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Apr 30

Knowledge-Informed Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction at Signalized Intersections for Infrastructure-to-Everything

Multi-agent trajectory prediction at signalized intersections is crucial for developing efficient intelligent transportation systems and safe autonomous driving systems. Due to the complexity of intersection scenarios and the limitations of single-vehicle perception, the performance of vehicle-centric prediction methods has reached a plateau. In this paper, we introduce an Infrastructure-to-Everything (I2X) collaborative prediction scheme. In this scheme, roadside units (RSUs) independently forecast the future trajectories of all vehicles and transmit these predictions unidirectionally to subscribing vehicles. Building on this scheme, we propose I2XTraj, a dedicated infrastructure-based trajectory prediction model. I2XTraj leverages real-time traffic signal states, prior maneuver strategy knowledge, and multi-agent interactions to generate accurate, joint multi-modal trajectory prediction. First, a continuous signal-informed mechanism is proposed to adaptively process real-time traffic signals to guide trajectory proposal generation under varied intersection configurations. Second, a driving strategy awareness mechanism estimates the joint distribution of maneuver strategies by integrating spatial priors of intersection areas with dynamic vehicle states, enabling coverage of the full set of feasible maneuvers. Third, a spatial-temporal-mode attention network models multi-agent interactions to refine and adjust joint trajectory outputs.Finally, I2XTraj is evaluated on two real-world datasets of signalized intersections, the V2X-Seq and the SinD drone dataset. In both single-infrastructure and online collaborative scenarios, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by over 30\% on V2X-Seq and 15\% on SinD, demonstrating strong generalizability and robustness.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 23, 2025

Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge

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.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 15, 2020

IndraEye: Infrared Electro-Optical UAV-based Perception Dataset for Robust Downstream Tasks

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.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 28, 2024

RFUAV: A Benchmark Dataset for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Detection and Identification

In this paper, we propose RFUAV as a new benchmark dataset for radio-frequency based (RF-based) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) identification and address the following challenges: Firstly, many existing datasets feature a restricted variety of drone types and insufficient volumes of raw data, which fail to meet the demands of practical applications. Secondly, existing datasets often lack raw data covering a broad range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), or do not provide tools for transforming raw data to different SNR levels. This limitation undermines the validity of model training and evaluation. Lastly, many existing datasets do not offer open-access evaluation tools, leading to a lack of unified evaluation standards in current research within this field. RFUAV comprises approximately 1.3 TB of raw frequency data collected from 37 distinct UAVs using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) device in real-world environments. Through in-depth analysis of the RF data in RFUAV, we define a drone feature sequence called RF drone fingerprint, which aids in distinguishing drone signals. In addition to the dataset, RFUAV provides a baseline preprocessing method and model evaluation tools. Rigorous experiments demonstrate that these preprocessing methods achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance using the provided evaluation tools. The RFUAV dataset and baseline implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/kitoweeknd/RFUAV/.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 11, 2025

MMAUD: A Comprehensive Multi-Modal Anti-UAV Dataset for Modern Miniature Drone Threats

In response to the evolving challenges posed by small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which possess the potential to transport harmful payloads or independently cause damage, we introduce MMAUD: a comprehensive Multi-Modal Anti-UAV Dataset. MMAUD addresses a critical gap in contemporary threat detection methodologies by focusing on drone detection, UAV-type classification, and trajectory estimation. MMAUD stands out by combining diverse sensory inputs, including stereo vision, various Lidars, Radars, and audio arrays. It offers a unique overhead aerial detection vital for addressing real-world scenarios with higher fidelity than datasets captured on specific vantage points using thermal and RGB. Additionally, MMAUD provides accurate Leica-generated ground truth data, enhancing credibility and enabling confident refinement of algorithms and models, which has never been seen in other datasets. Most existing works do not disclose their datasets, making MMAUD an invaluable resource for developing accurate and efficient solutions. Our proposed modalities are cost-effective and highly adaptable, allowing users to experiment and implement new UAV threat detection tools. Our dataset closely simulates real-world scenarios by incorporating ambient heavy machinery sounds. This approach enhances the dataset's applicability, capturing the exact challenges faced during proximate vehicular operations. It is expected that MMAUD can play a pivotal role in advancing UAV threat detection, classification, trajectory estimation capabilities, and beyond. Our dataset, codes, and designs will be available in https://github.com/ntu-aris/MMAUD.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

ALFA: A Dataset for UAV Fault and Anomaly Detection

We present a dataset of several fault types in control surfaces of a fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for use in Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) and Anomaly Detection (AD) research. Currently, the dataset includes processed data for 47 autonomous flights with 23 sudden full engine failure scenarios and 24 scenarios for seven other types of sudden control surface (actuator) faults, with a total of 66 minutes of flight in normal conditions and 13 minutes of post-fault flight time. It additionally includes many hours of raw data of fully-autonomous, autopilot-assisted and manual flights with tens of fault scenarios. The ground truth of the time and type of faults is provided in each scenario to enable evaluation of the methods using the dataset. We have also provided the helper tools in several programming languages to load and work with the data and to help the evaluation of a detection method using the dataset. A set of metrics is proposed to help to compare different methods using the dataset. Most of the current fault detection methods are evaluated in simulation and as far as we know, this dataset is the only one providing the real flight data with faults in such capacity. We hope it will help advance the state-of-the-art in Anomaly Detection or FDI research for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles and mobile robots to enhance the safety of autonomous and remote flight operations further. The dataset and the provided tools can be accessed from https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/12707963.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 14, 2019

UAV-VisLoc: A Large-scale Dataset for UAV Visual Localization

The application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has been widely extended recently. It is crucial to ensure accurate latitude and longitude coordinates for UAVs, especially when the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are disrupted and unreliable. Existing visual localization methods achieve autonomous visual localization without error accumulation by matching the ground-down view image of UAV with the ortho satellite maps. However, collecting UAV ground-down view images across diverse locations is costly, leading to a scarcity of large-scale datasets for real-world scenarios. Existing datasets for UAV visual localization are often limited to small geographic areas or are focused only on urban regions with distinct textures. To address this, we define the UAV visual localization task by determining the UAV's real position coordinates on a large-scale satellite map based on the captured ground-down view. In this paper, we present a large-scale dataset, UAV-VisLoc, to facilitate the UAV visual localization task. This dataset comprises images from diverse drones across 11 locations in China, capturing a range of topographical features. The dataset features images from fixed-wing drones and multi-terrain drones, captured at different altitudes and orientations. Our dataset includes 6,742 drone images and 11 satellite maps, with metadata such as latitude, longitude, altitude, and capture date. Our dataset is tailored to support both the training and testing of models by providing a diverse and extensive data.

