arXiv subjects

Vaishnavi Khindkar

Publications and source records attributed to Vaishnavi Khindkar.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Diagnosing Aerial-View Object Detectors with Foundational Image Generative Models

Recent advances in large-scale image generative models enable photorealistic scene synthesis with controllable attributes. Beyond data augmentation, their potential as diagnostic tools for trained vision systems remains unexplored in the aerial and remote sensing domains. We introduce a synthetic diagnostic framework for aerial-view vehicle detection that combines text-guided generation, attribute-controlled editing, and automated attribute verification to construct a controllable synthetic testbed. This enables fine-grained evaluation of pretrained detectors under diverse scene types and environmental conditions that are difficult to isolate in real datasets. Across three detection architectures and three real aerial datasets, synthetic scene-wise performance trends closely match real-world weaknesses. Guided by these diagnostics, targeted supplementation with small real datasets from the identified weak categories yields improvements of up to 13% AP50 while requiring substantially fewer additional samples than non-targeted augmentation. Our results show that controlled synthetic probing can predict real-domain performance gaps and guide efficient data collection. The proposed diagnostic framework is modular and can incorporate alternative generative or vision-language models as capabilities evolve. Our code and datasets are available here: https://humansensinglab.github.io/AVODDiag/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Can Reasons Help Improve Pedestrian Intent Estimation? A Cross-Modal Approach

With the increased importance of autonomous navigation systems has come an increasing need to protect the safety of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) such as pedestrians. Predicting pedestrian intent is one such challenging task, where prior work predicts the binary cross/no-cross intention with a fusion of visual and motion features. However, there has been no effort so far to hedge such predictions with human-understandable reasons. We address this issue by introducing a novel problem setting of exploring the intuitive reasoning behind a pedestrian's intent. In particular, we show that predicting the 'WHY' can be very useful in understanding the 'WHAT'. To this end, we propose a novel, reason-enriched PIE++ dataset consisting of multi-label textual explanations/reasons for pedestrian intent. We also introduce a novel multi-task learning framework called MINDREAD, which leverages a cross-modal representation learning framework for predicting pedestrian intent as well as the reason behind the intent. Our comprehensive experiments show significant improvement of 5.6% and 7% in accuracy and F1-score for the task of intent prediction on the PIE++ dataset using MINDREAD. We also achieved a 4.4% improvement in accuracy on a commonly used JAAD dataset. Extensive evaluation using quantitative/qualitative metrics and user studies shows the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

GAMMA: Generative Augmentation for Attentive Marine Debris Detection

We propose an efficient and generative augmentation approach to solve the inadequacy concern of underwater debris data for visual detection. We use cycleGAN as a data augmentation technique to convert openly available, abundant data of terrestrial plastic to underwater-style images. Prior works just focus on augmenting or enhancing existing data, which moreover adds bias to the dataset. Compared to our technique, which devises variation, transforming additional in-air plastic data to the marine background. We also propose a novel architecture for underwater debris detection using an attention mechanism. Our method helps to focus only on relevant instances of the image, thereby enhancing the detector performance, which is highly obliged while detecting the marine debris using Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). We perform extensive experiments for marine debris detection using our approach. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the potential of our framework that significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