Papers for

industrial inspection teams

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.

ElasticFormer speeds object detection in huge images by focusing computing

ElasticFormer: Detecting Objects in HRW Shots via Elastic Computing Vision Transformer

Abstract: Recent advances in gigapixel-level imaging have brought High-Resolution Wide shots to the forefront of research. However, these images present significant challenges: extreme sparsity of foreground, gigapixel-level resolutions and diverse target counts. This makes traditional close-up detectors inaccurate and slow as they are overwhelmed by the background. Although previous research has explored sparse backbones, their fixed sparsity patterns lack the adaptability required to handle diverse target numbers. To address this, we introduce ElasticFormer, a sparse backbone that dynamically allocates computational resources based on foreground proportion. After scoring windows based on variance, proposed ElasticSelector module will predict the foreground proportion for top-k selection. The mechanism guides the model to select target-containing windows, scaling resources in areas where objects are clustered. We introduce a novel loss function combined with the 3-phase training strategy for ElasticSelector, allowing it to function properly when bounding box annotations are missing. A WSOD study is carried on PASCAL VOC 2007 to evaluate its extensibility. Further, ElasticNet is created to verify its backbone-agnostic nature. In experiments on the PANDA gigapixel benchmark, ElasticFormer reduces backbone FLOPs by 80% while achieving a significant improvement in AP50 when compared to fixed-ratio sparse methods.

Thu 29 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting objects in extremely large, high-resolution pictures is difficult because most of the image is empty background, which slows down and confuses standard detectors. The authors introduce ElasticFormer, a method that smartly picks which parts of the image to focus on by guessing where objects might be. This saves a lot of computer work while improving detection accuracy. Their approach adapts well even without detailed object markings, making it flexible for real-world use.
Open → 2610.39946v1

Fast event simulation speeds up robot navigation learning

Rendering-Free Event Frame Simulation for Fast Reinforcement Learning of Autonomous Robot Navigation

Abstract: Event cameras offer low latency, high dynamic range, and milliwatt-level power consumption, making them ideal for agile robots such as tiny drones navigating through cluttered environments. However, existing simulators generally render photorealistic images before converting them into events, making large-scale reinforcement learning prohibitively slow. We propose an analytic event simulator that exploits what event cameras fundamentally measure - moving contrast edges - to synthesize event streams directly from scene geometry and ego-motion without visual rendering. Our simulator generates a 64x64 event observation in 17 microseconds on a single GPU - over 400x faster than a state-of-the-art rendering pipeline - enabling end-to-end reinforcement learning for goal-directed obstacle avoidance to converge in under 30 minutes - three orders of magnitude faster than training on rendered events. Policies transfer zero-shot to physically based event simulations (ray-traced Isaac Sim). Our policy reaches 83% success in cluttered courses unseen during training (mid-difficulty, traversability probability approx. 0.57), at 2.4 m/s average goal velocity, and retains 70% in a simulated texture-dense indoor hall. Furthermore, we quantized the policy to a 1.2 MB int8 network running fully onboard a 56-gram Crazyflie equipped with a Prophesee GenX320 event camera and an OpenMV N6 microcontroller board. Without any fine-tuning, external processing, or positioning, the policy achieves an average success rate of 82% (5/5, 5/6, 4/6 flights) across three real-world obstacle courses of increasing difficulty. Code: https://github.com/tudelft/rendering-free-event-nav

Tue 27 OctRobotics
The gist
Training tiny robots to navigate around obstacles using special event cameras is usually very slow because simulation needs to render full images first. The authors developed a fast method that directly simulates the event camera output from simple geometry and motion without rendering images. This approach makes simulation over 400 times faster and allows robots to learn how to avoid obstacles in under 30 minutes. Their trained navigation policies worked well in both simulated and real-world obstacle courses without extra tuning.
Open → 2610.37543v1

Quadruped robot pose estimated accurately from video sequences

Camera-to-Quadruped Robot Pose Estimation from Sequential Images

Abstract: Quadruped robots are increasingly deployed in hazardous environments such as disaster response and facility inspection, where external-camera monitoring is essential for safe operation. This setting is challenging because quadrupeds are articulated systems with time-varying leg joints, leg symmetry, and frequent self-occlusions, which make keypoint correspondence ambiguous. Moreover, no public benchmark exists, making quantitative comparison difficult. To address these challenges, we propose QuadPose, which estimates the full-body 18-DoF pose (6-DoF base pose + 12-DoF joint angles) from monocular video sequences, and introduce QuadSyn, the first camera-to-quadruped robot pose benchmark. On QuadSyn, QuadPose achieves 92.18% PCK@2.5px, 95.54% PCK-AUC, 85.94% ADD@20cm, 66.98% ADD-AUC, and 3.65 degree mean joint-angle error at approximately 33 FPS.

