arXiv subjects

Emmett J. Ientilucci

Publications and source records attributed to Emmett J. Ientilucci.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SULAND v2: A Refined RGB Dataset and Deep Learning Object Detection Benchmark for UAV/UGV-Based SUrface LANDmine Detection Under Domain Shift

RGB imagery offers a practical, low-cost option for Unmanned Aerial/Ground Vehicle (UAV/UGV) survey support in surface-landmine detection, but object detectors remain underexplored in this safety-critical domain. Limited cross-architecture benchmarking and insufficient out-of-distribution (OOD) analysis obscure whether detectors generalize across deployment conditions. This challenge is amplified by the scarcity of public RGB landmine datasets, making SULAND a key benchmark for PFM-1 and PMA-2 detection. However, inspection reveals missing/false annotations, localization errors, inconsistent visibility criteria, visual artifacts, temporal labeling inconsistencies, and an inverted OOD class-ID convention in SULAND. We present SULAND_v2, a refined RGB surface-landmine dataset and benchmark. Preserving original images and splits, we manually revise annotations to ensure completeness, precise localization, label validity, and class consistency. SULAND_v2 contains 33,771 images and 12,433 bounding boxes. We benchmark 35 detector configurations across nine families. Annotation refinement improves YOLOv8 in-distribution (IID) test mAP@50 by 14.6-19.6 percentage points, while fixing the OOD class-ID convention increases mean YOLOv8 OOD mAP@50 by ~25 percentage points. On SULAND_v2, YOLOv12-Small achieves the highest IID mAP@50 (0.908), while RF-DETR-Large yields the strongest OOD performance (0.799 mAP@50, 0.675 recall). Our results demonstrate that high IID accuracy does not guarantee operational readiness. SULAND_v2 provides a reliable benchmark for evaluating domain-shift robustness in RGB-based mine-action survey support.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Human-in-the-Loop Signature Bootstrapping for UAV Hyperspectral PFM-1 Mine Detection

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is useful for material discrimination, but operational mine screening also depends on how many false alarms must be inspected before targets are found. This paper studies PFM-1 landmine detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) visible and near-infrared (VNIR) HSI using spectral angle mapper (SAM), matched filter (MF), adaptive coherence estimator (ACE), and constrained energy minimization (CEM). We compare a ground-measured SVC signature, a fully informed in-scene core-pixel signature, and a simulated human-in-the-loop signature bootstrap. Besides receiver operating characteristic area under the curve and average precision, we report target-discovery curves and spatial candidate-review counts. Full-review bootstrapping reaches the fully informed in-scene signature case after all seven target regions are verified, but the required inspection effort varies strongly: ACE confirms all regions in two rounds and nine candidate inspections, whereas the SAM variants need thousands of candidate reviews for their final target locations. Code is available at https://github.com/SagarLekhak/IEEE_WHISPERS_2026_UAV_HSI_PFM1.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Benchmarking Deep Learning and Statistical Target Detection Methods for PFM-1 Landmine Detection in UAV Hyperspectral Imagery

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with imaging sensors and automated processing algorithms have emerged as a promising tool to accelerate large-area surveys while reducing risk to human operators. Although hyperspectral imaging (HSI) enables material discrimination using spectral signatures, standardized benchmarks for UAV-based landmine detection remain scarce. In this work, we present a systematic benchmark of four classical statistical detection algorithms, including Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM), Matched Filter (MF), Adaptive Cosine Estimator (ACE), and Constrained Energy Minimization (CEM), alongside a proposed lightweight Spectral Neural Network utilizing Parametric Mish activations for PFM-1 landmine detection. We also release pixel-level binary ground truth masks (target/background) to enable standardized, reproducible evaluation. Evaluations were conducted on inert PFM-1 targets across multiple scene crops using a recently released VNIR hyperspectral dataset. Metrics such as receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, area under the curve (AUC), precision-recall (PR) curve, and average precision (AP) were used. While all methods achieve high ROC-AUC on an independent test set, the ACE method observes the highest AUC of 0.989. However, because target pixels are extremely sparse relative to background, ROC-AUC alone can be misleading; under precision-focused evaluation (PR and AP), the Spectral-NN outperforms classical detectors, achieving the highest AP. These results emphasize the need for precision-focused evaluation, scene-aware benchmarking, and learning-based spectral models for reliable UAV-based hyperspectral landmine detection. The code and pixel-level annotations will be released.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

A UAV-Based VNIR Hyperspectral Benchmark Dataset for Landmine and UXO Detection

This paper introduces a novel benchmark dataset of Visible and Near-Infrared (VNIR) hyperspectral imagery acquired via an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform for landmine and unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection research. The dataset was collected over a controlled test field seeded with 143 realistic surrogate landmine and UXO targets, including surface, partially buried, and fully buried configurations. Data acquisition was performed using a Headwall Nano-Hyperspec sensor mounted on a multi-sensor drone platform, flown at an altitude of approximately 20.6 m, capturing 270 contiguous spectral bands spanning 398-1002 nm. Radiometric calibration, orthorectification, and mosaicking were performed followed by reflectance retrieval using a two-point Empirical Line Method (ELM), with reference spectra acquired using an SVC spectroradiometer. Cross-validation against six reference objects yielded RMSE values below 1.0 and SAM values between 1 and 6 degrees in the 400-900 nm range, demonstrating high spectral fidelity. The dataset is released alongside raw radiance cubes, GCP/AeroPoint data, and reference spectra to support reproducible research. This contribution fills a critical gap in open-access UAV-based hyperspectral data for landmine detection and offers a multi-sensor benchmark when combined with previously published drone-based electromagnetic induction (EMI) data from the same test field.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Uncertainty Quantification In Surface Landmines and UXO Classification Using MC Dropout

