# Telescope: Learnable Hyperbolic Foveation for Ultra-Long-Range Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06332 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06332/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [Object Detection with Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05511/) (2018)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Autonomous Driving: Common Practices and Emerging Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05113/) (2019)
- [Perception Encoder: The best visual embeddings are not at the output of the network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13181/) (2025)
- [Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03987/) (2022)
- [3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09474/) (2022)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous highway driving, especially for long-haul heavy trucks, requires detecting objects at long ranges beyond 500 meters to satisfy braking distance requirements at high speeds. At long distances, vehicles and other critical objects occupy only a few pixels in high-resolution images, causing state-of-the-art object detectors to fail. This challenge is compounded by the limited effective range of commercially available LiDAR sensors, which fall short of ultra-long range thresholds because of quadratic loss of resolution with distance, making image-based detection the most practically scalable solution given commercially available sensor constraints. We introduce Telescope, a two-stage detection model designed for ultra-long range autonomous driving. Alongside a powerful detection backbone, this model contains a novel re-sampling layer and image transformation to address the fundamental challenges of detecting small, distant objects. Telescope achieves 76% relative improvement in mAP in ultra-long range detection compared to state-of-the-art methods (improving from an absolute mAP of 0.185 to 0.326 at distances beyond 250 meters), requires minimal computational overhead, and maintains strong performance across all detection ranges.