Papers for

security system integrators

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.

Prototype guided pretraining improves human sense in mmWave point clouds

PT$^3$: Prototype-Guided Self-Supervised Pretraining for Generalizable mmWave Human Point Cloud Representation

Abstract: Multi-source millimeter-wave (mmWave) observations offer an opportunity to learn human representations reusable across sensing tasks. However, sparse detections and multipath effects make these observations unstable, challenging existing point cloud pretraining methods. We propose PT$^3$, a prototype-guided self-supervised pretraining framework for mmWave human point clouds. PT$^3$ represents local states in spatial regions as sparse compositions of shared prototypes and learns their temporal evolution through autoregressive prediction. Observation consistency further stabilizes representations under radar perturbations. After pretraining on unlabeled sequences from multiple sources, the same frozen encoder supports action classification, dense point generation, joint pose estimation, and future motion prediction on datasets not used for pretraining. Across these tasks, PT$^3$ outperforms the compared pretraining baselines and achieves competitive or superior performance to task-specific models.

Wed 28 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Millimeter-wave sensors can detect human shapes and movements but often produce messy, incomplete data that makes it hard to understand what’s going on. The authors created a new way to train computers to recognize human figures from these imperfect signals by teaching them common building blocks and how they change over time. This training method helps the computer better handle noisy data and works well across different tasks, like recognizing actions or predicting motion, even on data it hasn’t seen before. This means the system can learn from unlabeled data and adapt to many human sensing jobs.
Open → 2610.38551v1

Ambient WiFi signals enable indoor activity recognition with language descriptions

CSI-TextBench: A Dataset and Benchmark for Language-Grounded Ambient Sensing Perception

Abstract: Indoor context deciphered by ambient sensing underpins many applications, from assisted living to smart buildings, yet remains weakly connected to the language-aligned paradigm of modern multimodal systems. Through billions of IoT devices, ambient WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) captures the indoor context of human activity and environmental dynamics passively via ubiquitous, always-on infrastructure. However, unlike vision or audio, CSI lacks naturally paired text like captions or transcripts, limiting its integration with language-driven AI systems. We present CSI-TextBench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for aligning CSI data with natural language, unifying 3 sensing benchmarks into 285,790 samples across 7 tasks and pairing them with 2,291 hierarchically structured, label-derived descriptions via many-to-many assignment to construct 2.0 million CSI-text training tuples. Benchmarking 5 alignment methods from 4 paradigm families, we show that contrastive CSI-text alignment matches supervised classifiers without class labels, adapts to unseen classes with few samples, and responds to open-vocabulary natural-language prompts. A single unified model supports compositional scene understanding, answering joint queries over activity, proximity, and identity, achieving 86.9% top-1 accuracy on 140 composite scenes, outperforming task-specific classifier ensembles. CSI-TextBench enables ubiquitous ambient sensing as a language-indexed perception layer, enabling indoor contextual awareness in language-driven AI systems.

Sun 25 OctArtificial IntelligenceEmerging Technologies
The gist
Understanding what happens indoors using WiFi signals could help in homes and smart buildings. The authors created a large dataset linking WiFi signals, which capture movement and environment, to written descriptions. This lets AI systems learn to recognize indoor scenes and activities using natural language. Their method matches or beats traditional classifiers and adapts to new tasks more easily. This work helps connect these signals to language-based AI, improving indoor awareness without cameras or microphones.
Open → 2610.34616v1

Lightweight model predicts short-term human paths for mobile robots

Real-Time Human Trajectory Prediction from RGB-D for Mobile Robots Using Bi-Mamba

Abstract: Predicting the short-term future trajectory of a person from RGB-D cameras is a key capability for mobile robots navigating in dynamic and human populated environment. The key challenge to deploying learned predictors on real robots is the train-deploy pipeline gap. Training data are often prepared with an idealized, smoothed ground truth, whereas at inference, the model is fed noisy estimates from pose detectors and depth sensors. The model is therefore evaluated on an input distribution it never encountered during training. Most existing models rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or transformers, which either struggle to capture short-term temporal dependencies or suffer from computational cost. We present TrajMamba, a lightweight, bidirectional state space model for short-term human trajectory prediction using an RGB-D camera. The model uses a single shared processing path for both training and deployment, aligning human pose extraction, depth back projection, and smoothing processes. It encodes a short window of persons's hip center velocities with stacked bidirectional Mamba blocks and decodes future velocities with a GRU head. On the ETH/UCY benchmark, TrajMamba reaches an average ADE of 0.29 m FDE of 0.51 m. With 262K parameters, it runs in real time on modest hardware and is deployed on a TIAGo robot with an onboard NVIDIA Jetson Orin.