Tue 27 OctRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Tracking the exact position and joint movement of four-legged robots is hard when seen from normal cameras because their legs can block each other and look similar. To solve this, the authors created QuadPose, a method that estimates the robot’s full body pose from regular video. They also made QuadSyn, the first dataset to test how well such methods work. Their system works quickly and accurately enough to help monitor these robots in dangerous places.
Open → 2610.36599v1

Vision language anomaly detectors rely on text scale not meaning

Do Words Matter? What Text Contributes to Few and Full-Shot Vision-Language Anomaly Detection

Abstract: Vision-language anomaly detectors describe normal and abnormal appearance with text, and their gains are commonly credited to the semantic content of these descriptions. This attribution is plausible in the zero-shot setting, but few- and full-shot detectors interpose a trained visual adapter, and in that setting it has not been isolated. Changing a description changes both its meaning and its geometry, so accuracy comparisons cannot separate the two. We ask what a fixed pair of text embeddings, or anchors, contributes to such a detector: semantic content, effective scale, or joint anchor geometry. For a single anchor pair, the answer is effective scale alone. The score reads the anchors only through their difference, and a trained adapter can rotate to follow any replacement direction, leaving that direction, and with it the linguistic content, unidentifiable. We prove that replacement anchors with the same difference-vector length permit exactly the same probability maps and attainable losses. Across seven medical datasets, three vision backbones, both supervision regimes, and three adapter families, scale-matched random and orthogonal anchors track correct prompts; breaking the scale match opens a gap that restoring it closes without text. The same pattern holds in MVFA and when MadCLIP's learned prompts are replaced by a text-free learned scale. When one adapter serves many categories, the answer expands to their joint arrangement. Rotating all category axes together changes nothing, as predicted. For the tested CLIP prompts, these axes are nearly collinear, and meaning-free rotations that spread them apart improve performance on both industrial benchmarks. Even under frozen zero-shot transfer, a random anchor frame transfers as well as the prompt frame: coordinate consistency, not meaning. What these detectors read from their prompts is scale and arrangement, not semantic content.

Sun 25 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
The paper looks at how vision-language systems detect unusual images using text descriptions. It finds that these systems don't actually use the meaning of the words but instead rely on certain mathematical properties of the text's representation. Changing the text changes how the system interprets it geometrically, but the actual semantic content is not what matters for detection accuracy. The authors show this across many datasets and settings, indicating that these models read scale and arrangement from text embeddings rather than language meaning.
Open → 2610.34610v1

Lightweight change detection improves swarm robots in dynamic environments

Lightweight Change Detection for Adaptive Collective Perception in Dynamic Environments

Abstract: Swarm robotics enables scalable inspection through collective perception, where robots infer environmental properties from distributed observations. A common benchmark considers robots exploring black-white tiled environments and determining the majority tile type. While most work studies static environments, dynamic environments remain underexplored. We study collective perception in dynamic environments where the tile proportion and the spatial correlation of surface patterns may change over time. To enable implementation on resource-constrained robots, we integrate a lightweight change detection mechanism into a Bayesian collective decision-making framework that resets robot beliefs when distribution shifts are detected. The proposed detector requires constant memory and constant per-sample computation, unlike two recent competitive approaches that store the full sample stream, making it suitable for memory-constrained robots. We further introduce a method that detects spatially correlated sampling and adapts sampling intervals online to mitigate correlation effects. Our simulation results in Webots show competitive change detection delays, more consistent precision across communication settings, and improved decision accuracy under changing spatial correlations.

Sun 25 OctRobotics
The gist
Swarm robots work together to explore and understand their surroundings using shared information. This study looks at how these robots can better detect when their environment changes over time, especially in settings where patterns and proportions shift. The authors introduce a simple way for robots with limited memory and processing power to notice changes quickly and reset their thinking to stay accurate. Their method also adapts how often robots take samples to avoid mistakes from repeated similar readings. Simulations show their approach helps robots make smarter decisions even when the environment is always shifting.
Open → 2610.34059v1

Improving low-cost sensors to map sharp V-shaped surfaces more accurately

Reliability-Aware Reconstruction of V-Shaped Surfaces with a Low-Cost Multi-Zone SPAD Sensor

Abstract: Low-cost multi-zone single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensors provide compact time-of-flight measurements but are limited by sparse sampling and unreliable depth estimates near geometric discontinuities. This letter presents a reliability-aware reconstruction framework for V-shaped surfaces using two complementary TMF8821 acquisition configurations. Point-wise reliability is learned from sensor confidence, transient peak amplitude, and peak sharpness, and is incorporated into a graph-based depth optimization. The reconstructed geometry is evaluated by robust two-plane fitting and a perpendicular cross-section. Experiments on 60-degree, 90-degree, and 120-degree targets reduce the mean V-angle error from 11.21 degrees to 9.66 degrees (13.8%). For the representative 90-degree target, the combined point-to-plane RMSE decreases from 14.56 mm to 13.65 mm.

Tue 20 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Measuring the shape of surfaces with sharp corners is hard for simple, cheap sensors because their readings can be sparse and unreliable. The authors developed a method to judge how trustworthy each measurement is by looking at how confident the sensor is and the quality of the detected signal. They then use this reliability information to improve the 3D shape reconstruction of surfaces with V-shaped edges, such as corners at different angles. Their approach reduces errors in angle and depth measurements compared to previous methods.
Open → 2610.28258v1

