Reliable UAV object detection requires robustness to illumination changes, motion blur, and scene dynamics that suppress RGB cues. Thermal long-wave infrared (LWIR) sensing preserves contrast in low light, and event cameras retain microsecond-level temporal edges, but integrating all three modalities in a unified detector has not been systematically studied. We present a tri-modal framework that processes RGB, thermal, and event data with a dual-stream hierarchical vision transformer. At selected encoder depths, a Modality-Aware Gated Exchange (MAGE) applies inter-sensor channel and spatial gating, and a Bidirectional Token Exchange (BiTE) module performs bidirectional token-level attention with depthwise-pointwise refinement, producing resolution-preserving fused maps for a standard feature pyramid and two-stage detector.
We introduce a 10,489-frame UAV dataset with synchronized and pre-aligned RGB-thermal-event streams and 24,223 annotated vehicles across day and night flights. Through 61 controlled ablations, we evaluate fusion placement, mechanism (baseline MAGE+BiTE, CSSA, GAFF), modality subsets, and backbone capacity. Tri-modal fusion improves over all dual-modal baselines, with fusion depth having a significant effect and a lightweight CSSA variant recovering most of the benefit at minimal cost. This work provides the first systematic benchmark and modular backbone for tri-modal UAV-based object detection.
Cross-modal Offset-guided Dynamic Alignment and Fusion for Weakly Aligned UAV Object Detection
State Key Laboratory of Optical Field Manipulation Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（光学场操控科学与技术国家重点实验室，中国科学院）；Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院光电研究所）
Light-Weight Cross-Modal Enhancement Method with Benchmark Construction for UAV-based Open-Vocabulary Object Detection
School of Automation, Chongqing University（重庆大学自动化学院）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University（兰州大学信息科学与工程学院）；Department of Control Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学控制科学与工程系）；Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学机械与自动化工程系）
UEMM-Air: Make Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Perform More Multi-modal Tasks
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Hohai University（河海大学计算机与软件学院）；College of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Hohai University（河海大学人工智能与自动化学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学计算机科学与工程系）；School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University（格里菲斯大学信息与通信技术学院）
EGM-Det: Entropy-Guided Multimodal Adaptive Fusion for UAV RGB-IR Object Detection
School of Cybersecurity, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学网络空间安全学院）；School of Automation and Software Engineering, Shanxi University（山西大学自动化与软件学院）
Graph-based Semantic Calibration Network for Unaligned UAV RGBT Image Semantic Segmentation and A Large-scale Benchmark
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing (Anhui University), Ministry of Education（智能计算与信号处理重点实验室（安徽大学），教育部）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation, School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室，人工智能学院，安徽大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（计算机科学与技术学院，安徽大学）；GEOVIS Earth Technology Co., Ltd.（GEOVIS地球科技有限公司）
Large Language Model Guided Progressive Feature Alignment for Multimodal UAV Object Detection
School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple complementary sensors have tremendous potential for fast autonomous or remote-controlled semantic scene analysis, e.g., for disaster examination. In this work, we propose a UAV system for real-time semantic inference and fusion of multiple sensor modalities. Semantic segmentation of LiDAR scans and RGB images, as well as object detection on RGB and thermal images, run online onboard the UAV computer using lightweight CNN architectures and embedded inference accelerators. We follow a late fusion approach where semantic information from mult…
University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；Clemson University（克莱姆森大学）
This paper proposes a multi-sensor based approach to detect, track, and localize a quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Specifically, a pipeline is developed to process monocular RGB and thermal video (captured from a fixed platform) to detect and track the UAV in our FoV. Subsequently, a 2D planar lidar is used to allow conversion of pixel data to actual distance measurements, and thereby enable localization of the UAV in global coordinates. The monocular data is processed through a deep learning-based object detection method that computes an initial bounding box for the UAV. The thermal…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple complementary sensors have tremendous potential for fast autonomous or remote-controlled semantic scene analysis, e.g., for disaster examination. Here, we propose a UAV system for real-time semantic inference and fusion of multiple sensor modalities. Semantic segmentation of LiDAR scans and RGB images, as well as object detection on RGB and thermal images, run online onboard the UAV computer using lightweight CNN architectures and embedded inference accelerators. We follow a late fusion approach where semantic information from multiple sen…
