#01Aug 14, 2026
cs.CV
IRGNN: Efficient Invariant Radar Graph Neural Network for Radar Point Cloud Object Detection
Xiao Guo, Wanke Xia, Lili Yang and 1 more
Perception is a fundamental component of autonomous driving systems. While LiDAR-based methods have achieved remarkable progress in object detection, their reliability can degrade under adverse weather conditions. Radar point clouds provide a robust alternative due to their resilience to bad weather and low-illumination scenarios. However, radar point clouds are typically sparse, unordered, and less informative than LiDAR data, making it challenging to directly apply existing LiDAR-based perception methods. To address these challenges, we propose IRGNN, an Invariant Radar Graph Neural Network for radar point cloud object detection. IRGNN first reconstructs radar point clouds into graph representations using translation- and rotation-invariant feature designs, enabling robust modeling of sparse radar measurements. It then employs an improved message passing neural network (MPNN) with residual connections and a virtual node layer to enhance local feature propagation and global context modeling. Finally, task-specific heads are applied to the learned graph representations for object classification and bounding box prediction. Experimental results on the RadarScenes dataset show that IRGNN outperforms existing radar-based object detection methods and achieves competitive performance. In addition, IRGNN significantly reduces computational cost and memory usage during inference, demonstrating its effectiveness and practical potential for efficient radar-based perception in autonomous driving.
#02Aug 14, 2026
cs.SD
Acoustic UAV Detection in Battlefield Scenarios: Handling Noise, Domain Shift, and Weak Labels
Vadym Vilhurin, Volodymyr Sydorskyi, Andrii Shevtsov
Passive acoustic sensing offers a critical, cost-efficient, and, crucially, passive alternative for detecting small unmanned aerial vehicles. However, the practical deployment of acoustic systems is discouraged by extreme environmental noise and sensor-induced domain shift caused by heterogeneous hardware. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a robust framework optimized for real-world battlefield conditions. We propose the integration of Per-Channel Energy Normalization (PCEN) and attention-based pooling to enhance feature extraction under low signal-to-noise ratio scenarios. We further propose a domain-aware training strategy that leverages auxiliary classes and multi-microphone data to mitigate cross-domain performance degradation. Evaluated on a unique dataset of combat-zone recordings from the Ukrainian frontlines, our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines, increasing the F1 score from 55.4% to 78.6%. This paper was originally presented at the International Conference on Military Communication and Information Systems (ICMCIS), organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Scientific and Technical Committee, IST-224-RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Bath, United Kingdom, 12-13 May 2026.
#03Aug 14, 2026
cs.RO
MMUSV-Sim: A Perception-Oriented Simulation and Data-Generation Platform for Multi-USV Cooperative Perception
Ziao Li, Jianxiong Ye, Biao Tang and 4 more
Cooperative perception among multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) combines complementary observations to extend maritime target sensing beyond the view range and field of a single platform. Developing such systems at scale calls for a unified workflow for configurable multi-USV scenarios, multimodal acquisition, and shared annotations. We present MMUSV-Sim, a perception-oriented maritime simulation and data-generation platform built on Unreal Engine 5 and Project AirSim. It provides island, open-sea, and port environments; configurable weather, time of day, and wave conditions; a diverse vessel asset library; and spline-based multi-vessel motion. MMUSV-Sim acquires RGB, depth, semantic, LiDAR, and radar observations across multiple USVs and captures a common world state for per-agent annotation export. Experiments verify that the configured wave settings produce the intended changes in vessel heave, roll, and pitch, and evaluate the geometric consistency between projected annotations and semantic renderings. In LiDAR-based cooperative BEV vessel detection experiments on the generated multi-USV dataset, Early Fusion achieves an AP@0.5 of 72.74, compared with 45.54 using a single USV.
#04Aug 14, 2026
cs.CV
Learning to Forecast Crop Growth from Earth Observation Data
Dominik Senti, Mehmet Ozgur Turkoglu, Michele Volpi and 1 more
Forecasting crop growth across agricultural landscapes is important for improving the productivity, resilience, and operational management of farming systems. In this work, we investigate whether Earth observation time series and meteorological drivers can be used to predict future canopy development at country scale. We focus on winter wheat and formulate crop growth prediction as forecasting future leaf area index (LAI) trajectories beyond the last available Sentinel-2 observation. We evaluate this task on a multi-year dataset which spans the entire country of Switzerland, containing over 20 million pixel-level Sentinel-2-derived LAI time series paired with meteorological variables. Because cloud cover and revisit gaps leave LAI supervision sparse, models fit the few valid (cloud-free) LAI observations yet oscillate implausibly between them, producing trajectories no real canopy could follow. We introduce a lightweight unimodal shape regulariser which improves trajectory plausibility with negligible loss in accuracy. We compare deep learning sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models with classic machine learning baselines and show that Seq2Seq models generalise well across years, achieving $\mathrm{R}^2$ above 0.8 and consistently outperforming conventional approaches. Together, these results demonstrate that remote sensing and weather-driven sequence modelling can learn crop growth dynamics at landscape scale. S
#05Aug 14, 2026
cs.CV
Decoding the Past: An Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning Framework for Sex Attribution in Prehistoric Hand Stencils
Karel Becerra, Boris Mederos, Dean Snow and 1 more
Determining the biological sex of the individuals who created Upper Paleolithic hand stencils remains a challenging problem due to the absence of ground truth, population differences between contemporary and prehistoric groups, and the uncertainty introduced by image degradation. Traditional morphometric methods suffer from high structural overlap across sexes, poor cross-population generalizability, and subjective feature engineering. This study presents an uncertainty-aware deep learning framework for sex attribution in prehistoric hand stencils that explicitly models, propagates, and aggregates uncertainty throughout the analytical pipeline. The methodology combines dual image processing, dual contour extraction, structured silhouette augmentation, model architectural diversity, and ensemble-based decision aggregation. The pipeline generates twelve plausible silhouette realizations per stencil to capture boundary uncertainties, which are processed by two ensembles of ten deep neural networks each (EfficientNet-B3 and MobileViT-S) trained on 14,036 contemporary hand samples. Furthermore, a triangulated validation scheme integrates ensemble predictions with unsupervised 2D latent-space manifold mapping (UMAP + k-NN) and explainable AI spatial attributions (LayerCAM) to ensure anatomical consistency. On contemporary data, ensemble models achieve strong classification performance, with accuracies exceeding 88% in older age groups. When applied to prehistoric stencils, the framework produces both sex predictions and confidence measures of internal agreement, enabling the distinction between morphologically stable and ambiguous cases. Convergence across ensemble predictions, latent-space structure, and interpretability analyses shows that uncertainty can become a measurable component of archaeological inference, enabling robust and reproducible decoding of ancient rock art.