English

Group Evidence Matters: Tiling-based Semantic Gating for Dense Object Detection

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-09-29 v2

Abstract

Dense small objects in UAV imagery are often missed due to long-range viewpoints, occlusion, and clutter[cite: 5]. This paper presents a detector-agnostic post-processing framework that converts overlap-induced redundancy into group evidence[cite: 6]. Overlapping tiling first recovers low-confidence candidates[cite: 7]. A Spatial Gate (DBSCAN on box centroids) and a Semantic Gate (DBSCAN on ResNet-18 embeddings) then validates group evidence[cite: 7]. Validated groups receive controlled confidence reweighting before class-aware NMS fusion[cite: 8]. Experiments on VisDrone show a recall increase from 0.685 to 0.778 (+0.093) and a precision adjustment from 0.801 to 0.595, yielding F1=0.669[cite: 9]. Post-processing latency averages 0.095 s per image[cite: 10]. These results indicate recall-first, precision-trade-off behavior that benefits recall-sensitive applications such as far-field counting and monitoring[cite: 10]. Ablation confirms that tiling exposes missed objects, spatial clustering stabilizes geometry, semantic clustering enforces appearance coherence, and reweighting provides calibrated integration with the baseline[cite: 11]. The framework requires no retraining and integrates with modern detectors[cite: 12]. Future work will reduce semantic gating cost and extend the approach with temporal cues[cite: 13].

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.10779,
  title  = {Group Evidence Matters: Tiling-based Semantic Gating for Dense Object Detection},
  author = {Yilun Xiao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.10779},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:34:32.173Z