-time Multi-Camera Multi-Vehicle Tracking (MCMT) system designed to handle global identity persistence. Addressing the visual ambiguity and computational cost of appearance-based Re-Identification (Re-ID) in nadir views, we introduce a lightweight Topology-Based Spatiotemporal Handover mechanism. We implement a high-throughput parallel pipeline leveraging YOLO11 and ByteTrack to process concurrent 4K streams. Our core contribution is a deterministic queue-based matching algorithm that utilizes geometric overlaps and virtual lane discretization to predictively manage identity handover via FIFO queues. Experimental results on complex urban environments, including intersections and merging traffic, demonstrate a Handover Success Rate (HOSR) of 99.8% in continuous traffic flows, significantly outperforming Re-ID baselines (74.1%) while validating edge deployment feasibility. The source code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15779
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Optimizing Line Segment Inspection with Limited-Range Drones
2026-05-15 09:24:50Jos\'e-Miguel D\'iaz-B\'a\~nez, Jos\'e-Manuel Higes, Alina Kasiuk, Inmaculada VenturaAbstract
Optimization problems with drones are widely studied in a variety of civilian tasks, mainly due to their ability to traverse rough terrains and to carry cameras and other sensors for surveillance tasks. The limited battery life of these aerial robots poses challenges in operational research. In this paper, we address the following optimization problem. We are given a set of line segments (e.g. tubes in a solar plant) to inspect by drones. The objective is to detect broken pipes using artificial intelligence and path planning must be carried out efficiently. On the one hand, the limited capacity of the batteries necessitates periodic visits (tours) to a fixed base station. However, it is desirable to allocate a set of tours for each drone to ensure that the segments are covered as quickly as possible, aiming to minimize the makespan, which is the maximum time spent by any drone. We are able to prove that this optimization problem is strongly NP-hard even when the segments are positioned on a line and the scenario involves only two drones. Then, approximation algorithms are proposed. Our computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves near-optimal performance across diverse operational scenarios.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15765
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Where to Perch in a Tree: Vision-Guidance for Tree-Grasping Drones
2026-05-14 21:25:11Alex Dunnett, Leonie Bottomley, Mirko Kovac, Basaran Bahadir KocerAbstract
This study demonstrates a method to locate an ideal perch location on a tree for vision-guided autonomous tree-perching drones. Various image processing algorithms, including those used for machine learning, image segmentation and binary image morphology, are implemented to assess the shape and structure of a tree. Rather than identifying the closest available branch, this study builds on vision methods by evaluating the potential of each branch, determining its suitability for perching based on factors such as branch width, slope (angle to the horizontal) and curvature. For a given tree-perching drone and a dataset of more than 10,000 urban tree images taken from February to October in a subtropical and temperate monsoon climate, the proposed method successfully produces a result for 76% of feasible targets. A feasible target defined as a tree where the branch diameters are sufficiently thick and where the available perching space is at least equal to the width of a tendon-driven grasping claw. These successful preliminary results create a foundation from which a number of identified improvements and additional features can be developed to create a generalised method; this will involve the incorporation of supplementary data from depth perception and attitude sensors to enhance the branch assessment.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15430
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Frequency-domain Event-based Imaging for Selective Surveillance
2026-05-14 20:25:51Megan Birch, James Rick, Adrish Kar, Jason Zutty, Joseph L. GreeneAbstract
Event-based cameras (EBCs) are an attractive sensing modality for surveillance due to their reporting of pixel-level radiance changes with microsecond resolution and high dynamic range, enabling motion extraction while suppressing background. Their asynchronous, sparse output, however, necessitate algorithms that identify targets in event-space without processing full frames. We introduce Frequency Rate Information for Event Space (FRIES), a neuromorphic processing framework that detects periodicity in events, such as rotor rotation and mechanical vibrations, to discriminate and monitor man-made objects. FRIES first applies a time gate to suppress background and noise, then aggregates events into a pixel-wise activity (e.g., density) map and clusters pixels into regions-of-interest (ROIs). A localized spectral analysis is applied to each ROI to extract dominant frequencies used to distinguish structured object signatures from unstructured background and noise. Discriminated targets are visualized using a Resonant Time Surface (RTS), a frequency-selective method that weights events by their phase coherence with the extracted frequencies, rewarding in-sync content and suppressing out-of-sync clutter. We demonstrate FRIES and RTS in a controlled indoor experiment to recover the rotational frequency of a mechanical chopper and drone rotors against a moving background. We further test these methods on an outdoor data to detect a hovering drone against a realistic treeline. These preliminary results establish frequency-domain event processing as a promising front-end for selective surveillance in neuromorphic pipelines and a complementary surveillance modality, leveraging the high temporal resolution to enable spectral discrimination.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15392
