Daily Papers

Aerial object detection is a challenging task, in which one major obstacle lies in the limitations of large-scale data collection and the long-tail distribution of certain classes. Synthetic data offers a promising solution, especially with recent advances in diffusion-based methods like stable diffusion (SD). However, the direct application of diffusion methods to aerial domains poses unique challenges: stable diffusion's optimization for rich ground-level semantics doesn't align with the sparse nature of aerial objects, and the extraction of post-synthesis object coordinates remains problematic. To address these challenges, we introduce a synthetic data augmentation framework tailored for aerial images. It encompasses sparse-to-dense region of interest (ROI) extraction to bridge the semantic gap, fine-tuning the diffusion model with low-rank adaptation (LORA) to circumvent exhaustive retraining, and finally, a Copy-Paste method to compose synthesized objects with backgrounds, providing a nuanced approach to aerial object detection through synthetic data.

Efficient deployment of deep learning models for aerial object detection on resource-constrained devices requires significant compression without com-promising performance. In this study, we propose a novel three-stage compression pipeline for the YOLOv8 object detection model, integrating sparsity-aware training, structured channel pruning, and Channel-Wise Knowledge Distillation (CWD). First, sparsity-aware training introduces dynamic sparsity during model optimization, effectively balancing parameter reduction and detection accuracy. Second, we apply structured channel pruning by leveraging batch normalization scaling factors to eliminate redundant channels, significantly reducing model size and computational complexity. Finally, to mitigate the accuracy drop caused by pruning, we employ CWD to transfer knowledge from the original model, using an adjustable temperature and loss weighting scheme tailored for small and medium object detection. Extensive experiments on the VisDrone dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple YOLOv8 variants. For YOLOv8m, our method reduces model parameters from 25.85M to 6.85M (a 73.51% reduction), FLOPs from 49.6G to 13.3G, and MACs from 101G to 34.5G, while reducing AP50 by only 2.7%. The resulting compressed model achieves 47.9 AP50 and boosts inference speed from 26 FPS (YOLOv8m baseline) to 45 FPS, enabling real-time deployment on edge devices. We further apply TensorRT as a lightweight optimization step. While this introduces a minor drop in AP50 (from 47.9 to 47.6), it significantly improves inference speed from 45 to 68 FPS, demonstrating the practicality of our approach for high-throughput, re-source-constrained scenarios.

This paper investigates the application of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to small models for cross-domain few-shot object detection in aerial images. Originally designed for large-scale models, LoRA helps mitigate overfitting, making it a promising approach for resource-constrained settings. We integrate LoRA into DiffusionDet, and evaluate its performance on the DOTA and DIOR datasets. Our results show that LoRA applied after an initial fine-tuning slightly improves performance in low-shot settings (e.g., 1-shot and 5-shot), while full fine-tuning remains more effective in higher-shot configurations. These findings highlight LoRA's potential for efficient adaptation in aerial object detection, encouraging further research into parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for few-shot learning. Our code is available here: https://github.com/HichTala/LoRA-DiffusionDet.

This work introduces G-MAD, an open-source framework that uses Arma3 to generate synchronized multi-view RGB-T data for aerial object detection. G-MAD addresses key limitations of real-world aerial dataset construction, including limited viewpoint control, imperfect RGB-T alignment and high annotation cost. The framework supports structured scenario specification, controllable multi-view camera placement, simultaneous visible/thermal capture, and automatic bounding box annotation using engine-level geometric metadata. These capabilities enable controlled studies of viewpoint variation, multi-modal fusion, and synthetic-to-real transfer in aerial object detection. Besides, using G-MAD, we construct and release AMOD, a new large-scale multi-view aerial RGB-T object detection benchmark. The source code and the dataset are available at https://unique-chan.github.io/G-MAD-Project.

Detection of small objects and objects far away in the scene is a major challenge in surveillance applications. Such objects are represented by small number of pixels in the image and lack sufficient details, making them difficult to detect using conventional detectors. In this work, an open-source framework called Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI) is proposed that provides a generic slicing aided inference and fine-tuning pipeline for small object detection. The proposed technique is generic in the sense that it can be applied on top of any available object detector without any fine-tuning. Experimental evaluations, using object detection baselines on the Visdrone and xView aerial object detection datasets show that the proposed inference method can increase object detection AP by 6.8%, 5.1% and 5.3% for FCOS, VFNet and TOOD detectors, respectively. Moreover, the detection accuracy can be further increased with a slicing aided fine-tuning, resulting in a cumulative increase of 12.7%, 13.4% and 14.5% AP in the same order. Proposed technique has been integrated with Detectron2, MMDetection and YOLOv5 models and it is publicly available at https://github.com/obss/sahi.git .

Object detection in remotely sensed satellite pictures is fundamental in many fields such as biophysical, and environmental monitoring. While deep learning algorithms are constantly evolving, they have been mostly implemented and tested on popular ground-based taken photos. This paper critically evaluates and compares a suite of advanced object detection algorithms customized for the task of identifying aircraft within satellite imagery. Using the large HRPlanesV2 dataset, together with a rigorous validation with the GDIT dataset, this research encompasses an array of methodologies including YOLO versions 5 and 8, Faster RCNN, CenterNet, RetinaNet, RTMDet, and DETR, all trained from scratch. This exhaustive training and validation study reveal YOLOv5 as the preeminent model for the specific case of identifying airplanes from remote sensing data, showcasing high precision and adaptability across diverse imaging conditions. This research highlight the nuanced performance landscapes of these algorithms, with YOLOv5 emerging as a robust solution for aerial object detection, underlining its importance through superior mean average precision, Recall, and Intersection over Union scores. The findings described here underscore the fundamental role of algorithm selection aligned with the specific demands of satellite imagery analysis and extend a comprehensive framework to evaluate model efficacy. The benchmark toolkit and codes, available via https://github.com/toelt-llc/FlightScope_Bench, aims to further exploration and innovation in the realm of remote sensing object detection, paving the way for improved analytical methodologies in satellite imagery applications.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown exceptional performance when trained on well-illuminated images captured by Electro-Optical (EO) cameras, which provide rich texture details. However, in critical applications like aerial perception, it is essential for DNNs to maintain consistent reliability across all conditions, including low-light scenarios where EO cameras often struggle to capture sufficient detail. Additionally, UAV-based aerial object detection faces significant challenges due to scale variability from varying altitudes and slant angles, adding another layer of complexity. Existing methods typically address only illumination changes or style variations as domain shifts, but in aerial perception, correlation shifts also impact DNN performance. In this paper, we introduce the IndraEye dataset, a multi-sensor (EO-IR) dataset designed for various tasks. It includes 5,612 images with 145,666 instances, encompassing multiple viewing angles, altitudes, seven backgrounds, and different times of the day across the Indian subcontinent. The dataset opens up several research opportunities, such as multimodal learning, domain adaptation for object detection and segmentation, and exploration of sensor-specific strengths and weaknesses. IndraEye aims to advance the field by supporting the development of more robust and accurate aerial perception systems, particularly in challenging conditions. IndraEye dataset is benchmarked with object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. Dataset and source codes are available at https://bit.ly/indraeye.

Unmanned aerial vehicle object detection (UAV-OD) has been widely used in various scenarios. However, most existing UAV-OD algorithms rely on manually designed components, which require extensive tuning. End-to-end models that do not depend on such manually designed components are mainly designed for natural images, which are less effective for UAV imagery. To address such challenges, this paper proposes an efficient detection transformer (DETR) framework tailored for UAV imagery, i.e., UAV-DETR. The framework includes a multi-scale feature fusion with frequency enhancement module, which captures both spatial and frequency information at different scales. In addition, a frequency-focused down-sampling module is presented to retain critical spatial details during down-sampling. A semantic alignment and calibration module is developed to align and fuse features from different fusion paths. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our approach across various UAV imagery datasets. On the VisDrone dataset, our method improves AP by 3.1\% and AP_{50} by 4.2\% over the baseline. Similar enhancements are observed on the UAVVaste dataset. The project page: https://github.com/ValiantDiligent/UAV-DETR

Existing oriented object detection methods commonly use metric AP_{50} to measure the performance of the model. We argue that AP_{50} is inherently unsuitable for oriented object detection due to its large tolerance in angle deviation. Therefore, we advocate using high-precision metric, e.g. AP_{75}, to measure the performance of models. In this paper, we propose an Aspect Ratio Sensitive Oriented Object Detector with Transformer, termed ARS-DETR, which exhibits a competitive performance in high-precision oriented object detection. Specifically, a new angle classification method, calling Aspect Ratio aware Circle Smooth Label (AR-CSL), is proposed to smooth the angle label in a more reasonable way and discard the hyperparameter that introduced by previous work (e.g. CSL). Then, a rotated deformable attention module is designed to rotate the sampling points with the corresponding angles and eliminate the misalignment between region features and sampling points. Moreover, a dynamic weight coefficient according to the aspect ratio is adopted to calculate the angle loss. Comprehensive experiments on several challenging datasets show that our method achieves competitive performance on the high-precision oriented object detection task.

We present the HIT-UAV dataset, a high-altitude infrared thermal dataset for object detection applications on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The dataset comprises 2,898 infrared thermal images extracted from 43,470 frames in hundreds of videos captured by UAVs in various scenarios including schools, parking lots, roads, and playgrounds. Moreover, the HIT-UAV provides essential flight data for each image, such as flight altitude, camera perspective, date, and daylight intensity. For each image, we have manually annotated object instances with bounding boxes of two types (oriented and standard) to tackle the challenge of significant overlap of object instances in aerial images. To the best of our knowledge, the HIT-UAV is the first publicly available high-altitude UAV-based infrared thermal dataset for detecting persons and vehicles. We have trained and evaluated well-established object detection algorithms on the HIT-UAV. Our results demonstrate that the detection algorithms perform exceptionally well on the HIT-UAV compared to visual light datasets since infrared thermal images do not contain significant irrelevant information about objects. We believe that the HIT-UAV will contribute to various UAV-based applications and researches. The dataset is freely available at https://github.com/suojiashun/HIT-UAV-Infrared-Thermal-Dataset.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) object detection requires compact detectors that retain small-object details under onboard computation and memory constraints. Repeated downsampling inlightweight networks weakens shallow spatial information, while manually adding attention orfusion modules may increase cost without stable gains. This study analyzes YOLOX-Nano underedge-deployment constraints by combining a P2 high-resolution detection branch with a quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (QIEA) for lightweight structure screening. The search space isdefined by lightweight priority and task specificity, and the evaluation jointly considers accuracy,floating-point operations (FLOPs), latency, memory consumption, and recall. On VisDrone, theP2 branch increases APamall by 31.10% over the YOLOX-Nano baseline. Compared with NanoDet-Plus with similar model size, YOLOX-Nano+-P2 improves APs0.ss by 17.5% and APamal by 44.9%.The QIEA-selected candidate obtains the highest Recallso, but +P2 remains the strongest AP-oriented variant after full training. Full 100-epoch verification of Random-best, GA-best, andSA/QUBO-best candidates further shows that proxy rankings do not necessarily transfer to finalAPse9s. These results support using P2 as the main small-object enhancement path and QIEA as alightweight tool for candidate screening and accuracy-cost analysis. The source code, configurationfiles, diagnostic scripts, and summarized results are available at https://github.com/Ming23233/UAV-QIEA-Edge-Detection

Despite recent advancements in computer vision research, object detection in aerial images still suffers from several challenges. One primary challenge to be mitigated is the presence of multiple types of variation in aerial images, for example, illumination and viewpoint changes. These variations result in highly diverse image scenes and drastic alterations in object appearance, so that it becomes more complicated to localize objects from the whole image scene and recognize their categories. To address this problem, in this paper, we introduce a novel object detection framework in aerial images, named LANGuage-guided Object detection (LANGO). Upon the proposed language-guided learning, the proposed framework is designed to alleviate the impacts from both scene and instance-level variations. First, we are motivated by the way humans understand the semantics of scenes while perceiving environmental factors in the scenes (e.g., weather). Therefore, we design a visual semantic reasoner that comprehends visual semantics of image scenes by interpreting conditions where the given images were captured. Second, we devise a training objective, named relation learning loss, to deal with instance-level variations, such as viewpoint angle and scale changes. This training objective aims to learn relations in language representations of object categories, with the help of the robust characteristics against such variations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and our method obtains noticeable detection performance improvements.

Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA). To this end, we collect 2806 aerial images from different sensors and platforms. Each image is of the size about 4000-by-4000 pixels and contains objects exhibiting a wide variety of scales, orientations, and shapes. These DOTA images are then annotated by experts in aerial image interpretation using 15 common object categories. The fully annotated DOTA images contains 188,282 instances, each of which is labeled by an arbitrary (8 d.o.f.) quadrilateral To build a baseline for object detection in Earth Vision, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on DOTA. Experiments demonstrate that DOTA well represents real Earth Vision applications and are quite challenging.

Detecting tiny objects plays a vital role in remote sensing intelligent interpretation, as these objects often carry critical information for downstream applications. However, due to the extremely limited pixel information and significant variations in object density, mainstream Transformer-based detectors often suffer from slow convergence and inaccurate query-object matching. To address these challenges, we propose D^3R-DETR, a novel DETR-based detector with Dual-Domain Density Refinement. By fusing spatial and frequency domain information, our method refines low-level feature maps and utilizes their rich details to predict more accurate object density map, thereby guiding the model to precisely localize tiny objects. Extensive experiments on the AI-TOD-v2 dataset demonstrate that D^3R-DETR outperforms existing state-of-the-art detectors for tiny object detection.

Object detection using aerial drone imagery has received a great deal of attention in recent years. While visible light images are adequate for detecting objects in most scenarios, thermal cameras can extend the capabilities of object detection to night-time or occluded objects. As such, RGB and Infrared (IR) fusion methods for object detection are useful and important. One of the biggest challenges in applying deep learning methods to RGB/IR object detection is the lack of available training data for drone IR imagery, especially at night. In this paper, we develop several strategies for creating synthetic IR images using the AIRSim simulation engine and CycleGAN. Furthermore, we utilize an illumination-aware fusion framework to fuse RGB and IR images for object detection on the ground. We characterize and test our methods for both simulated and actual data. Our solution is implemented on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier running on an actual drone, requiring about 28 milliseconds of processing per RGB/IR image pair.

Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery is challenging, mainly due to scale variation, structural detail degradation, and limited computational resources. In high-altitude scenarios, fine-grained features are further weakened during hierarchical downsampling and cross-scale fusion, resulting in unstable localization and reduced robustness. To address this issue, we propose CollabOD, a lightweight collaborative detection framework that explicitly preserves structural details and aligns heterogeneous feature streams before multi-scale fusion. The framework integrates Structural Detail Preservation, Cross-Path Feature Alignment, and Localization-Aware Lightweight Design strategies. From the perspectives of image processing, channel structure, and lightweight design, it optimizes the architecture of conventional UAV perception models. The proposed design enhances representation stability while maintaining efficient inference. A unified detail-aware detection head further improves regression robustness without introducing additional deployment overhead. The code is available at: https://github.com/Bai-Xuecheng/CollabOD.