Sat 24 OctRoboticsMachine Learning
The gist
Predicting where a person will walk next helps robots move safely around people. The authors created a lightweight computer model called TrajMamba that uses camera images and depth info to guess short-term paths a person might take. Unlike past methods, their model works well even when the input data is noisy and runs fast on small robot computers. They tested it on popular benchmarks and real robots with good accuracy and speed.
Open → 2610.33916v1

Scalable edge cloud system improves multi-site video anomaly detection

YUTELA: A Scalable Edge Cloud AIoT System for Multi-Site Video Anomaly Detection with Scene Specific Adaptation

Abstract: Building upon our previous Ancilia framework, this work presents \emph{YUTELA}, an edge--server--cloud AIoT system for long-term, multi-site video anomaly detection. YUTELA replaces workstation-based on-site processing with NVIDIA Jetson Thor edge devices and redesigns the multi-camera pipeline through camera batching and redistribution, shared memory, reduced inter-stage data transfer, task integration, and TensorRT-accelerated inference. It maintains a separate anomaly model per camera, retrained on a centralized GPU server once enough recent pseudo-normal data are collected, with updated weights returned to the edge. With eight cameras, TensorRT increases throughput from 14.17 to 29.94 FPS under normal density, and the optimized edge node exceeds the throughput of the workstation-based Ancilia system in seven of nine workload settings, reaching up to 2.03 times its throughput at extreme density. This gain comes at the cost of higher latency under lighter loads with four or eight streams. YUTELA was then operated continuously for 170 hours at four public sites using 31 existing CCTV cameras. The deployment shows that runtime load is driven by scene activity and input frame rate rather than by camera count, and that retraining frequency varies by about three times across sites. The 101 automatically triggered training events occupied only about 6.6\% of a single GPU, indicating that one global node can support adaptation for tens of sites. Mean end-to-end alert latency ranged from 6.8 to 15.4~s depending on site traffic and anomaly type. These results show that YUTELA enables practical multi-camera edge processing with low-cost, camera-specific adaptation across heterogeneous sites.

Mon 19 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Video systems that detect strange events often rely on powerful computers on-site. The authors developed YUTELA, which uses smaller edge devices and cloud servers to watch many cameras at once and adjust detection to each location. This setup runs faster than older systems and can handle different activity levels at multiple public sites. It retrains its models automatically using recent data and keeps alerts timely with low delay. This makes it practical to monitor many places efficiently and adapt to changing conditions.
Open → 2610.26468v1

Toolkit evaluates face deidentification methods for privacy and quality

Toolkit for Facial Deidentification

Abstract: This work presents a novel open-source toolkit designed for the evaluation of face deidentification techniques with available evaluation models. The framework provides a complete evaluation pipeline, including preprocessing, deidentification, and performance assessment, based on data utility, image quality, and identity protection metrics. It supports a variety of datasets, enabling researchers to easily benchmark new deidentification techniques. Results show the effectiveness of some techniques on maintaining privacy while preserving image utility. The toolkit is aimed at unifying future research by providing a standard evaluation framework for privacy-enhancing technologies in facial biometrics. Implementation is available at github.com/blazm/deid-toolkit.

Mon 19 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Protecting people’s identities in photos is important for privacy but hard to measure. The authors created a free toolkit that helps test how well different face-blurring or masking methods work. It checks if faces are safely hidden without ruining the usefulness or quality of images. This toolkit supports many image collections and helps everyone compare new privacy tools fairly. It makes research on face privacy easier by providing one standard way to test methods.
Open → 2610.26079v1

Vespermuse transformer improves image understanding in low light

VesperMUSE: Multi-Modal Fusion Vision Transformer for Image Semantic Segmentation Under Diverse Light Conditions