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Automated semantic segmentation and object detection are of great importance in geospatial data analysis. However, supervised machine learning systems such as convolutional neural networks require large corpora of annotated training data. Especially in the geospatial domain, such datasets are quite scarce. Within this paper, we aim to alleviate this issue by introducing a new annotated 3D dataset that is unique in three ways: i) The dataset consists of both an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) laser scanning point cloud and a 3D textured mesh. ii) The point cloud features a mean point density of a…
Boost UAV-based Ojbect Detection via Scale-Invariant Feature Disentanglement and Adversarial Learning
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Hohai University（河海大学计算机与软件学院）；College of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Hohai University（河海大学人工智能与自动化学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University（格里菲斯大学信息与通信技术学院）
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with mounted cameras have the advantage of capturing aerial (bird-view) images. The availability of aerial visual data and the recent advances in object detection algorithms led the computer vision community to focus on object detection tasks on aerial images. As a result of this, several aerial datasets have been introduced, including visual data with object annotations. UAVs are used solely as flying-cameras in these datasets, discarding different data types regarding the flight (e.g., time, location, internal sensors). In this work, we propose a multi-purpose…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Beihang University（北航大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
University of Chinese Academic of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Institute of North Electronic Equipment（北方电子设备研究所）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) offers lots of applications in both commerce and recreation. With this, monitoring the operation status of UAVs is crucially important. In this work, we consider the task of tracking UAVs, providing rich information such as location and trajectory. To facilitate research on this topic, we propose a dataset, Anti-UAV, with more than 300 video pairs containing over 580k manually annotated bounding boxes. The releasing of such a large-scale dataset could be a useful initial step in research of tracking UAVs. Furthermore, the advancement of addressing research challen…
A Tri-Modal Dataset and a Baseline System for Tracking Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University（江南大学人工智能与计算机科学学院）；School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering and the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey（萨里大学计算机科学与电子工程学院及视觉、语音与信号处理中心）
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
Existing methods for object detection in UAV images ignored an important challenge - imbalanced class distribution in UAV images - which leads to poor performance on tail classes. We systematically investigate existing solutions to long-tail problems and unveil that re-balancing methods that are effective on natural image datasets cannot be trivially applied to UAV datasets. To this end, we rethink long-tailed object detection in UAV images and propose the Dual Sampler and Head detection Network (DSHNet), which is the first work that aims to resolve long-tail distribution in UAV images. The ke…
UAUTrack: Towards Unified Multimodal Anti-UAV Visual Tracking
College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing（智能机器人与先进制造学院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang Normal University（浙江师范大学）；Department of Mechanical Engineering（机械工程系）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network-Inspired Vessel Identification and Tracking for UAV-Based Maritime Surveillance
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；University of Aberdeen（阿伯丁大学）；Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Structure-Aware Matching for Robust UAV Thermal-to-Satellite Geo-Localization
State Key Laboratory of Spatial Datum, Henan University（河南大学空间数据基准国家重点实验室）；College of Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics Engineering, Henan University（河南大学遥感与地理信息工程学院）；School of Computer and Information Engineering, Henan University（河南大学计算机与信息工程学院）；Henan Yunhuan NetLink UAV Technology Co., Ltd.（河南云环网联无人机科技有限公司）
Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空间应用工程与技术中心）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The autonomous real-time optical navigation of planetary UAV is of the key technologies to ensure the success of the exploration. In such a GPS denied environment, vision-based localization is an optimal approach. In this paper, we proposed a multi-modal registration based SLAM algorithm, which estimates the location of a planet UAV using a nadir view camera on the UAV compared with pre-existing digital terrain model. To overcome the scale and appearance difference between on-board UAV images and pre-installed digital terrain model, a theoretical model is proposed to prove that topographic fea…