Oriented object detection emerges in many applications from aerial images to autonomous driving, while many existing detection benchmarks are annotated with horizontal bounding box only which is also less costive than fine-grained rotated box, leading to a gap between the readily available training corpus and the rising demand for oriented object detection. This paper proposes a simple yet effective oriented object detection approach called H2RBox merely using horizontal box annotation for weakly-supervised training, which closes the above gap and shows competitive performance even against those trained with rotated boxes. The cores of our method are weakly- and self-supervised learning, which predicts the angle of the object by learning the consistency of two different views. To our best knowledge, H2RBox is the first horizontal box annotation-based oriented object detector. Compared to an alternative i.e. horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation with our post adaption to oriented object detection, our approach is not susceptible to the prediction quality of mask and can perform more robustly in complex scenes containing a large number of dense objects and outliers. Experimental results show that H2RBox has significant performance and speed advantages over horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation methods, as well as lower memory requirements. While compared to rotated box-supervised oriented object detectors, our method shows very close performance and speed. The source code is available at PyTorch-based https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-mmrotate{MMRotate} and Jittor-based https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-jittor{JDet}.

Object detection from aerial platforms under adverse atmospheric conditions, particularly haze, is paramount for robust drone autonomy. Yet, this domain remains largely underexplored, primarily hindered by the absence of specialized benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we present HazyDet, the first, large-scale benchmark specifically designed for drone-view object detection in hazy conditions. Comprising 383,000 real-world instances derived from both naturally hazy captures and synthetically hazed scenes augmented from clear images, HazyDet provides a challenging and realistic testbed for advancing detection algorithms. To address the severe visual degradation induced by haze, we propose the Depth-Conditioned Detector (DeCoDet), a novel architecture that integrates a Depth-Conditioned Kernel to dynamically modulate feature representations based on depth cues. The practical efficacy and robustness of DeCoDet are further enhanced by its training with a Progressive Domain Fine-Tuning (PDFT) strategy to navigate synthetic-to-real domain shifts, and a Scale-Invariant Refurbishment Loss (SIRLoss) to ensure resilient learning from potentially noisy depth annotations. Comprehensive empirical validation on HazyDet substantiates the superiority of our unified DeCoDet framework, which achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing the closest competitor by a notable +1.5\% mAP on challenging real-world hazy test scenarios. Our dataset and toolkit are available at https://github.com/GrokCV/HazyDet.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based object detection is a critical but challenging task, when applied in dynamically changing scenarios with limited annotated training data. Layout-to-image generation approaches have proved effective in promoting detection accuracy by synthesizing labeled images based on diffusion models. However, they suffer from frequently producing artifacts, especially near layout boundaries of tiny objects, thus substantially limiting their performance. To address these issues, we propose UAVGen, a novel layout-to-image generation framework tailored for UAV-based object detection. Specifically, UAVGen designs a Visual Prototype Conditioned Diffusion Model (VPC-DM) that constructs representative instances for each class and integrates them into latent embeddings for high-fidelity object generation. Moreover, a Focal Region Enhanced Data Pipeline (FRE-DP) is introduced to emphasize object-concentrated foreground regions in synthesis, combined with a label refinement to correct missing, extra and misaligned generations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, and consistently promotes accuracy when integrated with distinct detectors. The source code is available at https://github.com/Sirius-Li/UAVGen.

Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) faces formidable challenges in complex visual environments. Aerial and satellite images inherently suffer from limitations such as low spatial resolution, sensor noise, blurred objects, low-light degradation, and partial occlusions. These degradation factors collectively compromise the feature discriminability in detection models, resulting in three key issues: (1) reduced contrast that hampers foreground-background separation, (2) structural discontinuities in edge representations, and (3) ambiguous feature responses caused by variations in illumination. These collectively weaken model robustness and deployment feasibility. To address these challenges, we propose LEGNet, a lightweight network that incorporates a novel edge-Gaussian aggregation (EGA) module specifically designed for low-quality remote sensing images. Our key innovation lies in the synergistic integration of Scharr operator-based edge priors with uncertainty-aware Gaussian modeling: (a) The orientation-aware Scharr filters preserve high-frequency edge details with rotational invariance; (b) The uncertainty-aware Gaussian layers probabilistically refine low-confidence features through variance estimation. This design enables precision enhancement while maintaining architectural simplicity. Comprehensive evaluations across four RSOD benchmarks (DOTA-v1.0, v1.5, DIOR-R, FAIR1M-v1.0) and a UAV-view dataset (VisDrone2019) demonstrate significant improvements. LEGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmark datasets while ensuring computational efficiency, making it well-suited for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices in real-world remote sensing applications. The code is available at https://github.com/lwCVer/LEGNet.

Object detection is integral to a bevy of real-world applications, from robotics to medical image analysis. To be used reliably in such applications, models must be capable of handling unexpected - or novel - objects. The open world object detection (OWD) paradigm addresses this challenge by enabling models to detect unknown objects and learn discovered ones incrementally. However, OWD method development is hindered due to the stringent benchmark and task definitions. These definitions effectively prohibit foundation models. Here, we aim to relax these definitions and investigate the utilization of pre-trained foundation models in OWD. First, we show that existing benchmarks are insufficient in evaluating methods that utilize foundation models, as even naive integration methods nearly saturate these benchmarks. This result motivated us to curate a new and challenging benchmark for these models. Therefore, we introduce a new benchmark that includes five real-world application-driven datasets, including challenging domains such as aerial and surgical images, and establish baselines. We exploit the inherent connection between classes in application-driven datasets and introduce a novel method, Foundation Object detection Model for the Open world, or FOMO, which identifies unknown objects based on their shared attributes with the base known objects. FOMO has ~3x unknown object mAP compared to baselines on our benchmark. However, our results indicate a significant place for improvement - suggesting a great research opportunity in further scaling object detection methods to real-world domains. Our code and benchmark are available at https://orrzohar.github.io/projects/fomo/.

With the rapid growth of the low-altitude economy, UAVs have become crucial for measurement and tracking in patrol systems. However, in GNSS-denied areas, satellite-based localization methods are prone to failure. This paper presents a cross-view UAV localization framework that performs map matching via object detection, aimed at effectively addressing cross-temporal, cross-view, heterogeneous aerial image matching. In typical pipelines, UAV visual localization is formulated as an image-retrieval problem: features are extracted to build a localization map, and the pose of a query image is estimated by matching it to a reference database with known poses. Because publicly available UAV localization datasets are limited, many approaches recast localization as a classification task and rely on scene labels in these datasets to ensure accuracy. Other methods seek to reduce cross-domain differences using polar-coordinate reprojection, perspective transformations, or generative adversarial networks; however, they can suffer from misalignment, content loss, and limited realism. In contrast, we leverage modern object detection to accurately extract salient instances from UAV and satellite images, and integrate a graph neural network to reason about inter-image and intra-image node relationships. Using a fine-grained, graph-based node-similarity metric, our method achieves strong retrieval and localization performance. Extensive experiments on public and real-world datasets show that our approach handles heterogeneous appearance differences effectively and generalizes well, making it applicable to scenarios with larger modality gaps, such as infrared-visible image matching. Our dataset will be publicly available at the following URL: https://github.com/liutao23/ODGNNLoc.git.

The multimodal language models (MLMs) based on generative pre-trained Transformer are considered powerful candidates for unifying various domains and tasks. MLMs developed for remote sensing (RS) have demonstrated outstanding performance in multiple tasks, such as visual question answering and visual grounding. In addition to visual grounding that detects specific objects corresponded to given instruction, aerial detection, which detects all objects of multiple categories, is also a valuable and challenging task for RS foundation models. However, aerial detection has not been explored by existing RS MLMs because the autoregressive prediction mechanism of MLMs differs significantly from the detection outputs. In this paper, we present a simple baseline for applying MLMs to aerial detection for the first time, named LMMRotate. Specifically, we first introduce a normalization method to transform detection outputs into textual outputs to be compatible with the MLM framework. Then, we propose a evaluation method, which ensures a fair comparison between MLMs and conventional object detection models. We construct the baseline by fine-tuning open-source general-purpose MLMs and achieve impressive detection performance comparable to conventional detector. We hope that this baseline will serve as a reference for future MLM development, enabling more comprehensive capabilities for understanding RS images. Code is available at https://github.com/Li-Qingyun/mllm-mmrotate.

Efficient crop detection via Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is critical for scaling precision agriculture, yet it remains challenging due to the small scale of targets and environmental variability. This paper addresses the detection of rice seedlings in paddy fields by leveraging a Faster R-CNN architecture initialized via transfer learning. To overcome the specific difficulties of detecting minute objects in high-resolution aerial imagery, we curate a significant UAV dataset for training and rigorously evaluate the model's generalization capabilities. Specifically, we validate performance across three distinct test sets acquired at different temporal intervals, thereby assessing robustness against varying imaging conditions. Our empirical results demonstrate that transfer learning not only facilitates the rapid convergence of object detection models in agricultural contexts but also yields consistent performance despite domain shifts in image acquisition.

The real-time detection of small objects in complex scenes, such as the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photography captured by drones, has dual challenges of detecting small targets (<32 pixels) and maintaining real-time efficiency on resource-constrained platforms. While YOLO-series detectors have achieved remarkable success in real-time large object detection, they suffer from significantly higher false negative rates for drone-based detection where small objects dominate, compared to large object scenarios. This paper proposes HierLight-YOLO, a hierarchical feature fusion and lightweight model that enhances the real-time detection of small objects, based on the YOLOv8 architecture. We propose the Hierarchical Extended Path Aggregation Network (HEPAN), a multi-scale feature fusion method through hierarchical cross-level connections, enhancing the small object detection accuracy. HierLight-YOLO includes two innovative lightweight modules: Inverted Residual Depthwise Convolution Block (IRDCB) and Lightweight Downsample (LDown) module, which significantly reduce the model's parameters and computational complexity without sacrificing detection capabilities. Small object detection head is designed to further enhance spatial resolution and feature fusion to tackle the tiny object (4 pixels) detection. Comparison experiments and ablation studies on the VisDrone2019 benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of HierLight-YOLO.

Remote sensing image object detection (RSIOD) aims to identify and locate specific objects within satellite or aerial imagery. However, there is a scarcity of labeled data in current RSIOD datasets, which significantly limits the performance of current detection algorithms. Although existing techniques, e.g., data augmentation and semi-supervised learning, can mitigate this scarcity issue to some extent, they are heavily dependent on high-quality labeled data and perform worse in rare object classes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a layout-controllable diffusion generative model (i.e. AeroGen) tailored for RSIOD. To our knowledge, AeroGen is the first model to simultaneously support horizontal and rotated bounding box condition generation, thus enabling the generation of high-quality synthetic images that meet specific layout and object category requirements. Additionally, we propose an end-to-end data augmentation framework that integrates a diversity-conditioned generator and a filtering mechanism to enhance both the diversity and quality of generated data. Experimental results demonstrate that the synthetic data produced by our method are of high quality and diversity. Furthermore, the synthetic RSIOD data can significantly improve the detection performance of existing RSIOD models, i.e., the mAP metrics on DIOR, DIOR-R, and HRSC datasets are improved by 3.7%, 4.3%, and 2.43%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/Sonettoo/AeroGen.

The rapid proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has highlighted the importance of robust and efficient object detection in diverse aerial scenarios. Detecting small objects under complex conditions, however, remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches often prioritize inference speed, leading to degraded performance when handling multi-modal inputs. To address this, we present DGE-YOLO, an enhanced YOLO-based detection framework designed to effectively fuse multi-modal information. Specifically, we introduce a dual-branch architecture for modality-specific feature extraction, enabling the model to process both infrared and visible images. To further enrich semantic representation, we propose an Efficient Multi-scale Attention (EMA) mechanism that enhances feature learning across spatial scales. Additionally, we replace the conventional neck with a Gather-and-Distribute module to mitigate information loss during feature aggregation. Extensive experiments on the Drone Vehicle dataset demonstrate that DGE-YOLO achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness in multi-modal UAV object detection tasks.

Single point-supervised object detection is gaining attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However, existing approaches focus on generating horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs) while ignoring oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) commonly used for objects in aerial images. This paper proposes PointOBB, the first single Point-based OBB generation method, for oriented object detection. PointOBB operates through the collaborative utilization of three distinctive views: an original view, a resized view, and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Upon the original view, we leverage the resized and rot/flp views to build a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module, respectively. In the former module, a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss is designed to enhance the deep network's ability to perceive the object scale. For accurate object angle predictions, the latter module incorporates self-supervised learning to predict angles, which is associated with a scale-guided Dense-to-Sparse (DS) matching strategy for aggregating dense angles corresponding to sparse objects. The resized and rot/flp views are switched using a progressive multi-view switching strategy during training to achieve coupled optimization of scale and angle. Experimental results on the DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 datasets demonstrate that PointOBB achieves promising performance, and significantly outperforms potential point-supervised baselines.

Small Video Object Detection (SVOD) is a crucial subfield in modern computer vision, essential for early object discovery and detection. However, existing SVOD datasets are scarce and suffer from issues such as insufficiently small objects, limited object categories, and lack of scene diversity, leading to unitary application scenarios for corresponding methods. To address this gap, we develop the XS-VID dataset, which comprises aerial data from various periods and scenes, and annotates eight major object categories. To further evaluate existing methods for detecting extremely small objects, XS-VID extensively collects three types of objects with smaller pixel areas: extremely small (es, 0sim12^2), relatively small (rs, 12^2sim20^2), and generally small (gs, 20^2sim32^2). XS-VID offers unprecedented breadth and depth in covering and quantifying minuscule objects, significantly enriching the scene and object diversity in the dataset. Extensive validations on XS-VID and the publicly available VisDrone2019VID dataset show that existing methods struggle with small object detection and significantly underperform compared to general object detectors. Leveraging the strengths of previous methods and addressing their weaknesses, we propose YOLOFT, which enhances local feature associations and integrates temporal motion features, significantly improving the accuracy and stability of SVOD. Our datasets and benchmarks are available at https://gjhhust.github.io/XS-VID/.

Deep learning-based object detectors have achieved remarkable success across numerous computer vision applications, yet they continue to struggle with small object detection in high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery, where dense object distributions, variable shooting angles, diminutive target sizes, and substantial inter-class variability pose formidable challenges. Existing slicing strategies that partition high-resolution images into manageable patches have demonstrated promising results for enlarging the effective receptive field of small targets; however, their reliance on fixed slice dimensions introduces significant redundant computation, inflating inference cost and undermining detection speed. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Slicing-Assisted Hyper Inference (ASAHI), a novel slicing framework that shifts the paradigm from prescribing a fixed slice size to adaptively determining the optimal number of slices according to image resolution, thereby substantially mitigating redundant computation while preserving beneficial overlap between adjacent patches. ASAHI integrates three synergistic components: (1)an adaptive resolution-aware slicing algorithm that dynamically generates 6 or 12 overlapping patches based on a learned threshold, (2)a slicing-assisted fine-tuning (SAF) strategy that constructs augmented training data comprising both full-resolution and sliced image patches, and (3)a Cluster-DIoU-NMS (CDN) post-processing module that combines the geometric merging efficiency of Cluster-NMS with the center-distance-aware suppression of DIoU-NMS to achieve robust duplicate elimination in crowded scenes. Extensive experiments on VisDrone2019 and xView, demonstrate that ASAHI achieves state-of-the-art performance with 56.8% on VisDrone2019-DET-val and 22.7% on xView-test, while reducing inference time by 20-25% compared to the baseline SAHI method.