Abstract: Semantic segmentation is critical for the reliable navigation and scene understanding of autonomous systems, yet its performance degrades severely in low-light environments due to noise, artifacts, colour distortion, and the loss of structural details. To address this challenge, this work introduces VesperMUSE, a unified multi-modal framework designed to achieve robust image semantic segmentation across diverse illumination conditions. The architecture addresses the light deficiency problem on multiple levels: proposing a novel physics-informed synthetic low-light adaptation algorithm, approaching Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) through a thermal-guided paradigm, and finally aiming to recover the intrinsic scene details for semantic segmentation through a multi-modal fusion approach. Following enhancement, the framework dynamically integrates the primary RGB features with auxiliary thermal representations and surface normal maps highlighting geometric discontinuities and material boundaries. At the core of this integration is a highly scalable, modality-agnostic self-attention mechanism that extracts both global context and fine local features from an arbitrary number of auxiliary inputs. By combining and projecting these hierarchical multi-modal representations into a unified component, the attention module allows the network to selectively attend to relevant cross-modal cues without requiring any architectural modifications when different sensor configurations are used. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that VesperMUSE successfully recovers missing visual cues, providing a flexible, state-of-the-art (SOTA) solution for machine perception in extreme and unstructured real-world environments.

Thu 15 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Semantic segmentation helps computers understand different parts of a scene in an image, but it struggles when images are taken in the dark or poor lighting. The authors created VesperMUSE, a new system that improves this by combining regular camera images with thermal images and surface details, helping the system see better in low light. They also improved low-light images using a physics-based method, then combined these multiple sources using a special attention mechanism that picks out the most useful pieces of information. This makes it easier for machines like robots and autonomous vehicles to understand scenes more reliably even when lighting is bad.
Open → 2610.21990v1

Universal Wi-Fi signal encoder improves human sensing across devices

UniCSI Towards a Universal Wi-Fi CSI Encoder for Ubiquitous Human Sensing

Abstract: Wi-Fi sensing promises to turn the everyday wireless signals that already surround us into ubiquitous sensors for human sensing. However, a fundamental obstacle is that CSI is acquired under diverse device-specific configurations, including different subcarrier counts, bandwidths, and carrier bands. Consequently, the resulting CSI tensors vary in both spectral resolution and tensor shape, making heterogeneous modeling challenging. Standard architectures struggle with such heterogeneity, forcing lossy pre-processing which compromises the underlying signal. To bridge this gap, we present UniCSI, a unified foundation architecture that directly operates on heterogeneous CSI while preserving the integrity of the native waveform. UniCSI hinges on two core innovations: (1) a physics-informed RF tokenizer that encodes each frequency channel based on its fractional position within the physical spectrum rather than rigid array indices. It preserves intrinsic spectral coherence and enables seamless, frequency resolution-agnostic processing across arbitrary sensing configurations. (2) a spectral aggregator that distills variable-length channel sequences into a fixed-size spectral signature, effectively decoupling the feature dimensionality from the physical subcarrier spacing. Extensive evaluations on a large-scale corpus of 25 heterogeneous public datasets, spanning 14 to 2048 subcarriers, 20 to 160 MHz bandwidth, and the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, demonstrate that native heterogeneous ingestion substantially improves cross-domain transfer under both supervised and self-supervised training schemes, particularly in regimes where fixed-grid architectures fail to generalize.

Wed 7 OctMachine LearningNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
Wi-Fi signals can be used to sense people's movements and activities, but different devices capture the Wi-Fi data in many incompatible ways. The authors created UniCSI, a system that understands Wi-Fi data from many different devices without losing important details. It uses physics-based encoding to handle the varied Wi-Fi frequencies and organizes the information into a fixed format that works for lots of sensors. This approach helps computer models learn better and perform more accurately when detecting humans from Wi-Fi signals across many setups.
Open → 2610.09559v1

Learned corner selection speeds up cooperative guard deployment

On Learning Optimal Corners in Orthogonal Partially Observable Cooperative Guard Art Galleries

Abstract: The CADENCE algorithm solves the Partially Observable Cooperative Guard Art Gallery Problem (POCGAGP) with formal coverage and connectivity guarantees, but leaves unspecified which valid corner each agent should be deployed to, a choice that strongly affects efficiency. We introduce two learned corner-selection heuristics that preserve these guarantees: a CNN scoring candidates on a grid encoding, and a GATv2 network trained with Deep Q-Learning (DQN) on a visibility graph. Across 7,500 runs on random orthogonal environments (50x50 to 250x250), our heuristics outperform baseline CADENCE in both steps to full coverage and peak agent count, with gains growing with scale, and improve on Incremental Self-Deployment (ISDA) baselines in agent utilization while providing guarantees ISDA lacks. Learned corner selection thus improves CADENCE in speed and agent utilization at no cost to its formal properties.