Multi-Modal UAV Detection, Classification and Tracking Algorithm -- Technical Report for CVPR 2024 UG2 Challenge
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；JITRI（江苏集萃智能制造技术研究所有限公司）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
UAV traffic scene understanding: A regulation embedded multi-modal network and a unified benchmark
Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China（中国科学院计算机网络信息中心，北京100190，中国）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China（中国科学院大学，北京100190，中国）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multi-modal Cognitive Computation, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室，安徽大学，合肥230601，中国）；Information Materials and Intelligent Sensing Laboratory of Anhui Province, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China（安徽省信息材料与智能感知实验室，安徽大学，合肥230601，中国）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Tiwaki Co.Ltd.（Tiwaki有限公司）
With the popularity of multi-modal sensors, visible-thermal (RGB-T) object tracking is to achieve robust performance and wider application scenarios with the guidance of objects' temperature information. However, the lack of paired training samples is the main bottleneck for unlocking the power of RGB-T tracking. Since it is laborious to collect high-quality RGB-T sequences, recent benchmarks only provide test sequences. In this paper, we construct a large-scale benchmark with high diversity for visible-thermal UAV tracking (VTUAV), including 500 sequences with 1.7 million high-resolution (192…
UAV-CB: A Complex-Background RGB-T Dataset and Local Frequency Bridge Network for UAV Detection
Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；South China University of Technology（南方科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Xinjiang University（新疆大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
PRI-Net: A Lightweight Multimodal Framework for 3D UAV Localization
College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学信息与电子工程学院）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Multimodal Communication Networks and Intelligent Information Processing（浙江省多模态通信网络与智能信息处理重点实验室）
Computer vision-based object detection is a key modality for advanced Detect-And-Avoid systems that allow for autonomous flight missions of UAVs. While standard object detection frameworks do not predict the actual depth of an object, this information is crucial to avoid collisions. In this paper, we propose several novel extensions to state-of-the-art methods for monocular object detection from images at long range. Firstly, we propose Sigmoid and ReLU-like encodings when modeling depth estimation as a regression task. Secondly, we frame the depth estimation as a classification problem and in…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become popular for use in plant phenotyping of field based crops, such as maize and sorghum, due to their ability to acquire high resolution data over field trials. Field experiments, which may comprise thousands of plants, are planted according to experimental designs to evaluate varieties or management practices. For many types of phenotyping analysis, we examine smaller groups of plants known as "plots." In this paper, we propose a new plot extraction method that will segment a UAV image into plots. We will demonstrate that our method achieves higher plo…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can pose a major risk for aviation safety, due to both negligent and malicious use. For this reason, the automated detection and tracking of UAV is a fundamental task in aerial security systems. Common technologies for UAV detection include visible-band and thermal infrared imaging, radio frequency and radar. Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) for image-based object detection open the possibility to use visual information for this detection and tracking task. Furthermore, these detection architectures can be implemented as backbones for visual trackin…
UAVD-Mamba: Deformable Token Fusion Vision Mamba for Multimodal UAV Detection
College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Hunan University（湖南大学机械与车辆工程学院）；School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学电子信息与通信学院）
Tongji University（同济大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Object tracking has been broadly applied in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tasks in recent years. However, existing algorithms still face difficulties such as partial occlusion, clutter background, and other challenging visual factors. Inspired by the cutting-edge attention mechanisms, a novel object tracking framework is proposed to leverage multi-level visual attention. Three primary attention, i.e., contextual attention, dimensional attention, and spatiotemporal attention, are integrated into the training and detection stages of correlation filter-based tracking pipeline. Therefore, the prop…
