Xiaoran Zhang

Dr. Xiaoran Zhang

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Representative Publications

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1 January 2026 in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
XZXiaoran Zhang
Xiaoran Zhang
YLYu Liu
Yu Liu
JLJinyu Liang
Jinyu Liang
KLKangqiushi Li
Kangqiushi Li
ZHZhiwei Huang
Zhiwei Huang
HXHuaxin Xiao
Huaxin Xiao

14 September 2026 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
KLKangqiushi Li
Kangqiushi Li
XZXiaoran Zhang
Xiaoran Zhang
ZZZheng Zhang
Zheng Zhang
HXHuaxin Xiao
Huaxin Xiao
YLYu Liu
Yu Liu
Object detection in Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) is crucial for large-scale intelligent surveillance and monitoring systems. However, detecting extremely small moving targets in low-frame-rate grayscale WAMI remains highly challenging. In particular, three key problems limit the performance of existing methods: weak motion responses caused by low target contrast can lead to missed detections; densely distributed targets often produce merged responses that are difficult to separate; and registration artifacts, parallax, and dynamic background clutter can generate numerous false alarms. To address these problems, we propose MDF-Det, a coarse-to-fine spatiotemporal framework for WAMI small moving target detection. The framework consists of three complementary components. First, a Motion and Appearance Feature Fusion (MAFF) strategy integrates dense optical-flow-derived motion saliency with grayscale frame differencing to enhance weak target responses and improve candidate preservation. Second, a Spatial Attention-Guided Target Decoupling (SA-TD) module employs fine-grained heatmap decoding and step-threshold degradation to separate merged responses in densely populated scenes. Finally, a Scene-Prior Guided Filtering (SPGF) mechanism learns complementary vehicle-accessibility and motion-activity priors from scene context to suppress contextually implausible false alarms caused by complex background interference. Extensive experiments on six evaluation AOIs of the WPAFB 2009 dataset demonstrate that MDF-Det achieves an average F1 score of 0.878, corresponding to a relative improvement of 5.5% over the strongest baseline.