Online method improves real-time scene change detection speed and accuracy

O-SCD++: Replay-Free Online Scene Change Detection via Recursive Evidence Fusion

Abstract: Online scene change detection requires an agent to detect what has changed in a previously mapped environment while it is still on site, observing from unconstrained viewpoints and without access to future observations. This causal setting is strictly harder than its offline counterpart, and online methods have consistently trailed offline accuracy. O-SCD closed that gap by treating change as a persistent property of a 3D Gaussian splatting map of the reference scene, surpassing the strongest offline methods in change detection accuracy while operating at over 10 frames per second. O-SCD optimizes a change field over the Gaussians of the reference map, refitting it to all past cue maps at every frame, a step that consumes more than half of the per-frame budget and forces accuracy to be traded against speed. We present a replay-free formulation that eliminates this trade-off. Because the reference map stays fixed, rendering the change field is a linear operation. Each new observation can therefore be carried onto the map's Gaussians directly, by a single backward pass of the renderer, which reduces multi-view fusion to an exact two-scalar recursion per Gaussian. Past observations are never stored or revisited. The self-supervised objective that O-SCD minimizes by descent also determines the decision threshold exactly, by sorting, yielding a label-free per-frame cutoff whose margin provides a selective-prediction signal. On PASLCD, our method improves mean intersection over union from 0.489 to 0.575 and throughput from 11.8 to 25.6 frames per second, even exceeding O-SCD's offline result while remaining strictly causal.

Sat 17 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting changes in a scene while being there in real time is tricky because you can't look ahead or store all past views. The authors improve a previous method by making it faster and more accurate without needing to replay old images. They represent the scene using a special 3D map and update it quickly with each new observation. This means robots or devices can detect changes more accurately and twice as fast, even when moving around freely.
Open → 2610.24462v1

UniPolar restores images and polarization info amid mixed distortions

UniPolar: Joint Image and Polarimetric Restoration under Compound Degradations via Physical Consistency Learning

Abstract: Polarimetric image restoration aims to recover polarization angle images and reliable polarimetric quantities from degraded observations. Beyond visual fidelity, it also requires preserving the physical relationships underlying reliable polarimetric estimation. However, existing methods typically address either device- or environment-induced degradations in isolation, limiting their applicability to color polarization filter array (CPFA) imaging, where both often coexist. Such compound degradations jointly perturb image intensities and cross angle polarization differences. Consequently, improved image fidelity alone does not necessarily ensure accurate Stokes, DoLP, and AoLP recovery. To address this challenge, we propose UniPolar, a coupled Image Stokes framework for joint image polarimetric restoration from compound-degraded CPFA observations. Specifically, UniPolar employs two complementary streams to reconstruct four polarization-angle images and directly predict Stokes difference components. To coordinate these streams, Degradation Conditioned Cross Domain Interaction combines Dual Domain Frequency Interaction for frequency selective evidence exchange with Degradation Conditioned Modulation for condition adaptive feature correction. Furthermore, at the output level, Image Stokes Physical Consistency Learning aligns image derived and directly predicted Stokes components while regularizing angular fidelity and the physical feasibility of DoLP. On the compound-degradation benchmark, UniPolar achieves average image and DoLP PSNR of 31.522 dB and 24.097 dB, respectively, with an average AoLP error of 16.833 degree. These results underscore the importance of jointly considering visual fidelity and polarimetric reliability, offering a physically grounded perspective on learning based restoration under compound degradations.

Fri 16 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Polarimetric images show how light waves are oriented, which helps in many scientific and technical fields. But images from sensors can be blurry or noisy due to device issues and environmental effects at the same time. The authors introduce UniPolar, a method that fixes these images and recovers important polarization details by learning physical rules about the light's behavior. This approach improves both the quality of the image and the accuracy of the recovered polarization data.
Open → 2610.23360v1

Unified 3d reconstruction combines rgb and x-ray for better object models

X-Splat: Unified Gaussian Splatting for Joint RGB and X-ray 3D Reconstruction

Abstract: Jointly reconstructing RGB and X-ray provides new insights by connecting external appearance with internal structure, enabling a more complete understanding of real-world objects than single modality. Yet existing methods train separate models per modality and suffer from redundant geometry, alignment artifacts, and loose coupling that limits cross-modal insight discovery. We propose a unified representation in which all Gaussian primitives share a single set of geometric parameters, with only surface-proximal primitives additionally carrying appearance attributes. We perform cross-modal registration through clean multi-view stereo and X-ray geometric proxies instead of aligning two sets of optimized Gaussians, improving alignment stability. We then jointly optimize the unified representation via supervision from both modalities, complemented by a surface-depth consistency loss derived from X-ray geometry to guide RGB reconstruction. Experiments on the InsideOut dataset and our Flower & Insect dataset show that our framework achieves more robust cross-modal alignment, higher RGB rendering quality without compromising X-ray reconstruction, and a more compact representation than maintaining two independent geometries.

Fri 16 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
Getting a full understanding of objects requires seeing their outside and inside together. The authors created a single 3D model that merges color images with X-ray scans, instead of making separate models for each. This helps keep the outside and inside views well aligned and improves the quality of both color and X-ray images. Their new way also uses less data and gives more stable combined results than previous methods.
Open → 2610.23237v1

Interpretable workwear detection improves accuracy in low light conditions

DICL-Qwen3VL: Decoupled Confidence Calibration for Interpretable Workwear Detection