Mon 5 OctMultiagent SystemsMachine LearningRobotics
The gist
Guard agents are placed in a gallery to watch over all areas, but deciding where to put each guard can be tricky and slow. The authors improved an existing method by teaching computers to pick the best corners for guards using two different learning techniques. These new strategies make the deployment faster and use fewer guards while still making sure every area is covered and the guards can communicate. Their improvements work better especially in bigger spaces compared to earlier methods.
Open → 2610.06777v1

Trajectory-guided tokenization improves Wi-Fi sensing accuracy

Trajectory-Guided Tokenization of Complex CSI for Wi-Fi Sensing

Abstract: Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) enables contactless presence detection and gesture recognition. Its high-dimensional complex-valued time series require input representations that preserve informative temporal variations during compression. We propose Trajectory-Guided Tokenization (TGT), which combines complex trajectory decomposition with asymmetric attention to construct compact continuous tokens. For each antenna link and subcarrier, an orthonormal Helmert transform decomposes short, ordered temporal patches into local-center and centered-trajectory coordinates. Keys are learned from the centered-trajectory coordinates, while values retain both components. Learnable queries aggregate subcarriers into frequency slots, which are fused into temporal tokens. Trained jointly from scratch, TGT with TokenMLP achieves the highest mean accuracy of 92.83% among all evaluated frontend-backend combinations on the self-collected dataset. Experiments on EHUNAM and Widar further support the applicability of TGT to cross-domain presence detection and gesture recognition.

Mon 5 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Wi-Fi signals can be used to detect presence and recognize gestures without touching devices. This paper introduces a method called Trajectory-Guided Tokenization (TGT) that simplifies the complex Wi-Fi signal data while keeping important time-based details. The method breaks down signal changes into smaller parts and uses attention mechanisms to create compact representations. When combined with a specific model, this approach achieved high accuracy in detecting people and gestures, even working well across different datasets.
Open → 2610.06288v1

Efficient global face detection boosts accuracy with clever feature fusion

Weave Mamba Fusion: Global Cross-Scale Interaction for Lightweight Face Detection

Abstract: Feature pyramid methods, from FPN to BiFPN, have achieved strong performance in face detection by fusing multi-scale features. However, detecting faces under unconstrained conditions, such as small scale, occlusion, and extreme pose, remains difficult, as it requires global cross-scale dependencies that local fusion cannot model. State space models such as Mamba provide global context with linear complexity by scanning features as a sequence, and therefore offer a promising direction for this problem. Nevertheless, such a scan needs the two pyramid scales combined into a single feature map, and the way they are combined determines whether cross-scale structure is preserved. Summation collapses the two scales before the scan, so the scan has no cross-scale structure to exploit, while concatenation keeps both scales but at far higher cost. To address this, we propose \textbf{Weave Mamba Fusion (WMF)}, which interleaves two adjacent pyramid scales column by column so that each step of a horizontal bidirectional SS2D scan moves from one scale to the other. With partial-channel processing and parameter-free de-weaving, WMF enables efficient cross-scale interaction while preserving feature structure. Integrating WMF into every fusion node yields \textbf{WeaveBiFPN}, the neck of our \textbf{WeaveFace} detector. On WIDER FACE, WeaveFace achieves 91.41\% mean AP with only 0.34M parameters and 1.16 GFLOPs, outperforming prior detectors under 0.5M parameters. Its largest gains are on the Hard subset, where it reaches 87.14\% AP. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/dohun-mat/WeaveMambaFusion}.

