Papers for

security surveillance 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.

Geometry helps drones handoff tracked targets accurately in flight

PATH: Continuous Target Sensing among Autonomous Cooperative Drones

Abstract: Continuous target sensing by uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) is constrained by limited flight endurance, motivating the transfer of tracking responsibility between cooperating UAVs. Such a handoff requires the receiver to identify the same physical target currently tracked by the sender despite differences in viewpoint, scale, and target appearance. Existing approaches based on global target localization or appearance-based cross-view association are limited by positioning uncertainty or ambiguous visual features. This paper presents Perspective Alignment \& Tracking Handoff (\textbf{PATH}), a platform-agnostic, geometry-assisted sensing and verification framework for target handoff between two moving UAVs. The sender reconstructs the tracked target as a metric 3D point using RGB-D sensing, while the receiver estimates its relative pose from a fiducial observation and projects the transmitted target point into its own image as a spatial prior for target acquisition. The receiver-generated candidate is then returned to the sender and verified through a cross-view Mutual Agreement Handshake before tracking responsibility is transferred. Real-world UAV experiments show mean relative-position and target-position errors of 0.047~m and 0.030~m, respectively. Under visually ambiguous conditions, PATH achieves 96.0\% frame-level receiver-side target acquisition accuracy, with 2.0\% false-positive and 2.0\% false-negative rates. A sensor-error sensitivity analysis shows that relative-pose uncertainty is the dominant contributor to receiver-view projection error. The implementation operates at video rate with compact inter-UAV communication below 16~kB/s at 60~Hz, demonstrating the feasibility of lightweight geometry-assisted target handoff on resource-constrained UAV platforms.

Fri 11 SeptRobotics
The gist
Drones often need to keep watching a target for a long time, but they run out of battery fast. To solve this, the authors made a way for one drone to pass the tracking job to another smoothly. Their method uses 3D shape data and special markers to help the receiving drone find the exact target even if it looks different from another angle. Tests showed the method is very accurate and works well even when visuals are unclear.
Open 2609.12456v1

Radar improves moving object tracking in challenging surveillance scenes

Segment Any Motion with Radar: Robust Multimodal Moving-Object Segmentation and Tracking

Abstract: Moving-object perception must decide which image regions correspond to real motion and keep every instance identified over time. Methods that read motion from appearance, optical flow, or estimated trajectories lose that evidence under poor illumination, adverse weather, reflections, and occlusion. Radar is a natural remedy because it measures radial velocity directly instead of inferring it from photometric correspondence. However, existing benchmarks do not jointly provide radar measurements, dense moving-instance masks, and temporally consistent identities for surveillance. We therefore introduce RGBTR-Motion, a synchronized and calibrated fixed-camera benchmark that pairs RGB, thermal, and radar streams with dense instance masks and temporally consistent identities across diverse surveillance scenes. We also develop SAM-Radar, an RGB, thermal, and radar-based segmentation and tracking framework built on SAM 3. SAM-Radar's radar-aware detector fuses calibrated RGBT features with radar returns that are grounded at their projected image locations, and motion supervision, implemented as foreground classification of those projected returns, teaches the detector to reject clutter without any text prompt. The tracker associates accepted radar returns with individual trajectories and uses them as physical evidence that a visually degraded target remains present. This allows it to bridge short periods of low visibility or occlusion and reconnect a reappearing target to its existing identity instead of starting a new track. SAM-Radar attains 0.7027 IoU and 0.8090 F1-50, and raises MOTA, HOTA, and IDF1 by 0.2977, 0.1603, and 0.2857 over the strongest competing values.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Tracking moving objects in video is hard when lighting is bad, the weather is poor, or objects block each other. The authors introduce a new dataset that combines regular video, thermal images, and radar data to detect and follow moving things more reliably. They build a system called SAM-Radar that uses radar signals along with images to spot and track objects, even when visuals are unclear. Their method keeps objects identified consistently over time, leading to better tracking than previous approaches.
Open 2609.08346v1

Object detector mismatch helps catch unknown objects fast

SAM3-O2D2: Zero-Shot Object Out-of-Distribution Detection by Object Class Prompting of the SAM3-Image Model

Abstract: Object detectors have shown remarkable performance in various fields, among these medical imaging, surveillance, and autonomous driving. However, they are prone to overconfidence when encountering unseen objects in real-world deployments, causing potential safety issues. To address this, detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) objects is essential for reliable object detection. Modern approaches leverage the broad semantic knowledge of foundation models such as CLIP for post-hoc few- and zero-shot OOD detection. However, these methods typically perform OOD assessment in feature space, which can be sensitive to object detector localization errors and variations in object appearance. Moreover, the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot method performs computationally costly diffusion in inference. In this work, for our proposed zero-shot object OOD detection method SAM3-O2D2, we employ the SAM3-image foundation model in an efficient manner. Specifically, we prompt SAM3 only with the object detector's predicted classes and compare the predictions of the object detector and SAM3. An object is in-distribution (ID), if SAM3 also detects an object at the corresponding location. If SAM3 does not detect the prompted object, this indicates a mismatch between the detector's prediction and the image content, suggesting that the object is OOD. Experimental results show that our method significantly surpasses the so-far zero-shot SOTA method. Specifically, we achieve new SOTA AuROC and FPR95 metrics over both ID datasets Pascal-VOC and BDD100K and both OOD datasets MS-COCO and OpenImages.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Object detectors can wrongly identify items they've never seen before, which can cause problems in real-world uses like driving or security. The paper shows a new method to spot these unknown objects without any prior examples. The method uses a model called SAM3, comparing its guesses with those from the main detector to see if they agree. If they don't match, it suggests the object is unfamiliar. This approach outperforms earlier methods while being more efficient.
Open 2609.08281v1

Vision language models improve zero shot anomaly detection accuracy

Proximity-CLIP: Text-Guided Semantic Proximity Learning for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Abstract: Vision-language models offer a promising approach for zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD). However, due to object-centric bias, normal and anomalous text prototypes exhibit a high semantic overlap. While enforcing strict orthogonality between them improves discriminability, mapping highly contiguous visual inputs onto drastically orthogonal prototypes introduces a geometric dilemma, disrupting the pre-trained structural continuity. To address this problem, we propose Proximity-CLIP, a framework that visually calibrates the semantic margin to guide visual adaptation. First, we introduce a visually-calibrated semantic proximity learning mechanism that uses a bounded dynamic regularization to learn an appropriate semantic margin, ensuring discriminative separation while preserving structural alignment. Second, we design an Anomaly Query Module (AQM) driven by these text priors. Using the calibrated anomalous prototype as a semantic query, the AQM actively retrieves localized defect cues from contextual visual patches, mitigating the dilution of subtle anomalies during global pooling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Proximity-CLIP outperforms current state-of-the-art methods across multiple ZSAD benchmarks with minimal architectural modifications.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting unusual or defective items in images without prior training is difficult because normal and abnormal features often look similar. The authors propose Proximity-CLIP, which adjusts how text descriptions relate to visual data to better separate normal from abnormal features. This method also focuses on small defective areas using a special querying mechanism and preserves smooth visual structure learned from before. Their approach performs better than existing methods on several tests with only minor changes to the model.
Open 2609.07229v1