Abstract: Poor illumination and occlusion obscure clothing cues in indoor work sites, while diverse clothing styles complicate workwear compliance judgments. Although vision-language models (VLMs) support localization and semantic reasoning, their predictions often lack explicit supporting evidence, and a single confidence score cannot distinguish visual uncertainty from ambiguity in compliance judgments. We propose DICL-Qwen3VL, a decoupled interpretable VLM that integrates structured workwear detection, evidence generation, and separate visual and reasoning confidence estimates. First, low-rank adaptation (LoRA) adapts Qwen3-VL to localize visible upper-body clothing and identify workwear. Second, decoupled calibration separates visual observations from compliance reasoning and assigns a confidence score to each. Token entropy and sensitivity to image perturbations provide supervision for visual confidence, linking confidence estimation to the generated observations and their dependence on image content. Finally, group relative policy optimization (GRPO) jointly optimizes detection accuracy, output validity, and confidence calibration. Experiments on the company-collected Indoor Construction Site Workwear Dataset (ICSWD) and the web-collected Indoor Construction Workwear Dataset (WICWD) yield mAP@50 values of 0.730 and 0.753, respectively, outperforming the evaluated LoRA-adapted VLM baselines, including Qwen3-VL. The framework also provides explicit evidence and separate confidence scores to support manual review in industrial safety monitoring. WICWD is publicly available at https://github.com/DaErwen1/WICWD.

Fri 16 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
In indoor construction sites, dim lighting and blocked views make it hard to tell if people are wearing the right safety clothes. The authors designed a system that can spot upper-body workwear and explain its decisions with separate confidence scores for what it sees and how sure it is about rule compliance. This helps supervisors better understand when the system is uncertain because of the image or because of the rules. The system was tested on two datasets, showing better detection than earlier methods and providing clear evidence to support safety monitoring.
Open → 2610.22929v1

Self-calibrated method removes mixed noise and stripes in hyperspectral images

Self-Calibrated Subspace Robust PCA for Parameter-Free Removal of Mixed Noise and Line Stripes in Hyperspectral Images

Abstract: Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are often corrupted by Gaussian noise, impulses and stripes whose intensities vary across bands. The representative coefficient correlated total variation (RCCTV) model restores HSIs efficiently, but it lacks Gaussian and stripe terms, and its noise-aware extensions require the noise level and a stripe budget to be specified in advance. This article proposes a self-calibrated RCCTV (SC-RCCTV) model, in which the noise parameters are estimated adaptively during the iterations. A band-wise dense term and line-constant column and row stripe terms are introduced into RCCTV. The noise level of each band is initialized by a stripe-invariant median absolute deviation estimator and refined online from the residual, which turns the separation of sparse and dense noise into a band-adaptive Huber loss, and the stripe thresholds follow from a significance test whose false-alarm rate can be predicted analytically. No parameter is tuned for a specific image, and every subproblem of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) solver is solved in closed form. Under line stripes, SC-RCCTV outperforms the parameter-free FastHyMix by 8.17 dB on native-size cubes, and, without any noise information, it exceeds S3TTV, which is given the true noise parameters, by 1.52 dB while running more than 1,900 times faster. On average, it stays within 0.01 dB of the same model given the true noise levels, and its online calibration improves on a two-stage estimate-then-denoise scheme. Experiments on real Indian Pines and Urban data further delineate its scope for stripes that do not span entire lines.

Thu 15 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Hyperspectral images, which capture detailed color data beyond normal pictures, often have different types of noise like random spots and line-like stripes. The authors developed a method that automatically estimates the noise characteristics without needing the user to set parameters. Their approach can clean these images efficiently and better than previous methods, even when the noise types and levels vary across the image. It works faster and adapts to different noise patterns in each color band, making it easier to get clear hyperspectral images.
Open → 2610.21896v1

ProGAN generates realistic images to improve metal defect detection

ProGAN-Based Synthetic Image Generation for Industrial Visual Inspection of Metallic Parts

Abstract: Automated visual inspection is essential for efficient repair and recycling of metallic components. AI-based defect detection is a strong fit. However, it is often constrained by scarce, low-diversity training data. To address this gap, we study Generative AI-driven synthetic image generation using Progressive Growing GANs (ProGAN). We implement a ProGAN pipeline with Wasserstein loss and gradient penalty and evaluate key hyperparameters on two public datasets, MVTec AD (metal nut) and MPDD (tube). As a result, training remained stable and the model yielded realistic images. These images can augment training data, improve robustness, and reduce the cost of collecting rare defects.

Mon 12 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting defects in metal parts helps make repairs and recycling work better, but computers need lots of images to learn what defects look like. The authors show how a special AI called ProGAN can create realistic fake images of metal parts to help train these computers. They tested their method on two types of metal images and found it made adding new images stable and realistic. This means better training for defect detection without needing to collect many rare damaged samples.
Open → 2610.16287v1

Gaussian fields improve multi-material CT image reconstruction quality

Gaussian Material Fields for Volumetric Multi-Energy CT Decomposition

Abstract: Volumetric material decomposition in multi-energy computed tomography requires a representation that organizes multiple three-dimensional material fields in a common spatial domain while retaining differences in composition and local structure. We observe that spatial primitives can be shared across materials without tying their coefficients, but their local capacity must respond to material-specific reconstruction needs. We introduce Gaussian material fields, which represent multiple material distributions with shared anisotropic 3D Gaussian primitives and independent nonnegative material coefficients. The shared geometry defines a continuous spatial basis, while the coefficients determine each primitive's contribution to the individual material fields. To reconstruct this representation from multi-energy projections, a differentiable spectral forward model combines Gaussian material path integrals with a calibrated basis matrix, enabling joint optimization of spatial geometry and material composition. Material-aware adaptive density control retains material-specific refinement evidence before aggregation and adjusts local representation capacity to accommodate both spatially extensive components and sparse details. Experiments use synthesized multi-energy projections generated from pseudo-reference material maps constructed by conventional methods from publicly available CT data. Across 15 cases, our approach improves average PSNR by 4.03 dB and SSIM by 4.96% over the strongest baseline, while reducing NRMSE by 33.45%. Material-wise comparisons and component ablations support improved recovery of localized structures, while runtime and memory measurements show favorable computational scaling. These results establish Gaussian material fields as an explicit, adaptive representation for volumetric multi-material reconstruction.

