Surveillance
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Kierston & KierstonBench: Simulation of Allentown, PA and Evaluation of Language Models in Crime Investigation and Surveillance Tasks
2026-11-10 11:27:46Andrew Semenov, Svyatoslav DorofeevAbstract
Large language models are candidates for collecting and analyzing records in criminal investigations and mass surveillance. Their capability and accuracy in this work cannot currently be measured. Real deployments lack the ground truth needed to score a model's conclusions, and no benchmark evaluates these capabilities in a simulated environment. We present Kierston, a city-scale simulation engine, and KierstonBench, a benchmark that tests these capabilities against known simulated events. Kierston models approximately 125,000 residents of Allentown, Pennsylvania, generating their daily activities and the telecommunications, financial, administrative and license-plate records that surveillance and investigative systems collect about them. These records derive from a common behavioral timeline and are distributed across sources representing separate providers. Models investigate through a restricted records interface, linking observations across sources without access to the underlying simulation. The benchmark comprises 32 task families covering record linkage, routine reconstruction, incident investigation and assessment of deceptive accounts. In an evaluation of sixteen language models, most could not perform records investigation and submitted identifications the records did not support. A small number of frontier models solved most of the tasks and abstained when evidence was insufficient. In some cases these models still fell for common deceptions and assumptions, and none replaced an investigator.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04785
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A lightweight convolutional neural network for target detection in an edge environment
2026-11-06 17:22:37Hughes Perreault, Ola Ahmad, Daniel CzubokaAbstract
This paper proposes a novel, lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for edge device deployment. The CNN is developed to recognize and classify threats or targets of interest. The model is equipped with a real-time hotspot detection algorithm, which enables it to process information quickly and accurately, resulting in improved inference time of up to 20 fps and a detection range of more than 400 meters with typical thermal situational awareness sensors. The proposed CNN has been rigorously tested and validated to demonstrate its high accuracy, sensitivity, and low false positive rate, providing a reliable solution for edge devices to detect potential targets. Additionally, the lightweight design of the CNN allows for easy deployment, making it an ideal solution for extending the security bubble for edge devices. The proposed model can be used for a variety of applications, including surveillance, security, and object recognition.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09756
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TriNetra: Thermal-Reliability-Guided RGB-Thermal Fusion and Tracking for Surveillance
2026-11-06 17:01:20Sadique Khatib, Aditya Ahirrao, Vedant Sonawane, Disha Kapse, Y. D. BhiseAbstract
Visible cameras fail at night and thermal sensors fail under saturation, blur or loss of contrast, yet most RGB-thermal (RGB-T) detectors mix the two streams with fixed weights and cannot tell when one modality has become unreliable. TriNetra is a reliability-aware surveillance framework built around this problem. The proposed solution computes a frame-level Thermal Reliability Coefficient (TRC) from five label-free image cues, uses it to gate the thermal features of a dual-branch YOLOv8m detector whose visible branch, neck and head are frozen and COCO-pretrained, and passes the same score to a ByteTrack-based tracker that feeds a rule-based behaviour analyser. On the M3FD benchmark (2,940/630/630 split) the detector reaches 87.6% precision, 79.4% recall, 70.0% mAP@50 and 47.8% mAP@50:95 on the test split, with 17.0 M of its 42.9 M parameters trained. TRC stays near 0.78 on clean frames (standard deviation 0.012), decreases with the severity of thermal saturation and blur, reaching 0.53 and 0.69 at full severity, and is insensitive to RGB-thermal misalignment. With identical weights, the adaptive gate matches a fixed gate on clean data (70.0% versus 69.8% mAP@50) but keeps 43.6% mAP@50 when the thermal stream is corrupted, against 38.4%, 29.2% and 25.0% for a fixed gate, full thermal admission and a closed gate; the 5.1-point gain over the fixed gate has a 95% bootstrap confidence interval of +3.6 to +6.5 points. In tracking, the TRC-gated association performs on par with ByteTrack on a synthetic benchmark with exact ground truth and on 14 M3FD clips, and is slightly less stable under thermal saturation, so its measured benefit is confined to the detector. The limitations of the current evaluation are reported together with the results.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09725
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FlyingDrones: A Dataset and Benchmark for Optical Flow Estimation from UAV motion
