Spoken query retrieval is an important interaction mode in modern information retrieval. However, existing evaluation datasets are often limited to simple queries under constrained noise conditions, making them inadequate for assessing the robustness of spoken query retrieval systems under complex acoustic perturbations. To address this limitation, we present SQuTR, a robustness benchmark for spoken query retrieval that includes a large-scale dataset and a unified evaluation protocol. SQuTR aggregates 37,317 unique queries from six commonly used English and Chinese text retrieval datasets, spanning multiple domains and diverse query types. We synthesize speech using voice profiles from 200 real speakers and mix 17 categories of real-world environmental noise under controlled SNR levels, enabling reproducible robustness evaluation from quiet to highly noisy conditions. Under the unified protocol, we conduct large-scale evaluations on representative cascaded and end-to-end retrieval systems. Experimental results show that retrieval performance decreases as noise increases, with substantially different drops across systems. Even large-scale retrieval models struggle under extreme noise, indicating that robustness remains a critical bottleneck. Overall, SQuTR provides a reproducible testbed for benchmarking and diagnostic analysis, and facilitates future research on robustness in spoken query to text retrieval.

Image matching is a primary technology for optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image fusion but often shows limited performance due to the highly nonlinear differences between optical and SAR modalities. Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been investigated to effectively extract nonlinear features for image matching tasks, where DNNs are trained based on the elaborated design of loss functions and a low loss value is often expected to obtain better image matching performance. In this letter, we first theoretically demonstrate that when the value of a state-of-the-art loss function decreases, the corresponding matching performance may not consistently improve due to the imbalanced effect of positive and negative samples. To tackle this issue, we proposed an improved loss function to train DNNs for image matching of SAR and optical images. We theoretically prove that the improved loss function ensures the improvement of the matching performance when the loss value decreases based on Taylor’s series expansion analysis. Experimental results on an open dataset with extensive optical and SAR image pairs show that 1) the proposed loss function is better than the original one in terms of image matching performance and 2) the combination of our loss function and existing multiscale convolutional gradient feature (MCGF)-based network provides better matching performance than other state-of-art approaches.