  • 7 authors
·
May 20, 2024

Plantation Monitoring Using Drone Images: A Dataset and Performance Review

Automatic monitoring of tree plantations plays a crucial role in agriculture. Flawless monitoring of tree health helps farmers make informed decisions regarding their management by taking appropriate action. Use of drone images for automatic plantation monitoring can enhance the accuracy of the monitoring process, while still being affordable to small farmers in developing countries such as India. Small, low cost drones equipped with an RGB camera can capture high-resolution images of agricultural fields, allowing for detailed analysis of the well-being of the plantations. Existing methods of automated plantation monitoring are mostly based on satellite images, which are difficult to get for the farmers. We propose an automated system for plantation health monitoring using drone images, which are becoming easier to get for the farmers. We propose a dataset of images of trees with three categories: ``Good health", ``Stunted", and ``Dead". We annotate the dataset using CVAT annotation tool, for use in research purposes. We experiment with different well-known CNN models to observe their performance on the proposed dataset. The initial low accuracy levels show the complexity of the proposed dataset. Further, our study revealed that, depth-wise convolution operation embedded in a deep CNN model, can enhance the performance of the model on drone dataset. Further, we apply state-of-the-art object detection models to identify individual trees to better monitor them automatically.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 12, 2025

Advanced computer vision for extracting georeferenced vehicle trajectories from drone imagery

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 4, 2024

The P-DESTRE: A Fully Annotated Dataset for Pedestrian Detection, Tracking, Re-Identification and Search from Aerial Devices

Over the last decades, the world has been witnessing growing threats to the security in urban spaces, which has augmented the relevance given to visual surveillance solutions able to detect, track and identify persons of interest in crowds. In particular, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a potential tool for this kind of analysis, as they provide a cheap way for data collection, cover large and difficult-to-reach areas, while reducing human staff demands. In this context, all the available datasets are exclusively suitable for the pedestrian re-identification problem, in which the multi-camera views per ID are taken on a single day, and allows the use of clothing appearance features for identification purposes. Accordingly, the main contributions of this paper are two-fold: 1) we announce the UAV-based P-DESTRE dataset, which is the first of its kind to provide consistent ID annotations across multiple days, making it suitable for the extremely challenging problem of person search, i.e., where no clothing information can be reliably used. Apart this feature, the P-DESTRE annotations enable the research on UAV-based pedestrian detection, tracking, re-identification and soft biometric solutions; and 2) we compare the results attained by state-of-the-art pedestrian detection, tracking, reidentification and search techniques in well-known surveillance datasets, to the effectiveness obtained by the same techniques in the P-DESTRE data. Such comparison enables to identify the most problematic data degradation factors of UAV-based data for each task, and can be used as baselines for subsequent advances in this kind of technology. The dataset and the full details of the empirical evaluation carried out are freely available at http://p-destre.di.ubi.pt/.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 6, 2020

Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning

Drone-based vehicle detection aims at finding the vehicle locations and categories in an aerial image. It empowers smart city traffic management and disaster rescue. Researchers have made mount of efforts in this area and achieved considerable progress. Nevertheless, it is still a challenge when the objects are hard to distinguish, especially in low light conditions. To tackle this problem, we construct a large-scale drone-based RGB-Infrared vehicle detection dataset, termed DroneVehicle. Our DroneVehicle collects 28, 439 RGB-Infrared image pairs, covering urban roads, residential areas, parking lots, and other scenarios from day to night. Due to the great gap between RGB and infrared images, cross-modal images provide both effective information and redundant information. To address this dilemma, we further propose an uncertainty-aware cross-modality vehicle detection (UA-CMDet) framework to extract complementary information from cross-modal images, which can significantly improve the detection performance in low light conditions. An uncertainty-aware module (UAM) is designed to quantify the uncertainty weights of each modality, which is calculated by the cross-modal Intersection over Union (IoU) and the RGB illumination value. Furthermore, we design an illumination-aware cross-modal non-maximum suppression algorithm to better integrate the modal-specific information in the inference phase. Extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle dataset demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed method for crossmodality vehicle detection. The dataset can be download from https://github.com/VisDrone/DroneVehicle.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 5, 2020

Sound-based drone fault classification using multitask learning

The drone has been used for various purposes, including military applications, aerial photography, and pesticide spraying. However, the drone is vulnerable to external disturbances, and malfunction in propellers and motors can easily occur. To improve the safety of drone operations, one should detect the mechanical faults of drones in real-time. This paper proposes a sound-based deep neural network (DNN) fault classifier and drone sound dataset. The dataset was constructed by collecting the operating sounds of drones from microphones mounted on three different drones in an anechoic chamber. The dataset includes various operating conditions of drones, such as flight directions (front, back, right, left, clockwise, counterclockwise) and faults on propellers and motors. The drone sounds were then mixed with noises recorded in five different spots on the university campus, with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) varying from 10 dB to 15 dB. Using the acquired dataset, we train a DNN classifier, 1DCNN-ResNet, that classifies the types of mechanical faults and their locations from short-time input waveforms. We employ multitask learning (MTL) and incorporate the direction classification task as an auxiliary task to make the classifier learn more general audio features. The test over unseen data reveals that the proposed multitask model can successfully classify faults in drones and outperforms single-task models even with less training data.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 22, 2023

Drone Detection using Deep Neural Networks Trained on Pure Synthetic Data

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 12, 2024

Hardware Acceleration for Real-Time Wildfire Detection Onboard Drone Networks

Early wildfire detection in remote and forest areas is crucial for minimizing devastation and preserving ecosystems. Autonomous drones offer agile access to remote, challenging terrains, equipped with advanced imaging technology that delivers both high-temporal and detailed spatial resolution, making them valuable assets in the early detection and monitoring of wildfires. However, the limited computation and battery resources of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) pose significant challenges in implementing robust and efficient image classification models. Current works in this domain often operate offline, emphasizing the need for solutions that can perform inference in real time, given the constraints of UAVs. To address these challenges, this paper aims to develop a real-time image classification and fire segmentation model. It presents a comprehensive investigation into hardware acceleration using the Jetson Nano P3450 and the implications of TensorRT, NVIDIA's high-performance deep-learning inference library, on fire classification accuracy and speed. The study includes implementations of Quantization Aware Training (QAT), Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP), and post-training mechanisms, comparing them against the latest baselines for fire segmentation and classification. All experiments utilize the FLAME dataset - an image dataset collected by low-altitude drones during a prescribed forest fire. This work contributes to the ongoing efforts to enable real-time, on-board wildfire detection capabilities for UAVs, addressing speed and the computational and energy constraints of these crucial monitoring systems. The results show a 13% increase in classification speed compared to similar models without hardware optimization. Comparatively, loss and accuracy are within 1.225% of the original values.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 15, 2024

U2UData-2: A Scalable Swarm UAVs Autonomous Flight Dataset for Long-horizon Tasks

Swarm UAV autonomous flight for Long-Horizon (LH) tasks is crucial for advancing the low-altitude economy. However, existing methods focus only on specific basic tasks due to dataset limitations, failing in real-world deployment for LH tasks. LH tasks are not mere concatenations of basic tasks, requiring handling long-term dependencies, maintaining persistent states, and adapting to dynamic goal shifts. This paper presents U2UData-2, the first large-scale swarm UAV autonomous flight dataset for LH tasks and the first scalable swarm UAV data online collection and algorithm closed-loop verification platform. The dataset is captured by 15 UAVs in autonomous collaborative flights for LH tasks, comprising 12 scenes, 720 traces, 120 hours, 600 seconds per trajectory, 4.32M LiDAR frames, and 12.96M RGB frames. This dataset also includes brightness, temperature, humidity, smoke, and airflow values covering all flight routes. The platform supports the customization of simulators, UAVs, sensors, flight algorithms, formation modes, and LH tasks. Through a visual control window, this platform allows users to collect customized datasets through one-click deployment online and to verify algorithms by closed-loop simulation. U2UData-2 also introduces an LH task for wildlife conservation and provides comprehensive benchmarks with 9 SOTA models. U2UData-2 can be found at https://fengtt42.github.io/U2UData-2/.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 25, 2025

