Beyond RGB: Leveraging Vision Transformers for Thermal Weapon Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kambhatla, Akhila, Khaled, Ahmed R
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909856827441152
author Kambhatla, Akhila
Khaled, Ahmed R
author_facet Kambhatla, Akhila
Khaled, Ahmed R
contents Thermal weapon segmentation is crucial for surveillance and security applications, enabling robust detection under lowlight and visually obscured conditions where RGB-based systems fail. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) dominate thermal segmentation literature, their ability to capture long-range dependencies and fine structural details is limited. Vision Transformers (ViTs), with their global context modeling capabilities, have achieved state-of-the-art results in RGB segmentation tasks, yet their potential in thermal weapon segmentation remains underexplored. This work adapts and evaluates four transformer-based architectures SegFormer, DeepLabV3\+, SegNeXt, and Swin Transformer for binary weapon segmentation on a custom thermal dataset comprising 9,711 images collected from real world surveillance videos and automatically annotated using SAM2. We employ standard augmentation strategies within the MMSegmentation framework to ensure robust model training and fair architectural comparison. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in segmentation performance: SegFormer-b5 achieves the highest mIoU (94.15\%) and Pixel Accuracy (97.04\%), while SegFormer-b0 provides the fastest inference speed (98.32 FPS) with competitive mIoU (90.84\%). SegNeXt-mscans offers balanced performance with 85.12 FPS and 92.24\% mIoU, and DeepLabV3\+ R101-D8 reaches 92.76\% mIoU at 29.86 FPS. The transformer architectures demonstrate robust generalization capabilities for weapon detection in low-light and occluded thermal environments, with flexible accuracy-speed trade-offs suitable for diverse real-time security applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_16913
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond RGB: Leveraging Vision Transformers for Thermal Weapon Segmentation
Kambhatla, Akhila
Khaled, Ahmed R
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
68T07, 68U10, 68U35
I.2.10; I.4.8; I.4.9
Thermal weapon segmentation is crucial for surveillance and security applications, enabling robust detection under lowlight and visually obscured conditions where RGB-based systems fail. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) dominate thermal segmentation literature, their ability to capture long-range dependencies and fine structural details is limited. Vision Transformers (ViTs), with their global context modeling capabilities, have achieved state-of-the-art results in RGB segmentation tasks, yet their potential in thermal weapon segmentation remains underexplored. This work adapts and evaluates four transformer-based architectures SegFormer, DeepLabV3\+, SegNeXt, and Swin Transformer for binary weapon segmentation on a custom thermal dataset comprising 9,711 images collected from real world surveillance videos and automatically annotated using SAM2. We employ standard augmentation strategies within the MMSegmentation framework to ensure robust model training and fair architectural comparison. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in segmentation performance: SegFormer-b5 achieves the highest mIoU (94.15\%) and Pixel Accuracy (97.04\%), while SegFormer-b0 provides the fastest inference speed (98.32 FPS) with competitive mIoU (90.84\%). SegNeXt-mscans offers balanced performance with 85.12 FPS and 92.24\% mIoU, and DeepLabV3\+ R101-D8 reaches 92.76\% mIoU at 29.86 FPS. The transformer architectures demonstrate robust generalization capabilities for weapon detection in low-light and occluded thermal environments, with flexible accuracy-speed trade-offs suitable for diverse real-time security applications.
title Beyond RGB: Leveraging Vision Transformers for Thermal Weapon Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
68T07, 68U10, 68U35
I.2.10; I.4.8; I.4.9
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16913