2026-11-05 09:26:36Laurenz Ruzicka, Roman Pflugfelder, Daniel CremersAbstract
Optical flow is an important cue for drone analysis in aerial surveillance, airspace monitoring, and long-range target tracking, where motion remains informative when appearance is weak. Estimating the motion of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, however, is difficult because distant targets occupy few pixels, have low contrast, and move against complex dynamic backgrounds. Standard optical-flow benchmarks emphasize large, object-centric motions and therefore do not characterize distant aerial targets well. We introduce FlyingDrones, a generated benchmark with dense ground-truth optical flow and segmentation masks derived from physically based rendering, and define resolution-normalized metrics (EPE Norm) that normalize flow by image dimensions. We evaluate 16 state-of-the-art model families on a motion- and size-stratified subset of 999 flow pairs at three resolutions. Every family recovers drone motion better than the zero-flow reference, but the gap between families widens with resolution: at 1920x1080, global-matching, recurrent, transformer, and short-window temporal models separate clearly from pyramid, classical, self-supervised, lightweight, and diffusion models. Within-family checkpoint spread is comparable to or larger than between-family spread, so the training curriculum is as important as the architecture. Two complementary studies test the benchmark beyond synthetic accuracy: a ground-truth-free motion-alignment evaluation on 21 cameras of real UAV footage shows that the synthetic ranking carries a moderate, significant signal about real-world performance (Spearman \r{ho} = 0.63 over 41 checkpoints) while the exact top ranks differ, and a fine-tuning study shows that 800 FlyingDrones pairs reduce held-out drone-region error by up to 37% and improve drone localization on the real footage for all four architectures tested.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07705
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Traffic-VL: Reinforced Vision-Language Models for Generalizable End-to-End Traffic Signal Control
2026-11-04 11:15:20Xingchen Zou, Maonan Wang, Kemou Jiang, Jie Li, Yiqi Chen, Xi Chen, Hai Yang, Yuxuan LiangAbstract
Existing traffic signal control methods typically rely on structured traffic states produced by dedicated perception pipelines. Emerging visual approaches often use idealized simulator images and convert them into intermediate representations before control, limiting their ability to directly exploit roadside visual observations. To bridge both the visual-domain and perception-to-decision gaps, we introduce SynTra-V and Traffic-VL. SynTra-V converts physics-based traffic simulations into photorealistic multi-view surveillance imagery across diverse road topologies and sensing conditions, and automatic semantic auditing checks that control-critical geometry, vehicle movements, and lane semantics match the simulator state. Traffic-VL is an eight-billion-parameter vision-language model that directly maps synchronized multi-view images and natural-language phase descriptions to signal decisions without intermediate structured states. Building on Traffic-R1's two-stage reinforced reasoning framework, Traffic-VL adapts its vision encoder via offline reinforcement learning on SynTra-V and freezes it during online visual stepwise trajectory policy optimization in closed-loop simulation. Experiments show that Traffic-VL matches structured-state Traffic-R1 while outperforming image-based controllers and general-purpose vision-language models, including Gemini 3 Pro. Evaluations on unseen topologies, degraded sensing conditions, real surveillance footage, and a three-week deployment across ten intersections further demonstrate robust visual generalization and effective constrained online control.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06353
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AVID: A Weakly Aligned RGB-Infrared Dataset and Perturbation Benchmark for Tiny Aerial Targets
2026-10-29 20:26:40Dharini Raghavan, Vishnu Rao, Sethu Selvi SAbstract
Long-range detection of small drones is complicated by their visual similarity to birds and by the limited detail available from ground-based cameras. Combining visible and infrared observations offers complementary information, but their usefulness depends on target size, cross-modal alignment, and image quality. We present AVID, a benchmark for studying these factors using real RGB-infrared bird-drone surveillance footage originating from the Drone Detection Dataset and curated for the IEEE ICIP 2025 Video and Image Processing Cup. AVID comprises 32,040 corresponding frame pairs from 115 videos, with 35,952 existing bird and drone annotations at $320\times256$ resolution. Targets occupy an unusually narrow size range: 68.1\% have a geometric-mean bounding-box side of 8--16 pixels, and 99.0\% meet the COCO small-object criterion. To characterize the geometric difficulty of combining the modalities, we introduce an object-relative alignment ratio and an alignment burden curve. In a sample of 300 frame pairs, 32.3\% have estimated global translations greater than 5 pixels; among the 264 pairs with matching annotations, 16.3\% exceed one median target side. We further introduce AVID-C, which simulates seven families of image degradation at five severity levels independently in RGB, infrared, or both. A fixed-feature analysis examines how scale, degradation, and added cross-modal shifts affect fitted bird-drone class overlap. At 12--16 pixels, the Bhattacharyya error bounds are 0.148 for RGB, 0.198 for infrared, and 0.046 for their combined features. These values describe separation in the specified feature and density models, not detector accuracy. Together, AVID and AVID-C support scale-aware, alignment-aware, and sensor-specific studies of tiny aerial targets.