Integrating Biological Data into Autonomous Remote Sensing Systems for In Situ Imageomics: A Case Study for Kenyan Animal Behavior Sensing with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

In situ imageomics leverages machine learning techniques to infer biological traits from images collected in the field, or in situ, to study individuals organisms, groups of wildlife, and whole ecosystems. Such datasets provide real-time social and environmental context to inferred biological traits, which can enable new, data-driven conservation and ecosystem management. The development of machine learning techniques to extract biological traits from images are impeded by the volume and quality data required to train these models. Autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are well suited to collect in situ imageomics data as they can traverse remote terrain quickly to collect large volumes of data with greater consistency and reliability compared to manually piloted UAV missions. However, little guidance exists on optimizing autonomous UAV missions for the purposes of remote sensing for conservation and biodiversity monitoring. The UAV video dataset curated by KABR: In-Situ Dataset for Kenyan Animal Behavior Recognition from Drone Videos required three weeks to collect, a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. Our analysis of KABR revealed that a third of the videos gathered were unusable for the purposes of inferring wildlife behavior. We analyzed the flight telemetry data from portions of UAV videos that were usable for inferring wildlife behavior, and demonstrate how these insights can be integrated into an autonomous remote sensing system to track wildlife in real time. Our autonomous remote sensing system optimizes the UAV's actions to increase the yield of usable data, and matches the flight path of an expert pilot with an 87% accuracy rate, representing an 18.2% improvement in accuracy over previously proposed methods.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 23, 2024

A UAV-Based VNIR Hyperspectral Benchmark Dataset for Landmine and UXO Detection

This paper introduces a novel benchmark dataset of Visible and Near-Infrared (VNIR) hyperspectral imagery acquired via an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform for landmine and unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection research. The dataset was collected over a controlled test field seeded with 143 realistic surrogate landmine and UXO targets, including surface, partially buried, and fully buried configurations. Data acquisition was performed using a Headwall Nano-Hyperspec sensor mounted on a multi-sensor drone platform, flown at an altitude of approximately 20.6 m, capturing 270 contiguous spectral bands spanning 398-1002 nm. Radiometric calibration, orthorectification, and mosaicking were performed followed by reflectance retrieval using a two-point Empirical Line Method (ELM), with reference spectra acquired using an SVC spectroradiometer. Cross-validation against six reference objects yielded RMSE values below 1.0 and SAM values between 1 and 6 degrees in the 400-900 nm range, demonstrating high spectral fidelity. The dataset is released alongside raw radiance cubes, GCP/AeroPoint data, and reference spectra to support reproducible research. This contribution fills a critical gap in open-access UAV-based hyperspectral data for landmine detection and offers a multi-sensor benchmark when combined with previously published drone-based electromagnetic induction (EMI) data from the same test field.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025

HumBugDB: A Large-scale Acoustic Mosquito Dataset

This paper presents the first large-scale multi-species dataset of acoustic recordings of mosquitoes tracked continuously in free flight. We present 20 hours of audio recordings that we have expertly labelled and tagged precisely in time. Significantly, 18 hours of recordings contain annotations from 36 different species. Mosquitoes are well-known carriers of diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever. Collecting this dataset is motivated by the need to assist applications which utilise mosquito acoustics to conduct surveys to help predict outbreaks and inform intervention policy. The task of detecting mosquitoes from the sound of their wingbeats is challenging due to the difficulty in collecting recordings from realistic scenarios. To address this, as part of the HumBug project, we conducted global experiments to record mosquitoes ranging from those bred in culture cages to mosquitoes captured in the wild. Consequently, the audio recordings vary in signal-to-noise ratio and contain a broad range of indoor and outdoor background environments from Tanzania, Thailand, Kenya, the USA and the UK. In this paper we describe in detail how we collected, labelled and curated the data. The data is provided from a PostgreSQL database, which contains important metadata such as the capture method, age, feeding status and gender of the mosquitoes. Additionally, we provide code to extract features and train Bayesian convolutional neural networks for two key tasks: the identification of mosquitoes from their corresponding background environments, and the classification of detected mosquitoes into species. Our extensive dataset is both challenging to machine learning researchers focusing on acoustic identification, and critical to entomologists, geo-spatial modellers and other domain experts to understand mosquito behaviour, model their distribution, and manage the threat they pose to humans.

  • 16 authors
·
Oct 14, 2021

RIS-LAD: A Benchmark and Model for Referring Low-Altitude Drone Image 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/.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025

Vision-Based UAV Self-Positioning in Low-Altitude Urban Environments

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on satellite systems for stable positioning. However, due to limited satellite coverage or communication disruptions, UAVs may lose signals from satellite-based positioning systems. In such situations, vision-based techniques can serve as an alternative, ensuring the self-positioning capability of UAVs. However, most of the existing datasets are developed for the geo-localization tasks of the objects identified by UAVs, rather than the self-positioning task of UAVs. Furthermore, the current UAV datasets use discrete sampling on synthetic data, such as Google Maps, thereby neglecting the crucial aspects of dense sampling and the uncertainties commonly experienced in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, this paper presents a new dataset, DenseUAV, which is the first publicly available dataset designed for the UAV self-positioning task. DenseUAV adopts dense sampling on UAV images obtained in low-altitude urban settings. In total, over 27K UAV-view and satellite-view images of 14 university campuses are collected and annotated, establishing a new benchmark. In terms of model development, we first verify the superiority of Transformers over CNNs in this task. Then, we incorporate metric learning into representation learning to enhance the discriminative capacity of the model and to lessen the modality discrepancy. Besides, to facilitate joint learning from both perspectives, we propose a mutually supervised learning approach. Last, we enhance the Recall@K metric and introduce a new measurement, SDM@K, to evaluate the performance of a trained model from both the retrieval and localization perspectives simultaneously. As a result, the proposed baseline method achieves a remarkable Recall@1 score of 83.05% and an SDM@1 score of 86.24% on DenseUAV. The dataset and code will be made publicly available on https://github.com/Dmmm1997/DenseUAV.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 23, 2022

Game4Loc: A UAV Geo-Localization Benchmark from Game Data

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25, 2024 2

Efficient Masked AutoEncoder for Video Object Counting and A Large-Scale Benchmark

The dynamic imbalance of the fore-background is a major challenge in video object counting, which is usually caused by the sparsity of target objects. This remains understudied in existing works and often leads to severe under-/over-prediction errors. To tackle this issue in video object counting, we propose a density-embedded Efficient Masked Autoencoder Counting (E-MAC) framework in this paper. To empower the model's representation ability on density regression, we develop a new Density-Embedded Masked mOdeling (DEMO) method, which first takes the density map as an auxiliary modality to perform multimodal self-representation learning for image and density map. Although DEMO contributes to effective cross-modal regression guidance, it also brings in redundant background information, making it difficult to focus on the foreground regions. To handle this dilemma, we propose an efficient spatial adaptive masking derived from density maps to boost efficiency. Meanwhile, we employ an optical flow-based temporal collaborative fusion strategy to effectively capture the dynamic variations across frames, aligning features to derive multi-frame density residuals. The counting accuracy of the current frame is boosted by harnessing the information from adjacent frames. In addition, considering that most existing datasets are limited to human-centric scenarios, we first propose a large video bird counting dataset, DroneBird, in natural scenarios for migratory bird protection. Extensive experiments on three crowd datasets and our DroneBird validate our superiority against the counterparts. The code and dataset are available.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 20, 2024