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Road Maps as Free Geometric Priors: Weather-Invariant Drone Geo-Localization with GeoFuse
2026-05-14 15:01:22Yunsong Fang (University of Macau), Tingyu Wang (Hangzhou Dianzi University), Zhedong Zheng (University of Macau)Abstract
Drone-view geo-localization aims to match a query drone image, often captured under adverse weather conditions (e.g., rain, snow, fog), against a gallery of geo-tagged satellite images. Weather-induced degradations in the drone view, such as noise, reduced visibility, and partial occlusions, severely exacerbate the intrinsic cross-view domain gap. While prior methods predominantly rely on weather-specific architectures or data augmentations, they have largely overlooked road map data, a readily available modality that provides strong, inherently weather-invariant geometric layout cues (e.g., road networks and building footprints) at negligible additional cost. We introduce GeoFuse, a cross-modal fusion framework that integrates precisely aligned road map tiles with satellite imagery to yield more discriminative and weather-resilient representations. We first augment the existing University-1652 and DenseUAV benchmarks with geo-aligned road maps, supplying structural priors robust to meteorological variations. Building on this, we propose a flexible fusion module that combines satellite and road map features via token-level and channel-level interactions, with a lightweight dynamic gating mechanism that adaptively weights modality contributions per instance. Finally, we employ class-level cross-view contrastive learning to promote robust alignment between weather-degraded drone features and the fused satellite-roadmap representations. Extensive experiments under diverse weather conditions show that GeoFuse consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving +3.46% and +23.18% Recall@1 accuracy on the University-1652 and DenseUAV benchmarks, respectively.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14925
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Video Reconstruction using Diffusion-based Image-to-Video Generation with Trajectory Guidance
2026-05-14 12:38:23Stelio Bompai, Ioannis Kontopoulos, Giannis Spiliopoulos, Dimitris Zissis, Konstantinos TserpesAbstract
This paper addresses the problem of reconstructing missing or dropped frames in top-down drone video of autonomous surface vehicles performing structured maritime manoeuvres. We propose a pipeline that converts raw GPS telemetry and a single reference frame into a trajectory-guided video sequence using a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model, requiring no domain-specific fine-tuning. GPS coordinates from onboard telemetry logs are projected into image space via an equirectangular mapping, producing per-vessel motion cues that condition the SG-I2V diffusion model. The generated frames are evaluated against ground-truth video using perceptual, temporal and trajectory-based metrics, and benchmarked against optical flow extrapolation and RIFE interpolation baselines. SG-I2V produces the most naturally appearing frames among all methods (BRISQUE 25.52, closest to ground-truth 23.64), the most realistic motion magnitude (temporal smoothness 1.14 vs. ground truth 1.42), and the strongest GPS trajectory adherence (9.31px vs. 28.70px for ground-truth, the latter reflecting approximate temporal alignment between footage and GPS logs rather than generation error), demonstrating that trajectory-guided diffusion synthesis is a viable approach to maritime video reconstruction under challenging low-texture, small-object conditions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16420
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OmniLiDAR: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Multi-Domain 3D LiDAR Generation
2026-05-13 17:42:20Youquan Liu, Weidong Yang, Ao Liang, Xiang Xu, Lingdong Kong, Yang Wu, Dekai Zhu, Xin Li, Runnan Chen, Ben Fei, Tongliang Liu, Wanli OuyangAbstract