Mon 5 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Detecting faces in photos with tricky conditions like very small size or unusual angles is hard because it requires looking at features on many scales at once. The authors propose a new way to combine features across scales so that the detector can understand the big picture better without extra computational cost. They do this by weaving two different scales together step-by-step, allowing the model to share information globally but efficiently. This approach improves accuracy on a challenging face detection benchmark while keeping the model lightweight.
Open → 2610.05865v1

Efficient audio deepfake detection with smaller models

Task-Aware Joint Pruning and Distillation for Efficient Audio Deepfake Detection

Abstract: Advances in speech synthesis have made deepfake speeches increasingly convincing, posing growing threats to security. While self-supervised learning (SSL) based detectors achieve state-of-the-art performance, their computational demands (typically 300M+ parameters) prevent deployment on resource-constrained devices. Existing compression methods, designed mainly for content-centric tasks, struggle to maintain competitive performance when directly adapted to deepfake detection. We propose a Task-Aware Joint Pruning and Distillation framework that combines cross-domain knowledge distillation with movement-guided structured pruning to transfer forgery-discriminative knowledge and preserve critical structures under aggressive compression. Our framework reduces the model to 31.9M parameters with 6.3$\times$ FLOPs reduction, with an average performance drop of only 1.30\% across multiple datasets compared to the uncompressed baseline, demonstrating strong potential for on-device deployment.

Sun 4 OctSoundArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Deepfake voices are getting better and more convincing, which can cause security problems. The authors focus on making deepfake speech detection work well on small devices by shrinking the size of the detection model without losing much accuracy. They created a new method that smartly removes unnecessary parts of the model and transfers important knowledge from bigger models to smaller ones. Their smaller model keeps most of the accuracy while being much faster and easier to run on devices like phones.
Open → 2610.05264v1

Single photon cameras offer clearer images with more measurements

One Photon, Many Worlds: Posteriors and Predictions with Single-Photon Cameras

Abstract: Single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) cameras operate fundamentally differently from conventional cameras due to their photon-counting nature. Each frame produces a binary image: pixels report zero if no photons arrived during exposure, and one if one or more photons arrived. Reconstructing a scene or inferring its properties from a single binary frame is difficult because many different images could produce the same measurement; thus, the inverse problem is fundamentally one-to-many. As we gather more binary measurements, the inherent uncertainty associated with the inverse problem and any associated inference diminishes. With sufficient photon counts, photon noise becomes negligible relative to the signal mean, enabling near-deterministic scene recovery and inference. This work characterizes the transition from stochastic to near-deterministic scene understanding as photon budget increases, analyzing how the stochasticity in photon arrival affects downstream inference tasks. Technically, we develop a conditional generative framework based on a Hypergeometric frame-thinning process for accumulated binary SPAD measurements. Generative models capture the one-to-many nature of photon-starved inverse problems, enabling empirical characterization of how this ambiguity diminishes with increasing measurements and its impact on downstream tasks like character recognition, QR code decoding, and facial analysis.

Fri 2 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Single-photon cameras work differently from regular cameras because their pixels only report whether they detect any photons, not how many. This creates a challenge: one snapshot can correspond to many possible images, making it hard to understand the scene. The authors show that taking more such binary snapshots reduces this uncertainty, allowing better predictions like reading QR codes or recognizing faces. They built a mathematical model that helps explain how adding more data improves the image quality and downstream tasks.
Open → 2610.02675v1

Temporal HDR camera fusion vulnerable to pulsed light attacks

Lights, Camera, Attack: Exploiting Temporal HDR Fusion with Pulsed Light

Abstract: Modern cameras widely use temporal High Dynamic Range (HDR) to improve visibility by capturing a sequence of exposures with different integration times and fusing them into a single image. This process implicitly assumes that scene illumination remains sufficiently stable during capture. We introduce FLASH (Fusion-Level Attack by Saturating HDR), an external pulsed-light attack that deliberately attacks this assumption by creating cross-exposure inconsistency before downstream perception. FLASH exploits an algorithmic assumption rather than relying on sensor damage or hardware failure, and requires neither physical camera access, access to raw exposure brackets, knowledge of the fusion algorithm, nor exact phase lock to the camera. Across eight physical camera platforms spanning embedded, surveillance, photography, smartphone, and automotive use cases, and matched optical controls, FLASH causes pipeline-dependent darkening, overexposure, and visibility loss. This includes extreme-darkening rates of 50.0% on an iPhone 16 Pro and 33.7% on a Wyze Battery Cam Pro. On the Wyze camera, FLASH triggers the system-level low-visibility response in 10/10 trials, compared with 0/10 continuous-light and randomized-frequency flashing controls. In a controlled stationary OpenPilot case study, 23.0% of frames exhibit severe darkening in the traffic-cone target region, with target-background CNR decreasing by up to 90.8%. Under FLASH, the OpenPilot interface also fails to display the system-level path state observed in the corresponding control trials. In a controlled night-only HDR reconstruction stress test, a proof-of-concept exposure-rejection defense reduces median output-brightness deviation by 79.16%. These results show that temporal HDR fusion itself requires security-aware validation of exposure evidence.