WIT-UAS: A Wildland-fire Infrared Thermal Dataset to Detect Crew Assets From Aerial Views

We present the Wildland-fire Infrared Thermal (WIT-UAS) dataset for long-wave infrared sensing of crew and vehicle assets amidst prescribed wildland fire environments. While such a dataset is crucial for safety monitoring in wildland fire applications, to the authors' awareness, no such dataset focusing on assets near fire is publicly available. Presumably, this is due to the barrier to entry of collaborating with fire management personnel. We present two related data subsets: WIT-UAS-ROS consists of full ROS bag files containing sensor and robot data of UAS flight over the fire, and WIT-UAS-Image contains hand-labeled long-wave infrared (LWIR) images extracted from WIT-UAS-ROS. Our dataset is the first to focus on asset detection in a wildland fire environment. We show that thermal detection models trained without fire data frequently detect false positives by classifying fire as people. By adding our dataset to training, we show that the false positive rate is reduced significantly. Yet asset detection in wildland fire environments is still significantly more challenging than detection in urban environments, due to dense obscuring trees, greater heat variation, and overbearing thermal signal of the fire. We publicize this dataset to encourage the community to study more advanced models to tackle this challenging environment. The dataset, code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/castacks/WIT-UAS-Dataset.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 14, 2023

Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning Embedded in Aerial Vehicle Imagery: Benchmarking, Analysis, and Exploration

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

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025

SAGA: Semantic-Aware Gray color Augmentation for Visible-to-Thermal Domain Adaptation across Multi-View Drone and Ground-Based Vision Systems

Domain-adaptive thermal object detection plays a key role in facilitating visible (RGB)-to-thermal (IR) adaptation by reducing the need for co-registered image pairs and minimizing reliance on large annotated IR datasets. However, inherent limitations of IR images, such as the lack of color and texture cues, pose challenges for RGB-trained models, leading to increased false positives and poor-quality pseudo-labels. To address this, we propose Semantic-Aware Gray color Augmentation (SAGA), a novel strategy for mitigating color bias and bridging the domain gap by extracting object-level features relevant to IR images. Additionally, to validate the proposed SAGA for drone imagery, we introduce the IndraEye, a multi-sensor (RGB-IR) dataset designed for diverse applications. The dataset contains 5,612 images with 145,666 instances, captured from diverse angles, altitudes, backgrounds, and times of day, offering valuable opportunities for multimodal learning, domain adaptation for object detection and segmentation, and exploration of sensor-specific strengths and weaknesses. IndraEye aims to enhance the development of more robust and accurate aerial perception systems, especially in challenging environments. Experimental results show that SAGA significantly improves RGB-to-IR adaptation for autonomous driving and IndraEye dataset, achieving consistent performance gains of +0.4% to +7.6% (mAP) when integrated with state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/airliisc/IndraEye.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 22, 2025

DroneMOT: Drone-based Multi-Object Tracking Considering Detection Difficulties and Simultaneous Moving of Drones and Objects

Multi-object tracking (MOT) on static platforms, such as by surveillance cameras, has achieved significant progress, with various paradigms providing attractive performances. However, the effectiveness of traditional MOT methods is significantly reduced when it comes to dynamic platforms like drones. This decrease is attributed to the distinctive challenges in the MOT-on-drone scenario: (1) objects are generally small in the image plane, blurred, and frequently occluded, making them challenging to detect and recognize; (2) drones move and see objects from different angles, causing the unreliability of the predicted positions and feature embeddings of the objects. This paper proposes DroneMOT, which firstly proposes a Dual-domain Integrated Attention (DIA) module that considers the fast movements of drones to enhance the drone-based object detection and feature embedding for small-sized, blurred, and occluded objects. Then, an innovative Motion-Driven Association (MDA) scheme is introduced, considering the concurrent movements of both the drone and the objects. Within MDA, an Adaptive Feature Synchronization (AFS) technique is presented to update the object features seen from different angles. Additionally, a Dual Motion-based Prediction (DMP) method is employed to forecast the object positions. Finally, both the refined feature embeddings and the predicted positions are integrated to enhance the object association. Comprehensive evaluations on VisDrone2019-MOT and UAVDT datasets show that DroneMOT provides substantial performance improvements over the state-of-the-art in the domain of MOT on drones.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 12, 2024

VECTOR: Velocity-Enhanced GRU Neural Network for Real-Time 3D UAV Trajectory Prediction

This paper tackles the challenge of real-time 3D trajectory prediction for UAVs, which is critical for applications such as aerial surveillance and defense. Existing prediction models that rely primarily on position data struggle with accuracy, especially when UAV movements fall outside the position domain used in training. Our research identifies a gap in utilizing velocity estimates, first-order dynamics, to better capture the dynamics and enhance prediction accuracy and generalizability in any position domain. To bridge this gap, we propose a new trajectory prediction method using Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) within sequence-based neural networks. Unlike traditional methods that rely on RNNs or transformers, this approach forecasts future velocities and positions based on historical velocity data instead of positions. This is designed to enhance prediction accuracy and scalability, overcoming challenges faced by conventional models in handling complex UAV dynamics. The methodology employs both synthetic and real-world 3D UAV trajectory data, capturing a wide range of flight patterns, speeds, and agility. Synthetic data is generated using the Gazebo simulator and PX4 Autopilot, while real-world data comes from the UZH-FPV and Mid-Air drone racing datasets. The GRU-based models significantly outperform state-of-the-art RNN approaches, with a mean square error (MSE) as low as 2 x 10^-8. Overall, our findings confirm the effectiveness of incorporating velocity data in improving the accuracy of UAV trajectory predictions across both synthetic and real-world scenarios, in and out of position data distributions. Finally, we open-source our 5000 trajectories dataset and a ROS 2 package to facilitate the integration with existing ROS-based UAV systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024

XS-VID: An Extremely Small Video Object Detection Dataset

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/.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024

AgriLiRa4D: A Multi-Sensor UAV Dataset for Robust SLAM in Challenging Agricultural Fields

Multi-sensor Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is essential for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) performing agricultural tasks such as spraying, surveying, and inspection. However, real-world, multi-modal agricultural UAV datasets that enable research on robust operation remain scarce. To address this gap, we present AgriLiRa4D, a multi-modal UAV dataset designed for challenging outdoor agricultural environments. AgriLiRa4D spans three representative farmland types-flat, hilly, and terraced-and includes both boundary and coverage operation modes, resulting in six flight sequence groups. The dataset provides high-accuracy ground-truth trajectories from a Fiber Optic Inertial Navigation System with Real-Time Kinematic capability (FINS_RTK), along with synchronized measurements from a 3D LiDAR, a 4D Radar, and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), accompanied by complete intrinsic and extrinsic calibrations. Leveraging its comprehensive sensor suite and diverse real-world scenarios, AgriLiRa4D supports diverse SLAM and localization studies and enables rigorous robustness evaluation against low-texture crops, repetitive patterns, dynamic vegetation, and other challenges of real agricultural environments. To further demonstrate its utility, we benchmark four state-of-the-art multi-sensor SLAM algorithms across different sensor combinations, highlighting the difficulty of the proposed sequences and the necessity of multi-modal approaches for reliable UAV localization. By filling a critical gap in agricultural SLAM datasets, AgriLiRa4D provides a valuable benchmark for the research community and contributes to advancing autonomous navigation technologies for agricultural UAVs. The dataset can be downloaded from: https://zhan994.github.io/AgriLiRa4D.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

