# UTA-Sign: Unsupervised Thermal Video Augmentation via Event-Assisted Traffic Signage Sketching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20594 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20594/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06705/) (2023)
- [Events-to-Video: Bringing Modern Computer Vision to Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08298/) (2019)
- [Video to Events: Recycling Video Datasets for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03095/) (2019)
- [Text-IF: Leveraging Semantic Text Guidance for Degradation-Aware and Interactive Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16387/) (2024)
- [Continuous-time Intensity Estimation Using Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00386/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Intensity-Image Reconstruction for Event Cameras Using Manifold Regularisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06283/) (2016)
- [Towards Robust Event-guided Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Large-Scale Real-World Event-Image Dataset and Novel Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00834/) (2024)
- [CrossFuse: A Novel Cross Attention Mechanism based Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10581/) (2024)
- [HyperE2VID: Improving Event-Based Video Reconstruction via Hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06382/) (2023)
- [One Model for ALL: Low-Level Task Interaction Is a Key to Task-Agnostic Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19854/) (2025)
- [Edge-guided Multi-domain RGB-to-TIR image Translation for Training Vision Tasks with Challenging Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12689/) (2023)
- [Position-Aware Relation Learning for RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10158/) (2022)
- [Beyond conventional vision: RGB-event fusion for robust object detection in dynamic traffic scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10704/) (2025)
- [An Event-based Fast Intensity Reconstruction Scheme for UAV Real-time Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02238/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The thermal camera excels at perceiving outdoor environments under low-light conditions, making it ideal for applications such as nighttime autonomous driving and unmanned navigation. However, thermal cameras encounter challenges when capturing signage from objects made of similar materials, which can pose safety risks for accurately understanding semantics in autonomous driving systems. In contrast, the neuromorphic vision camera, also known as an event camera, detects changes in light intensity asynchronously and has proven effective in high-speed, low-light traffic environments. Recognizing the complementary characteristics of these two modalities, this paper proposes UTA-Sign, an unsupervised thermal-event video augmentation for traffic signage in low-illumination environments, targeting elements such as license plates and roadblock indicators. To address the signage blind spots of thermal imaging and the non-uniform sampling of event cameras, we developed a dual-boosting mechanism that fuses thermal frames and event signals for consistent signage representation over time. The proposed method utilizes thermal frames to provide accurate motion cues as temporal references for aligning the uneven event signals. At the same time, event signals contribute subtle signage content to the raw thermal frames, enhancing the overall understanding of the environment. The proposed method is validated on datasets collected from real-world scenarios, demonstrating superior quality in traffic signage sketching and improved detection accuracy at the perceptual level.