Despite previous DETR-like methods having performed successfully in generic object detection, tiny object detection is still a challenging task for them since the positional information of object queries is not customized for detecting tiny objects, whose scale is extraordinarily smaller than general objects. Also, DETR-like methods using a fixed number of queries make them unsuitable for aerial datasets, which only contain tiny objects, and the numbers of instances are imbalanced between different images. Thus, we present a simple yet effective model, named DQ-DETR, which consists of three different components: categorical counting module, counting-guided feature enhancement, and dynamic query selection to solve the above-mentioned problems. DQ-DETR uses the prediction and density maps from the categorical counting module to dynamically adjust the number of object queries and improve the positional information of queries. Our model DQ-DETR outperforms previous CNN-based and DETR-like methods, achieving state-of-the-art mAP 30.2% on the AI-TOD-V2 dataset, which mostly consists of tiny objects. Our code will be available at https://github.com/hoiliu-0801/DQ-DETR.

RGB imagery offers a practical, low-cost option for Unmanned Aerial/Ground Vehicle (UAV/UGV) survey support in surface-landmine detection, but object detectors remain underexplored in this safety-critical domain. Limited cross-architecture benchmarking and insufficient out-of-distribution (OOD) analysis obscure whether detectors generalize across deployment conditions. This challenge is amplified by the scarcity of public RGB landmine datasets, making SULAND a key benchmark for PFM-1 and PMA-2 detection. However, inspection reveals missing/false annotations, localization errors, inconsistent visibility criteria, visual artifacts, temporal labeling inconsistencies, and an inverted OOD class-ID convention in SULAND. We present SULAND_v2, a refined RGB surface-landmine dataset and benchmark. Preserving original images and splits, we manually revise annotations to ensure completeness, precise localization, label validity, and class consistency. SULAND_v2 contains 33,771 images and 12,433 bounding boxes. We benchmark 35 detector configurations across nine families. Annotation refinement improves YOLOv8 in-distribution (IID) test mAP@50 by 14.6-19.6 percentage points, while fixing the OOD class-ID convention increases mean YOLOv8 OOD mAP@50 by ~25 percentage points. On SULAND_v2, YOLOv12-Small achieves the highest IID mAP@50 (0.908), while RF-DETR-Large yields the strongest OOD performance (0.799 mAP@50, 0.675 recall). Our results demonstrate that high IID accuracy does not guarantee operational readiness. SULAND_v2 provides a reliable benchmark for evaluating domain-shift robustness in RGB-based mine-action survey support.

Object detection in aerial imagery is a critical task in applications such as UAV reconnaissance. Although existing methods have extensively explored feature interaction between different modalities, they commonly rely on simple fusion strategies for feature aggregation. This introduces two critical flaws: it is prone to cross-modal noise and disrupts the hierarchical structure of the feature pyramid, thereby impairing the fine-grained detection of small objects. To address this challenge, we propose the Pyramidal Adaptive Cross-Gating Network (PACGNet), an architecture designed to perform deep fusion within the backbone. To this end, we design two core components: the Symmetrical Cross-Gating (SCG) module and the Pyramidal Feature-aware Multimodal Gating (PFMG) module. The SCG module employs a bidirectional, symmetrical "horizontal" gating mechanism to selectively absorb complementary information, suppress noise, and preserve the semantic integrity of each modality. The PFMG module reconstructs the feature hierarchy via a progressive hierarchical gating mechanism. This leverages the detailed features from a preceding, higher-resolution level to guide the fusion at the current, lower-resolution level, effectively preserving fine-grained details as features propagate. Through evaluations conducted on the DroneVehicle and VEDAI datasets, our PACGNet sets a new state-of-the-art benchmark, with mAP50 scores reaching 81.7% and 82.1% respectively.

Detecting objects in aerial images is challenging because they are typically composed of crowded small objects distributed non-uniformly over high-resolution images. Density cropping is a widely used method to improve this small object detection where the crowded small object regions are extracted and processed in high resolution. However, this is typically accomplished by adding other learnable components, thus complicating the training and inference over a standard detection process. In this paper, we propose an efficient Cascaded Zoom-in (CZ) detector that re-purposes the detector itself for density-guided training and inference. During training, density crops are located, labeled as a new class, and employed to augment the training dataset. During inference, the density crops are first detected along with the base class objects, and then input for a second stage of inference. This approach is easily integrated into any detector, and creates no significant change in the standard detection process, like the uniform cropping approach popular in aerial image detection. Experimental results on the aerial images of the challenging VisDrone and DOTA datasets verify the benefits of the proposed approach. The proposed CZ detector also provides state-of-the-art results over uniform cropping and other density cropping methods on the VisDrone dataset, increasing the detection mAP of small objects by more than 3 points.

Despite the commercial abundance of UAVs, aerial data acquisition remains challenging, and the existing Asia and North America-centric open-source UAV datasets are small-scale or low-resolution and lack diversity in scene contextuality. Additionally, the color content of the scenes, solar-zenith angle, and population density of different geographies influence the data diversity. These two factors conjointly render suboptimal aerial-visual perception of the deep neural network (DNN) models trained primarily on the ground-view data, including the open-world foundational models. To pave the way for a transformative era of aerial detection, we present Multiview Aerial Visual RECognition or MAVREC, a video dataset where we record synchronized scenes from different perspectives -- ground camera and drone-mounted camera. MAVREC consists of around 2.5 hours of industry-standard 2.7K resolution video sequences, more than 0.5 million frames, and 1.1 million annotated bounding boxes. This makes MAVREC the largest ground and aerial-view dataset, and the fourth largest among all drone-based datasets across all modalities and tasks. Through our extensive benchmarking on MAVREC, we recognize that augmenting object detectors with ground-view images from the corresponding geographical location is a superior pre-training strategy for aerial detection. Building on this strategy, we benchmark MAVREC with a curriculum-based semi-supervised object detection approach that leverages labeled (ground and aerial) and unlabeled (only aerial) images to enhance the aerial detection. We publicly release the MAVREC dataset: https://mavrec.github.io.

The development of multi-modal learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) typically relies on a large amount of pixel-aligned multi-modal image data. However, existing datasets face challenges such as limited modalities, high construction costs, and imprecise annotations. To this end, we propose a synthetic multi-modal UAV-based multi-task dataset, UEMM-Air. Specifically, we simulate various UAV flight scenarios and object types using the Unreal Engine (UE). Then we design the UAV's flight logic to automatically collect data from different scenarios, perspectives, and altitudes. Furthermore, we propose a novel heuristic automatic annotation algorithm to generate accurate object detection labels. Finally, we utilize labels to generate text descriptions of images to make our UEMM-Air support more cross-modality tasks. In total, our UEMM-Air consists of 120k pairs of images with 6 modalities and precise annotations. Moreover, we conduct numerous experiments and establish new benchmark results on our dataset. We also found that models pre-trained on UEMM-Air exhibit better performance on downstream tasks compared to other similar datasets. The dataset is publicly available (https://github.com/1e12Leon/UEMM-Air) to support the research of multi-modal tasks on UAVs.

Visual scene understanding is the core task in making any crucial decision in any computer vision system. Although popular computer vision datasets like Cityscapes, MS-COCO, PASCAL provide good benchmarks for several tasks (e.g. image classification, segmentation, object detection), these datasets are hardly suitable for post disaster damage assessments. On the other hand, existing natural disaster datasets include mainly satellite imagery which have low spatial resolution and a high revisit period. Therefore, they do not have a scope to provide quick and efficient damage assessment tasks. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) can effortlessly access difficult places during any disaster and collect high resolution imagery that is required for aforementioned tasks of computer vision. To address these issues we present a high resolution UAV imagery, FloodNet, captured after the hurricane Harvey. This dataset demonstrates the post flooded damages of the affected areas. The images are labeled pixel-wise for semantic segmentation task and questions are produced for the task of visual question answering. FloodNet poses several challenges including detection of flooded roads and buildings and distinguishing between natural water and flooded water. With the advancement of deep learning algorithms, we can analyze the impact of any disaster which can make a precise understanding of the affected areas. In this paper, we compare and contrast the performances of baseline methods for image classification, semantic segmentation, and visual question answering on our dataset.

In this paper, we present a method for detecting objects of interest, including cars, humans, and fire, in aerial images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) usually during vegetation fires. To achieve this, we use artificial neural networks and create a dataset for supervised learning. We accomplish the assisted labeling of the dataset through the implementation of an object detection pipeline that combines classic image processing techniques with pretrained neural networks. In addition, we develop a data augmentation pipeline to augment the dataset with automatically labeled images. Finally, we evaluate the performance of different neural networks.

Although advances in deep learning and aerial surveillance technology are improving wildlife conservation efforts, complex and erratic environmental conditions still pose a problem, requiring innovative solutions for cost-effective small animal detection. This work introduces DEAL-YOLO, a novel approach that improves small object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images by using multi-objective loss functions like Wise IoU (WIoU) and Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD), which prioritize pixels near the centre of the bounding box, ensuring smoother localization and reducing abrupt deviations. Additionally, the model is optimized through efficient feature extraction with Linear Deformable (LD) convolutions, enhancing accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. The Scaled Sequence Feature Fusion (SSFF) module enhances object detection by effectively capturing inter-scale relationships, improving feature representation, and boosting metrics through optimized multiscale fusion. Comparison with baseline models reveals high efficacy with up to 69.5\% fewer parameters compared to vanilla Yolov8-N, highlighting the robustness of the proposed modifications. Through this approach, our paper aims to facilitate the detection of endangered species, animal population analysis, habitat monitoring, biodiversity research, and various other applications that enrich wildlife conservation efforts. DEAL-YOLO employs a two-stage inference paradigm for object detection, refining selected regions to improve localization and confidence. This approach enhances performance, especially for small instances with low objectness scores.

The 1^{st} Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023 focused on maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), and organized several subchallenges in this domain: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Detection, (ii) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking, (iii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and (iv) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Detection. The subchallenges were based on the SeaDronesSee and MODS benchmarks. This report summarizes the main findings of the individual subchallenges and introduces a new benchmark, called SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2, which extends the previous benchmark by including more classes and footage. We provide statistical and qualitative analyses, and assess trends in the best-performing methodologies of over 130 submissions. The methods are summarized in the appendix. The datasets, evaluation code and the leaderboard are publicly available at https://seadronessee.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/macvi.

This paper presents a generalized model for real-time detection of flying objects that can be used for transfer learning and further research, as well as a refined model that is ready for implementation. We achieve this by training our first generalized model on a data set containing 40 different classes of flying objects, forcing the model to extract abstract feature representations. We then perform transfer learning with these learned parameters on a data set more representative of real world environments (i.e., higher frequency of occlusion, small spatial sizes, rotations, etc.) to generate our refined model. Object detection of flying objects remains challenging due to large variance object spatial sizes/aspect ratios, rate of speed, occlusion, and clustered backgrounds. To address some of the presented challenges while simultaneously maximizing performance, we utilize the current state of the art single-shot detector, YOLOv8, in an attempt to find the best tradeoff between inference speed and mAP. While YOLOv8 is being regarded as the new state-of-the-art, an official paper has not been provided. Thus, we provide an in-depth explanation of the new architecture and functionality that YOLOv8 has adapted. Our final generalized model achieves an mAP50-95 of 0.685 and average inference speed on 1080p videos of 50 fps. Our final refined model maintains this inference speed and achieves an improved mAP50-95 of 0.835.

Detecting vehicles in aerial imagery is a critical task with applications in traffic monitoring, urban planning, and defense intelligence. Deep learning methods have provided state-of-the-art (SOTA) results for this application. However, a significant challenge arises when models trained on data from one geographic region fail to generalize effectively to other areas. Variability in factors such as environmental conditions, urban layouts, road networks, vehicle types, and image acquisition parameters (e.g., resolution, lighting, and angle) leads to domain shifts that degrade model performance. This paper proposes a novel method that uses generative AI to synthesize high-quality aerial images and their labels, improving detector training through data augmentation. Our key contribution is the development of a multi-stage, multi-modal knowledge transfer framework utilizing fine-tuned latent diffusion models (LDMs) to mitigate the distribution gap between the source and target environments. Extensive experiments across diverse aerial imagery domains show consistent performance improvements in AP50 over supervised learning on source domain data, weakly supervised adaptation methods, unsupervised domain adaptation methods, and open-set object detectors by 4-23%, 6-10%, 7-40%, and more than 50%, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce two newly annotated aerial datasets from New Zealand and Utah to support further research in this field. Project page is available at: https://humansensinglab.github.io/AGenDA

This is the paper for the first place winning solution of the Drone vs. Bird Challenge, organized by AVSS 2021. As the usage of drones increases with lowered costs and improved drone technology, drone detection emerges as a vital object detection task. However, detecting distant drones under unfavorable conditions, namely weak contrast, long-range, low visibility, requires effective algorithms. Our method approaches the drone detection problem by fine-tuning a YOLOv5 model with real and synthetically generated data using a Kalman-based object tracker to boost detection confidence. Our results indicate that augmenting the real data with an optimal subset of synthetic data can increase the performance. Moreover, temporal information gathered by object tracking methods can increase performance further.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are of crucial importance in search and rescue missions in maritime environments due to their flexible and fast operation capabilities. Modern computer vision algorithms are of great interest in aiding such missions. However, they are dependent on large amounts of real-case training data from UAVs, which is only available for traffic scenarios on land. Moreover, current object detection and tracking data sets only provide limited environmental information or none at all, neglecting a valuable source of information. Therefore, this paper introduces a large-scaled visual object detection and tracking benchmark (SeaDronesSee) aiming to bridge the gap from land-based vision systems to sea-based ones. We collect and annotate over 54,000 frames with 400,000 instances captured from various altitudes and viewing angles ranging from 5 to 260 meters and 0 to 90 degrees while providing the respective meta information for altitude, viewing angle and other meta data. We evaluate multiple state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on this newly established benchmark serving as baselines. We provide an evaluation server where researchers can upload their prediction and compare their results on a central leaderboard

Aerial scene classification, which aims to automatically label an aerial image with a specific semantic category, is a fundamental problem for understanding high-resolution remote sensing imagery. In recent years, it has become an active task in remote sensing area and numerous algorithms have been proposed for this task, including many machine learning and data-driven approaches. However, the existing datasets for aerial scene classification like UC-Merced dataset and WHU-RS19 are with relatively small sizes, and the results on them are already saturated. This largely limits the development of scene classification algorithms. This paper describes the Aerial Image Dataset (AID): a large-scale dataset for aerial scene classification. The goal of AID is to advance the state-of-the-arts in scene classification of remote sensing images. For creating AID, we collect and annotate more than ten thousands aerial scene images. In addition, a comprehensive review of the existing aerial scene classification techniques as well as recent widely-used deep learning methods is given. Finally, we provide a performance analysis of typical aerial scene classification and deep learning approaches on AID, which can be served as the baseline results on this benchmark.

Drone detection is a challenging object detection task where visibility conditions and quality of the images may be unfavorable, and detections might become difficult due to complex backgrounds, small visible objects, and hard to distinguish objects. Both provide high confidence for drone detections, and eliminating false detections requires efficient algorithms and approaches. Our previous work, which uses YOLOv5, uses both real and synthetic data and a Kalman-based tracker to track the detections and increase their confidence using temporal information. Our current work improves on the previous approach by combining several improvements. We used a more diverse dataset combining multiple sources and combined with synthetic samples chosen from a large synthetic dataset based on the error analysis of the base model. Also, to obtain more resilient confidence scores for objects, we introduced a classification component that discriminates whether the object is a drone or not. Finally, we developed a more advanced scoring algorithm for object tracking that we use to adjust localization confidence. Furthermore, the proposed technique won 1st Place in the Drone vs. Bird Challenge (Workshop on Small-Drone Surveillance, Detection and Counteraction Techniques at ICIAP 2021).