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40949
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ChatGPT as a Surveillance Assistant? An Exploratory Case Study of AI-Assisted Surveillance Risks
2026-10-29 19:10:04Ayana Hussain, Nicholas VincentAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) can generate detailed guidance, functional code, and persuasive text at scale. As one of the most widely used consumer language model products as of 2026, ChatGPT gives broad public access to these capabilities, motivating concerns about its potential use in surveillance-related tasks. We present an exploratory case study of what potentially harmful surveillance assistance looks like in ChatGPT's public web interface. We contribute a taxonomy of seven surveillance risk categories based on prior LLM risk research and reports of deployed surveillance systems, instantiated as 110 prompts, along with a manually reviewed analysis of ChatGPT's responses. Prompts were issued using two approaches: 55 jailbreak prompts drawing on five types of elicitation strategies, and 55 plain-language direct prompts, each run alone, and if unsuccessful, again with a short fixed prefix. We find that ChatGPT provides substantive surveillance guidance for 40 of the 55 jailbreak prompts and for 33 of the 55 direct prompts without any prefix. Compliant responses also rarely included policy mentions or suggestions for privacy-preserving alternatives. We manually review every response and find that even when ChatGPT states a refusal, it may still supply detailed instructions, working code, or architectural guidance alongside brief ethical caveats.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40890
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Luggage re-identification: A study of strategies towards a real-world application
2026-10-29 17:58:59Quentin Dh\^ote, Romaric AudigierAbstract
Luggage re-identification (ReID) is a critical task in video surveillance for forensics, security or border management (suspicious or abandoned luggage recognition), as well as luggage management (lost luggage recovery). It enables the association of observations of the same luggage across disjoint camera views in complex environments such as airports, train stations and border crossing. While existing approaches primarily focus on appearance-based cropped image matching under relatively clean conditions, real-world scenarios are characterized by frequent occlusions, cluttered background and crowded scenes which significantly degrade performance. Yet, strategies leveraging the complementarity of multiple shots and views from different video streams is overlooked. In this paper, we study strategies for an end-to-end pipeline that operates from multiple video streams to detect and re-identify luggage. We evaluate different variants on a benchmark dataset acquired in real-world environments to address the questions of selecting and merging different views and shots of the same luggage as well as training on different environment datasets for an overall ReID performance improvement in practical applications.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40643
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CVBL-CCTV-Face Dataset for Real-World Face Enhancement and Recognition in Surveillance
2026-10-27 07:48:18Manish Das, Ajay Kumar Yadav, Shiv Ram Dubey, Satish Kumar SinghAbstract
In real-world surveillance settings, facial captures from closed-circuit television systems suffer from degradations such as low resolution, motion blur, noise, and occlusions, which undermine dependable face recognition. In this study, we propose a framework for super-resolution and identity recognition, aimed at surveillance applications. For this purpose, we present the CVBL-CCTV-Face Dataset which is a dataset of real-world images taken in an unpaired manner where each pair consists of a low-quality (LQ) image of a face captured by a 8MP IP Dome CCTV camera together with a high-quality (HQ) reference image that is taken in controlled settings. In order to cope with the various problems posed by such datasets, we construct a modular system that involves face detection, deep learning-based super-resolution of low-quality face images, and identity recognition through L2-normalized embeddings extracted by an embedding model. Enhancement models are trained and tested according to three different setups, and the system is deployed for identity verification in a real-time unconstrained environment.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36781
