Papers for

security surveillance operators

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.

Radar builds detailed 3D scenes with language understanding

3D Occupancy-Language Fields from mmWave Radar

Abstract: Radar systems can recover scene geometry and recognize predefined categories, but these outputs do not provide a persistent spatial representation for open-ended language queries. Such queries require linking observations from different viewpoints to the same physical locations. We present TextRadar, a framework that constructs a scene-level 3D occupancy-language field from panoramic radar observations. The field combines occupancy with scale-dependent language features at surface locations, allowing the reconstructed scene to be queried with new descriptions. A single-frame radar distillation model predicts aligned ranges and language features from each radar observation. Using radar-estimated poses, we register these predictions to reconstruct the field from radar alone in a new scene. Experiments on approximately 20k synchronized observations across seven buildings demonstrate scene-level natural-language querying and prompt-free semantic visualization. Analysis of camera-to-radar concept transferability shows stronger agreement for structures, materials, and human poses than for colors and printed text.

Tue 27 OctRobotics
The gist
Radar can usually tell where things are and recognize some categories, but it struggles to keep a full 3D map that understands new language questions. The authors created TextRadar, which uses radar data to build a 3D map that links space and language descriptions together. This map can answer new questions about the scene by connecting observations from different viewpoints. They tested their method across several buildings and found it works well for recognizing structures and human poses but less so for colors or printed text.
Open → 2610.37929v1

Consensus method improves camouflaged object detection using multiple references

Consensus-Aware Multi-Source Fusion for Reference-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection

Abstract: Reference-guided camouflaged object detection aims to segment a target whose visual appearance closely resembles its surroundings by exploiting auxiliary reference samples. The task remains difficult because reference samples contain inconsistent target cues, while generic visual representations are not inherently aligned with the target specified by the references. To handle these problems, we present a consensus-aware multi-source fusion framework. Reference-Conditioned Dual-Backbone Fusion (RCDF) couples trainable PVTv2 query features with frozen DINOv3 representations and uses reference-conditioned correlation to select foundation-model evidence before multi-scale fusion. The framework also aggregates multiple references through cross-reference consensus aggregation and injects reference information at semantic depths matched to the query features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results further show that reference consensus, target-conditioned foundation features, and hierarchical decoding provide complementary improvements under the evaluation protocol. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Wed 30 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Camouflaged objects are hard to spot because they blend in with their surroundings. This paper presents a way to better detect these objects by using multiple reference images that hint at what the target looks like. The authors combine information from different deep learning models and references to consensus on what parts of an image belong to the camouflaged object. Their approach improves the accuracy of identifying these hidden objects compared to previous methods.
Open → 2609.38747v1

Ultra high resolution remote sensing vqa improves with self distillation

RS-OPSD: Reliable Privileged On-Policy-Self-Distillation for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing VQA

Abstract: Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing visual question answering (VQA) requires models to resolve small visual evidence within extremely large images. Existing approaches typically rely on token pruning, visual search, or tool-augmented reasoning at inference time. We instead investigate whether the benefit of zoom-in visual privilege can be internalized into the model. We introduce RS-OPSD, a reliable privileged on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) framework for UHR remote sensing VQA. To provide high-quality privileged information with explicit question-relevant evidence, we construct GeoEvidence-6K, containing 6,750 VQA samples across seven task categories with evidence-region annotations, and develop Human Feedback-Guided Skill Refinement (HF-SR) for scalable annotation. To address context loss from tight crops and conflicting signals from imperfect teachers, RS-OPSD introduces Context-Preserving Visual Privilege (CPVP) and Correctness-Aligned Distillation (CAD). Without any additional visual search or tool calls at inference time, RS-OPSD achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on XLRS-Bench, MME-RealWorld-RS, and LRS-VQA, outperforming pervious SOTA models of comparable scale by an average of 4.0 percentage points. Moreover, our 2B variant, RS-OPD-Lite, surpasses most 8B-scale models while achieving the fastest measured inference speed. Our Code, GeoEvidence-6K, and the model weights for RS-OPSD and RS-OPD-Lite are publicly available.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Ultra-high-resolution remote sensing images are very large and contain tiny details that must be noticed to answer questions about them. The paper's authors built a special training method called RS-OPSD that helps a model learn to focus on important small parts without extra searching later. They also created a new dataset to help the model identify evidence regions relevant to questions. This approach improves accuracy without slowing down the model, outperforming similarly sized competitors and even beating some much larger models.
Open → 2609.38072v1

UniqueShip improves ship sound recognition with better data controls

UniqueShip: Mitigating Data Leakage in Acoustic Ship Classification Benchmark Datasets

Abstract: Underwater Acoustic Target Recognition (UATR) of ships is well-suited for machine learning, yet its progress is hindered by the lack of large, diverse, and publicly available labeled datasets. In this work, we introduce UniqueShip, a machine learning-ready benchmark dataset for UATR applications sourced from the open Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) repository. Unlike previous datasets, we explicitly control for "data leakage" between the training and evaluation sets to ensure more reliable and generalizable model evaluation that does not encourage the model to memorize individual ships. We demonstrate that typical, random data partitioning in two prominent UATR datasets leads to falsely optimistic test performance, increasing accuracy by 10-48 percentage points compared to our more careful partitioning. Ablations on UniqueShip further show that doubling the number of unique vessels improves accuracy by 2.4-2.6 percentage points, while doubling total audio duration improves only by 0.8-1.3 points, indicating that vessel diversity should drive dataset curation more than total hours. We provide baselines with convolutional and transformer backbones, and analyze how ship metadata correlates with classification performance, finding that individual vessel characteristics predict classification difficulty far better than distance to the hydrophone alone. Overall, UniqueShip contains 2,460 hours of ship-radiated audio from 4,218 unique vessels (3,437 hours including background). We publish the dataset, code, and easy-to-download splits at uniqueshipdata.org to foster further UATR research.

Sat 12 SeptSoundComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Recognizing ships by their underwater sounds helps with tracking and identifying vessels but needs lots of good example data. The authors created UniqueShip, a large new dataset with over 4,000 different ships that avoids a problem where the same ships appear both in training and testing, which can fool the computer into just memorizing sounds. They show that having a bigger variety of ships in training helps more than just having longer recordings. They also tested different computer models and found that specific ship features affect recognition difficulty more than just how far the ship is from the sensor.
Open → 2609.13659v1