Aerial Image Segmentation is a top-down perspective semantic segmentation and has several challenging characteristics such as strong imbalance in the foreground-background distribution, complex background, intra-class heterogeneity, inter-class homogeneity, and tiny objects. To handle these problems, we inherit the advantages of Transformers and propose AerialFormer, which unifies Transformers at the contracting path with lightweight Multi-Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks (MD-CNNs) at the expanding path. Our AerialFormer is designed as a hierarchical structure, in which Transformer encoder outputs multi-scale features and MD-CNNs decoder aggregates information from the multi-scales. Thus, it takes both local and global contexts into consideration to render powerful representations and high-resolution segmentation. We have benchmarked AerialFormer on three common datasets including iSAID, LoveDA, and Potsdam. Comprehensive experiments and extensive ablation studies show that our proposed AerialFormer outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with remarkable performance. Our source code will be publicly available upon acceptance.

Accurate depth and semantic segmentation are crucial for various computer vision tasks. However, the scarcity of annotated real-world aerial datasets poses a significant challenge for training and evaluating robust models. Additionally, the detection and segmentation of thin objects, such as wires, cables, and fences, present a critical concern for ensuring the safe operation of drones. To address these limitations, we present a novel synthetic dataset specifically designed for depth and semantic segmentation tasks in aerial views. Leveraging photo-realistic rendering techniques, our dataset provides a valuable resource for training models using a synthetic-supervision training scheme while introducing new drone-specific metrics for depth accuracy.

Existing image perception methods based on VLMs generally follow a paradigm wherein models extract and analyze image content based on user-provided textual task prompts. However, such methods face limitations when applied to UAV imagery, which presents challenges like target confusion, scale variations, and complex backgrounds. These challenges arise because VLMs' understanding of image content depends on the semantic alignment between visual and textual tokens. When the task prompt is simplistic and the image content is complex, achieving effective alignment becomes difficult, limiting the model's ability to focus on task-relevant information. To address this issue, we introduce AerialVP, the first agent framework for task prompt enhancement in UAV image perception. AerialVP proactively extracts multi-dimensional auxiliary information from UAV images to enhance task prompts, overcoming the limitations of traditional VLM-based approaches. Specifically, the enhancement process includes three stages: (1) analyzing the task prompt to identify the task type and enhancement needs, (2) selecting appropriate tools from the tool repository, and (3) generating enhanced task prompts based on the analysis and selected tools. To evaluate AerialVP, we introduce AerialSense, a comprehensive benchmark for UAV image perception that includes Aerial Visual Reasoning, Aerial Visual Question Answering, and Aerial Visual Grounding tasks. AerialSense provides a standardized basis for evaluating model generalization and performance across diverse resolutions, lighting conditions, and both urban and natural scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that AerialVP significantly enhances task prompt guidance, leading to stable and substantial performance improvements in both open-source and proprietary VLMs. Our work will be available at https://github.com/lostwolves/AerialVP.

This work addresses cross-view camera pose estimation, i.e., determining the 3-Degrees-of-Freedom camera pose of a given ground-level image w.r.t. an aerial image of the local area. We propose SliceMatch, which consists of ground and aerial feature extractors, feature aggregators, and a pose predictor. The feature extractors extract dense features from the ground and aerial images. Given a set of candidate camera poses, the feature aggregators construct a single ground descriptor and a set of pose-dependent aerial descriptors. Notably, our novel aerial feature aggregator has a cross-view attention module for ground-view guided aerial feature selection and utilizes the geometric projection of the ground camera's viewing frustum on the aerial image to pool features. The efficient construction of aerial descriptors is achieved using precomputed masks. SliceMatch is trained using contrastive learning and pose estimation is formulated as a similarity comparison between the ground descriptor and the aerial descriptors. Compared to the state-of-the-art, SliceMatch achieves a 19% lower median localization error on the VIGOR benchmark using the same VGG16 backbone at 150 frames per second, and a 50% lower error when using a ResNet50 backbone.

Real-world aerial scene understanding is limited by a lack of datasets that contain densely annotated images curated under a diverse set of conditions. Due to inherent challenges in obtaining such images in controlled real-world settings, we present SkyScenes, a synthetic dataset of densely annotated aerial images captured from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) perspectives. We carefully curate SkyScenes images from CARLA to comprehensively capture diversity across layout (urban and rural maps), weather conditions, times of day, pitch angles and altitudes with corresponding semantic, instance and depth annotations. Through our experiments using SkyScenes, we show that (1) Models trained on SkyScenes generalize well to different real-world scenarios, (2) augmenting training on real images with SkyScenes data can improve real-world performance, (3) controlled variations in SkyScenes can offer insights into how models respond to changes in viewpoint conditions, and (4) incorporating additional sensor modalities (depth) can improve aerial scene understanding.

We introduce a new large-scale dataset for the advancement of object detection techniques and overhead object detection research. This satellite imagery dataset enables research progress pertaining to four key computer vision frontiers. We utilize a novel process for geospatial category detection and bounding box annotation with three stages of quality control. Our data is collected from WorldView-3 satellites at 0.3m ground sample distance, providing higher resolution imagery than most public satellite imagery datasets. We compare xView to other object detection datasets in both natural and overhead imagery domains and then provide a baseline analysis using the Single Shot MultiBox Detector. xView is one of the largest and most diverse publicly available object-detection datasets to date, with over 1 million objects across 60 classes in over 1,400 km^2 of imagery.

Drones, or general UAVs, equipped with cameras have been fast deployed with a wide range of applications, including agriculture, aerial photography, and surveillance. Consequently, automatic understanding of visual data collected from drones becomes highly demanding, bringing computer vision and drones more and more closely. To promote and track the developments of object detection and tracking algorithms, we have organized three challenge workshops in conjunction with ECCV 2018, ICCV 2019 and ECCV 2020, attracting more than 100 teams around the world. We provide a large-scale drone captured dataset, VisDrone, which includes four tracks, i.e., (1) image object detection, (2) video object detection, (3) single object tracking, and (4) multi-object tracking. In this paper, we first present a thorough review of object detection and tracking datasets and benchmarks, and discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale drone-based object detection and tracking datasets with fully manual annotations. After that, we describe our VisDrone dataset, which is captured over various urban/suburban areas of 14 different cities across China from North to South. Being the largest such dataset ever published, VisDrone enables extensive evaluation and investigation of visual analysis algorithms for the drone platform. We provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale object detection and tracking on drones, and conclude the challenge as well as propose future directions. We expect the benchmark largely boost the research and development in video analysis on drone platforms. All the datasets and experimental results can be downloaded from https://github.com/VisDrone/VisDrone-Dataset.

Despite significant advancements, autonomous driving systems continue to struggle with occluded objects and long-range detection due to the inherent limitations of single-perspective sensing. Aerial-ground cooperation offers a promising solution by integrating UAVs' aerial views with ground vehicles' local observations. However, progress in this emerging field has been hindered by the absence of public datasets and standardized evaluation benchmarks. To address this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive solution for aerial-ground cooperative 3D perception through three key contributions: (1) Griffin, a large-scale multi-modal dataset featuring over 200 dynamic scenes (30k+ frames) with varied UAV altitudes (20-60m), diverse weather conditions, and occlusion-aware 3D annotations, enhanced by CARLA-AirSim co-simulation for realistic UAV dynamics; (2) A unified benchmarking framework for aerial-ground cooperative detection and tracking tasks, including protocols for evaluating communication efficiency, latency tolerance, and altitude adaptability; (3) AGILE, an instance-level intermediate fusion baseline that dynamically aligns cross-view features through query-based interaction, achieving an advantageous balance between communication overhead and perception accuracy. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of aerial-ground cooperative perception and demonstrate the direction of further research. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/wang-jh18-SVM/Griffin.

Spatial intelligence is essential for low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) perception, collaboration, and navigation. However, existing UAV benchmarks often emphasize image-level recognition, single-view understanding, or narrow answer formats, leaving 3D spatial inference, multi-view collaboration, scene dynamics, and diverse task formulations insufficiently evaluated. To address these gaps, we introduce SpatialUAV, a real low-altitude UAV benchmark comprising 4,331 curated instances across 14 fine-grained task types, covering semantic discrimination, spatial relation, aerial--aerial collaboration, aerial--ground collaboration, and motion understanding. SpatialUAV organizes all samples into a unified visual-input--question--answer schema, while supporting seven input configurations and nine answer formats, including option labels, region identifiers, geometric values, cross-view correspondences, and free-form motion descriptions. To ensure reliable and grounded evaluation, our data construction pipeline integrates detector-assisted regions, depth supervision, metadata-derived rules, extensive manual annotation, blind filtering, and multi-turn human validation, together with task-specific metrics for heterogeneous outputs. Evaluating representative vision-language models across three categories, we show that current models remain far from human-level performance, with pronounced bottlenecks in cross-view association, structured grounding, geometric reasoning, and temporal viewpoint understanding. These results offer empirical guidance for advancing low-altitude UAV spatial intelligence. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Hyu-Zhang/SpatialUAV.

Understanding the complex urban infrastructure with centimeter-level accuracy is essential for many applications from autonomous driving to mapping, infrastructure monitoring, and urban management. Aerial images provide valuable information over a large area instantaneously; nevertheless, no current dataset captures the complexity of aerial scenes at the level of granularity required by real-world applications. To address this, we introduce SkyScapes, an aerial image dataset with highly-accurate, fine-grained annotations for pixel-level semantic labeling. SkyScapes provides annotations for 31 semantic categories ranging from large structures, such as buildings, roads and vegetation, to fine details, such as 12 (sub-)categories of lane markings. We have defined two main tasks on this dataset: dense semantic segmentation and multi-class lane-marking prediction. We carry out extensive experiments to evaluate state-of-the-art segmentation methods on SkyScapes. Existing methods struggle to deal with the wide range of classes, object sizes, scales, and fine details present. We therefore propose a novel multi-task model, which incorporates semantic edge detection and is better tuned for feature extraction from a wide range of scales. This model achieves notable improvements over the baselines in region outlines and level of detail on both tasks.

Drone detection has become an essential task in object detection as drone costs have decreased and drone technology has improved. It is, however, difficult to detect distant drones when there is weak contrast, long range, and low visibility. In this work, we propose several sequence classification architectures to reduce the detected false-positive ratio of drone tracks. Moreover, we propose a new drone vs. bird sequence classification dataset to train and evaluate the proposed architectures. 3D CNN, LSTM, and Transformer based sequence classification architectures have been trained on the proposed dataset to show the effectiveness of the proposed idea. As experiments show, using sequence information, bird classification and overall F1 scores can be increased by up to 73% and 35%, respectively. Among all sequence classification models, R(2+1)D-based fully convolutional model yields the best transfer learning and fine-tuning results.

We propose a unified framework that integrates object detection (OD) and visual grounding (VG) for remote sensing (RS) imagery. To support conventional OD and establish an intuitive prior for VG task, we fine-tune an open-set object detector using referring expression data, framing it as a partially supervised OD task. In the first stage, we construct a graph representation of each image, comprising object queries, class embeddings, and proposal locations. Then, our task-aware architecture processes this graph to perform the VG task. The model consists of: (i) a multi-branch network that integrates spatial, visual, and categorical features to generate task-aware proposals, and (ii) an object reasoning network that assigns probabilities across proposals, followed by a soft selection mechanism for final referring object localization. Our model demonstrates superior performance on the OPT-RSVG and DIOR-RSVG datasets, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods while retaining classical OD capabilities. The code will be available in our repository: https://github.com/rd20karim/MB-ORES.

The escalating use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as remote sensing platforms has garnered considerable attention, proving invaluable for ground object recognition. While satellite remote sensing images face limitations in resolution and weather susceptibility, UAV remote sensing, employing low-speed unmanned aircraft, offers enhanced object resolution and agility. The advent of advanced machine learning techniques has propelled significant strides in image analysis, particularly in semantic segmentation for UAV remote sensing images. This paper evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of SegFormer, a semantic segmentation framework, for the semantic segmentation of UAV images. SegFormer variants, ranging from real-time (B0) to high-performance (B5) models, are assessed using the UAVid dataset tailored for semantic segmentation tasks. The research details the architecture and training procedures specific to SegFormer in the context of UAV semantic segmentation. Experimental results showcase the model's performance on benchmark dataset, highlighting its ability to accurately delineate objects and land cover features in diverse UAV scenarios, leading to both high efficiency and performance.

Aerial scene recognition is a fundamental task in remote sensing and has recently received increased interest. While the visual information from overhead images with powerful models and efficient algorithms yields considerable performance on scene recognition, it still suffers from the variation of ground objects, lighting conditions etc. Inspired by the multi-channel perception theory in cognition science, in this paper, for improving the performance on the aerial scene recognition, we explore a novel audiovisual aerial scene recognition task using both images and sounds as input. Based on an observation that some specific sound events are more likely to be heard at a given geographic location, we propose to exploit the knowledge from the sound events to improve the performance on the aerial scene recognition. For this purpose, we have constructed a new dataset named AuDio Visual Aerial sceNe reCognition datasEt (ADVANCE). With the help of this dataset, we evaluate three proposed approaches for transferring the sound event knowledge to the aerial scene recognition task in a multimodal learning framework, and show the benefit of exploiting the audio information for the aerial scene recognition. The source code is publicly available for reproducibility purposes.

Despite the rapid progress in data-driven 3D vision, aerial geometric 3D vision remains a formidable challenge due to the severe scarcity of large-scale, high-fidelity training data. Existing benchmarks, predominantly biased toward ground-level or object-centric views, do not account for complex viewpoint transformations and diverse environmental conditions in UAV-based sensing. To bridge this critical gap, we propose AirZoo, a unified large-scale dataset and benchmark for grounding aerial geometric 3D vision. AirZoo possesses three appealing properties: 1) Scalable Generation Pipeline: Leveraging freely available, world-scale photogrammetric 3D meshes, it renders vast outdoor environments with customizable UAV flight trajectories and configurable weather/illumination. 2) Comprehensive Scene Diversity: It provides the most extensive coverage of region types to date (spanning 378 regions across 22 countries), systematically encompassing both highly structured urban landscapes and complex unstructured natural environments. 3) Rich Geometric Annotations: Each frame provides synchronized, pixel-level metric depth and precise 6-DoF geo-referenced poses, essential for geometry-aware learning. Through three rigorous evaluation tracks -- aerial image retrieval, cross-view matching, and multi-view 3D reconstruction -- we demonstrate that AirZoo serves as a powerful pre-training engine. Extensive experiments on both public and newly collected real-world benchmarks reveal that fine-tuning on AirZoo yields substantial performance gains for SoTA models (e.g., MegaLoc, RoMa, VGGT, and Depth Anything 3), establishing a new performance upper bound for aerial spatial intelligence.

Detecting small objects in UAV remote sensing images and identifying surface defects in industrial inspection remain difficult tasks. These applications face common obstacles: features are sparse and weak, backgrounds are cluttered, and object scales vary dramatically. Current transformer-based detectors, while powerful, struggle with three critical issues. First, features degrade severely as networks downsample progressively. Second, spatial convolutions cannot capture long-range dependencies effectively. Third, standard upsampling methods inflate feature maps unnecessarily. We introduce DFIR-DETR to tackle these problems through dynamic feature aggregation combined with frequency-domain processing. Our architecture builds on three novel components. The DCFA module uses dynamic K-sparse attention, cutting complexity from O(N2) down to O(NK), and employs spatial gated linear units for better nonlinear modeling. The DFPN module applies amplitude-normalized upsampling to prevent feature inflation and uses dual-path shuffle convolution to retain spatial details across scales. The FIRC3 module operates in the frequency domain, achieving global receptive fields without sacrificing efficiency. We tested our method extensively on NEU-DET and VisDrone datasets. Results show mAP50 scores of 92.9% and 51.6% respectively-both state-of-the-art. The model stays lightweight with just 11.7M parameters and 41.2 GFLOPs. Strong performance across two very different domains confirms that DFIR-DETR generalizes well and works effectively in resource-limited settings for cross-scene small object detection.