Detecting surface landmines and unexploded ordnances (UXOs) using deep learning has shown promise in humanitarian demining. However, deterministic neural networks can be vulnerable to noisy conditions and adversarial attacks, leading to missed detection or misclassification. This study introduces the idea of uncertainty quantification through Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout, integrated into a fine-tuned ResNet-50 architecture for surface landmine and UXO classification, which was tested on a simulated dataset. Integrating the MC Dropout approach helps quantify epistemic uncertainty, providing an additional metric for prediction reliability, which could be helpful to make more informed decisions in demining operations. Experimental results on clean, adversarially perturbed, and noisy test images demonstrate the model's ability to flag unreliable predictions under challenging conditions. This proof-of-concept study highlights the need for uncertainty quantification in demining, raises awareness about the vulnerability of existing neural networks in demining to adversarial threats, and emphasizes the importance of developing more robust and reliable models for practical applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Adaptive Contextual Embedding for Robust Far-View Borehole Detection

In controlled blasting operations, accurately detecting densely distributed tiny boreholes from far-view imagery is critical for operational safety and efficiency. However, existing detection methods often struggle due to small object scales, highly dense arrangements, and limited distinctive visual features of boreholes. To address these challenges, we propose an adaptive detection approach that builds upon existing architectures (e.g., YOLO) by explicitly leveraging consistent embedding representations derived through exponential moving average (EMA)-based statistical updates. Our method introduces three synergistic components: (1) adaptive augmentation utilizing dynamically updated image statistics to robustly handle illumination and texture variations; (2) embedding stabilization to ensure consistent and reliable feature extraction; and (3) contextual refinement leveraging spatial context for improved detection accuracy. The pervasive use of EMA in our method is particularly advantageous given the limited visual complexity and small scale of boreholes, allowing stable and robust representation learning even under challenging visual conditions. Experiments on a challenging proprietary quarry-site dataset demonstrate substantial improvements over baseline YOLO-based architectures, highlighting our method's effectiveness in realistic and complex industrial scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SmokeNet: Efficient Smoke Segmentation Leveraging Multiscale Convolutions and Multiview Attention Mechanisms

Efficient segmentation of smoke plumes is crucial for environmental monitoring and industrial safety, enabling the detection and mitigation of harmful emissions from activities like quarry blasts and wildfires. Accurate segmentation facilitates environmental impact assessments, timely interventions, and compliance with safety standards. However, existing models often face high computational demands and limited adaptability to diverse smoke appearances, restricting their deployment in resource-constrained environments. To address these issues, we introduce SmokeNet, a novel deep learning architecture that leverages multiscale convolutions and multiview linear attention mechanisms combined with layer-specific loss functions to handle the complex dynamics of diverse smoke plumes, ensuring efficient and accurate segmentation across varied environments. Additionally, we evaluate SmokeNet's performance and versatility using four datasets, including our quarry blast smoke dataset made available to the community. The results demonstrate that SmokeNet maintains a favorable balance between computational efficiency and segmentation accuracy, making it suitable for deployment in environmental monitoring and safety management systems. By contributing a new dataset and offering an efficient segmentation model, SmokeNet advances smoke segmentation capabilities in diverse and challenging environments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

A Fully Convolutional Network for Semantic Labeling of 3D Point Clouds

When classifying point clouds, a large amount of time is devoted to the process of engineering a reliable set of features which are then passed to a classifier of choice. Generally, such features - usually derived from the 3D-covariance matrix - are computed using the surrounding neighborhood of points. While these features capture local information, the process is usually time-consuming, and requires the application at multiple scales combined with contextual methods in order to adequately describe the diversity of objects within a scene. In this paper we present a 1D-fully convolutional network that consumes terrain-normalized points directly with the corresponding spectral data,if available, to generate point-wise labeling while implicitly learning contextual features in an end-to-end fashion. Our method uses only the 3D-coordinates and three corresponding spectral features for each point. Spectral features may either be extracted from 2D-georeferenced images, as shown here for Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point clouds, or extracted directly for passive-derived point clouds,i.e. from muliple-view imagery. We train our network by splitting the data into square regions, and use a pooling layer that respects the permutation-invariance of the input points. Evaluated using the ISPRS 3D Semantic Labeling Contest, our method scored second place with an overall accuracy of 81.6%. We ranked third place with a mean F1-score of 63.32%, surpassing the F1-score of the method with highest accuracy by 1.69%. In addition to labeling 3D-point clouds, we also show that our method can be easily extended to 2D-semantic segmentation tasks, with promising initial results.

cs.CV↗