Wed 7 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Medical imaging often uses CT scans to see inside the body and identify different materials like bone and tissue. The authors developed a new way to represent and separate these materials in 3D scans using shared shapes called Gaussian fields combined with material-specific details. This approach helps better recover fine details and different structures inside the scanned volume from multi-energy CT data. Their method outperforms existing ones in image quality while handling complex material compositions efficiently.
Open → 2610.09492v1

Quadruped robot guides micro drone for improved flight control

Towards Quadruped-Provided Localization and Active Tracking for Micro-UAVs

Abstract: Micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs) are small enough to reach confined spaces that larger robots cannot access, but too small to carry the sensing and computing power required for autonomous flight. We move the localization stack entirely off the aerial platform onto a quadruped robot with a 7-degree-of-freedom (DOF) arm, which supplies the micro-UAV (27 g bare, 42 g with fiducial markers) its full 6-DOF pose. A camera at the arm's end-effector detects AprilTag fiducial markers on the drone and composes that observation with the quadruped's own self-localization to place the drone in a shared map frame, so the ground robot localizes its partner, rather than only tracking it relative to the camera. The arm acts as an actively-controlled observer, repositioning to keep the drone in view as both robots move; the drone carries only an inertial measurement unit and fuses the external pose to fly commanded setpoints. In lab flights the external pose is accurate to 12-16 mm, enough to fly the drone autonomously within 2-5 cm of motion-capture-fed control. Having the quadruped actively follow the drone reduces the tracking error from 11.0 cm to 6.9 cm by holding the camera in the close range, where the markers are most accurate.

Mon 5 OctRobotics
The gist
Very small drones can fly into tight spaces, but they can’t carry the equipment needed to know exactly where they are. The authors move the job of locating the drone onto a walking robot with an arm, which watches the drone using a camera and special markers. The walking robot moves its arm to keep the drone in sight, helping the drone fly more accurately. This method lets the drone fly accurately without carrying heavy sensors.
Open → 2610.06215v1

Any-scale object detection improved by scale-aware super-resolution images

Any-scale Object Detection using Arbitrary-scaled Images

Abstract: This paper proposes any-scale object detection using arbitrary-scale super-resolution for continuously rescaling object images, while general multi-scale object detection uses discretely rescaled appearance representations. However, a naive usage of super-resolution produces many false-positive detections if many super-resolution images are independently fed into an object detector. Our method suppresses these false positives by predicting scale proposal maps, each of which represents a set of pixels appropriate for each super-resolution scale.

Sat 3 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting objects in images often requires looking at different sizes, but current methods only check a few fixed sizes. The authors propose a way to zoom in or out on objects at any size using super-resolution images, which makes the detection more flexible. However, just zooming in too much can cause many false alarms, so they added a step to decide which zoom levels make sense for different parts of the image. This approach helps detect objects more accurately across a continuous range of sizes.
Open → 2610.04346v1

Curated synthetic data improve visual perception for specific tasks

Curating Synthetic Data for Task-Specific Visual Perception

Abstract: Synthetic data are most valuable where general-purpose datasets cannot provide the domain-specific priors a task requires, and where manual annotation is expensive, imprecise, or infeasible. In this article we argue that the central question for specialized vision systems is not how to generate more data, but which data to generate. We therefore discuss curated synthetic data, whose scene content, appearance variations, sensing characteristics, and annotations are deliberately designed around a given task. We examine three complementary curation paradigms. Procedural rendering offers explicit control over scene parameters and the annotations follow by construction. Physically-based simulation encodes the mechanism behind an observed effect and yields exactly aligned supervision pairs. Generative AI learns sensor-specific appearance from small real seed sets and attains plausible realism, though it remains prone to hallucination and to inaccurate annotation. These paradigms are illustrated with examples from industrial surface defect detection, restoration of degraded digitized autochrome plates, and 6DoF pose estimation from RGB and event data. Using these examples, we analyze different data regimes and training strategies that combine synthetic and real data across these paradigms. We conclude that curated synthetic data are best understood as a complement to real observations, and that hybrid pipelines combining controllable supervision with learned appearance are the most promising direction for reliable sim-to-real transfer.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
In some areas, regular image datasets don’t have the special examples needed for certain computer vision tasks, and labeling real images can be expensive or difficult. The authors argue that it’s better to carefully choose what synthetic images are created instead of just making lots of them. They describe three ways to produce these curated synthetic images, including procedural control, physics-based simulation, and AI-generated visuals. Combining these methods with real images can help build better vision systems that work well in specific scenarios.
Open → 2609.38476v1