Tue 29 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
Many modern cameras create clearer images by combining several photos taken with different brightness settings. This approach assumes the lighting doesn’t change much while the photos are taken. The authors show that flashing a bright light in a certain way can trick the camera’s processing, making it produce very dark or very bright images instead of normal ones. This can confuse things that rely on camera images, like security systems or self-driving cars. They also propose a way to reduce this problem by detecting and ignoring suspicious exposures.
Open → 2609.37742v1

Robot uses sound and depth to navigate toward hidden sources

BCNav: Bearing-Conditioned Depth Policies for Sound Source Navigation

Abstract: The ability to navigate toward sound sources extends a robot's reach beyond its visual field, enabling response to auditory events in unknown environments. To equip robots with this capability, existing methods couple acoustic and visual information through joint audio-visual learning in acoustic simulators. However, acoustic simulation is both low-fidelity and expensive, producing a domain gap that prevents reliable real-world deployment, while the discrete action spaces inherited from grid-based simulators introduce an additional kinematic gap on physical robots. To alleviate these issues, we propose BCNav, a decoupled framework that separates the acoustic module from the learned navigation policy using direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation: an estimator provides a scalar bearing to the sound source, so the navigation policy only processes depth images and a bearing angle, two inputs whose domain gaps are well characterized. We collect shortest-path demonstrations with calibrated bearing noise injection and train the policy via imitation learning to output continuous velocity commands directly executable on ground robots. We demonstrate the method in simulation and on a physical robot, navigating unknown environments without any acoustic fine-tuning, prior mapping, or real-world audio data collection. Code is available at https://github.com/york1to/bcnav.

Tue 29 SeptRobotics
The gist
Finding the direction of a sound helps robots move toward it even when they can't see it. The authors created a method where a robot uses a sound direction estimate and depth camera images to decide how to move, without needing expensive sound simulations or detailed maps. They trained the robot to follow the best path using examples, and it works both in computer tests and on real robots without extra tuning. This approach makes it easier for robots to respond to sounds in new places.
Open → 2609.37084v1

Dynamic RGB thermal reconstruction tracks heat and color changes in 3D scenes

Dynamic Thermal Gaussians: Multimodal 4D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: Thermography plays a vital role in military and broader thermal analysis applications. Recent progress in 3D thermal reconstruction has extended temperature analysis from 2D to 3D space, yet most existing works assume static temperature distributions, neglecting the temporal dynamics of heat transfer in real-world environments. To address this limitation, we propose the first dynamic RGB-Thermal reconstruction framework for complex scenes. Our method jointly models RGB appearance, thermal observations, and scene geometry as they change over time. Specifically, we introduce a multimodal dynamic scene representation that anchors both the color and thermal modalities to a shared geometric substrate, ensuring their consistency under spatiotemporal deformations. We further design multimodal embeddings to enhance the motion expressiveness for each modality, and propose a multimodal routing mechanism that retains a unified set of shared multimodal Gaussians as the geometric backbone while adaptively spawning modality-specific Gaussians to strengthen the representational capacity in detail-rich regions of each individual modality. In addition, we contribute a novel benchmark dataset featuring high-frequency temperature variations to facilitate the evaluation of 4D reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high-fidelity spatiotemporal reconstruction of both appearance and temperature. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/LinLif1869/DTG.