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A Category-Selective Encryption Framework for Privacy Protection of UAV Images
2026-10-26 16:46:17Ting Yan, Minghui Shang, Haolang Sun, Xu Wang, Yamin Han, Mingze HeAbstract
Imagery captured by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems increasingly raises privacy concerns, as UAV aerial surveillance routinely captures sensitive objects such as pedestrians and vehicles alongside ordinary scene content. Existing privacy-preserving approaches typically employ class-agnostic saliency detection to indiscriminately obfuscate all visually salient regions, leading to unnecessary information loss and hindering downstream scene analysis. This paper proposes a category-selective encryption framework for privacy-preserving UAV surveillance. The core advance over prior class-agnostic approaches is semantic-level selectivity: the system first recognizes what is present in the scene via an 80-class detector, then encrypts only user-specified sensitive categories while leaving non-sensitive objects and background intact for downstream analytics. The framework supports two complementary encryption schemes: Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption (TPE), which applies adaptive pixelation with a learnable blend parameter and recovers content through a jointly trained Enhanced U-Net, and XOR stream cipher encryption, which offers parameter-free, mathematically exact reversibility. The architectural design, composite loss formulation, and joint training methodology are presented in detail, establishing a foundation for practical privacy-preserving UAV surveillance that balances protection strength and scene utility.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35729
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Revealing Imaging Characteristics of Thermal Wakes from Underwater Vehicles Without Cooling-Water Discharge
2026-10-26 08:52:12Guoyi Zhang, Yanjin Du, Guangsheng Xu, Zhengyao Zhao, Siyang Chen, Jingjing Gao, Yuezheng Zhou, Yiyang Wu, Bin Wu, Tongsu Zhang, Lejia Ye, Donghe Wang, Jie Wang, Kaiye Hu, Zhipeng Ren, Han Wang, Boo Cheong Khoo, Xiangpeng Xu, Xiaohu ZhangAbstract
Small uncrewed underwater vehicles are proliferating and threaten maritime security, yet evade sonar and magnetic sensors built for larger submarines. Infrared thermal wakes, generated by hydrodynamic displacement that modulates the cold-skin layer, offer a non-acoustic, non-magnetic alternative even without cooling-water discharge. Existing studies, however, rely on idealized simulations that fail to capture real-world backgrounds, offering limited guidance for target-background discrimination. We establish AVP-IR-Wake, the first large-scale, real-world, physically diverse benchmark of 161,485 frames collected over three years. We show that thermal wakes are extended structures of discrete vortices, violating the compactness assumption of conventional targets. We reveal local indistinguishability: individual wake vortices are statistically identical to wind-induced background vortices in temporal, frequency, and sparse domains, sharing low-frequency information and long-range correlations. This challenges the assumptions of compact, transient, high-frequency targets in conventional detection. Yet we establish global morphological separability: although locally inseparable, the wake as a whole is organized by vehicle trajectory, whereas background clutter is organized by wind-driven thermal fronts. This explains why representative detectors fail and shows that reliable detection must shift from local feature extraction to global trajectory-constrained physical modeling. Because the cold-skin layer varies globally and seasonally, forecasting wake observability will require integrating physical oceanography and atmospheric science, linking underwater surveillance to the changing ocean surface.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35038
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Localization-Uncertainty-Aware UAV Swarm Search for GNSS-Denied Maritime Surveillance
2026-10-26 05:41:45Siyuan Yang, Junning Lyu, Xiaoyu He, Lakmal Seneviratne, Shaoming HeAbstract
This paper studies UAV swarm search in GNSS-denied maritime environments, where inter-UAV ranging drives cooperative localization and uncertainty propagates along the multi-hop reference chain, affecting connectivity, collision avoidance, and search effectiveness. We propose an uncertainty-aware control barrier function (CBF) framework approximating cascading localization covariance through Fisher information matrices. First, the cascading covariance model captures how ranging noise and neighbor uncertainty accumulate along the localization chain. Second, uncertainty-tightened CBFs incorporate the covariance model and its rate into margins for connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance, with conditional invariance and graceful-degradation bounds. Third, a hierarchical Voronoi-target strategy with formation keeping supports efficient forward-looking coverage. The distributed controller is validated with a standard unbiased extended Kalman filter in the loop. The framework is demonstrated on several polygon shapes and swarm sizes from 6 to 30 sUAVs. An estimator-in-the-loop run completes the search in 302.5 s, 20 Monte Carlo deployments confirm repeatable completion with all local QPs feasible and containment in at least 98.97% of UAV-frames, and six MBZIRC runs provide estimator-in-the-loop evidence. The source code is publicly available.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34873
