Ensuring the safety and extended operational life of fighter aircraft necessitates frequent and exhaustive inspections. While surface defect detection is feasible for human inspectors, manual methods face critical limitations in scalability, efficiency, and consistency due to the vast surface area, structural complexity, and operational demands of aircraft maintenance. We propose a smart surface damage detection and localization system for fighter aircraft, termed J-DDL. J-DDL integrates 2D images and 3D point clouds of the entire aircraft surface, captured using a combined system of laser scanners and cameras, to achieve precise damage detection and localization. Central to our system is a novel damage detection network built on the YOLO architecture, specifically optimized for identifying surface defects in 2D aircraft images. After detecting damage in 2D images, the system maps the identified anomalies onto corresponding 3D point clouds, enabling accurate 3D localization of defects across the aircraft surface. To facilitate further advancements in this domain, we have developed the first publicly available dataset specifically focused on aircraft damage. Experimental evaluations validate the effectiveness of our framework, underscoring its potential to significantly advance automated aircraft inspection technologies.

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is a challenging task due to the low contrast and small size of the targets, which are often affected by complex backgrounds. UNet and its variants, known for their encoder–decoder structures, are widely used in such tasks since they can capture both local and global features. However, a significant drawback of UNet-based networks is the irreversible loss of crucial local features during downsampling, leading to missed detections and false positives, especially for small targets. Compared to other architectures like feature pyramid networks, UNet provides a more symmetric and efficient structure, allowing it to handle dense pixel-wise predictions effectively. However, standard UNet models still struggle to fully retain small target details, motivating the need for further improvements. To address this issue, we propose HintU, a novel network to recover the local features lost by various UNet-based methods for effective ISTD. HintU has two key contributions. First, it introduces the “Hint” mechanism for the first time, i.e., leveraging the prior knowledge of target locations to highlight critical local features. Second, it improves the mainstream UNet-based architecture to preserve target pixels even after downsampling. HintU can shift the focus of various networks (e.g., vanilla UNet, UNet++, UIUNet, MiM+, and HCFNet) from the irrelevant background pixels to a more restricted area from the beginning. Experimental results on three datasets NUDT-SIRST, SIRSTv2, and IRSTD1K demonstrate that HintU enhances the performance of existing methods with only an additional 1.88-ms cost (on RTX Titan). Additionally, the explicit constraints of HintU enhance the generalization ability of UNet-based methods. Code is available athttps://github.com/Wuzhou-Quan/HintU.

Haze severely degrades the visual quality of remote sensing images and hampers the performance of road extraction, vehicle detection, and traffic flow monitoring. The emerging denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) exhibits the significant potential for dense haze removal with its strong generation ability. Since remote sensing images contain extensive small-scale texture structures, it is important to effectively restore image details from hazy images. However, current wisdom of DDPM fails to preserve image details and color fidelity well, limiting its dehazing capacity for remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a novel unified Fourier-aware diffusion model for remote sensing image dehazing, termed RSHazeDiff. From a new perspective, RSHazeDiff explores the conditional DDPM to improve image quality in dense hazy scenarios, and it makes three key contributions. First, RSHazeDiff refines the training phase of diffusion process by performing noise estimation and reconstruction constraints in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Thus, it remedies the unpleasing results caused by the simple noise estimation constraint in DDPM. Second, by taking the frequency information as important prior knowledge during iterative sampling steps, RSHazeDiff can preserve more texture details and color fidelity in dehazed images. Third, we design a global compensated learning module to utilize the Fourier transform to capture the global dependency features of input images, which can effectively mitigate the effects of boundary artifacts when processing fixed-size patches. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate the favorable performance of RSHazeDiff over state-of-the-art methods. Source code will be released athttps://github.com/jm-xiong/RSHazeDiff

The core of self-supervised point cloud learning lies in setting up appropriate pretext tasks, to construct a pre-training framework that enables the encoder to perceive 3D objects effectively. In this article, we integrate two prevalent methods, masked point modeling (MPM) and 3D-to-2D generation, as pretext tasks within a pre-training framework. We leverage the spatial awareness and precise supervision offered by these two methods to address their respective limitations: ambiguous supervision signals and insensitivity to geometric information. Specifically, the proposed framework, abbreviated as PointCG, consists of a Hidden Point Completion (HPC) module and an Arbitrary-view Image Generation (AIG) module. We first capture visible points from arbitrary views as inputs by removing hidden points. Then, HPC extracts representations of the inputs with an encoder and completes the entire shape with a decoder, while AIG is used to generate rendered images based on the visible points' representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the baselines in various downstream tasks. Our code will be made available upon acceptance.