Visible-thermal small object detection (RGBT SOD) is a significant yet challenging task with a wide range of applications, including video surveillance, traffic monitoring, search and rescue. However, existing studies mainly focus on either visible or thermal modality, while RGBT SOD is rarely explored. Although some RGBT datasets have been developed, the insufficient quantity, limited diversity, unitary application, misaligned images and large target size cannot provide an impartial benchmark to evaluate RGBT SOD algorithms. In this paper, we build the first large-scale benchmark with high diversity for RGBT SOD (namely RGBT-Tiny), including 115 paired sequences, 93 K frames and 1.2 M manual annotations. RGBT-Tiny contains abundant objects (7 categories) and high-diversity scenes (8 types that cover different illumination and density variations). Note that, over 81% of objects are smaller than 16×16, and we provide paired bounding box annotations with tracking ID to offer an extremely challenging benchmark with wide-range applications, such as RGBT image fusion, object detection and tracking. In addition, we propose a scale adaptive fitness (SAFit) measure that exhibits high robustness on both small and large objects. The proposed SAFit can provide reasonable performance evaluation and promote detection performance. Based on the proposed RGBT-Tiny dataset, extensive evaluations have been conducted with IoU and SAFit metrics, including 30 recent state-of-the-art algorithms that cover four different types (i.e., visible generic object detection, visible SOD, thermal SOD and RGBT object detection).

Bilateral filter has demonstrated its effectiveness in many traditional methods for image restoration tasks. In this letter, we incorporate the idea of bilateral grid processing in a CNN framework and propose a bilateral stereo super-resolution network (BSSRnet). Specifically, we use a parallax-attention module to incorporate information from left and right views to learn content-aware bilateral filters. Then, these bilateral filters are used to recover missing details at different spatial locations while preserving stereo consistency. Our network is fully differentiable and is robust to both content and disparity variations. Comparative results show that our BSSRnet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Flickr1024, Middlebury, KITTI 2012 and KITTI 2015 datasets. Source code is available at.

Tracking multiple tiny objects is highly challenging due to their weak appearance and limited features. Existing multi-object tracking algorithms generally focus on singlemodality scenes, and overlook the complementary characteristics of tiny objects captured by multiple remote sensors. To enhance tracking performance by integrating complementary information from multiple sources, we propose a novel framework called HGT-Track (Heterogeneous Graph Transformer based Multi-Tiny-Object Tracking). Specifically, we first employ a Transformer-based encoder to embed images from different modalities. Subsequently, we utilize Heterogeneous Graph Transformer to aggregate spatial and temporal information from multiple modalities to generate detection and tracking features. Additionally, we introduce a target re-detection module (ReDet) to ensure tracklet continuity by maintaining consistency across different modalities. Furthermore, this paper introduces the first benchmark VT-Tiny-MOT (Visible-Thermal Tiny MultiObject Tracking) for RGB-T fused multiple tiny object tracking. Extensive experiments are conducted on VT-Tiny-MOT, and the results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves better performance in terms of MOTA (Multiple-Object Tracking Accuracy) and ID-F1 score. The code and dataset will be made available at https://github.com/xuqingyu26/HGTMT

Restoration tasks in low-level vision aim to restore high-quality (HQ) data from their low-quality (LQ) observations. To circumvents the difficulty of acquiring paired data in real scenarios, unpaired approaches that aim to restore HQ data solely on unpaired data are drawing increasing interest. Since restoration tasks are tightly coupled with the degradation model, unknown and highly diverse degradations in real scenarios make learning from unpaired data quite challenging. In this paper, we propose a degradation representation learning scheme to address this challenge. By learning to distinguish various degradations in the representation space, our degradation representations can extract implicit degradation information in an unsupervised manner. Moreover, to handle diverse degradations, we develop degradation-aware (DA) convolutions with flexible adaption to various degradations to fully exploit the degrdation information in the learned representations. Based on our degradation representations and DA convolutions, we introduce a generic framework for unpaired restoration tasks. Based on our framework, we propose UnIRnet and UnPRnet for unpaired image and point cloud restoration tasks, respectively. It is demonstrated that our degradation representation learning scheme can extract discriminative representations to obtain accurate degradation information. Experiments on unpaired image and point cloud restoration tasks show that our UnIRnet and UnPRnet achieve state-of-the-art performance.

In the field of remote sensing, tracking highly maneuvering targets is challenging due to its rapidly changing patterns and uncertainties, particularly under non-Gaussian noise conditions. In this paper, we consider the problem of tracking highly maneuvering targets without using preset parameters in non-Gaussian noise. We propose a multi-domain intelligent state estimation network (MIENet). It consists of two main models to estimate the key parameter for the Unscented Kalman Filter, enabling robust tracking of highly maneuvering targets under various intensities and distributions of observation noise. The first model, called a fusion denoising model (FDM), is designed to eliminate observation noise by enhancing multi-domain feature fusion. The second model, called a parameter estimation model (PEM), is designed to estimate key parameters of target motion by learning both global and local motion information. Additionally, we design a physically constrained loss function (PCLoss) that incorporates physics-informed constraints and prior knowledge. We evaluate our method on radar trajectory simulation and real remote sensing video datasets. Simulation results on the LAST dataset demonstrate that the proposed FDM can reduce the root mean square error (RMSE) of observation noise by more than 60%. Moreover, the proposed MIENet consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art state estimation algorithms across various highly maneuvering scenes, achieving this performance without requiring adjustment of noise parameters under non-Gaussian noise. Furthermore, experiments conducted on the real-world SV248S dataset confirm that MIENet effectively generalizes to satellite video object tracking tasks.

Maneuvering target tracking remains a critical yet challenging task, due to the unpredictable and varying motion patterns of targets. Although learning-based methods have shown promise by directly learning the non-linear mappings from noisy observations to target states by integrating both long- and short-range dependencies, existing advanced Transformer-based models struggle with robustness to noise, computational efficiency, and capturing fine-grained temporal dependencies. To address these, we propose the Adaptive Spectral Denoising Network (ASDN), comprising an Adaptive Spectral Denoising Filter (ASDF) and a Temporal Local-pattern Guided Block (TLGB). The ASDF processes signals in the frequency domain through Fourier Transform to enhance feature representation by simultaneously capturing long- and short-range dependencies. This is achieved through adaptive spectral masking that suppresses noise-corrupted frequency components while preserving critical dependencies. To compensate for potential information loss caused by such spectral masking, the TLGB explicitly models short-term temporal interactions to preserve local dynamics critical for accurate tracking. Furthermore, we introduce LASTv2, a large-scale dataset of maneuvering target trajectories characterized by diverse and complex motion patterns, specifically designed to simulate real-world adversarial scenarios with high mobility and stochastic dynamics. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing root-mean-square-error by 76.9% and improving inference speed by two orders of magnitude compared to the baseline methods.