Small and cluttered objects are common in real-world which are challenging for detection. The difficulty is further pronounced when the objects are rotated, as traditional detectors often routinely locate the objects in horizontal bounding box such that the region of interest is contaminated with background or nearby interleaved objects. In this paper, we first innovatively introduce the idea of denoising to object detection. Instance-level denoising on the feature map is performed to enhance the detection to small and cluttered objects. To handle the rotation variation, we also add a novel IoU constant factor to the smooth L1 loss to address the long standing boundary problem, which to our analysis, is mainly caused by the periodicity of angular (PoA) and exchangeability of edges (EoE). By combing these two features, our proposed detector is termed as SCRDet++. Extensive experiments are performed on large aerial images public datasets DOTA, DIOR, UCAS-AOD as well as natural image dataset COCO, scene text dataset ICDAR2015, small traffic light dataset BSTLD and our released S^2TLD by this paper. The results show the effectiveness of our approach. The released dataset S2TLD is made public available, which contains 5,786 images with 14,130 traffic light instances across five categories.

The success of deep learning in visual recognition tasks has driven advancements in multiple fields of research. Particularly, increasing attention has been drawn towards its application in agriculture. Nevertheless, while visual pattern recognition on farmlands carries enormous economic values, little progress has been made to merge computer vision and crop sciences due to the lack of suitable agricultural image datasets. Meanwhile, problems in agriculture also pose new challenges in computer vision. For example, semantic segmentation of aerial farmland images requires inference over extremely large-size images with extreme annotation sparsity. These challenges are not present in most of the common object datasets, and we show that they are more challenging than many other aerial image datasets. To encourage research in computer vision for agriculture, we present Agriculture-Vision: a large-scale aerial farmland image dataset for semantic segmentation of agricultural patterns. We collected 94,986 high-quality aerial images from 3,432 farmlands across the US, where each image consists of RGB and Near-infrared (NIR) channels with resolution as high as 10 cm per pixel. We annotate nine types of field anomaly patterns that are most important to farmers. As a pilot study of aerial agricultural semantic segmentation, we perform comprehensive experiments using popular semantic segmentation models; we also propose an effective model designed for aerial agricultural pattern recognition. Our experiments demonstrate several challenges Agriculture-Vision poses to both the computer vision and agriculture communities. Future versions of this dataset will include even more aerial images, anomaly patterns and image channels. More information at https://www.agriculture-vision.com.

Recent advances in large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have provided rich semantic understanding that empowers drones to search for open-set objects via natural language instructions. However, prior systems struggle to integrate VLMs into practical aerial systems due to orders-of-magnitude frequency mismatch between VLM inference and real-time planning, as well as VLMs' limited 3D scene understanding. They also lack a unified mechanism to balance semantic guidance with motion efficiency in large-scale environments. To address these challenges, we present AirHunt, an aerial object navigation system that efficiently locates open-set objects with zero-shot generalization in outdoor environments by seamlessly fusing VLM semantic reasoning with continuous path planning. AirHunt features a dual-pathway asynchronous architecture that establishes a synergistic interface between VLM reasoning and path planning, enabling continuous flight with adaptive semantic guidance that evolves through motion. Moreover, we propose an active dual-task reasoning module that exploits geometric and semantic redundancy to enable selective VLM querying, and a semantic-geometric coherent planning module that dynamically reconciles semantic priorities and motion efficiency in a unified framework, enabling seamless adaptation to environmental heterogeneity. We evaluate AirHunt across diverse object navigation tasks and environments, demonstrating a higher success rate with lower navigation error and reduced flight time compared to state-of-the-art methods. Real-world experiments further validate AirHunt's practical capability in complex and challenging environments. Code and dataset will be made publicly available before publication.

We consider the problem of cross-view geo-localization. The primary challenge of this task is to learn the robust feature against large viewpoint changes. Existing benchmarks can help, but are limited in the number of viewpoints. Image pairs, containing two viewpoints, e.g., satellite and ground, are usually provided, which may compromise the feature learning. Besides phone cameras and satellites, in this paper, we argue that drones could serve as the third platform to deal with the geo-localization problem. In contrast to the traditional ground-view images, drone-view images meet fewer obstacles, e.g., trees, and could provide a comprehensive view when flying around the target place. To verify the effectiveness of the drone platform, we introduce a new multi-view multi-source benchmark for drone-based geo-localization, named University-1652. University-1652 contains data from three platforms, i.e., synthetic drones, satellites and ground cameras of 1,652 university buildings around the world. To our knowledge, University-1652 is the first drone-based geo-localization dataset and enables two new tasks, i.e., drone-view target localization and drone navigation. As the name implies, drone-view target localization intends to predict the location of the target place via drone-view images. On the other hand, given a satellite-view query image, drone navigation is to drive the drone to the area of interest in the query. We use this dataset to analyze a variety of off-the-shelf CNN features and propose a strong CNN baseline on this challenging dataset. The experiments show that University-1652 helps the model to learn the viewpoint-invariant features and also has good generalization ability in the real-world scenario.

We propose a novel approach for aerial video action recognition. Our method is designed for videos captured using UAVs and can run on edge or mobile devices. We present a learning-based approach that uses customized auto zoom to automatically identify the human target and scale it appropriately. This makes it easier to extract the key features and reduces the computational overhead. We also present an efficient temporal reasoning algorithm to capture the action information along the spatial and temporal domains within a controllable computational cost. Our approach has been implemented and evaluated both on the desktop with high-end GPUs and on the low power Robotics RB5 Platform for robots and drones. In practice, we achieve 6.1-7.4% improvement over SOTA in Top-1 accuracy on the RoCoG-v2 dataset, 8.3-10.4% improvement on the UAV-Human dataset and 3.2% improvement on the Drone Action dataset.

Early detection of wildfires is essential to prevent large-scale fires resulting in extensive environmental, structural, and societal damage. Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) can cover large remote areas effectively with quick deployment requiring minimal infrastructure and equipping them with small cameras and computers enables autonomous real-time detection. In remote areas, however, detection methods are limited to onboard computation due to the lack of high-bandwidth mobile networks. For accurate camera-based localisation, segmentation of the detected smoke is essential but training data for deep learning-based wildfire smoke segmentation is limited. This study shows how small specialised segmentation models can be trained using only bounding box labels, leveraging zero-shot foundation model supervision. The method offers the advantages of needing only fairly easily obtainable bounding box labels and requiring training solely for the smaller student network. The proposed method achieved 63.3% mIoU on a manually annotated and diverse wildfire dataset. The used model can perform in real-time at ~25 fps with a UAV-carried NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX computer while reliably recognising smoke, as demonstrated at real-world forest burning events. Code is available at: https://gitlab.com/fgi_nls/public/wildfire-real-time-segmentation

Referring Image Segmentation (RIS), which aims to segment specific objects based on natural language descriptions, plays an essential role in vision-language understanding. Despite its progress in remote sensing applications, RIS in Low-Altitude Drone (LAD) scenarios remains underexplored. Existing datasets and methods are typically designed for high-altitude and static-view imagery. They struggle to handle the unique characteristics of LAD views, such as diverse viewpoints and high object density. To fill this gap, we present RIS-LAD, the first fine-grained RIS benchmark tailored for LAD scenarios. This dataset comprises 13,871 carefully annotated image-text-mask triplets collected from realistic drone footage, with a focus on small, cluttered, and multi-viewpoint scenes. It highlights new challenges absent in previous benchmarks, such as category drift caused by tiny objects and object drift under crowded same-class objects. To tackle these issues, we propose the Semantic-Aware Adaptive Reasoning Network (SAARN). Rather than uniformly injecting all linguistic features, SAARN decomposes and routes semantic information to different stages of the network. Specifically, the Category-Dominated Linguistic Enhancement (CDLE) aligns visual features with object categories during early encoding, while the Adaptive Reasoning Fusion Module (ARFM) dynamically selects semantic cues across scales to improve reasoning in complex scenes. The experimental evaluation reveals that RIS-LAD presents substantial challenges to state-of-the-art RIS algorithms, and also demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed model in addressing these challenges. The dataset and code will be publicly released soon at: https://github.com/AHideoKuzeA/RIS-LAD/.

The widespread deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in surveillance, security, and airspace management has created an urgent demand for precise, scalable, and efficient UAV detection. However, existing datasets often suffer from limited scale diversity and inaccurate annotations, hindering robust model development. This paper introduces UAVDB, a high-resolution UAV detection dataset constructed using Patch Intensity Convergence (PIC). This novel technique automatically generates high-fidelity bounding box annotations from UAV trajectory data~li2020reconstruction, eliminating the need for manual labeling. UAVDB features single-class annotations with a fixed-camera setup and consists of RGB frames capturing UAVs across various scales, from large-scale UAVs to near-single-pixel representations, along with challenging backgrounds that pose difficulties for modern detectors. We first validate the accuracy and efficiency of PIC-generated bounding boxes by comparing Intersection over Union (IoU) performance and runtime against alternative annotation methods, demonstrating that PIC achieves higher annotation accuracy while being more efficient. Subsequently, we benchmark UAVDB using state-of-the-art (SOTA) YOLO-series detectors, establishing UAVDB as a valuable resource for advancing long-range and high-resolution UAV detection.

High-resolution aerial imagery has recently emerged as a complementary modality for automated driving perception and has shown potential to improve birds-eye-view (BEV) scene understanding when fused with onboard sensors. Prior work demonstrated performance gains for online high-definition (HD) map construction through aerial-onboard fusion; however, conventional end-to-end fusion does not fully exploit the structural information contained in aerial representations. In this work, we introduce AerialFusionMapNet, a fusion-based mapping framework with a structured two-stage training strategy that explicitly enhances the contribution of aerial features within a unified pipeline. The proposed training scheme enables more effective integration of structural aerial priors. On the nuScenes geographic split, AerialFusionMapNet achieves up to 54.7 mAP, improving over prior aerial-onboard fusion baselines from 48.8 mAP by +5.9 absolute and +12.1% relative. The results suggest that structured training design, rather than increased architectural complexity, plays a more decisive role in unlocking the full potential of aerial imagery for online HD map construction. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/DriverlessMobility/AerialFusionMapNet.

Semantic segmentation of drone images is critical for various aerial vision tasks as it provides essential semantic details to understand scenes on the ground. Ensuring high accuracy of semantic segmentation models for drones requires access to diverse, large-scale, and high-resolution datasets, which are often scarce in the field of aerial image processing. While existing datasets typically focus on urban scenes and are relatively small, our Varied Drone Dataset (VDD) addresses these limitations by offering a large-scale, densely labeled collection of 400 high-resolution images spanning 7 classes. This dataset features various scenes in urban, industrial, rural, and natural areas, captured from different camera angles and under diverse lighting conditions. We also make new annotations to UDD and UAVid, integrating them under VDD annotation standards, to create the Integrated Drone Dataset (IDD). We train seven state-of-the-art models on drone datasets as baselines. It's expected that our dataset will generate considerable interest in drone image segmentation and serve as a foundation for other drone vision tasks. Datasets are publicly available at our website{https://github.com/RussRobin/VDD}.

This paper addresses the problem of monocular metric depth estimation in aerial UAV imagery. Although recent data-driven methods have achieved remarkable progress in ground-level scenarios, models trained primarily on street-view and indoor datasets exhibit significant domain gaps when applied to aerial viewpoints. To tackle these challenges, we introduce AerialMetric, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate and facilitate the adaptation of monocular metric depth estimation under UAV aerial viewpoints. The dataset consists of four complementary subsets collected from different sources, jointly covering real-world photogrammetry data, controlled aerial acquisition settings, photorealistic synthetic scenes, and in-the-wild Internet imagery. Totally, AerialMetric provides 52K real-world and 16K synthetic image-depth pairs with reliable metric ground truth. Based on this dataset, we conduct systematic evaluations of existing state-of-the-art models under aerial settings and investigate the impact of viewpoint, altitude, and camera parameters on metric depth prediction. In addition, by fine-tuning representative metric depth model on our dataset, we establish a comprehensive aerial benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance across diverse aerial imagery. Our dataset, code, and model weight are publicly available at https://kuieless.github.io/AerialMetric-ECCV2026-page/.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in close proximity to humans for applications such as parcel delivery, traffic monitoring, disaster response and infrastructure inspections. Ensuring safe and reliable operation in these human-populated environments demands accurate perception of human poses and actions from an aerial viewpoint. This perspective challenges existing methods with low resolution, steep viewing angles and (self-)occlusion, especially if the application demands realtime feasibile models. We train and deploy FlyPose, a lightweight top-down human pose estimation pipeline for aerial imagery. Through multi-dataset training, we achieve an average improvement of 6.8 mAP in person detection across the test-sets of Manipal-UAV, VisDrone, HIT-UAV as well as our custom dataset. For 2D human pose estimation we report an improvement of 16.3 mAP on the challenging UAV-Human dataset. FlyPose runs with an inference latency of ~20 milliseconds including preprocessing on a Jetson Orin AGX Developer Kit and is deployed onboard a quadrotor UAV during flight experiments. We also publish FlyPose-104, a small but challenging aerial human pose estimation dataset, that includes manual annotations from difficult aerial perspectives: https://github.com/farooqhassaan/FlyPose.

Computer vision methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have presented promising results on image-based fruit detection at ground-level for different crops. However, the integration of the detections found in different images, allowing accurate fruit counting and yield prediction, have received less attention. This work presents a methodology for automated fruit counting employing aerial-images. It includes algorithms based on multiple view geometry to perform fruits tracking, not just avoiding double counting but also locating the fruits in the 3-D space. Preliminary assessments show correlations above 0.8 between fruit counting and true yield for apples. The annotated dataset employed on CNN training is publicly available.

As a novel and challenging task, referring segmentation combines computer vision and natural language processing to localize and segment objects based on textual descriptions. While referring image segmentation (RIS) has been extensively studied in natural images, little attention has been given to aerial imagery, particularly from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The unique challenges of UAV imagery, including complex spatial scales, occlusions, and varying object orientations, render existing RIS approaches ineffective. A key limitation has been the lack of UAV-specific datasets, as manually annotating pixel-level masks and generating textual descriptions is labour-intensive and time-consuming. To address this gap, we design an automatic labelling pipeline that leverages pre-existing UAV segmentation datasets and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) for generating textual descriptions. Furthermore, we propose Aerial Referring Transformer (AeroReformer), a novel framework for UAV referring image segmentation (UAV-RIS), featuring a Vision-Language Cross-Attention Module (VLCAM) for effective cross-modal understanding and a Rotation-Aware Multi-Scale Fusion (RAMSF) decoder to enhance segmentation accuracy in aerial scenes. Extensive experiments on two newly developed datasets demonstrate the superiority of AeroReformer over existing methods, establishing a new benchmark for UAV-RIS. The datasets and code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/lironui/AeroReformer.