LiDAR scene generation is increasingly important for scalable simulation and synthetic data creation, especially under diverse sensing conditions that are costly to capture at scale. Typically, diffusion-based LiDAR generators are developed under single-domain settings, requiring separate models for different datasets or sensing conditions and hindering unified, controllable synthesis under heterogeneous distribution shifts. To this end, we present OmniLiDAR, a unified text-conditioned diffusion framework that generates LiDAR scans in a shared range-image representation across eight representative domains spanning three shift types: adverse weather, sensor-configuration changes (e.g., reduced beams), and cross-platform acquisition (vehicle, drone, and quadruped). To enable training a single model over heterogeneous domains without isolating optimization by domain, we introduce a Cross-Domain Training Strategy (CDTS) that mixes domains within each mini-batch and leverages conditioning to steer generation. We further propose Cross-Domain Feature Modeling (CDFM), which captures directional dependencies along azimuth and elevation axes to reflect the anisotropic scanning structure of range images, and Domain-Adaptive Feature Scaling (DAFS) as a lightweight modulation to account for structured domain-dependent feature shifts during denoising. In the absence of a public consolidated benchmark, we construct an 8-domain dataset by combining real-world scans with physically based weather simulation and systematic beam reduction while following official splits. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generation fidelity and consistent gains in downstream use cases, including generative data augmentation for LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection, as well as robustness evaluation under corruptions, with consistent benefits in limited-label regimes.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13815
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Weather-Robust Cross-View Geo-Localization via Prototype-Based Semantic Part Discovery
2026-05-12 07:15:52Chi-Nguyen Tran, Dao Sy Duy Minh, Huynh Trung Kiet, Nguyen Lam Phu Quy, Phu-Hoa Pham, Long Tran-ThanhAbstract
Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL), which matches an oblique drone view to a geo-referenced satellite tile, has emerged as a key alternative for autonomous drone navigation when GNSS signals are jammed, spoofed, or unavailable. Despite strong recent progress, three limitations persist: (1) global-descriptor designs compress the patch grid into a single vector without separating layout from texture across the view gap; (2) altitude-related scale variation is retained in the learned embedding rather than marginalized; and (3) multi-objective training relies on hand-tuned scalars over losses on incompatible gradient scales. We propose SkyPart, a lightweight swappable head for patch-based vision transformers (ViTs) that institutes explicit part grouping over the patch grid. SkyPart has four theory-grounded components: (i) learnable prototypes competing for patch tokens via single-pass cosine assignment; (ii) altitude-conditioned linear modulation applied only during training, making the retrieval embedding altitude-free at inference; (iii) a graph-attention readout over active prototypes; and (iv) a Kendall uncertainty-weighted multi-objective loss whose stationary points are Pareto-stationary. At 26.95M parameters and 22.14 GFLOPs, SkyPart is the smallest among top-performing methods and sets a new state of the art on SUES-200, University-1652, and DenseUAV under a single-pass, no-re-ranking, no-TTA protocol. Its advantage over the strongest baseline widens under the ten-condition WeatherPrompt corruption benchmark.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11654
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BGG: Bridging the Geometric Gap between Cross-View images by Vision Foundation Model Adaptation for Geo-Localization
2026-05-11 10:46:33Wei Wang, Dou Quan, Ning Huyan, Shuang Wang, Yi Li, Pei He, Licheng JiaoAbstract
Geometric differences between cross-view images, such as drone and satellite views, significantly increase the challenge of Cross-View Geo-Localization (CVGL), which aims to acquire the geolocation of images by image retrieval. To further enhance the CVGL performance, this paper proposes a parameter-efficient adaptation framework for bridging the geometric gap across images based on the vision foundation model (VFM) (e.g., DINOv3), termed BGG. BGG not only effectively leverages the general visual representations of VFM and captures the robust and consistent features from cross-view images, but also utilizes the generalization capabilities of the VFM, significantly improving the CVGL performance. It mainly contains a Multi-granularity Feature Enhancement Adapter (MFEA) and a Frequency-Aware Structural Aggregation (FASA) module. Specifically, MFEA enhances the scale adaptability and viewpoint robustness of features by multi-level dilated convolutions, effectively bridging the cross-view geometric gap with small training costs. Additionally, considering the [CLS] token lacks spatial details for precise image retrieval and localization, the FASA module modulates patch tokens in the frequency domain and performs adaptive aggregation for local structural feature enhancement. Finally, BGG fuses the enhanced local features with the [CLS] token for more accurate CVGL. Extensive experiments on University-1652 and SUES-200 datasets demonstrate that BGG has significant advantages over other methods and achieves state-of-the-art localization performance with low training costs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10345
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Integro-differential equations in angular stabilization of drone motion by distributed feedback control
