Exploring Syn-to-Real Domain Adaptation for Military Target Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jeong, Jongoh, Oh, Youngjin, Nam, Gyeongrae, Lee, Jeongeun, Yoon, Kuk-Jin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jeong, Jongoh
Oh, Youngjin
Nam, Gyeongrae
Lee, Jeongeun
Yoon, Kuk-Jin
author_facet Jeong, Jongoh
Oh, Youngjin
Nam, Gyeongrae
Lee, Jeongeun
Yoon, Kuk-Jin
contents Object detection is one of the key target tasks of interest in the context of civil and military applications. In particular, the real-world deployment of target detection methods is pivotal in the decision-making process during military command and reconnaissance. However, current domain adaptive object detection algorithms consider adapting one domain to another similar one only within the scope of natural or autonomous driving scenes. Since military domains often deal with a mixed variety of environments, detecting objects from multiple varying target domains poses a greater challenge. Several studies for armored military target detection have made use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data due to its robustness to all weather, long range, and high-resolution characteristics. Nevertheless, the costs of SAR data acquisition and processing are still much higher than those of the conventional RGB camera, which is a more affordable alternative with significantly lower data processing time. Furthermore, the lack of military target detection datasets limits the use of such a low-cost approach. To mitigate these issues, we propose to generate RGB-based synthetic data using a photorealistic visual tool, Unreal Engine, for military target detection in a cross-domain setting. To this end, we conducted synthetic-to-real transfer experiments by training our synthetic dataset and validating on our web-collected real military target datasets. We benchmark the state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods distinguished by the degree of supervision on our proposed train-val dataset pair, and find that current methods using minimal hints on the image (e.g., object class) achieve a substantial improvement over unsupervised or semi-supervised DA methods. From these observations, we recognize the current challenges that remain to be overcome.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23208
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Syn-to-Real Domain Adaptation for Military Target Detection
Jeong, Jongoh
Oh, Youngjin
Nam, Gyeongrae
Lee, Jeongeun
Yoon, Kuk-Jin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Object detection is one of the key target tasks of interest in the context of civil and military applications. In particular, the real-world deployment of target detection methods is pivotal in the decision-making process during military command and reconnaissance. However, current domain adaptive object detection algorithms consider adapting one domain to another similar one only within the scope of natural or autonomous driving scenes. Since military domains often deal with a mixed variety of environments, detecting objects from multiple varying target domains poses a greater challenge. Several studies for armored military target detection have made use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data due to its robustness to all weather, long range, and high-resolution characteristics. Nevertheless, the costs of SAR data acquisition and processing are still much higher than those of the conventional RGB camera, which is a more affordable alternative with significantly lower data processing time. Furthermore, the lack of military target detection datasets limits the use of such a low-cost approach. To mitigate these issues, we propose to generate RGB-based synthetic data using a photorealistic visual tool, Unreal Engine, for military target detection in a cross-domain setting. To this end, we conducted synthetic-to-real transfer experiments by training our synthetic dataset and validating on our web-collected real military target datasets. We benchmark the state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods distinguished by the degree of supervision on our proposed train-val dataset pair, and find that current methods using minimal hints on the image (e.g., object class) achieve a substantial improvement over unsupervised or semi-supervised DA methods. From these observations, we recognize the current challenges that remain to be overcome.
title Exploring Syn-to-Real Domain Adaptation for Military Target Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23208