BaboonLand Dataset: Tracking Primates in the Wild and Automating Behaviour Recognition from Drone Videos

Using drones to track multiple individuals simultaneously in their natural environment is a powerful approach for better understanding group primate behavior. Previous studies have demonstrated that it is possible to automate the classification of primate behavior from video data, but these studies have been carried out in captivity or from ground-based cameras. To understand group behavior and the self-organization of a collective, the whole troop needs to be seen at a scale where behavior can be seen in relation to the natural environment in which ecological decisions are made. This study presents a novel dataset from drone videos for baboon detection, tracking, and behavior recognition. The baboon detection dataset was created by manually annotating all baboons in drone videos with bounding boxes. A tiling method was subsequently applied to create a pyramid of images at various scales from the original 5.3K resolution images, resulting in approximately 30K images used for baboon detection. The tracking dataset is derived from the detection dataset, where all bounding boxes are assigned the same ID throughout the video. This process resulted in half an hour of very dense tracking data. The behavior recognition dataset was generated by converting tracks into mini-scenes, a video subregion centered on each animal; each mini-scene was manually annotated with 12 distinct behavior types, resulting in over 20 hours of data. Benchmark results show mean average precision (mAP) of 92.62\% for the YOLOv8-X detection model, multiple object tracking precision (MOTA) of 63.81\% for the BotSort tracking algorithm, and micro top-1 accuracy of 63.97\% for the X3D behavior recognition model. Using deep learning to classify wildlife behavior from drone footage facilitates non-invasive insight into the collective behavior of an entire group.

  • 12 authors
·
May 27, 2024

Zenseact Open Dataset: A large-scale and diverse multimodal dataset for autonomous driving

Existing datasets for autonomous driving (AD) often lack diversity and long-range capabilities, focusing instead on 360{\deg} perception and temporal reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce Zenseact Open Dataset (ZOD), a large-scale and diverse multimodal dataset collected over two years in various European countries, covering an area 9x that of existing datasets. ZOD boasts the highest range and resolution sensors among comparable datasets, coupled with detailed keyframe annotations for 2D and 3D objects (up to 245m), road instance/semantic segmentation, traffic sign recognition, and road classification. We believe that this unique combination will facilitate breakthroughs in long-range perception and multi-task learning. The dataset is composed of Frames, Sequences, and Drives, designed to encompass both data diversity and support for spatio-temporal learning, sensor fusion, localization, and mapping. Frames consist of 100k curated camera images with two seconds of other supporting sensor data, while the 1473 Sequences and 29 Drives include the entire sensor suite for 20 seconds and a few minutes, respectively. ZOD is the only large-scale AD dataset released under a permissive license, allowing for both research and commercial use. The dataset is accompanied by an extensive development kit. Data and more information are available online (https://zod.zenseact.com).

  • 10 authors
·
May 3, 2023

EVPropNet: Detecting Drones By Finding Propellers For Mid-Air Landing And Following

The rapid rise of accessibility of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones pose a threat to general security and confidentiality. Most of the commercially available or custom-built drones are multi-rotors and are comprised of multiple propellers. Since these propellers rotate at a high-speed, they are generally the fastest moving parts of an image and cannot be directly "seen" by a classical camera without severe motion blur. We utilize a class of sensors that are particularly suitable for such scenarios called event cameras, which have a high temporal resolution, low-latency, and high dynamic range. In this paper, we model the geometry of a propeller and use it to generate simulated events which are used to train a deep neural network called EVPropNet to detect propellers from the data of an event camera. EVPropNet directly transfers to the real world without any fine-tuning or retraining. We present two applications of our network: (a) tracking and following an unmarked drone and (b) landing on a near-hover drone. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate the proposed approach in many real-world experiments with different propeller shapes and sizes. Our network can detect propellers at a rate of 85.1% even when 60% of the propeller is occluded and can run at upto 35Hz on a 2W power budget. To our knowledge, this is the first deep learning-based solution for detecting propellers (to detect drones). Finally, our applications also show an impressive success rate of 92% and 90% for the tracking and landing tasks respectively.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 28, 2021

Probabilistic Hyper-Graphs using Multiple Randomly Masked Autoencoders for Semi-supervised Multi-modal Multi-task Learning

The computer vision domain has greatly benefited from an abundance of data across many modalities to improve on various visual tasks. Recently, there has been a lot of focus on self-supervised pre-training methods through Masked Autoencoders (MAE) he2022masked,bachmann2022multimae, usually used as a first step before optimizing for a downstream task, such as classification or regression. This is very useful as it doesn't require any manually labeled data. In this work, we introduce Probabilistic Hyper-Graphs using Masked Autoencoders (PHG-MAE): a novel model that unifies the classical work on neural graphs leordeanu2021semi with the modern approach of masked autoencoders under a common theoretical framework. Through random masking of entire modalities, not just patches, the model samples from the distribution of hyper-edges on each forward pass. Additionally, the model adapts the standard MAE algorithm by combining pre-training and fine-tuning into a single training loop. Moreover, our approach enables the creation of inference-time ensembles which, through aggregation, boost the final prediction performance and consistency. Lastly, we show that we can apply knowledge distillation on top of the ensembles with little loss in performance, even with models that have fewer than 1M parameters. While our work mostly focuses on outdoor UAV scenes that contain multiple world interpretations and modalities, the same steps can be followed in other similar domains, such as autonomous driving or indoor robotics. In order to streamline the process of integrating external pre-trained experts for computer vision multi-modal multi-task learning (MTL) scenarios, we developed a data-pipeline software. Using this tool, we have created and released a fully-automated extension of the Dronescapes dataset. All the technical details, code and reproduction steps are publicly released.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 11, 2025

Learning on the Fly: Replay-Based Continual Object Perception for Indoor Drones

Autonomous agents such as indoor drones must learn new object classes in real-time while limiting catastrophic forgetting, motivating Class-Incremental Learning (CIL). However, most unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) datasets focus on outdoor scenes and offer limited temporally coherent indoor videos. We introduce an indoor dataset of 14,400 frames capturing inter-drone and ground vehicle footage, annotated via a semi-automatic workflow with a 98.6% first-pass labeling agreement before final manual verification. Using this dataset, we benchmark 3 replay-based CIL strategies: Experience Replay (ER), Maximally Interfered Retrieval (MIR), and Forgetting-Aware Replay (FAR), using YOLOv11-nano as a resource-efficient detector for deployment-constrained UAV platforms. Under tight memory budgets (5-10% replay), FAR performs better than the rest, achieving an average accuracy (ACC, mAP_{50-95} across increments) of 82.96% with 5% replay. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) analysis shows attention shifts across classes in mixed scenes, which is associated with reduced localization quality for drones. The experiments further demonstrate that replay-based continual learning can be effectively applied to edge aerial systems. Overall, this work contributes an indoor UAV video dataset with preserved temporal coherence and an evaluation of replay-based CIL under limited replay budgets. Project page: https://spacetime-vision-robotics-laboratory.github.io/learning-on-the-fly-cl

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 13

Machine Learning for UAV Propeller Fault Detection based on a Hybrid Data Generation Model