Mon 21 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Thermal imaging helps us see heat patterns, but most tools only look at still scenes and miss how temperature changes over time. The authors created a new method that combines normal color images and thermal data to show how both appearance and heat move in 3D spaces. Their approach uses a shared 3D model to keep color and heat aligned even as the scene changes. They also made a special dataset to test their method, showing it can accurately capture detailed temperature changes along with what the scene looks like.
Open → 2609.24531v1

XCalib enhances alignment of infrared and visible camera videos

XCalib Depth-Guided Geometric Optimization for Dense Thermal-Visible Video Registration

Abstract: Image registration is a vital preprocessing step in multimodal perception tasks, including image fusion, object detection, and semantic segmentation. In Advanced Driver- Assistance Systems (ADAS), spatial misalignment between visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) cameras -caused by non-coincident optical axes and field-of-view differences- introduces non-uniform parallax and visual ghosting. Classical keypoint-based methods are restricted to global homographies that fail under dynamic depth, while unconstrained dense flow algorithms lack structural regularization and suffer from temporal instability. In this paper, we propose XCalib, an unsupervised dense thermal-visible registration framework that bridges this gap. Rather than serving as an absolute metric calibration tool, XCalib leverages virtual pinhole camera parameterization strictly as a geometric constraint space. By optimizing effective relative pose and intrinsics alongside predicted monocular metric depth, XCalib restricts the search space of spatial displacements to physically valid projection geometries. Our key contributions are: (1) a novel registration paradigm that uses camera parameterization as an implicit regularizer for dense cross-modal warping; (2) Normalized Edges Correlation (NEC), a robust structural similarity metric tailored to cross- spectral alignment; and (3) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across public ADAS datasets, demonstrating superior temporal stability and alignment accuracy over unconstrained dense flow baselines.

Fri 18 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Aligning infrared and visible images is important for things like driver-assistance systems but is tricky due to differences in camera position and angle. The authors propose XCalib, a new method that uses camera setup and depth information to better match these images over time. Unlike past approaches, XCalib constrains how the images can be warped to physically plausible ways, improving stability and accuracy. They also introduce a new way to measure how well the images line up, especially across different types of cameras.
Open → 2609.21770v1

Frequency modulation improves facial landmark detection across datasets

FreqFLD: Towards All-in-One Facial Landmark Detection via Frequency Modulation

Abstract: Recent progress in deep learning has significantly advanced facial landmark detection. However, most existing methods process features in a spatial-domain manner under a dataset-specific training paradigm, which overlooks the fact that facial landmark detection is inherently geometry-driven and sensitive to frequency variations, thereby limiting cross-dataset generalization under complex scenarios and hindering the development of a facial landmark detection model. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{FreqFLD}, a \textbf{freq}uency-modulated framework towards All-in-One \textbf{f}acial \textbf{l}andmark \textbf{d}etection. Specifically, FreqFLD introduces a Frequency Modulation Module (FreqMoM) to explicitly induce the frequency prior by decoupling and modulating low- and high-frequency components, which is then injected into subsequent feature modeling to enable balanced modeling of global facial structure and local landmark details. Furthermore, FreqFLD employs a Frequency-Modulated Mixture-of-Experts (FreqMoE), with expert selection adaptively conditioned on frequency-modulated priors, enabling flexible modeling of heterogeneous facial landmark patterns under diverse and challenging scenarios. To regularize frequency-consistent modeling under the All-in-One paradigm, we further introduce a Frequency-Consistent Routing (FreqCR) loss, which constrains the routing and assignment of frequency-aware experts to promote balanced expert utilization across diverse facial scenarios, thereby enabling stable expert specialization and achieving robust facial landmark detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed FreqFLD achieves comparable performance on popular datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/jkj1059657014/FreqFLD.

Wed 9 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Facial landmark detection means finding key points on faces, like eyes and mouth, which is important for many apps but can be hard when faces change a lot. Most current methods focus on looking at the face as a whole picture, missing important details about different frequencies or patterns in the image. The authors created a new method called FreqFLD that looks at both the big picture and small details by separating low and high frequency parts of the face data. This approach helps the system better handle different types of faces and conditions, making facial landmark detection more reliable across various datasets.
Open → 2609.10278v1

Dual-polarized rectenna enables wireless sensing and secure backscatter communication

A New Backscattering Dual-Polarized Rectenna for Wireless Power Transfer and IoT Applications

Abstract: This paper proposes an innovative dual-polarized backscattering rectenna that operates in two distinct modesenergy harvesting and backscattering modulation-driven by two-bit digital control signals. By utilizing two orthogonal (co-and cross-) polarizations, the design represents a versatile candidate for IoT applications such as battery-free wireless sensing, identification, localization, and communication. The rectenna's dual functionality is validated through its integration into a proofof-concept battery-free wireless sensor, where it operates both as an energy harvester and as a dual-polarized backscattering modulator. As a proof of concept, a 16-byte AES-128 encrypted payload is backscattered over the wireless power transfer link to enhance the resilience of a battery-free Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless sensor against replay, relay, and eavesdropping attacks.