2026-05-10 14:16:45Alexander Domoshnitsky, Oleg Kupervasser, Anatoly PolonskyAbstract
In this paper, we propose angular stabilization of drone motion using distributed feedback control in the form of an integral operator. It should be stressed that the memory of this integral operator could be unbounded. It is intuitively clear that large length of the observation time open new possibilities to construct better control based on previous states of the control object. Unbounded memory in control requires the creation of a certain approach different from standard ones to the study of integro-differential equations. One of the goals of this article is to propose a certain universal approach that allows us to study the stability of integro-differential equations in the case of unbounded memory in the integral operator specifying the feedback control in stabilization. The approach we propose allows us to reduce the study of integro-differential equations to the analysis of systems of ordinary differential equations. In general, such systems can consist of an infinite number of equations. In relation to the so-called linear approximation in the problem of angle stabilization manages to limit itself to relatively simple exponential kernels in the integral control and arrive at a system with a finite number of equations. The examples explain that more complex kernels, for example, linear combinations of the exponential kernels, can enhance the stabilization capabilities. We obtain new unexpectable results on the exponential stability of integro-differential equations. Then we apply them to stabilization of drone flight.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18251
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Seeing Across Skies and Streets: Feedforward 3D Reconstruction from Satellite, Drone, and Ground Images
2026-05-08 16:35:57Qiwei Wang, Zhongyao Tuo, Xianghui Ze, Yujiao ShiAbstract
Cross-view localization classically asks: where does this ground image lie on the satellite tile? Existing methods are typically limited to 3-DoF estimates -- an $(x,y)$ position and a yaw angle -- because nadir satellite imagery provides no direct cues for roll, pitch, or altitude, forcing a reliance on planar-motion and zero-tilt assumptions. These assumptions break on real terrain with slopes, ramps, and tilted camera mounts. To overcome this, we introduce a single UAV image as an intermediate viewpoint: it reveals the 3D structure invisible from nadir, supplies the cues for roll, pitch, and altitude that the satellite alone cannot provide, and needs only spatial overlap with the ground camera -- no known relative pose is required. Building on this insight, we propose **Cross3R**, a flexible feed-forward model that ingests a satellite tile together with a UAV image, a ground image, or both, and, in a single forward pass, recovers a cross-view 3D point cloud, the 6-DoF poses of every input camera, and the on-tile $(x,y)$ position and yaw of each perspective camera. For training and evaluation, we also construct **CrossGeo**, a 278K-image tri-view dataset spanning 85 scenes across every continent except Antarctica. On CrossGeo, Cross3R consistently outperforms feed-forward 3D baselines in point-cloud reconstruction, 6-DoF camera-pose estimation, and cross-view localization. On KITTI, it outperforms dedicated cross-view methods trained on KITTI on most metrics, despite having no KITTI training itself.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07978
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Accurate Trajectory Tracking with MPCC for Flapping-Wing MAVs
2026-05-07 11:31:34Charbel Toumieh, Jack Zeng, Niel Mistry, Dario FloreanoAbstract
Flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles offer quieter and safer operation than rotary-wing drones, yet achieving precise autonomous control of bird-scale ornithopters remains challenging: lift, airspeed, and turning authority are tightly coupled and governed by only a few control inputs. Conventional cascaded controllers treat altitude, speed, and heading independently, producing persistent tracking errors during complex maneuvers, while time-parameterized trajectory tracking requires predefined speed profiles that existing methods cannot robustly produce for these coupled dynamics. We address both limitations simultaneously with a Model Predictive Contouring Control (MPCC) approach that tracks arc-length-parameterized trajectories while optimizing progress online, eliminating the need for predefined timing. However, MPCC requires a dynamical model that captures the coupled aerodynamics without exceeding the computational budget of real-time nonlinear optimization. Here, we propose a compact, continuously differentiable model that captures the dominant couplings of bird-scale ornithopters, enabling real-time predictive control. We validated the method with the XFly ornithopter flying along circular and three-dimensional racing trajectories and achieved a mean deviation from the reference trajectory between 6.5 and 9 cm at speeds up to 3 m/s, which represents an almost 10-fold improvement over prior ornithopter control methods.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06042
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