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On Distributed Sensing and Adversarial Localization of Narrowband Acoustic Sources for Offshore Data Center Monitoring
2026-10-25 15:54:02Adnan Abdullah, David Blow, Harsha Gundala Sureshbabu, Dongyoon Joung, Sara Rampazzi, Md Jahidul IslamAbstract
This report investigates an acoustic surveillance framework for localizing and tracking narrowband adversarial acoustic sources that threaten offshore data centers. Unlike conventional sound source localization (SSL) methods that rely on broadband signals and compact receiver arrays, the considered scenario involves narrowband emissions and sparse sensors. In such scenarios, the observed time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements are aliased and produce an ambiguous solution space, rendering conventional localization methods ineffective. To address this challenge, we integrate a mobile receiver that temporarily forms anchor pairs with selected fixed receivers, constraining the feasible solution space. The proposed two-stage pipeline first estimates the initial source position using anchor constraints, then initializes a particle filter that jointly tracks source position and velocity using one live anchor measurement and quality-adaptive fixed-pair measurements. We evaluate the proposed method through Monte Carlo acoustic simulations, ROS-Gazebo robotic demonstrations, and open-water field experiments. Our framework achieves a localization success rate of 91% in simulation, while 9 of 10 field trials show tracking error below 2m under receiver-position uncertainty and noisy sensing conditions. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of passive acoustic surveillance for protecting large-scale infrastructure against acoustic threats.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34393
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DSGN: A Dual-Stream Gated Network for Scalable Simultaneous Surveillance and Containment
2026-10-25 05:58:52Heng Zhang, Ziyang Zuo, Guoxiang Zhao, Xiaoqiang RenAbstract
The simultaneous surveillance and containment (SSC) problem arises in multi-robot applications such as perimeter security and environmental monitoring, where robots must survey a region of interest and coordinate to enclose targets once they are detected. Surveillance favors spatial dispersion for coverage, whereas containment requires target-centric cohesion for enclosure. This conflict makes heuristic switching unstable, and the instability becomes more pronounced as larger robotic networks introduce more inter-agent and agent-target relations. End-to-end DRL reduces reliance on hand-crafted switching, but conventional single-stream policies often mix surveillance and containment cues in one shared feature space that could entangle dispersion-oriented and target-centric signals and weaken task transitions. In this paper, we propose the Dual-Stream Gated Network (DSGN), an architecture designed to address scale-amplified task-transition difficulties by separating surveillance and containment into specialized representation streams and coordinating them through a context-aware gating mechanism. A probabilistic prior further regularizes the gating process, reducing ambiguous intermediate decisions and supporting clearer behavioral transitions under large-scale interaction complexity. Evaluations show that DSGN maintains strong task efficacy and scalability under constant-density cross-scale settings. Additional ablation and phase-specific evaluations show that the proposed dynamic gating mechanism and probabilistic prior support effective task arbitration and reliable mode switching in both pure surveillance and task-switching scenarios. The source code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34084
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LENS: Likelihood Evaluation and Neighbor Smoothing for Attribute-Based Person Retrieval on Unseen Cameras
2026-10-24 12:48:40Nguyen Dang Duy Tan, Vo Thanh Nguyen, Linh T. T. Tran, Huynh Nguyen PhatAbstract