3D anomaly detection improves by modeling geometric relational consistency

Towards Generalizable 3D Anomaly Detection via Relational Inconsistency Modeling

Abstract: 3D anomaly detection (3DAD) aims to identify defective regions in point cloud data, serving as a critical component in industrial inspection systems. Existing methods are normality-centered -- learning the distribution of normal samples and treating deviations as anomalies -- without explicitly modeling what constitutes a defect. This leads to ambiguous decision boundaries with increased false positives and negatives, particularly in unified and cross-domain settings where diverse normal distributions further blur the boundaries. We propose a relational inconsistency modeling framework that characterizes defects as violations of geometric consistency among neighboring structures. Our approach learns category-agnostic defect cues through pseudo-anomalies designed as controlled relational violations, instantiated by two key modules: Edge-aware Graph Refinement (EGR) for encoding geometric relationships among local regions, and Cluster-Deviation Modeling (CDM) for identifying regions that are relationally incompatible within their structural peer group. Extensive experiments on Anomaly-ShapeNet and Real3D-AD demonstrate consistent improvements over prior state-of-the-art methods in both in-domain and cross-domain settings, validating the effectiveness of learning an explicit, relation-based defect criterion for 3D anomaly detection. Project page: https://visualsciencelab-khu.github.io/GRIM_project/.

Mon 28 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Finding defects in 3D scanned objects is hard because normal shapes can vary a lot. The authors designed a method that looks for places where the geometric relationships between parts break down, which often signals a defect. Instead of just learning what normal 3D shapes look like, their approach learns what kinds of inconsistencies hint at problems. It works well even when tested on different categories or datasets, making it more reliable in real-world inspection tasks.
Open → 2609.35059v1

Autonomous robotic system inspects large space structures without markers

Markerless Multi-Modal Autonomous Robotic Inspection of Large Space Structures

Abstract: Future orbital infrastructures, such as deployable antennas, solar farms, and large orbital platforms will require autonomous inspection systems able to operate with limited prior knowledge and without cooperative markers. Current on-orbit servicing approaches often rely on predefined trajectories, standard interfaces, fiducial markers or accurate target models, which limits scalability for large, heterogeneous or partially unknown structures. This paper presents a markerless autonomous robotic inspection pipeline in which 3D reconstruction is used as an inspection-support representation. The system integrates a Kinova Gen2 manipulator with an end-effector-mounted multimodal sensor head composed of an RGB-D camera, a thermal camera and a 2D LiDAR. The pipeline estimates an approximate inspection volume, generates viewpoints, plans collision-free motions with MoveIt, and synchronously records RGB-D images, thermal data, and robot poses in ROS2. Candidate reconstruction methods were evaluated to select a practical method for this pipeline, with Nerfacto used for geometric reconstruction and Thermal-Nerfacto used to demonstrate thermal-aware rendering for inspection. Validation in a Gazebo-based simulator and preliminary laboratory tests reveal that the proposed system can autonomously acquire spatially coherent inspection data and produce reconstructions suitable for visual and geometric assessment, representing a step towards inspection of large non-cooperative space structures.

Thu 24 SeptRobotics
The gist
Inspecting big space structures like antennas or solar panels is hard because they can be huge and don’t have special markers to guide robots. The authors built a robot system that uses cameras and sensors to create 3D maps and thermal images without needing these markers. It plans safe paths to move around and collects detailed data about the structure. The system was tested in simulations and labs, showing it can work on big, unknown space objects without prior models.
Open → 2609.29644v1

Point clouds prove more reliable than pixels for zero-shot anomaly detection

When Point Clouds Outperform Pixels: Rethinking Zero-Shot Multimodal Anomaly Detection

Abstract: Zero-shot multimodal anomaly detection commonly assumes that RGB and point cloud modalities are equally reliable and can contribute uniformly to anomaly localization. We challenge this assumption. Using a set of recently proposed stringent metrics that penalize false anomaly responses in normal regions, we find that point clouds are substantially more reliable than RGB under zero-shot category shift. Motivated by this observation, we propose WOOPS (\textbf{W}hen P\textbf{o}int Cl\textbf{o}uds Out\textbf{p}erform Pixel\textbf{s}), a reliability-aware zero-shot multimodal anomaly detection framework. To strengthen the more reliable geometric modality, we design a Multi-view Information Decoupling module to suppress heterogeneous information from multi-view point cloud projections and enhance point cloud feature quality. To avoid unconditional fusion, we further introduce a Modality Reliability Calibration module to adaptively calibrate modality contributions according to their reliability. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves the best or competitive performance under the new metrics in both unimodal and multimodal settings. Further analysis demonstrates that point cloud information also improves RGB-only inference, while ablations verify the effectiveness of both modules. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Tue 22 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting unusual or faulty parts in things like machines or objects is often done by looking at their pictures, but these pictures can sometimes be misleading when used without prior training. The authors found that 3D point cloud data, which capture the shape and geometry of objects, are more reliable than regular images in spotting anomalies especially when the system has never seen that category before. Based on this, they built a new method called WOOPS that pays more attention to 3D data and adjusts how much it trusts images depending on the situation. Their tests showed this approach detects anomalies better and also helps improve image-only methods.
Open → 2609.25793v1

Mission-informed planning improves mobile gas inspection reliability

MIRA-PRM: Mission-Informed Reusable Roadmap Planning for Mobile Gas-Sensing Inspection

