# Contour-Guided Spectral Routing for Robust Real-Time Pedestrian Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14383 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14383/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (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)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [FNet: Mixing Tokens with Fourier Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03824/) (2021)
- [FcaNet: Frequency Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11879/) (2020)
- [CityPersons: A Diverse Dataset for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05693/) (2017)
- [DocPedia: Unleashing the Power of Large Multimodal Model in the Frequency Domain for Versatile Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11810/) (2023)
- [MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11985/) (2024)
- [Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14059/) (2025)
- [D-FINE: Redefine Regression Task in DETRs as Fine-grained Distribution Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13842/) (2024)
- [TabPedia: Towards Comprehensive Visual Table Understanding with Concept Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01326/) (2024)
- [DEIM: DETR with Improved Matching for Fast Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04234/) (2024)
- [Few Could Be Better Than All: Feature Sampling and Grouping for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15221/) (2022)
- [Attentive Eraser: Unleashing Diffusion Model's Object Removal Potential via Self-Attention Redirection Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12974/) (2024)
- [TextSquare: Scaling up Text-Centric Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12803/) (2024)
- [Occlusion-aware R-CNN: Detecting Pedestrians in a Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08407/) (2018)
- [A Bounding Box is Worth One Token: Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01976/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-time pedestrian detection in driving scenes is constrained by three coupled failure modes: tiny targets lose discriminative evidence, occlusion weakens geometric support, and weather or illumination changes distort appearance statistics. We formulate the detector through a unified contour-guided spectral routing view rather than treating frequency processing, attention, and boundary reasoning as independent add-ons. The detector routes information in a prescribed order: spatial evidence is first augmented with global spectral context, deep representations then exchange spatial and spectral cues, and cross-scale fusion is finally conditioned on boundary--semantic disagreement. This ordering yields a compact representation pipeline in which low-frequency context stabilizes global structure while high-frequency evidence protects small-object contours. We further retain a wavelet-subband training transformation that perturbs low- and high-frequency coefficients independently, targeting appearance shifts caused by fog, rain, snow, and low illumination. The formulation exposes a single routing variable at each stage and distinguishes reusable signal transforms from the task-specific policy that decides where each signal is injected. On CityPersons, the proposed detector obtains 70.4 AP50 and 44.2 AP50:95, compared with 68.1 and 42.2 for RT-DETR, while the full wavelet-augmented configuration reaches 71.1 and 44.6.