Fast Post-Hoc Confidence Fusion for 3-Class Open-Set Aerial Object Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, post-hoc fusion method for 3-class open-set aerial object detection that improves the separation of known, unknown, and background objects, enhancing UAV navigation safety.

Contribution

It presents a novel, model-agnostic fusion framework that extends open-set detection to three classes, improving accuracy and robustness over threshold-based methods.

Findings

Outperforms threshold-based baselines in AUROC by 2.7% on average.

Enhances open-set mAP while maintaining real-time performance.

Enables robust three-class classification for UAV safety.

Abstract

Developing reliable UAV navigation systems requires robust air-to-air object detectors capable of distinguishing between objects seen during training and previously unseen objects. While many methods address closed-set detection and achieve high-confidence recognition of in-domain (ID) targets, they generally do not tackle open-set detection, which requires simultaneous handling of both ID and out-of-distribution (OOD) objects. Existing open-set approaches typically rely on a single uncertainty score with thresholding, limiting flexibility and often conflating OOD objects with background clutter. In contrast, we propose a lightweight, model-agnostic post-processing framework that explicitly separates background from unknown objects while preserving the base detector's performance. Our approach extends open-set detection beyond binary ID/OOD classification to real-time three-way classification among ID targets, OOD objects, and background. To this end, we employ a fusion scheme that aggregates multiple confidence estimates and per-detection features using a compact multilayer perceptron (MLP). Incorporating different logit variants into the MLP consistently enhances performance across both binary and three-class classification without compromising throughput. Extensive ablation and comparative experiments confirm that our method surpasses threshold-based baselines in two-class classification by an average of 2.7% AUROC, while retaining or improving open-set mAP. Furthermore, our study uniquely enables robust three-class classification, a critical capability for safe UAV navigation, where OOD objects must be actively avoided and background regions safely ignored. Comparative analysis highlights that our method surpasses competitive techniques in AUROC across datasets, while improving closed-set mAP by up to 9 points, an 18% relative gain.