Imagery collected from outdoor visual environments is often degraded due to the presence of dense smoke or haze. A key challenge for research in scene understanding in these degraded visual environments (DVE) is the lack of representative benchmark datasets. These datasets are required to evaluate state-of-the-art vision algorithms (e.g., detection and tracking) in degraded settings. In this paper, we address some of these limitations by introducing the first realistic hazy image benchmark, from both aerial and ground view, with paired haze-free images, and in-situ haze density measurements. This dataset was produced in a controlled environment with professional smoke generating machines that covered the entire scene, and consists of images captured from the perspective of both an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). We also evaluate a set of representative state-of-the-art dehazing approaches as well as object detectors on the dataset. The full dataset presented in this paper, including the ground truth object classification bounding boxes and haze density measurements, is provided for the community to evaluate their algorithms at: https://a2i2-archangel.vision. A subset of this dataset has been used for the ``Object Detection in Haze'' Track of CVPR UG2 2022 challenge at http://cvpr2022.ug2challenge.org/track1.html.

How can we effectively engineer a computer vision system that is able to interpret videos from unconstrained mobility platforms like UAVs? One promising option is to make use of image restoration and enhancement algorithms from the area of computational photography to improve the quality of the underlying frames in a way that also improves automatic visual recognition. Along these lines, exploratory work is needed to find out which image pre-processing algorithms, in combination with the strongest features and supervised machine learning approaches, are good candidates for difficult scenarios like motion blur, weather, and mis-focus -- all common artifacts in UAV acquired images. This paper summarizes the protocols and results of Track 1 of the UG^2+ Challenge held in conjunction with IEEE/CVF CVPR 2019. The challenge looked at two separate problems: (1) object detection improvement in video, and (2) object classification improvement in video. The challenge made use of the UG^2 (UAV, Glider, Ground) dataset, which is an established benchmark for assessing the interplay between image restoration and enhancement and visual recognition. 16 algorithms were submitted by academic and corporate teams, and a detailed analysis of how they performed on each challenge problem is reported here.

This paper explores the process of designing an automatic multi-sensor drone detection system. Besides the common video and audio sensors, the system also includes a thermal infrared camera, which is shown to be a feasible solution to the drone detection task. Even with slightly lower resolution, the performance is just as good as a camera in visible range. The detector performance as a function of the sensor-to-target distance is also investigated. In addition, using sensor fusion, the system is made more robust than the individual sensors, helping to reduce false detections. To counteract the lack of public datasets, a novel video dataset containing 650 annotated infrared and visible videos of drones, birds, airplanes and helicopters is also presented (https://github.com/DroneDetectionThesis/Drone-detection-dataset). The database is complemented with an audio dataset of the classes drones, helicopters and background noise.

This work investigates the integration of spatially aligned aerial imagery into perception tasks for automated vehicles (AVs). As a central contribution, we present AID4AD, a publicly available dataset that augments the nuScenes dataset with high-resolution aerial imagery precisely aligned to its local coordinate system. The alignment is performed using SLAM-based point cloud maps provided by nuScenes, establishing a direct link between aerial data and nuScenes local coordinate system. To ensure spatial fidelity, we propose an alignment workflow that corrects for localization and projection distortions. A manual quality control process further refines the dataset by identifying a set of high-quality alignments, which we publish as ground truth to support future research on automated registration. We demonstrate the practical value of AID4AD in two representative tasks: in online map construction, aerial imagery serves as a complementary input that improves the mapping process; in motion prediction, it functions as a structured environmental representation that replaces high-definition maps. Experiments show that aerial imagery leads to a 15-23% improvement in map construction accuracy and a 2% gain in trajectory prediction performance. These results highlight the potential of aerial imagery as a scalable and adaptable source of environmental context in automated vehicle systems, particularly in scenarios where high-definition maps are unavailable, outdated, or costly to maintain. AID4AD, along with evaluation code and pretrained models, is publicly released to foster further research in this direction: https://github.com/DriverlessMobility/AID4AD.

We propose a novel method for geolocalizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environments lacking Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Current state-of-the-art techniques employ an offline-trained encoder to generate a vector representation (embedding) of the UAV's current view, which is then compared with pre-computed embeddings of geo-referenced images to determine the UAV's position. Here, we demonstrate that the performance of these methods can be significantly enhanced by preprocessing the images to extract their edges, which exhibit robustness to seasonal and illumination variations. Furthermore, we establish that utilizing edges enhances resilience to orientation and altitude inaccuracies. Additionally, we introduce a confidence criterion for localization. Our findings are substantiated through synthetic experiments.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization in natural image tasks. However, their performance often degrades on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based aerial imagery, which features high resolution, complex spatial semantics, and strict real-time constraints. These challenges limit the applicability of general-purpose VLMs to structured aerial reasoning tasks. To address these challenges, we propose UAV-VL-R1, a lightweight VLM explicitly designed for aerial visual reasoning. It is trained using a hybrid method that combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and multi-stage reinforcement learning (RL). We leverage the group relative policy optimization (GRPO) algorithm to promote structured and interpretable reasoning through rule-guided rewards and intra-group policy alignment. To support model training and evaluation, we introduce a high-resolution visual question answering dataset named HRVQA-VL, which consists of 50,019 annotated samples covering eight UAV-relevant reasoning tasks, including object counting, transportation recognition, and spatial scene inference. Experimental results show that UAV-VL-R1 achieves a 48.17% higher zero-shot accuracy than the Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct baseline and even outperforms its 72B-scale variant, which is 36x larger, on multiple tasks. Ablation studies reveal that while SFT improves semantic alignment, it may reduce reasoning diversity in mathematical tasks. GRPO-based RL compensates for this limitation by enhancing logical flexibility and the robustness of inference. Additionally, UAV-VL-R1 requires only 3.9GB of memory under FP16 inference and can be quantized to 2.5GB with INT8, supporting real-time deployment on resource-constrained UAV platforms.

Referring expression segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision that integrates natural language understanding with precise visual localization of target regions. Considering aerial imagery (e.g., modern aerial photos collected through drones, historical photos from aerial archives, high-resolution satellite imagery, etc.) presents unique challenges because spatial resolution varies widely across datasets, the use of color is not consistent, targets often shrink to only a few pixels, and scenes contain very high object densities and objects with partial occlusions. This work presents Aerial-D, a new large-scale referring expression segmentation dataset for aerial imagery, comprising 37,288 images with 1,522,523 referring expressions that cover 259,709 annotated targets, spanning across individual object instances, groups of instances, and semantic regions covering 21 distinct classes that range from vehicles and infrastructure to land coverage types. The dataset was constructed through a fully automatic pipeline that combines systematic rule-based expression generation with a Large Language Model (LLM) enhancement procedure that enriched both the linguistic variety and the focus on visual details within the referring expressions. Filters were additionally used to simulate historic imaging conditions for each scene. We adopted the RSRefSeg architecture, and trained models on Aerial-D together with prior aerial datasets, yielding unified instance and semantic segmentation from text for both modern and historical images. Results show that the combined training achieves competitive performance on contemporary benchmarks, while maintaining strong accuracy under monochrome, sepia, and grainy degradations that appear in archival aerial photography. The dataset, trained models, and complete software pipeline are publicly available at https://luispl77.github.io/aerial-d .

We explore the task of geometric reconstruction of images captured from a mixture of ground and aerial views. Current state-of-the-art learning-based approaches fail to handle the extreme viewpoint variation between aerial-ground image pairs. Our hypothesis is that the lack of high-quality, co-registered aerial-ground datasets for training is a key reason for this failure. Such data is difficult to assemble precisely because it is difficult to reconstruct in a scalable way. To overcome this challenge, we propose a scalable framework combining pseudo-synthetic renderings from 3D city-wide meshes (e.g., Google Earth) with real, ground-level crowd-sourced images (e.g., MegaDepth). The pseudo-synthetic data simulates a wide range of aerial viewpoints, while the real, crowd-sourced images help improve visual fidelity for ground-level images where mesh-based renderings lack sufficient detail, effectively bridging the domain gap between real images and pseudo-synthetic renderings. Using this hybrid dataset, we fine-tune several state-of-the-art algorithms and achieve significant improvements on real-world, zero-shot aerial-ground tasks. For example, we observe that baseline DUSt3R localizes fewer than 5% of aerial-ground pairs within 5 degrees of camera rotation error, while fine-tuning with our data raises accuracy to nearly 56%, addressing a major failure point in handling large viewpoint changes. Beyond camera estimation and scene reconstruction, our dataset also improves performance on downstream tasks like novel-view synthesis in challenging aerial-ground scenarios, demonstrating the practical value of our approach in real-world applications.

Two challenges are presented when parsing road scenes in UAV images. First, the high resolution of UAV images makes processing difficult. Second, supervised deep learning methods require a large amount of manual annotations to train robust and accurate models. In this paper, an unsupervised road parsing framework that leverages recent advances in vision language models and fundamental computer vision model is introduced.Initially, a vision language model is employed to efficiently process ultra-large resolution UAV images to quickly detect road regions of interest in the images. Subsequently, the vision foundation model SAM is utilized to generate masks for the road regions without category information. Following that, a self-supervised representation learning network extracts feature representations from all masked regions. Finally, an unsupervised clustering algorithm is applied to cluster these feature representations and assign IDs to each cluster. The masked regions are combined with the corresponding IDs to generate initial pseudo-labels, which initiate an iterative self-training process for regular semantic segmentation. The proposed method achieves an impressive 89.96% mIoU on the development dataset without relying on any manual annotation. Particularly noteworthy is the extraordinary flexibility of the proposed method, which even goes beyond the limitations of human-defined categories and is able to acquire knowledge of new categories from the dataset itself.

Vision-Language Models have achieved strong progress in ground-view visual understanding, yet they remain brittle in high-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicle scenes, where objects are tiny and densely packed, textures are repetitive, and top-down orientations are ambiguous. We introduce UAVReason, a large-scale UAV-native dataset and evaluation suite for studying unified aerial reasoning and generation under this nadir-view domain shift. UAVReason aligns RGB imagery, depth maps, semantic segmentation masks, captions, and question-answer pairs within a consistent aerial domain. It contains 23.6K captioned frames, 273K VQA pairs including 68.2K two-frame temporal questions, and 188.8K cross-modal generation samples across RGB, depth, and segmentation modalities. We further adapt UAVReason-Bagel as a unified understanding-and-generation baseline that jointly optimizes language reasoning and dense visual generation objectives. Experiments show that general-purpose VLMs and off-the-shelf unified generators struggle with UAV-native grounding, while UAVReason-Bagel substantially improves over its pretrained counterpart, increasing VQA-1F F1 from 0.394 to 0.711, VQA-2F F1 from 0.427 to 0.822, and heading-aware VQA F1 from 0.798 to 0.973. For generation, it improves segmentation mIoU to 0.143 and reduces KID from 0.078 to 0.048 for depth-segmentation-text-conditioned RGB synthesis. More importantly, our ablations reveal a bidirectional synergy between synthesis and reasoning. Dense generation objectives improve temporal semantic consistency, while language-level reasoning regularizes sparse-condition image synthesis. These results suggest that unified reasoning and generation provide effective geometry-aware structural priors for physically grounded aerial intelligence. All data, code, and evaluation tools will be released.

Existing approaches to drone visual geo-localization predominantly adopt the image-based setting, where a single drone-view snapshot is matched with images from other platforms. Such task formulation, however, underutilizes the inherent video output of the drone and is sensitive to occlusions and viewpoint disparity. To address these limitations, we formulate a new video-based drone geo-localization task and propose the Video2BEV paradigm. This paradigm transforms the video into a Bird's Eye View (BEV), simplifying the subsequent inter-platform matching process. In particular, we employ Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct a 3D scene and obtain the BEV projection. Different from the existing transform methods, \eg, polar transform, our BEVs preserve more fine-grained details without significant distortion. To facilitate the discriminative intra-platform representation learning, our Video2BEV paradigm also incorporates a diffusion-based module for generating hard negative samples. To validate our approach, we introduce UniV, a new video-based geo-localization dataset that extends the image-based University-1652 dataset. UniV features flight paths at 30^circ and 45^circ elevation angles with increased frame rates of up to 10 frames per second (FPS). Extensive experiments on the UniV dataset show that our Video2BEV paradigm achieves competitive recall rates and outperforms conventional video-based methods. Compared to other competitive methods, our proposed approach exhibits robustness at lower elevations with more occlusions.

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with imaging sensors and automated processing algorithms have emerged as a promising tool to accelerate large-area surveys while reducing risk to human operators. Although hyperspectral imaging (HSI) enables material discrimination using spectral signatures, standardized benchmarks for UAV-based landmine detection remain scarce. In this work, we present a systematic benchmark of four classical statistical detection algorithms, including Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM), Matched Filter (MF), Adaptive Cosine Estimator (ACE), and Constrained Energy Minimization (CEM), alongside a proposed lightweight Spectral Neural Network utilizing Parametric Mish activations for PFM-1 landmine detection. We also release pixel-level binary ground truth masks (target/background) to enable standardized, reproducible evaluation. Evaluations were conducted on inert PFM-1 targets across multiple scene crops using a recently released VNIR hyperspectral dataset. Metrics such as receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, area under the curve (AUC), precision-recall (PR) curve, and average precision (AP) were used. While all methods achieve high ROC-AUC on an independent test set, the ACE method observes the highest AUC of 0.989. However, because target pixels are extremely sparse relative to background, ROC-AUC alone can be misleading; under precision-focused evaluation (PR and AP), the Spectral-NN outperforms classical detectors, achieving the highest AP. These results emphasize the need for precision-focused evaluation, scene-aware benchmarking, and learning-based spectral models for reliable UAV-based hyperspectral landmine detection. The code and pixel-level annotations will be released.

This paper presents a Multi-Elevation Semantic Segmentation Image (MESSI) dataset comprising 2525 images taken by a drone flying over dense urban environments. MESSI is unique in two main features. First, it contains images from various altitudes, allowing us to investigate the effect of depth on semantic segmentation. Second, it includes images taken from several different urban regions (at different altitudes). This is important since the variety covers the visual richness captured by a drone's 3D flight, performing horizontal and vertical maneuvers. MESSI contains images annotated with location, orientation, and the camera's intrinsic parameters and can be used to train a deep neural network for semantic segmentation or other applications of interest (e.g., localization, navigation, and tracking). This paper describes the dataset and provides annotation details. It also explains how semantic segmentation was performed using several neural network models and shows several relevant statistics. MESSI will be published in the public domain to serve as an evaluation benchmark for semantic segmentation using images captured by a drone or similar vehicle flying over a dense urban environment.

Real-time wildlife detection in drone imagery is critical for numerous applications, including animal ecology, conservation, and biodiversity monitoring. Low-altitude drone missions are effective for collecting fine-grained animal movement and behavior data, particularly if missions are automated for increased speed and consistency. However, little work exists on evaluating computer vision models on low-altitude aerial imagery and generalizability across different species and settings. To fill this gap, we present a novel multi-environment, multi-species, low-altitude aerial footage (MMLA) dataset. MMLA consists of drone footage collected across three diverse environments: Ol Pejeta Conservancy and Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, and The Wilds Conservation Center in Ohio, which includes five species: Plains zebras, Grevy's zebras, giraffes, onagers, and African Painted Dogs. We comprehensively evaluate three YOLO models (YOLOv5m, YOLOv8m, and YOLOv11m) for detecting animals. Results demonstrate significant performance disparities across locations and species-specific detection variations. Our work highlights the importance of evaluating detection algorithms across different environments for robust wildlife monitoring applications using drones.

