Papers for
drone software developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
ScopeMamba YOLO improves small object detection in aerial images
ScopeMamba-YOLO: Widening the Perceptual Scope Inward and Outward for Small Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery
Abstract: Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and remote sensing imagery requires preserving high-resolution detail while modeling long-range context. Adding a stride-4 detection level and removing the stride-32 stage benefits tiny targets but weakens peripheral spatial support, whereas directly inserting selective scanning into the main feature path can interfere with weak local cues. We propose ScopeMamba-YOLO, built around an off-path, zero-gated selective-scanning principle that decouples contextual modeling from the convolutional stream. The principle is instantiated by a Cascaded Global-Context Module (CGCM) in the backbone and a Selective-Scan PAN (SS-PAN) in the neck. An Adaptive Multi-scale Strip (AMS) Block reduces the cost of high-resolution feature extraction, while a Scale-Adaptive DFL (SA-DFL) head reallocates distributional support and regression capacity across scales with only 0.008M additional parameters. Controlled experiments show that matched main-path selective scanning reduces mAP50 by 0.98 pp, whereas off-path CGCM improves the final configuration by 0.67 pp over the three-seed no-CGCM mean; operator controls indicate that this gain is not explained by auxiliary branch capacity alone. ERF analysis further shows that the complete context pathway increases the peripheral energy ratio from 0.008 to 0.090 at stride 8. On VisDrone-2019, ScopeMamba-S achieves 50.8% mAP50 with 3.57M parameters, exceeding YOLOv8s by 10.8 pp while using 32% of its parameters; ScopeMamba-M reaches 52.6% mAP50 with 6.48M parameters. Consistent improvements are also observed on AI-TOD, especially for very-tiny and tiny objects.
EgosIS improves drone video understanding by separating motion from scene changes
EgoSIS: From Factorized Visual Ego-Transitions to Motion-Canonical Spatial Evidence for UAV Reasoning
Abstract: UAV video question answering requires separating camera motion from changes in the scene, but RGB-only multimodal models receive no explicit, stable reference for that separation. We present EgoSIS, a pose-free adapter that converts RGB-derived bidirectional flow into motion-canonical visual evidence in three stages. Factorized Visual Ego-Transitions (FVET) fits a robust image-plane transition and exposes motion, residual-support, and reliability factors. Reliability-Gated Ego-Transition Memory (ReTEM) uses reliability-weighted updates for a bounded history and re-anchors it at cuts or sustained uncertainty. Ego-Aligned Spatial Evidence (EASE) warps supported visual features into each segment's local anchor and injects four spatial evidence tokens per visual slice through zero-initialized residuals, without changing Qwen's visual-token count. On SIS-Bench, EgoSIS-8B obtains 89.9\% perception, 82.5\% perception-plus-memory, and 76.2\% overall accuracy, with the largest gains concentrated in self-awareness perception and memory. The adapter thus provides an interpretable interface between optical flow and spatial reasoning.