This paper describes the development of an on-board data-driven system that can monitor and localize the fault in a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and at the same time, evaluate the degree of damage of the fault under real scenarios. To achieve offline training data generation, a hybrid approach is proposed for the development of a virtual data-generative model using a combination of data-driven models as well as well-established dynamic models that describe the kinematics of the UAV. To effectively represent the drop in performance of a faulty propeller, a variation of the deep neural network, a LSTM network is proposed. With the RPM of the propeller as input and based on the fault condition of the propeller, the proposed propeller model estimates the resultant torque and thrust. Then, flight datasets of the UAV under various fault scenarios are generated via simulation using the developed data-generative model. Lastly, a fault classifier using a CNN model is proposed to identify as well as evaluate the degree of damage to the damaged propeller. The scope of this paper focuses on the identification of faulty propellers and classification of the fault level for quadrotor UAVs using RPM as well as flight data. Doing so allows for early minor fault detection to prevent serious faults from occurring if the fault is left unrepaired. To further validate the workability of this approach outside of simulation, a real-flight test is conducted indoors. The real flight data is collected and a simulation to real sim-real test is conducted. Due to the imperfections in the build of our experimental UAV, a slight calibration approach to our simulation model is further proposed and the experimental results obtained show that our trained model can identify the location of propeller fault as well as the degree/type of damage. Currently, the diagnosis accuracy on the testing set is over 80%.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 3, 2023

Real-Time Dynamic Scale-Aware Fusion Detection Network: Take Road Damage Detection as an example

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based Road Damage Detection (RDD) is important for daily maintenance and safety in cities, especially in terms of significantly reducing labor costs. However, current UAV-based RDD research is still faces many challenges. For example, the damage with irregular size and direction, the masking of damage by the background, and the difficulty of distinguishing damage from the background significantly affect the ability of UAV to detect road damage in daily inspection. To solve these problems and improve the performance of UAV in real-time road damage detection, we design and propose three corresponding modules: a feature extraction module that flexibly adapts to shape and background; a module that fuses multiscale perception and adapts to shape and background ; an efficient downsampling module. Based on these modules, we designed a multi-scale, adaptive road damage detection model with the ability to automatically remove background interference, called Dynamic Scale-Aware Fusion Detection Model (RT-DSAFDet). Experimental results on the UAV-PDD2023 public dataset show that our model RT-DSAFDet achieves a mAP50 of 54.2%, which is 11.1% higher than that of YOLOv10-m, an efficient variant of the latest real-time object detection model YOLOv10, while the amount of parameters is reduced to 1.8M and FLOPs to 4.6G, with a decreased by 88% and 93%, respectively. Furthermore, on the large generalized object detection public dataset MS COCO2017 also shows the superiority of our model with mAP50-95 is the same as YOLOv9-t, but with 0.5% higher mAP50, 10% less parameters volume, and 40% less FLOPs.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024

FlightScope: An Experimental Comparative Review of Aircraft Detection Algorithms in Satellite Imagery

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 3, 2024

MEVA: A Large-Scale Multiview, Multimodal Video Dataset for Activity Detection

We present the Multiview Extended Video with Activities (MEVA) dataset, a new and very-large-scale dataset for human activity recognition. Existing security datasets either focus on activity counts by aggregating public video disseminated due to its content, which typically excludes same-scene background video, or they achieve persistence by observing public areas and thus cannot control for activity content. Our dataset is over 9300 hours of untrimmed, continuous video, scripted to include diverse, simultaneous activities, along with spontaneous background activity. We have annotated 144 hours for 37 activity types, marking bounding boxes of actors and props. Our collection observed approximately 100 actors performing scripted scenarios and spontaneous background activity over a three-week period at an access-controlled venue, collecting in multiple modalities with overlapping and non-overlapping indoor and outdoor viewpoints. The resulting data includes video from 38 RGB and thermal IR cameras, 42 hours of UAV footage, as well as GPS locations for the actors. 122 hours of annotation are sequestered in support of the NIST Activity in Extended Video (ActEV) challenge; the other 22 hours of annotation and the corresponding video are available on our website, along with an additional 306 hours of ground camera data, 4.6 hours of UAV data, and 9.6 hours of GPS logs. Additional derived data includes camera models geo-registering the outdoor cameras and a dense 3D point cloud model of the outdoor scene. The data was collected with IRB oversight and approval and released under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 1, 2020

University-1652: A Multi-view Multi-source Benchmark for Drone-based Geo-localization

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.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 27, 2020

Coconut Palm Tree Counting on Drone Images with Deep Object Detection and Synthetic Training Data

Drones have revolutionized various domains, including agriculture. Recent advances in deep learning have propelled among other things object detection in computer vision. This study utilized YOLO, a real-time object detector, to identify and count coconut palm trees in Ghanaian farm drone footage. The farm presented has lost track of its trees due to different planting phases. While manual counting would be very tedious and error-prone, accurately determining the number of trees is crucial for efficient planning and management of agricultural processes, especially for optimizing yields and predicting production. We assessed YOLO for palm detection within a semi-automated framework, evaluated accuracy augmentations, and pondered its potential for farmers. Data was captured in September 2022 via drones. To optimize YOLO with scarce data, synthetic images were created for model training and validation. The YOLOv7 model, pretrained on the COCO dataset (excluding coconut palms), was adapted using tailored data. Trees from footage were repositioned on synthetic images, with testing on distinct authentic images. In our experiments, we adjusted hyperparameters, improving YOLO's mean average precision (mAP). We also tested various altitudes to determine the best drone height. From an initial mAP@.5 of 0.65, we achieved 0.88, highlighting the value of synthetic images in agricultural scenarios.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024

Object Detection as an Optional Basis: A Graph Matching Network for Cross-View UAV Localization

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.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025

Multiview Aerial Visual Recognition (MAVREC): Can Multi-view Improve Aerial Visual Perception?

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 7, 2023

GrowliFlower: An image time series dataset for GROWth analysis of cauLIFLOWER

This article presents GrowliFlower, a georeferenced, image-based UAV time series dataset of two monitored cauliflower fields of size 0.39 and 0.60 ha acquired in 2020 and 2021. The dataset contains RGB and multispectral orthophotos from which about 14,000 individual plant coordinates are derived and provided. The coordinates enable the dataset users the extraction of complete and incomplete time series of image patches showing individual plants. The dataset contains collected phenotypic traits of 740 plants, including the developmental stage as well as plant and cauliflower size. As the harvestable product is completely covered by leaves, plant IDs and coordinates are provided to extract image pairs of plants pre and post defoliation, to facilitate estimations of cauliflower head size. Moreover, the dataset contains pixel-accurate leaf and plant instance segmentations, as well as stem annotations to address tasks like classification, detection, segmentation, instance segmentation, and similar computer vision tasks. The dataset aims to foster the development and evaluation of machine learning approaches. It specifically focuses on the analysis of growth and development of cauliflower and the derivation of phenotypic traits to foster the development of automation in agriculture. Two baseline results of instance segmentation at plant and leaf level based on the labeled instance segmentation data are presented. The entire data set is publicly available.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 1, 2022

NUDT4MSTAR: A New Dataset and Benchmark Towards SAR Target Recognition in the Wild