Tue 8 SeptCryptography and SecurityNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
Wireless devices often need a way to gather power and send information without using batteries. The authors created a special antenna system called a rectenna that not only harvests energy from radio waves but also uses different signal directions to send encrypted messages back. This design works in two modes, one to gather energy and another to communicate securely. They demonstrated this using a simple wireless sensor that sends encrypted data, making it safer against hacking attempts.
Open → 2609.08833v1

Foundation models improve semantic communication at very low bit rates

Foundation Models for Generalizable Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

Abstract: Semantic and goal-oriented communication is increasingly studied for 6G, but generalization beyond seen data remains a key weakness under tight rate budgets. Many existing systems overfit their training data and degrade sharply at very low bit rates because they attempt to compress the entire signal. We introduce Foundation Model-Guided Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication (FMSGOC), a framework that uses broad visual-linguistic Foundation Model priors to mitigate overfitting. It further improves rate efficiency by concentrating bits on sparse, goal-aligned anchors and relying on generative foundation-model priors to reconstruct the masked regions. By decoupling what to send from how to reconstruct, a vision-language foundation model selects and transmits a sparse set of semantic anchors, while a pretrained diffusion model, fine-tuned for masked completion, reconstructs the image at the receiver. In our experiments, FMSGOC reaches 0.039 bits per pixel (BPP), maintains high semantic fidelity (cosine similarity 0.87-0.90 on CIFAR-10), remains robust on previously unseen inputs (0.83-0.86 on ImageNet), and shows good perceptual similarity (0.1278/0.1558, CIFAR-10/ImageNet), outperforming strong end-to-end baselines at lower bit rates.

Mon 7 SeptMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceRobotics
The gist
Sending pictures clearly over very limited data connections is hard because most methods try to send the entire image. The authors created a way that sends only important parts of the image that matter to the goal, then uses smart AI to fill in the rest. This approach avoids learning just from the training images and works well even on new, unseen pictures. Their method keeps the meaning of images with fewer bits and looks visually similar to the originals.
Open → 2609.07853v1

Federated screening reduces video transmission for anomaly detection

Federated Binary Gating with Server-Side Vision-Language Inference for Surveillance Anomaly Classification

Abstract: Privacy-sensitive surveillance systems could benefit from large vision-language models (VLMs), but such models typically require centralized access to raw video. In federated learning settings, this challenge is amplified by non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) client data, which can make direct multiclass anomaly classification unstable, especially for rare categories. We propose a hybrid two-stage architecture that combines a federated binary convolutional neural network (CNN) gate with server-side zero-shot VLM inference. The lightweight LiteCNN3D gate performs local anomaly screening and forwards only flagged videos to Qwen3-VL-8B, which assigns them to four anomaly metaclasses. We evaluate this design on UCF-Crime grouped into five coarse metaclasses and implement the federated stage in a real three-node heterogeneous deployment. In the studied setting, direct federated multiclass training collapses, whereas the proposed decomposition yields a better trade-off between classification quality and raw-video transmission. With fixed-threshold routing, the federated hybrid pipeline preserves nearly the same macro-averaged F1 score (F1-macro) as its centralized CNN+VLM counterpart while reducing the fraction of transmitted videos to 51.4%, although with a lower proxy macro receiver operating characteristic area under the curve (ROC AUC) than the centralized hybrid system. A complementary sensitivity-oriented routing operating point increases macro ROC AUC from 0.673 to 0.692 and reduces the false negative rate from 29.3% to 22.9%, but decreases F1-macro from 0.503 to 0.485 while increasing transmission from 51.4% to 57.9%. These results suggest that federation is better suited to coarse local screening, while routing rules can be adjusted to trade server-side VLM usage for higher anomaly sensitivity.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Detecting unusual events in surveillance videos is hard when camera data can’t be shared in full due to privacy. The authors developed a two-step system where simple local models first flag suspicious clips, sending only those to a powerful server model to identify broad anomaly types. This approach works better than trying to classify all anomaly types locally in a federated way, especially for rare events, while cutting down the amount of video sent over the network. They show that tuning when videos are sent balances better detection accuracy with less data transfer.
Open → 2609.07403v1