Abstract: Mobile gas-sensing inspection requires a mobile platform to reliably reach ordered sampling poses. We present MIRA-PRM, a mission-informed probabilistic roadmap that combines geometry-, mission-flow-, and inspection-conditioned sampling with locally adaptive connectivity and evidence-gated refinement. Eight development campaigns comprising 142,448 planner runs evaluated mission scaling, repeated-query adaptation, finite node budgets, target distributions, local map repair, ablation, cross-family comparison, and parameter sensitivity. MIRA-PRM maintained 100% seed-level success as ordered targets increased from two to eight, and achieved 97.67% seed-level success under a 40-node ceiling, compared with 67.17% for PRM and 86.50% for PRM*. Local repair reduced event time by 79.9-81.9% and node additions by 90.8-94.3% relative to rebuilding. On a separate frozen holdout of 12 maps, 48 ordered missions, and three seeds per map-mission unit, MIRA-PRM produced 96/144 validated successes, versus 82/144 for PRM, 89/144 for PRM*, and 70/144 for LE-HG-PRM. On paired common-success runs, MIRA-PRM reduced wall time by 16.89% relative to PRM* and 81.01% relative to LE-HG-PRM, but was 52.23% slower than PRM; paths were 0.54-1.86% longer. All validated paths passed independent full-segment checks and clearance non-inferiority. The results support a reliability-oriented trade-off in structured simulations and motivate external-map and physical mobile-sensing validation.

Sat 19 SeptRobotics
The gist
Planning paths for mobile robots to inspect gas levels at specific spots can be tricky. The authors created MIRA-PRM, a new method that helps robots find reliable routes that visit ordered targets efficiently. It improves success rates and reduces repair time compared to older planning methods. Tests show it works well in many simulated scenarios and careful checks confirm its paths avoid obstacles safely.
Open → 2609.22954v1

A new method for detecting anomalies by modeling their causes

A Principled Approach to Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Abstract: Traditional unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) methods are designed to flag or localise deviations from a normative distribution, ignoring the underlying generative mechanisms of the anomalies. Yet the nature of an anomaly is often as important as its presence. We reformulate UAD as a Bayesian inverse problem, in which the objective is to infer the most probable corruption responsible for each observation. Our framework yields a probabilistic anomaly score as the energy of the inferred corruption parameters, and serves as a principled recipe for developing new UAD algorithms. We derive several existing methods as instances of the general framework, each corresponding to the same energy score under different modelling choices. Experimentally, we study the framework's components in a controlled setting, and improve object-class AUROC on the MVTec AD dataset by 2.3% by adapting the underlying corruption model. Finally, we validate the framework on a brain MRI benchmark, achieving strong detection performance while producing estimates of pathology intensity, bias, and geometry. Code is available at https://github.com/jgmyles/inverse-uad.

Fri 18 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting anomalies usually means spotting anything unusual, but often it’s important to understand what caused those unusual things. The authors propose a new way to detect anomalies by guessing the hidden changes that made the data strange, using probabilities. Their method can explain how bad changes happened, not just if something is wrong. This approach improved detection accuracy in industrial images and brain MRIs, while also estimating how the abnormalities appeared.
Open → 2609.21800v1

Legged robot improves object coverage using pose and omnidirectional sensing

Pose-aware Legged Robot Semantic Exploration with Omnidirectional Perception in Confined Unknown Environments

Abstract: Semantic exploration in confined environments requires both environment mapping and detailed observation of target objects. For ground robots, limited sensor vertical fields of view and restricted standoff distances can leave upper object surfaces unobserved from planar viewpoints. Body tilting can improve coverage, but additional observations and posture transitions increase mission time. To address this trade-off, we present POSE, a pose-aware semantic exploration system that exploits a legged robot's intrinsic body pitch and roll with omnidirectional camera-LiDAR perception. The proposed pose-aware viewpoint sampling module selects body postures from partial object maps according to expected coverage gain, while aim-aligned execution reduces unnecessary body reorientation. Further, we introduce an object-centric viewpoint pruning strategy assisted by a vision-language model (VLM), which uses persistent observation history and bird's-eye-view (BEV) maps to reduce redundant inspection visits. The resulting semantic viewpoints are combined with geometric exploration viewpoints in a global exploration planner. Simulations show that POSE improves final target-surface coverage by 8-10 percentage points over the planar planning baseline while reducing exploration time by 17-32%, and achieves the highest mean object coverage AUC among the evaluated baselines. Real-world experiments with a legged robot carrying an omnidirectional camera-LiDAR suite in a machine shop further demonstrate the system's applicability. These results support adaptive body-posture planning for improving the coverage-efficiency trade-off in legged robot semantic exploration. We plan to release the code for community benefit in the future.

Wed 16 SeptRobotics
The gist
Exploring tight, unfamiliar spaces is hard for robots because their cameras and sensors often miss parts of objects, especially the tops. The authors created POSE, a system that helps a legged robot tilt and change its posture smartly to see objects better using all-around cameras and lasers. This system decides how the robot should position itself to get the most useful views without wasting time. Tests in simulations and a real machine shop showed POSE finds more object surfaces faster than older methods. This could help robots inspect places people find hard to reach.
Open → 2609.19460v1

PSMP-CLIP improves zero-shot anomaly detection with better image masks

PSMP-CLIP: Patch-Prompt SAM and Multi-Semantic Prompting for CLIP-Based Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Abstract: Zero-shot anomaly detection aims to localize anomalies without target-domain samples. Existing CLIP-based methods suffer from coarse anomaly maps and limited semantic prompts. We propose PSMP-CLIP, integrating patch-prompt SAM2 segmentation (PPSS) and multi-semantic guided prompt regularization (MSGPR). PPSS samples prompts directly from intermediate patch features, avoiding threshold drift and guiding SAM2 to produce precise masks. MSGPR uses multiple learnable prompts constrained by semantic anchors to preserve generalization. Experiments on 14 datasets show highly competitive performance, achieving the best pixel-level AUROC on MVTec AD, BTAD, DTD-Synthetic, CVC-ClinicDB, TN3K, Endo, and Kvasir.