Semantic segmentation has been one of the leading research interests in computer vision recently. It serves as a perception foundation for many fields, such as robotics and autonomous driving. The fast development of semantic segmentation attributes enormously to the large scale datasets, especially for the deep learning related methods. There already exist several semantic segmentation datasets for comparison among semantic segmentation methods in complex urban scenes, such as the Cityscapes and CamVid datasets, where the side views of the objects are captured with a camera mounted on the driving car. There also exist semantic labeling datasets for the airborne images and the satellite images, where the top views of the objects are captured. However, only a few datasets capture urban scenes from an oblique Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) perspective, where both of the top view and the side view of the objects can be observed, providing more information for object recognition. In this paper, we introduce our UAVid dataset, a new high-resolution UAV semantic segmentation dataset as a complement, which brings new challenges, including large scale variation, moving object recognition and temporal consistency preservation. Our UAV dataset consists of 30 video sequences capturing 4K high-resolution images in slanted views. In total, 300 images have been densely labeled with 8 classes for the semantic labeling task. We have provided several deep learning baseline methods with pre-training, among which the proposed Multi-Scale-Dilation net performs the best via multi-scale feature extraction. Our UAVid website and the labeling tool have been published https://uavid.nl/.

Estimating 3D orientation and translation of objects is essential for infrastructure-less autonomous navigation and driving. In case of monocular vision, successful methods have been mainly based on two ingredients: (i) a network generating 2D region proposals, (ii) a R-CNN structure predicting 3D object pose by utilizing the acquired regions of interest. We argue that the 2D detection network is redundant and introduces non-negligible noise for 3D detection. Hence, we propose a novel 3D object detection method, named SMOKE, in this paper that predicts a 3D bounding box for each detected object by combining a single keypoint estimate with regressed 3D variables. As a second contribution, we propose a multi-step disentangling approach for constructing the 3D bounding box, which significantly improves both training convergence and detection accuracy. In contrast to previous 3D detection techniques, our method does not require complicated pre/post-processing, extra data, and a refinement stage. Despite of its structural simplicity, our proposed SMOKE network outperforms all existing monocular 3D detection methods on the KITTI dataset, giving the best state-of-the-art result on both 3D object detection and Bird's eye view evaluation. The code will be made publicly available.

Monitoring of reforestation is currently being considerably streamlined through the use of drones and image recognition algorithms, which have already proven to be effective on colour imagery. In addition to colour imagery, elevation data is often also available. The primary aim of this work was to improve the performance of the faster-RCNN object detection algorithm by integrating this height information, which showed itself to notably improve performance. Interestingly, the structure of the network played a key role, with direct addition of the height information as a fourth image channel showing no improvement, while integration after the backbone network and before the region proposal network led to marked improvements. This effect persisted with very long training regimes. Increasing the resolution of this height information also showed little effect.

The vision-based geo-localization technology for UAV, serving as a secondary source of GPS information in addition to the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), can still operate independently in the GPS-denied environment. Recent deep learning based methods attribute this as the task of image matching and retrieval. By retrieving drone-view images in geo-tagged satellite image database, approximate localization information can be obtained. However, due to high costs and privacy concerns, it is usually difficult to obtain large quantities of drone-view images from a continuous area. Existing drone-view datasets are mostly composed of small-scale aerial photography with a strong assumption that there exists a perfect one-to-one aligned reference image for any query, leaving a significant gap from the practical localization scenario. In this work, we construct a large-range contiguous area UAV geo-localization dataset named GTA-UAV, featuring multiple flight altitudes, attitudes, scenes, and targets using modern computer games. Based on this dataset, we introduce a more practical UAV geo-localization task including partial matches of cross-view paired data, and expand the image-level retrieval to the actual localization in terms of distance (meters). For the construction of drone-view and satellite-view pairs, we adopt a weight-based contrastive learning approach, which allows for effective learning while avoiding additional post-processing matching steps. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our data and training method for UAV geo-localization, as well as the generalization capabilities to real-world scenarios.

We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network predicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detectors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is far less likely to predict false detections where nothing exists. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms all other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, by a wide margin when generalizing from natural images to artwork on both the Picasso Dataset and the People-Art Dataset.

The development of aerial holistic scene understanding algorithms is hindered by the scarcity of comprehensive datasets that enable both semantic and geometric reconstruction. While synthetic datasets offer an alternative, existing options exhibit task-specific limitations, unrealistic scene compositions, and rendering artifacts that compromise real-world applicability. We introduce ClaraVid, a synthetic aerial dataset specifically designed to overcome these limitations. Comprising 16,917 high-resolution images captured at 4032x3024 from multiple viewpoints across diverse landscapes, ClaraVid provides dense depth maps, panoptic segmentation, sparse point clouds, and dynamic object masks, while mitigating common rendering artifacts. To further advance neural reconstruction, we introduce the Delentropic Scene Profile (DSP), a novel complexity metric derived from differential entropy analysis, designed to quantitatively assess scene difficulty and inform reconstruction tasks. Utilizing DSP, we systematically benchmark neural reconstruction methods, uncovering a consistent, measurable correlation between scene complexity and reconstruction accuracy. Empirical results indicate that higher delentropy strongly correlates with increased reconstruction errors, validating DSP as a reliable complexity prior. Currently under review, upon acceptance the data and code will be available at https://rdbch.github.io/claravid{rdbch.github.io/ClaraVid}.

Accurate visual localization from aerial views is a fundamental problem with applications in mapping, large-area inspection, and search-and-rescue operations. In many scenarios, these systems require high-precision localization while operating with limited resources (e.g., no internet connection or GNSS/GPS support), making large image databases or heavy 3D models impractical. Surprisingly, little attention has been given to leveraging orthographic geodata as an alternative paradigm, which is lightweight and increasingly available through free releases by governmental authorities (e.g., the European Union). To fill this gap, we propose OrthoLoC, the first large-scale dataset comprising 16,425 UAV images from Germany and the United States with multiple modalities. The dataset addresses domain shifts between UAV imagery and geospatial data. Its paired structure enables fair benchmarking of existing solutions by decoupling image retrieval from feature matching, allowing isolated evaluation of localization and calibration performance. Through comprehensive evaluation, we examine the impact of domain shifts, data resolutions, and covisibility on localization accuracy. Finally, we introduce a refinement technique called AdHoP, which can be integrated with any feature matcher, improving matching by up to 95% and reducing translation error by up to 63%. The dataset and code are available at: https://deepscenario.github.io/OrthoLoC.

Semantic segmentation for uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) is fundamental for aerial scene understanding, yet existing RGB and RGB-T datasets remain limited in scale, diversity, and annotation efficiency due to the high cost of manual labeling and the difficulties of accurate RGB-T alignment on off-the-shelf UAVs. To address these challenges, we propose a scalable geometry-driven 2D-3D-2D paradigm that leverages multi-view redundancy in high-overlap aerial imagery to automatically propagate labels from a small subset of manually annotated RGB images to both RGB and thermal modalities within a unified framework. By lifting less than 3% of RGB images into a semantic 3D point cloud and reprojecting it into all views, our approach enables dense pseudo ground-truth generation across large image collections, automatically producing 97% of RGB labels and 100% of thermal labels while achieving 91% and 88% annotation accuracy without any 2D manual refinement. We further extend this 2D-3D-2D paradigm to cross-modal image registration, using 3D geometry as an intermediate alignment space to obtain fully automatic, strong pixel-level RGB-T alignment with 87% registration accuracy and no hardware-level synchronization. Applying our framework to existing geo-referenced aerial imagery, we construct SegFly, a large-scale benchmark with over 20,000 high-resolution RGB images and more than 15,000 geometrically aligned RGB-T pairs spanning diverse urban, industrial, and rural environments across multiple altitudes and seasons. On SegFly, we establish the Firefly baseline for RGB and thermal semantic segmentation and show that both conventional architectures and vision foundation models benefit substantially from SegFly supervision, highlighting the potential of geometry-driven 2D-3D-2D pipelines for scalable multi-modal scene understanding. Data and Code available at https://github.com/markus-42/SegFly.

Drone detection has benefited from improvements in deep neural networks, but like many other applications, suffers from the availability of accurate data for training. Synthetic data provides a potential for low-cost data generation and has been shown to improve data availability and quality. However, models trained on synthetic datasets need to prove their ability to perform on real-world data, known as the problem of sim-to-real transferability. Here, we present a drone detection Faster-RCNN model trained on a purely synthetic dataset that transfers to real-world data. We found that it achieves an AP_50 of 97.0% when evaluated on the MAV-Vid - a real dataset of flying drones - compared with 97.8% for an equivalent model trained on real-world data. Our results show that using synthetic data for drone detection has the potential to reduce data collection costs and improve labelling quality. These findings could be a starting point for more elaborate synthetic drone datasets. For example, realistic recreations of specific scenarios could de-risk the dataset generation of safety-critical applications such as the detection of drones at airports. Further, synthetic data may enable reliable drone detection systems, which could benefit other areas, such as unmanned traffic management systems. The code is available https://github.com/mazqtpopx/cranfield-synthetic-drone-detection alongside the datasets https://huggingface.co/datasets/mazqtpopx/cranfield-synthetic-drone-detection.

Aerial imagery analysis is critical for many research fields. However, obtaining frequent high-quality aerial images is not always accessible due to its high effort and cost requirements. One solution is to use the Ground-to-Aerial (G2A) technique to synthesize aerial images from easily collectible ground images. However, G2A is rarely studied, because of its challenges, including but not limited to, the drastic view changes, occlusion, and range of visibility. In this paper, we present a novel Geometric Preserving Ground-to-Aerial (G2A) image synthesis (GPG2A) model that can generate realistic aerial images from ground images. GPG2A consists of two stages. The first stage predicts the Bird's Eye View (BEV) segmentation (referred to as the BEV layout map) from the ground image. The second stage synthesizes the aerial image from the predicted BEV layout map and text descriptions of the ground image. To train our model, we present a new multi-modal cross-view dataset, namely VIGORv2 which is built upon VIGOR with newly collected aerial images, maps, and text descriptions. Our extensive experiments illustrate that GPG2A synthesizes better geometry-preserved aerial images than existing models. We also present two applications, data augmentation for cross-view geo-localization and sketch-based region search, to further verify the effectiveness of our GPG2A. The code and data will be publicly available.

Predominant methods for image-based drone detection frequently rely on employing generic object detection algorithms like YOLOv5. While proficient in identifying drones against homogeneous backgrounds, these algorithms often struggle in complex, highly textured environments. In such scenarios, drones seamlessly integrate into the background, creating camouflage effects that adversely affect the detection quality. To address this issue, we introduce a novel deep learning architecture called YOLO-FEDER FusionNet. Unlike conventional approaches, YOLO-FEDER FusionNet combines generic object detection methods with the specialized strength of camouflage object detection techniques to enhance drone detection capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations of YOLO-FEDER FusionNet show the efficiency of the proposed model and demonstrate substantial improvements in both reducing missed detections and false alarms.

Illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest causes deforestation, water contamination, and long-term ecosystem disruption, yet remains difficult to monitor at fine spatial scales. Satellite imagery supports large-scale observation, but often misses small mining-related structures and subtle land-cover transitions, especially under frequent cloud cover. We introduce ELDOR, a large-scale UAV benchmark for monitoring environmental and landscape disturbance from illegal gold mining in the rainforest. ELDOR contains manually annotated orthomosaic imagery covering over 2,500 hectares, with pixel-level semantic labels for both mining-related activities and surrounding ecological structures. With this unified annotation source, we establish four benchmark tasks: semantic segmentation, segmentation-derived recognition, direct multi-label classification, and class-presence recognition with vision-language models. Across these tasks, we compare generic and remote-sensing-specific segmentation models, vision foundation model-related segmentation methods, direct multi-label classification methods, and vision-language models under a controlled closed-set protocol. Results show that current methods still struggle with rare small-scale mining structures and fine-grained recovery classes, suggesting the need for context-aware and multimodal modeling. To support domain analysis and practical use, we further build an interactive explorer for domain experts that provides a unified interface for data exploration and model inference.

Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) is essential for 3D perception in mobile robotics, as it enables holistic scene understanding by jointly estimating dense volumetric occupancy and per-voxel semantics. Although SSC has been widely studied in terrestrial domains such as autonomous driving, aerial settings like autonomous flying remain largely unexplored, thereby limiting progress on downstream applications. Furthermore, LiDAR sensors are the primary modality for SSC data generation, which poses challenges for most uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) due to flight regulations, mass and energy constraints, and the sparsity of LiDAR point clouds from elevated viewpoints. To address these limitations, we propose a LiDAR-free, camera-based data generation framework. By leveraging classical 3D reconstruction, our framework automates semantic label transfer by lifting <10% of annotated images into the reconstructed point cloud, substantially minimizing manual 3D annotation effort. Based on this framework, we introduce OccuFly, the first real-world, camera-based aerial SSC benchmark, captured across multiple altitudes and all seasons. OccuFly provides over 20,000 samples of images, semantic voxel grids, and metric depth maps across 21 semantic classes in urban, industrial, and rural environments, and follows established data organization for seamless integration. We benchmark both SSC and metric monocular depth estimation on OccuFly, revealing fundamental limitations of current vision foundation models in aerial settings and establishing new challenges for robust 3D scene understanding in the aerial domain. Visit https://github.com/markus-42/occufly.

This paper deals with the problem of informative path planning for a UAV deployed for precision agriculture applications. First, we observe that the ``fear of missing out'' data lead to uniform, conservative scanning policies over the whole agricultural field. Consequently, employing a non-uniform scanning approach can mitigate the expenditure of time in areas with minimal or negligible real value, while ensuring heightened precision in information-dense regions. Turning to the available informative path planning methodologies, we discern that certain methods entail intensive computational requirements, while others necessitate training on an ideal world simulator. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an active sensing coverage path planning approach, named OverFOMO, that regulates the speed of the UAV in accordance with both the relative quantity of the identified classes, i.e. crops and weeds, and the confidence level of such detections. To identify these instances, a robust Deep Learning segmentation model is deployed. The computational needs of the proposed algorithm are independent of the size of the agricultural field, rendering its applicability on modern UAVs quite straightforward. The proposed algorithm was evaluated with a simu-realistic pipeline, combining data from real UAV missions and the high-fidelity dynamics of AirSim simulator, showcasing its performance improvements over the established state of affairs for this type of missions. An open-source implementation of the algorithm and the evaluation pipeline is also available: https://github.com/emmarapt/OverFOMO.

Inspired by recent development of artificial satellite, remote sensing images have attracted extensive attention. Recently, noticeable progress has been made in scene classification and target detection.However, it is still not clear how to describe the remote sensing image content with accurate and concise sentences. In this paper, we investigate to describe the remote sensing images with accurate and flexible sentences. First, some annotated instructions are presented to better describe the remote sensing images considering the special characteristics of remote sensing images. Second, in order to exhaustively exploit the contents of remote sensing images, a large-scale aerial image data set is constructed for remote sensing image caption. Finally, a comprehensive review is presented on the proposed data set to fully advance the task of remote sensing caption. Extensive experiments on the proposed data set demonstrate that the content of the remote sensing image can be completely described by generating language descriptions. The data set is available at https://github.com/201528014227051/RSICD_optimal

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), leveraging their powerful visual perception and reasoning capabilities, have been widely applied in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) tasks. However, the spatial intelligence capabilities of existing VLMs in UAV scenarios remain largely unexplored, raising concerns about their effectiveness in navigating and interpreting dynamic environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce SpatialSky-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the spatial intelligence capabilities of VLMs in UAV navigation. Our benchmark comprises two categories-Environmental Perception and Scene Understanding-divided into 13 subcategories, including bounding boxes, color, distance, height, and landing safety analysis, among others. Extensive evaluations of various mainstream open-source and closed-source VLMs reveal unsatisfactory performance in complex UAV navigation scenarios, highlighting significant gaps in their spatial capabilities. To address this challenge, we developed the SpatialSky-Dataset, a comprehensive dataset containing 1M samples with diverse annotations across various scenarios. Leveraging this dataset, we introduce Sky-VLM, a specialized VLM designed for UAV spatial reasoning across multiple granularities and contexts. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Sky-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across all benchmark tasks, paving the way for the development of VLMs suitable for UAV scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/linglingxiansen/SpatialSKy.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4o, Gemini, LLaVA, and Flamingo, have made significant progress in integrating visual and textual modalities, excelling in tasks like visual question answering (VQA), image captioning, and content retrieval. They can generate coherent and contextually relevant descriptions of images. However, they still face challenges in accurately identifying and counting objects and determining their spatial locations, particularly in complex scenes with overlapping or small objects. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework based on multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which introduces structured scene graphs to enhance object recognition, relationship identification, and spatial understanding within images. Our framework improves the MLLM's capacity to handle tasks requiring precise visual descriptions, especially in scenarios with challenging perspectives, such as aerial views or scenes with dense object arrangements. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on the VG-150 dataset that focuses on first-person visual understanding and the AUG dataset that involves aerial imagery. The results show that our approach consistently outperforms existing MLLMs in VQA tasks, which stands out in recognizing, localizing, and quantifying objects in different spatial contexts and provides more accurate visual descriptions.