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) stands as an indispensable sensor for Earth observation, owing to its unique capability for all-day imaging. Nevertheless, in a data-driven era, the scarcity of large-scale datasets poses a significant bottleneck to advancing SAR automatic target recognition (ATR) technology. This paper introduces NUDT4MSTAR, a large-scale SAR dataset for vehicle target recognition in the wild, including 40 target types and a wide array of imaging conditions across 5 different scenes. NUDT4MSTAR represents a significant leap forward in dataset scale, containing over 190,000 images-tenfold the size of its predecessors. To enhance the utility of this dataset, we meticulously annotate each image with detailed target information and imaging conditions. We also provide data in both processed magnitude images and original complex formats. Then, we construct a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 7 experiments with 15 recognition methods focusing on the stable and effective ATR issues. Besides, we conduct transfer learning experiments utilizing various models trained on NUDT4MSTAR and applied to three other target datasets, thereby demonstrating its substantial potential to the broader field of ground objects ATR. Finally, we discuss this dataset's application value and ATR's significant challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this work marks the first-ever endeavor to create a large-scale dataset benchmark for fine-grained SAR recognition in the wild, featuring an extensive collection of exhaustively annotated vehicle images. We expect that the open source of NUDT4MSTAR will facilitate the development of SAR ATR and attract a wider community of researchers.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 22, 2025

Falcon: A Remote Sensing Vision-Language Foundation Model (Technical Report)

This paper introduces a holistic vision-language foundation model tailored for remote sensing, named Falcon. Falcon offers a unified, prompt-based paradigm that effectively executes comprehensive and complex remote sensing tasks. Falcon demonstrates powerful understanding and reasoning abilities at the image, region, and pixel levels. Specifically, given simple natural language instructions and remote sensing images, Falcon can produce impressive results in text form across 14 distinct tasks, i.e., image classification, object detection, segmentation, image captioning, and etc. To facilitate Falcon's training and empower its representation capacity to encode rich spatial and semantic information, we developed Falcon_SFT, a large-scale, multi-task, instruction-tuning dataset in the field of remote sensing. The Falcon_SFT dataset consists of approximately 78 million high-quality data samples, covering 5.6 million multi-spatial resolution and multi-view remote sensing images with diverse instructions. It features hierarchical annotations and undergoes manual sampling verification to ensure high data quality and reliability. Extensive comparative experiments are conducted, which verify that Falcon achieves remarkable performance over 67 datasets and 14 tasks, despite having only 0.7B parameters. We release the complete dataset, code, and model weights at https://github.com/TianHuiLab/Falcon, hoping to help further develop the open-source community.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 14, 2025

MIDV-500: A Dataset for Identity Documents Analysis and Recognition on Mobile Devices in Video Stream

A lot of research has been devoted to identity documents analysis and recognition on mobile devices. However, no publicly available datasets designed for this particular problem currently exist. There are a few datasets which are useful for associated subtasks but in order to facilitate a more comprehensive scientific and technical approach to identity document recognition more specialized datasets are required. In this paper we present a Mobile Identity Document Video dataset (MIDV-500) consisting of 500 video clips for 50 different identity document types with ground truth which allows to perform research in a wide scope of document analysis problems. The paper presents characteristics of the dataset and evaluation results for existing methods of face detection, text line recognition, and document fields data extraction. Since an important feature of identity documents is their sensitiveness as they contain personal data, all source document images used in MIDV-500 are either in public domain or distributed under public copyright licenses. The main goal of this paper is to present a dataset. However, in addition and as a baseline, we present evaluation results for existing methods for face detection, text line recognition, and document data extraction, using the presented dataset. (The dataset is available for download at ftp://smartengines.com/midv-500/.)

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 16, 2018

STPLS3D: A Large-Scale Synthetic and Real Aerial Photogrammetry 3D Point Cloud Dataset

Although various 3D datasets with different functions and scales have been proposed recently, it remains challenging for individuals to complete the whole pipeline of large-scale data collection, sanitization, and annotation. Moreover, the created datasets usually suffer from extremely imbalanced class distribution or partial low-quality data samples. Motivated by this, we explore the procedurally synthetic 3D data generation paradigm to equip individuals with the full capability of creating large-scale annotated photogrammetry point clouds. Specifically, we introduce a synthetic aerial photogrammetry point clouds generation pipeline that takes full advantage of open geospatial data sources and off-the-shelf commercial packages. Unlike generating synthetic data in virtual games, where the simulated data usually have limited gaming environments created by artists, the proposed pipeline simulates the reconstruction process of the real environment by following the same UAV flight pattern on different synthetic terrain shapes and building densities, which ensure similar quality, noise pattern, and diversity with real data. In addition, the precise semantic and instance annotations can be generated fully automatically, avoiding the expensive and time-consuming manual annotation. Based on the proposed pipeline, we present a richly-annotated synthetic 3D aerial photogrammetry point cloud dataset, termed STPLS3D, with more than 16 km^2 of landscapes and up to 18 fine-grained semantic categories. For verification purposes, we also provide a parallel dataset collected from four areas in the real environment. Extensive experiments conducted on our datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and quality of the proposed synthetic dataset.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 16, 2022

SyMTRS: Benchmark Multi-Task Synthetic Dataset for Depth, Domain Adaptation and Super-Resolution in Aerial Imagery

Recent advances in deep learning for remote sensing rely heavily on large annotated datasets, yet acquiring high-quality ground truth for geometric, radiometric, and multi-domain tasks remains costly and often infeasible. In particular, the lack of accurate depth annotations, controlled illumination variations, and multi-scale paired imagery limits progress in monocular depth estimation, domain adaptation, and super-resolution for aerial scenes. We present SyMTRS, a large-scale synthetic dataset generated using a high-fidelity urban simulation pipeline. The dataset provides high-resolution RGB aerial imagery (2048 x 2048), pixel-perfect depth maps, night-time counterparts for domain adaptation, and aligned low-resolution variants for super-resolution at x2, x4, and x8 scales. Unlike existing remote sensing datasets that focus on a single task or modality, SyMTRS is designed as a unified multi-task benchmark enabling joint research in geometric understanding, cross-domain robustness, and resolution enhancement. We describe the dataset generation process, its statistical properties, and its positioning relative to existing benchmarks. SyMTRS aims to bridge critical gaps in remote sensing research by enabling controlled experiments with perfect geometric ground truth and consistent multi-domain supervision. The results obtained in this work can be reproduced from this Github repository: https://github.com/safouaneelg/SyMTRS.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 22

Adapting Vehicle Detectors for Aerial Imagery to Unseen Domains with Weak Supervision

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

ECOSoundSet: a finely annotated dataset for the automated acoustic identification of Orthoptera and Cicadidae in North, Central and temperate Western Europe

Currently available tools for the automated acoustic recognition of European insects in natural soundscapes are limited in scope. Large and ecologically heterogeneous acoustic datasets are currently needed for these algorithms to cross-contextually recognize the subtle and complex acoustic signatures produced by each species, thus making the availability of such datasets a key requisite for their development. Here we present ECOSoundSet (European Cicadidae and Orthoptera Sound dataSet), a dataset containing 10,653 recordings of 200 orthopteran and 24 cicada species (217 and 26 respective taxa when including subspecies) present in North, Central, and temperate Western Europe (Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, mainland France and Corsica, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Switzerland), collected partly through targeted fieldwork in South France and Catalonia and partly through contributions from various European entomologists. The dataset is composed of a combination of coarsely labeled recordings, for which we can only infer the presence, at some point, of their target species (weak labeling), and finely annotated recordings, for which we know the specific time and frequency range of each insect sound present in the recording (strong labeling). We also provide a train/validation/test split of the strongly labeled recordings, with respective approximate proportions of 0.8, 0.1 and 0.1, in order to facilitate their incorporation in the training and evaluation of deep learning algorithms. This dataset could serve as a meaningful complement to recordings already available online for the training of deep learning algorithms for the acoustic classification of orthopterans and cicadas in North, Central, and temperate Western Europe.