Tue 15 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting unusual parts in images without using examples from that image type is hard. Existing methods using a model called CLIP struggle to pinpoint odd spots precisely. The authors present PSMP-CLIP, which helps by creating better image masks from smaller image patches and by using multiple guided text prompts for improved detection. They tested this approach on many datasets and found it works better than similar methods in identifying anomalies at the pixel level.
Open → 2609.16785v1

Neural networks recover fiber images despite bending distortions

Proximal-Only Transmission Matrix Recovery of an Arbitrarily Deformed Graded-Index Multimode Fiber

Abstract: The multimode fiber is among the thinnest imaging conduits available, carrying hundreds to thousands of spatial modes through a cross-section comparable to a human hair, but its endoscopic capabilities are currently limited by the sensitivity of the transmission matrix to the fiber's deformed state. Proximal-only recovery of the fiber's transmission matrix is an appealing approach for enabling general use multimode fiber endoscopy, and within the last decade, machine learning techniques have been applied to both single-ended and double-ended transmission matrix recovery tasks. We present a new approach to this interdisciplinary problem and show that neural networks can generalize to recover transmission matrices of an arbitrarily deformed graded-index multimode fiber from proximal measurements alone.

Mon 14 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Multimode optical fibers can carry many light signals through a very thin strand, like a tiny cable. However, when the fiber bends or deforms, it changes how light passes through, making it hard to use for imaging inside the body. The authors show that neural networks can figure out how the fiber is bending just by looking at signals from one end. This method helps recover clear images even when the fiber is twisted or curved in complex ways.
Open → 2609.14869v1

Point cloud upsampling improves 3D anomaly detection on low-resolution sensors

PC$^2$-AD: Point Cloud Upsampling to Safeguard 3D Anomaly Detection with Resolution-constrained Edge Devices

Abstract: Low-cost and low-resolution sensors used in edge deployments can produce test point clouds that are substantially sparser than the normal training data. This train-test sampling-resolution gap changes the local geometry available to a 3D anomaly detector. We propose PC$^2$-AD, a point cloud upsampling framework that compensates sparse test inputs before downstream detection. Target Domain Candidate Generation (TCG) adapts a pretrained upsampler to normal training geometry and generates a dense candidate pool. Geometry-Aware Candidate Filtering (GACF) selects candidates according to geometric spacing and spatial coverage. Normality-Preserving Point Compensation (NPPC) refines the selection by comparing candidate normality scores with those of their input anchors. The selected points are combined with the unchanged input points and processed by the existing detector. Experiments with six detectors on two Anomaly-ShapeNet settings and Real3D-AD show improvements in the mean of object-level and point-level AUROC for all six detectors in each Anomaly-ShapeNet setting and four on Real3D-AD. These results support point cloud compensation as an input-level approach to improving 3D anomaly detection under low-resolution sensing conditions. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/gyutong406-commits/PC2-AD.

Sun 13 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Using cheap sensors at the edge can create sparse 3D data that makes it harder to find problems with objects. The authors introduce a method called PC²-AD that adds points to sparse 3D scans before checking for anomalies. Their system chooses extra points carefully to match the original shapes and keep normal parts intact. Tests show this approach helps many existing anomaly detectors work better with low-quality 3D inputs.
Open → 2609.14722v1

Efficient 3D imaging on low-power edge devices speeds up CT scans

An Efficient Out-of-Core Tomographic Imaging Framework for Edge Devices

Abstract: Computed Tomography (CT) is an essential 3D imaging technology widely used in medical diagnostics and scientific research. However, performing CT imaging on edge devices is challenging due to limitations in computational power, memory capacity, and energy budget. This paper presents an efficient CT reconstruction framework, called edgeFBP, designed for Nvidia Jetson System-on-Chip (SoC) devices. edgeFBP adopts an end-to-end pipeline design for efficient out-of-core image reconstruction under tight power and memory constraints. edgeFBP utilizes a mixed-precision strategy leveraging half-precision Tensor Cores (TCs) to accelerate the bottleneck back-projection (BP) kernel. edgeFBP achieves a 1.83x speedup over the widely used RTK library on Jetson Nano and a 2.56x speedup on Jetson AGX. Under a strict 25-Watt power budget, edgeFBP on Jetson Nano achieves up to 5-48x higher energy efficiency than an Nvidia DGX A100, enabling datacenter-scale imaging on constrained edge devices.

Mon 7 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Computed Tomography (CT) scans create 3D images used in medicine and research but usually require powerful computers. The authors developed a new method called edgeFBP that works well on small, low-power devices like Nvidia Jetson, which have limited memory and processing power. Their approach speeds up the image reconstruction process using special computing units and smart precision choices, making it much faster and more energy efficient compared to current solutions. This allows advanced CT imaging to be done in settings without big data centers.
Open → 2609.07249v1