Understanding the geometric and semantic properties of the scene is crucial in autonomous navigation and particularly challenging in the case of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. Such information may be by obtained by estimating depth and semantic segmentation maps of the surrounding environment and for their practical use in autonomous navigation, the procedure must be performed as close to real-time as possible. In this paper, we leverage monocular cameras on aerial robots to predict depth and semantic maps in low-altitude unstructured environments. We propose a joint deep-learning architecture that can perform the two tasks accurately and rapidly, and validate its effectiveness on MidAir and Aeroscapes benchmark datasets. Our joint-architecture proves to be competitive or superior to the other single and joint architecture methods while performing its task fast predicting 20.2 FPS on a single NVIDIA quadro p5000 GPU and it has a low memory footprint. All codes for training and prediction can be found on this link: https://github.com/Malga-Vision/Co-SemDepth

In this paper we present a large-scale visual object detection and tracking benchmark, named VisDrone2018, aiming at advancing visual understanding tasks on the drone platform. The images and video sequences in the benchmark were captured over various urban/suburban areas of 14 different cities across China from north to south. Specifically, VisDrone2018 consists of 263 video clips and 10,209 images (no overlap with video clips) with rich annotations, including object bounding boxes, object categories, occlusion, truncation ratios, etc. With intensive amount of effort, our benchmark has more than 2.5 million annotated instances in 179,264 images/video frames. Being the largest such dataset ever published, the benchmark enables extensive evaluation and investigation of visual analysis algorithms on the drone platform. In particular, we design four popular tasks with the benchmark, including object detection in images, object detection in videos, single object tracking, and multi-object tracking. All these tasks are extremely challenging in the proposed dataset due to factors such as occlusion, large scale and pose variation, and fast motion. We hope the benchmark largely boost the research and development in visual analysis on drone platforms.

Unsupervised 3D object detection methods have emerged to leverage vast amounts of data without requiring manual labels for training. Recent approaches rely on dynamic objects for learning to detect mobile objects but penalize the detections of static instances during training. Multiple rounds of self-training are used to add detected static instances to the set of training targets; this procedure to improve performance is computationally expensive. To address this, we propose the method UNION. We use spatial clustering and self-supervised scene flow to obtain a set of static and dynamic object proposals from LiDAR. Subsequently, object proposals' visual appearances are encoded to distinguish static objects in the foreground and background by selecting static instances that are visually similar to dynamic objects. As a result, static and dynamic mobile objects are obtained together, and existing detectors can be trained with a single training. In addition, we extend 3D object discovery to detection by using object appearance-based cluster labels as pseudo-class labels for training object classification. We conduct extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset and increase the state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised 3D object discovery, i.e. UNION more than doubles the average precision to 39.5. The code is available at github.com/TedLentsch/UNION.

This paper investigates the integration of the Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) paradigm in object detection to exploit fine-grained, descriptive information available during training but not at inference. We introduce a general, model-agnostic methodology for injecting privileged information-such as bounding box masks, saliency maps, and depth cues-into deep learning-based object detectors through a teacher-student architecture. Experiments are conducted across five state-of-the-art object detection models and multiple public benchmarks, including UAV-based litter detection datasets and Pascal VOC 2012, to assess the impact on accuracy, generalization, and computational efficiency. Our results demonstrate that LUPI-trained students consistently outperform their baseline counterparts, achieving significant boosts in detection accuracy with no increase in inference complexity or model size. Performance improvements are especially marked for medium and large objects, while ablation studies reveal that intermediate weighting of teacher guidance optimally balances learning from privileged and standard inputs. The findings affirm that the LUPI framework provides an effective and practical strategy for advancing object detection systems in both resource-constrained and real-world settings.

The field of autonomous driving has attracted considerable interest in approaches that directly infer 3D objects in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) from multiple cameras. Some attempts have also explored utilizing 2D detectors from single images to enhance the performance of 3D detection. However, these approaches rely on a two-stage process with separate detectors, where the 2D detection results are utilized only once for token selection or query initialization. In this paper, we present a single model termed SimPB, which simultaneously detects 2D objects in the perspective view and 3D objects in the BEV space from multiple cameras. To achieve this, we introduce a hybrid decoder consisting of several multi-view 2D decoder layers and several 3D decoder layers, specifically designed for their respective detection tasks. A Dynamic Query Allocation module and an Adaptive Query Aggregation module are proposed to continuously update and refine the interaction between 2D and 3D results, in a cyclic 3D-2D-3D manner. Additionally, Query-group Attention is utilized to strengthen the interaction among 2D queries within each camera group. In the experiments, we evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset and demonstrate promising results for both 2D and 3D detection tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/nullmax-vision/SimPB.

Object detection is a computer vision task that has become an integral part of many consumer applications today such as surveillance and security systems, mobile text recognition, and diagnosing diseases from MRI/CT scans. Object detection is also one of the critical components to support autonomous driving. Autonomous vehicles rely on the perception of their surroundings to ensure safe and robust driving performance. This perception system uses object detection algorithms to accurately determine objects such as pedestrians, vehicles, traffic signs, and barriers in the vehicle's vicinity. Deep learning-based object detectors play a vital role in finding and localizing these objects in real-time. This article discusses the state-of-the-art in object detectors and open challenges for their integration into autonomous vehicles.

This paper presents a framework for extracting georeferenced vehicle trajectories from high-altitude drone imagery, addressing key challenges in urban traffic monitoring and the limitations of traditional ground-based systems. Our approach integrates several novel contributions, including a tailored object detector optimized for high-altitude bird's-eye view perspectives, a unique track stabilization method that uses detected vehicle bounding boxes as exclusion masks during image registration, and an orthophoto and master frame-based georeferencing strategy that enhances consistent alignment across multiple drone viewpoints. Additionally, our framework features robust vehicle dimension estimation and detailed road segmentation, enabling comprehensive traffic analysis. Conducted in the Songdo International Business District, South Korea, the study utilized a multi-drone experiment covering 20 intersections, capturing approximately 12TB of 4K video data over four days. The framework produced two high-quality datasets: the Songdo Traffic dataset, comprising approximately 700,000 unique vehicle trajectories, and the Songdo Vision dataset, containing over 5,000 human-annotated images with about 300,000 vehicle instances in four classes. Comparisons with high-precision sensor data from an instrumented probe vehicle highlight the accuracy and consistency of our extraction pipeline in dense urban environments. The public release of Songdo Traffic and Songdo Vision, and the complete source code for the extraction pipeline, establishes new benchmarks in data quality, reproducibility, and scalability in traffic research. Results demonstrate the potential of integrating drone technology with advanced computer vision for precise and cost-effective urban traffic monitoring, providing valuable resources for developing intelligent transportation systems and enhancing traffic management strategies.

Drone-based multi-object tracking is essential yet highly challenging due to small targets, severe occlusions, and cluttered backgrounds. Existing RGB-based tracking algorithms heavily depend on spatial appearance cues such as color and texture, which often degrade in aerial views, compromising reliability. Multispectral imagery, capturing pixel-level spectral reflectance, provides crucial cues that enhance object discriminability under degraded spatial conditions. However, the lack of dedicated multispectral UAV datasets has hindered progress in this domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMOT, the first challenging benchmark for drone-based multispectral multi-object tracking. It features three key characteristics: (i) Large Scale - 125 video sequences with over 488.8K annotations across eight categories; (ii) Comprehensive Challenges - covering diverse conditions such as extreme small targets, high-density scenarios, severe occlusions, and complex motion; and (iii) Precise Oriented Annotations - enabling accurate localization and reduced ambiguity under aerial perspectives. To better extract spectral features and leverage oriented annotations, we further present a multispectral and orientation-aware MOT scheme adapting existing methods, featuring: (i) a lightweight Spectral 3D-Stem integrating spectral features while preserving compatibility with RGB pretraining; (ii) an orientation-aware Kalman filter for precise state estimation; and (iii) an end-to-end orientation-adaptive transformer. Extensive experiments across representative trackers consistently show that multispectral input markedly improves tracking performance over RGB baselines, particularly for small and densely packed objects. We believe our work will advance drone-based multispectral multi-object tracking research. Our MMOT, code, and benchmarks are publicly available at https://github.com/Annzstbl/MMOT.

Image-based localization in GNSS-denied environments is critical for UAV autonomy. Existing state-of-the-art approaches rely on matching UAV images to geo-referenced satellite images; however, they typically require large-scale, paired UAV-satellite datasets for training. Such data are costly to acquire and often unavailable, limiting their applicability. To address this challenge, we adopt a training paradigm that removes the need for UAV imagery during training by learning directly from satellite-view reference images. This is achieved through a dedicated augmentation strategy that simulates the visual domain shift between satellite and real-world UAV views. We introduce CAEVL, an efficient model designed to exploit this paradigm, and validate it on ViLD, a new and challenging dataset of real-world UAV images that we release to the community. Our method achieves competitive performance compared to approaches trained with paired data, demonstrating its effectiveness and strong generalization capabilities.

Mathematical reasoning is critical for tasks such as precise distance and area computations, trajectory estimations, and spatial analysis in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based remote sensing, yet current vision-language models (VLMs) have not been adequately tested in this domain. To address this gap, we introduce AVI-Math, the first benchmark to rigorously evaluate multimodal mathematical reasoning in aerial vehicle imagery, moving beyond simple counting tasks to include domain-specific knowledge in areas such as geometry, logic, and algebra. The dataset comprises 3,773 high-quality vehicle-related questions captured from UAV views, covering 6 mathematical subjects and 20 topics. The data, collected at varying altitudes and from multiple UAV angles, reflects real-world UAV scenarios, ensuring the diversity and complexity of the constructed mathematical problems. In this paper, we benchmark 14 prominent VLMs through a comprehensive evaluation and demonstrate that, despite their success on previous multimodal benchmarks, these models struggle with the reasoning tasks in AVI-Math. Our detailed analysis highlights significant limitations in the mathematical reasoning capabilities of current VLMs and suggests avenues for future research. Furthermore, we explore the use of Chain-of-Thought prompting and fine-tuning techniques, which show promise in addressing the reasoning challenges in AVI-Math. Our findings not only expose the limitations of VLMs in mathematical reasoning but also offer valuable insights for advancing UAV-based trustworthy VLMs in real-world applications. The code, and datasets will be released at https://github.com/VisionXLab/avi-math

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a standard approach for representation learning in aerial imagery. Existing methods enforce invariance between augmented views, which works well when augmentations preserve semantic content. However, aerial images are frequently degraded by haze, motion blur, rain, and occlusion that remove critical evidence. Enforcing alignment between a clean and a severely degraded view can introduce spurious structure into the latent space. This study proposes a training strategy and architectural modification to enhance SSL robustness to such corruptions. It introduces a per-sample, per-factor trust weight into the alignment objective, combined with the base contrastive loss as an additive residual. A stop-gradient is applied to the trust weight instead of a multiplicative gate. While a multiplicative gate is a natural choice, experiments show it impairs the backbone, whereas our additive-residual approach improves it. Using a 200-epoch protocol on a 210,000-image corpus, the method achieves the highest mean linear-probe accuracy among six backbones on EuroSAT, AID, and NWPU-RESISC45 (90.20% compared to 88.46% for SimCLR and 89.82% for VICReg). It yields the largest improvements under severe information-erasing corruptions on EuroSAT (+19.9 points on haze at s=5 over SimCLR). The method also demonstrates consistent gains of +1 to +3 points in Mahalanobis AUROC on a zero-shot cross-domain stress test using BDD100K weather splits. Two ablations (scalar uncertainty and cosine gate) indicate the additive-residual formulation is the primary source of these improvements. An evidential variant using Dempster-Shafer fusion introduces interpretable signals of conflict and ignorance. These findings offer a concrete design principle for uncertainty-aware SSL. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/WadiiBoulila/trust-ssl.

Cross-view image matching for geo-localisation is a challenging problem due to the significant visual difference between aerial and ground-level viewpoints. The method provides localisation capabilities from geo-referenced images, eliminating the need for external devices or costly equipment. This enhances the capacity of agents to autonomously determine their position, navigate, and operate effectively in GNSS-denied environments. Current research employs a variety of techniques to reduce the domain gap such as applying polar transforms to aerial images or synthesising between perspectives. However, these approaches generally rely on having a 360{\deg} field of view, limiting real-world feasibility. We propose BEV-CV, an approach introducing two key novelties with a focus on improving the real-world viability of cross-view geo-localisation. Firstly bringing ground-level images into a semantic Birds-Eye-View before matching embeddings, allowing for direct comparison with aerial image representations. Secondly, we adapt datasets into application realistic format - limited Field-of-View images aligned to vehicle direction. BEV-CV achieves state-of-the-art recall accuracies, improving Top-1 rates of 70{\deg} crops of CVUSA and CVACT by 23% and 24% respectively. Also decreasing computational requirements by reducing floating point operations to below previous works, and decreasing embedding dimensionality by 33% - together allowing for faster localisation capabilities.

Cross-view geo-localization for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in GNSS-denied environments remains challenging due to the severe geometric discrepancy between oblique UAV imagery and orthogonal satellite maps. Most existing methods address this problem through a decoupled pipeline of place retrieval and pose estimation, implicitly treating perspective distortion as appearance noise rather than an explicit geometric transformation. In this work, we propose a geometry-aware UAV geo-localization framework that explicitly models the 3D scene geometry to unify coarse place recognition and fine-grained pose estimation within a single inference pipeline. Our approach reconstructs a local 3D scene from multi-view UAV image sequences using a Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), and renders a virtual Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation that orthorectifies the UAV perspective to align with satellite imagery. This BEV serves as a geometric intermediary that enables robust cross-view retrieval and provides spatial priors for accurate 3 Degrees of Freedom (3-DoF) pose regression. To efficiently handle multiple location hypotheses, we introduce a Satellite-wise Attention Block that isolates the interaction between each satellite candidate and the reconstructed UAV scene, preventing inter-candidate interference while maintaining linear computational complexity. In addition, we release a recalibrated version of the University-1652 dataset with precise coordinate annotations and spatial overlap analysis, enabling rigorous evaluation of end-to-end localization accuracy. Extensive experiments on the refined University-1652 benchmark and SUES-200 demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving robust meter-level localization accuracy and improved generalization in complex urban environments.