Attribute-based person retrieval ranks surveillance images from a binary query of semantic attributes, but mean Average Attribute Degree of Match (mADM) drops on unseen cameras as predicted probabilities shift. Common pipelines rank gallery images by their L1 distance to the query, which penalizes a confident single-attribute mismatch no more than small uncertainties across many attributes, while post-hoc recalibration fitted on source validation data fails to transfer because the per-attribute maps fitted on source data do not match those of new cameras. We propose LENS (Likelihood Evaluation and Neighbor Smoothing), combining fine-tuned DINOv3 and CLIP models with a distilled student. LENS regularizes mutually exclusive attribute groups with group cross-entropy in training, scores gallery images by the log-likelihood of the exact query, and smooths gallery logits over nearest neighbors using DINOv3 appearance features from the same forward pass. On held-out datasets, all three changes raise mADM: the likelihood score improves all six retrieval metrics for the main ensemble and mADM for all 48 development models, and training-free kNN smoothing improves all 46 tested development models. On the hidden test set of the UPAR 2027 benchmark, LENS reaches 68.17 mADM.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33641
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UniQuery: Unifying Vision Models with a Joint Query Head for Cross-Domain Pedestrian Attribute Recognition
2026-10-24 12:45:27Nguyen Dang Duy Tan, Linh T. T. Tran, Huynh Nguyen Phat, Vo Thanh NguyenAbstract
Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) predicts semantic attributes of individuals, such as gender, age, clothing and accessories, and its descriptions support attribute-based person retrieval and person re-identification. However, accurately recognizing fine-grained attributes across domains remains challenging due to occlusion, appearance variations, and shifts in image distributions. Ensembles of independently trained foundation encoders combine their logits with fixed fusion weights, so every attribute uses the same mix and the encoders are never trained together. We propose UniQuery, which instead jointly fine-tunes DINOv3 and CLIP for attribute-specific fusion. It combines two query heads, one for each encoder, with a joint query head whose attribute queries attend to tokens from both encoders, and the prediction is the average of the logits of the three query heads. We evaluate UniQuery on the benchmark of the UPAR Challenge 2027 at the WACV 2027 Real-World Surveillance workshop, where models are trained on PA100k, PETA and Market-1501 with a shared set of attributes. In leave-one-dataset-out experiments, UniQuery outperforms the independent ensemble in Challenge_Avg on both held-out datasets. Ablations show that learning fusion over independently trained encoders does not improve upon logit averaging in the mean over the two held-out datasets, while freezing the encoders lowers the Challenge_Avg of UniQuery. On the hidden test set of the benchmark, UniQuery achieves a Challenge_Avg of 0.8001.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33639
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Synthetic-to-Real Text-Based Person Anomaly Search via Multi-Model Retrieval Fusion and Cross-Encoder Reranking
2026-10-22 21:19:19Eugene Denteh, Blessing Agyei Kyem, Andrews Danyo, Joshua Kofi Asamoah, Richard Dzinyela, Solomon Owusu-Ansah, Dickson G. Asiedu, Armstrong AboahAbstract
Text-based person anomaly search requires a model to retrieve individuals from a large image gallery using natural-language descriptions of both appearance and behavior. This task is challenging because model training relies on synthetic image-text pairs, whereas evaluation is performed on real surveillance images containing domain differences, near-duplicate frames, and many visually similar distractors. We present a multi-model retrieval and reranking framework designed to improve synthetic-to-real transfer. The framework first adapts Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B to synthetic person descriptions using bidirectional contrastive learning, explicit negative sampling, false-negative masking, and domain randomization. It then combines the normalized scores of six complementary Qwen3-VL checkpoints with those of a frozen SigLIP2 model using four-view gallery encoding. The fused retrieval scores identify the strongest candidates, which are jointly evaluated with the query using Qwen3-VL-Reranker-8B. The cross-encoder and retrieval scores are subsequently blended to produce the final ranking. We also construct a distractor-matched validation protocol entirely from synthetic data to select checkpoint weights, fusion coefficients, candidate depths, and reranking parameters without accessing the official test images. The final system achieves 94.7815% mAP and 90.8493% R@1 under the official AI City Challenge 2026 Track 4 test setting, with a reported eighth-place finish on the public leaderboard.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31930
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From Signals to Evidence: Interpretable Underwater Acoustic Target Sensing with Large Language Models - Part II: Passive Detection
2026-10-22 14:28:31Zhiyuan Li, Yuge Zhang, Jie Chen, Xiruo Su, Zhengqiao Zhao, Xiling Yao, Lingji Xu, Jingdong Chen, Yixin YangAbstract