  • 26 authors
·
Apr 29, 2025

Insect-Foundation: A Foundation Model and Large-scale 1M Dataset for Visual Insect Understanding

In precision agriculture, the detection and recognition of insects play an essential role in the ability of crops to grow healthy and produce a high-quality yield. The current machine vision model requires a large volume of data to achieve high performance. However, there are approximately 5.5 million different insect species in the world. None of the existing insect datasets can cover even a fraction of them due to varying geographic locations and acquisition costs. In this paper, we introduce a novel ``Insect-1M'' dataset, a game-changing resource poised to revolutionize insect-related foundation model training. Covering a vast spectrum of insect species, our dataset, including 1 million images with dense identification labels of taxonomy hierarchy and insect descriptions, offers a panoramic view of entomology, enabling foundation models to comprehend visual and semantic information about insects like never before. Then, to efficiently establish an Insect Foundation Model, we develop a micro-feature self-supervised learning method with a Patch-wise Relevant Attention mechanism capable of discerning the subtle differences among insect images. In addition, we introduce Description Consistency loss to improve micro-feature modeling via insect descriptions. Through our experiments, we illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in insect modeling and achieve State-of-the-Art performance on standard benchmarks of insect-related tasks. Our Insect Foundation Model and Dataset promise to empower the next generation of insect-related vision models, bringing them closer to the ultimate goal of precision agriculture.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 26, 2023

StarCraftImage: A Dataset For Prototyping Spatial Reasoning Methods For Multi-Agent Environments

Spatial reasoning tasks in multi-agent environments such as event prediction, agent type identification, or missing data imputation are important for multiple applications (e.g., autonomous surveillance over sensor networks and subtasks for reinforcement learning (RL)). StarCraft II game replays encode intelligent (and adversarial) multi-agent behavior and could provide a testbed for these tasks; however, extracting simple and standardized representations for prototyping these tasks is laborious and hinders reproducibility. In contrast, MNIST and CIFAR10, despite their extreme simplicity, have enabled rapid prototyping and reproducibility of ML methods. Following the simplicity of these datasets, we construct a benchmark spatial reasoning dataset based on StarCraft II replays that exhibit complex multi-agent behaviors, while still being as easy to use as MNIST and CIFAR10. Specifically, we carefully summarize a window of 255 consecutive game states to create 3.6 million summary images from 60,000 replays, including all relevant metadata such as game outcome and player races. We develop three formats of decreasing complexity: Hyperspectral images that include one channel for every unit type (similar to multispectral geospatial images), RGB images that mimic CIFAR10, and grayscale images that mimic MNIST. We show how this dataset can be used for prototyping spatial reasoning methods. All datasets, code for extraction, and code for dataset loading can be found at https://starcraftdata.davidinouye.com

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 8, 2024

Captain Safari: A World Engine

World engines aim to synthesize long, 3D-consistent videos that support interactive exploration of a scene under user-controlled camera motion. However, existing systems struggle under aggressive 6-DoF trajectories and complex outdoor layouts: they lose long-range geometric coherence, deviate from the target path, or collapse into overly conservative motion. To this end, we introduce Captain Safari, a pose-conditioned world engine that generates videos by retrieving from a persistent world memory. Given a camera path, our method maintains a dynamic local memory and uses a retriever to fetch pose-aligned world tokens, which then condition video generation along the trajectory. This design enables the model to maintain stable 3D structure while accurately executing challenging camera maneuvers. To evaluate this setting, we curate OpenSafari, a new in-the-wild FPV dataset containing high-dynamic drone videos with verified camera trajectories, constructed through a multi-stage geometric and kinematic validation pipeline. Across video quality, 3D consistency, and trajectory following, Captain Safari substantially outperforms state-of-the-art camera-controlled generators. It reduces MEt3R from 0.3703 to 0.3690, improves AUC@30 from 0.181 to 0.200, and yields substantially lower FVD than all camera-controlled baselines. More importantly, in a 50-participant, 5-way human study where annotators select the best result among five anonymized models, 67.6% of preferences favor our method across all axes. Our results demonstrate that pose-conditioned world memory is a powerful mechanism for long-horizon, controllable video generation and provide OpenSafari as a challenging new benchmark for future world-engine research.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 27, 2025 2

ClaraVid: A Holistic Scene Reconstruction Benchmark From Aerial Perspective With Delentropy-Based Complexity Profiling

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}.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 22, 2025

Video2BEV: Transforming Drone Videos to BEVs for Video-based Geo-localization

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 19, 2024

VegaEdge: Edge AI Confluence Anomaly Detection for Real-Time Highway IoT-Applications

Vehicle anomaly detection plays a vital role in highway safety applications such as accident prevention, rapid response, traffic flow optimization, and work zone safety. With the surge of the Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years, there has arisen a pressing demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) based anomaly detection methods designed to meet the requirements of IoT devices. Catering to this futuristic vision, we introduce a lightweight approach to vehicle anomaly detection by utilizing the power of trajectory prediction. Our proposed design identifies vehicles deviating from expected paths, indicating highway risks from different camera-viewing angles from real-world highway datasets. On top of that, we present VegaEdge - a sophisticated AI confluence designed for real-time security and surveillance applications in modern highway settings through edge-centric IoT-embedded platforms equipped with our anomaly detection approach. Extensive testing across multiple platforms and traffic scenarios showcases the versatility and effectiveness of VegaEdge. This work also presents the Carolinas Anomaly Dataset (CAD), to bridge the existing gap in datasets tailored for highway anomalies. In real-world scenarios, our anomaly detection approach achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.94, and our proposed VegaEdge design, on an embedded IoT platform, processes 738 trajectories per second in a typical highway setting. The dataset is available at https://github.com/TeCSAR-UNCC/Carolinas_Dataset#chd-anomaly-test-set .

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 13, 2023

AeroGen: Enhancing Remote Sensing Object Detection with Diffusion-Driven Data Generation

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.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 23, 2024

Is your VLM Sky-Ready? A Comprehensive Spatial Intelligence Benchmark for UAV Navigation

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.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 17, 2025

SOUS VIDE: Cooking Visual Drone Navigation Policies in a Gaussian Splatting Vacuum

We propose a new simulator, training approach, and policy architecture, collectively called SOUS VIDE, for end-to-end visual drone navigation. Our trained policies exhibit zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with robust real-world performance using only onboard perception and computation. Our simulator, called FiGS, couples a computationally simple drone dynamics model with a high visual fidelity Gaussian Splatting scene reconstruction. FiGS can quickly simulate drone flights producing photorealistic images at up to 130 fps. We use FiGS to collect 100k-300k image/state-action pairs from an expert MPC with privileged state and dynamics information, randomized over dynamics parameters and spatial disturbances. We then distill this expert MPC into an end-to-end visuomotor policy with a lightweight neural architecture, called SV-Net. SV-Net processes color image, optical flow and IMU data streams into low-level thrust and body rate commands at 20 Hz onboard a drone. Crucially, SV-Net includes a learned module for low-level control that adapts at runtime to variations in drone dynamics. In a campaign of 105 hardware experiments, we show SOUS VIDE policies to be robust to 30% mass variations, 40 m/s wind gusts, 60% changes in ambient brightness, shifting or removing objects from the scene, and people moving aggressively through the drone's visual field. Code, data, and experiment videos can be found on our project page: https://stanfordmsl.github.io/SousVide/.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 20, 2024