Underwater acoustic passive detection is essential to maritime surveillance and intelligent ocean sensing. Existing detection systems typically collapse multichannel array observations into a binary decision or a scalar confidence score, offering limited insight into the physical evidence that supports or contradicts a target declaration. This limitation is acute at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), where isolated spectral peaks and transient beamforming responses are inherently ambiguous and physically verifiable targets are characterized by an ensemble of coupled reinforcing cues. Building on the unified from-signals-to-evidence framework introduced in the companion Part I, this paper instantiates the framework for passive target detection. A physics-aware multichannel acoustic encoder encodes the array observations into complementary acoustic evidence tokens through a direction-guided architecture that combines minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) processing with time-frequency and fine-frequency representations. These tokens are combined with environmental priors and fed into a pretrained large language model (LLM) that evaluates target-present and noise-only hypotheses and generates a structured detection report detailing target presence, bearing, spectral-line locations, received SNR, range, and per-field confidence scores. A physics-parameterized data engine extended to realistic oceanic channels provides traceable supervision at both discrete-label and structured-description levels. Experiments under white-noise and mixed ocean-background conditions demonstrate reliable detection, accurate bearing estimation, and physically interpretable structured reports, validating the feasibility of evidence-grounded underwater acoustic detection.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31346
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Traditional and Recent Approaches for Infrared Small Target Detection : Overview, Challenges and Perspectives
2026-10-21 15:19:41Thierry Bouwmans, Anastasia Zakharova, Belmar Garcia, Marwa Chendeb El Rai, Meghna Kapoor, Badri Narayan SubudhiAbstract
Infrared small target detection is often used in different civilian and military applications to detect static or moving targets in scenes like in ground, air and sea surveillance. Research in this field started more than three decades ago, and the last two decades have witnessed very significant publications in this field following the rise of low-rank and sparse decomposition (model-based methods) and deep learning models (data-based methods). Furthermore, several surveys can be found in the literature but none of them addresses an overall review in this field. In this context, the aim of this paper is to provide a complete survey of the traditional and recent approaches in infrared small target detection. First, we categorize the different approaches found in the literature in terms of the modeling models, i.e mathematical models, machine learning models and signal processing models. Then, we have discussed them in terms of the critical situations that they claim to handle. Furthermore, we present the available resources, datasets and libraries. Then, we conclude with several promising directions for future research. For the sake of reading, this survey is divided into two parts: 1) "Traditional and Recent Approaches for Infrared Small Target Detection: Overview, Challenges and Perspectives (Part 1)" about conventional and low-rank and sparse decomposition (model-based methods), and 2) "Traditional and Recent Approaches for Infrared Small Target Detection: Overview, Challenges and Perspectives (Part 2)" about deep learning models (data-based methods).
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18276
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MS2CAST: A Video Anomaly Detection Framework via Multi-Scale Spatial Cross-Attention and Efficient Spatiotemporal Networks
2026-10-21 12:29:24Ali Safaei, Mohammad KazemiAbstract
Video anomaly detection (VAD) is a challenging task for surveillance systems due to the scarcity and diversity of anomalous events. While semi-supervised VAD approaches have advanced the field, many rely on computationally intensive optical flow networks to capture motion dynamics. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are also widely used for spatial encoding, but their effective receptive field is highly local. To address these limitations, we introduce MS2CAST, an end-to-end semi-supervised predictive VAD framework. For spatial encoding, we employ a multi-scale cross-attention encoder that fuses the hierarchical feature representations from a vision transformer (MViTv2-S) and a CNN (ConvNeXt-T) to exploit their distinct receptive fields. To model spatiotemporal dynamics without optical flow estimation, we integrate two interchangeable spatiotemporal modules in the latent space. One module (SwinLSTM) incorporates a Swin Transformer, while the other (VMRNN) integrates Vision Mamba blocks. Our objective function combines L1 loss, Gradient Difference Loss (GDL), and Multi-Scale Structural Similarity Index Measure (MS-SSIM) to ensure pixel-wise accuracy, sharpness, and structural integrity. Evaluations across the UCSD Ped2, CUHK Avenue, and ShanghaiTech datasets demonstrate frame-level Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Area Under the Curve (AUC) scores that are competitive with top-tier techniques while maintaining a peak GPU memory usage of under 1 GB.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29649
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