Unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to restrict civilian access, agricultural activity, infrastructure recovery, and environmental remediation in contaminated areas around the world. This study created a multi campaign UAV thermal image data set of inert ordnance, developed a labeled image set from collected imagery, tested object detection models, and identified practical considerations for humanitarian mine action and demining applications. Data were collected during four field campaigns in Tennessee under summer and winter conditions using inert mines, munitions, and other ordnance placed in short grass, tall vegetation, gravel, mulch, rock, compost, and compacted surfaces. Thermal imagery was collected under flight altitutes of 33 m and 15 m. The final source inventory contained 5,855 thermal image label pairs, including 918 positive images and 4,937 background images. After retaining all positive images and downsampling background images, the 33 m dataset contained 420 training and 106 validation images, while the 15 m dataset contained 629 training and 157 validation images. YOLOV11l and RT-DETR-R50 algorithms were trained and evaluated to develop an automated candidate detection model. Practical recommendations include collecting thermal and RGB imagery together, incorporating varied surfaces and background only imagery, considering periods following changes in solar exposure, balancing survey coverage against target pixel representation, calibrating models with representative local data, and retaining qualified human review. The intended use is screening and prioritization for follow on technical survey or EOD assessment, and not a standalone clearance.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increasingly require robust visual localization in GNSS-denied environments. A common solution estimates UAV poses by matching keypoints between UAV images and geo-tagged orthographic reference maps derived from satellite or aerial imagery, followed by Perspective-\(n\)-Point (PnP) pose solving. However, such reference maps mainly record top-down surfaces such as roofs and ground planes, while vertical structures such as facades and walls are often compressed or missing. Consequently, many visually distinctive keypoints in low-altitude UAV images have no valid counterparts in the reference map, leading to redundant matches and inaccurate pose estimation. To address this issue, we propose DECO, a DEpth-guided CO-visibility reasoning framework for low-altitude UAV visual localization. DECO uses monocular depth priors to infer local surface geometry and estimate co-visible regions between UAV images and the reference map. Based on this prior, a Geometry-Saliency Coupled Co-visibility Score is introduced to jointly consider geometric co-visibility and detector saliency for keypoint ranking. In this way, DECO retains keypoints that are both visually distinctive and geometrically co-visible, improving feature matching and PnP-based pose estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECO achieves superior localization performance and can be integrated with different depth models, feature detectors, and matchers. The source code will be available at https://github.com/UAV-AVL/DECO.
Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely employed in understanding and reasoning tasks for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Existing UAV benchmarks primarily focus on aerial-view scenarios. However, whether current VLMs can perform well on understanding and reasoning tasks in aerial-ground collaborative scenarios which are practical in real-world applications like rescue and infrastructure inspection remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AeroGround, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs in aerial-ground collaborative reasoning. AeroGround is built upon a simulated aerial-ground dataset containing approximately 29,000 multimodal observation groups from diverse open environments, and provides 2,250 high-quality question-answering instances covering cross-view correspondence, spatial understanding, and reasoning. Experiments on 16 pretrained VLMs, together with two domain-adapted variants, reveal a substantial gap between current models and human performance: the best model achieves an average accuracy of 54.4%, whereas humans reach 93.3%. By systematically revealing the strengths and limitations of existing models in aerial-ground collaborative reasoning, AeroGround provides a foundation for developing more capable aerial-ground collaborative embodied intelligence systems.
UAV vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) focuses on enabling an aerial agent to follow natural-language instructions in open 3D environments from egocentric visual observations. Current approaches suffer from three coupled issues: weak grounding of instruction-relevant landmarks in visual observations, insufficient exploitation of long-horizon history, and unstable decisions under local traps or repeated exploration. To address these issues, we propose a unified semantic-to-decision framework. First, we present an instruction-grounded semantic enhancement module that injects object-level semantics and relative spatial cues into the current observation state. Subsequently, we develop a relevance-aware dynamic temporal aggregation strategy that reweights the full history buffer while converting a few high-relevance frames into structured landmark prompts for the decoder. Finally, we devise a topology-aware decision method that combines local-optimum cognition with group-relative policy optimization under progress, goal, semantic, and path-compliance rewards. Experiments on the widely used AerialVLN and OpenFly benchmarks clearly demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Unmanned aerial vehicle vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) requires agents to translate visual observations and language instructions into reliable flight actions in complex environments. Although recent end-to-end UAV vision-language-action (UAV-VLA) policies reduce reliance on separately designed perception, planning, and control modules, their behavior-cloning objectives provide limited corrective supervision for interactive closed-loop execution. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising solution, while its effectiveness is constrained by inefficient use of samples, long-tailed scene distributions, and policy distribution shift during optimization. To this end, we propose RecoverFly, a failure-aware RL post-training framework for end-to-end UAV-VLA policies. Specifically, RecoverFly adapts token-level RL for stable optimization of grammar-constrained autoregressive UAV actions, revisits unresolved failure cases to strengthen corrective learning and sample utilization, and combines a two-stage long-tail scene curriculum with reference-policy regularization to improve scene adaptation while preserving acquired capabilities. Experiments on the TravelUAV benchmark demonstrate that RecoverFly achieves the best performance on the seen, unseen-map, and unseen-object splits. Moreover, compared to the AerialVLA initialization, RecoverFly improves success rate by 3.12 to 8.37 percentage points under a total rollout budget of about 30\% of the training-set size, validating its effectiveness, robustness, and generalization capabilities.
Ghadeer Elmkaiel, Michael Muehlebachcs.RO cs.AI eess.SY
The development and testing of advanced aerial robots require experiments in controlled environments with tailored airflow profiles. This paper presents an online learning algorithm for controlling the complex airflow field in a multi-fan vertical wind tunnel. Our method combines a simplified physical model with iterative, measurement-based learning, enabling sample-efficient convergence to desired airflow distributions. We demonstrate the method's versatility by generating complex airflow, such as uniform, Gaussian, and parabolic profiles. Crucially, we show that our algorithm can produce an airflow profile specifically designed for passive soaring, greatly enhancing flight performance of a soaring robot. Variability, practical utility, and robustness of our approach are further highlighted by successful operation with a varying number of fans.
Boyang Xu, Mostafa Reisi Gahrooei, Mohammad Ilbeigi +1cs.LG
Natural disasters frequently inflict severe damage to the built environment, which demands a rapid, reliable, and cost-effective damage assessment for emergency response. However, traditional methods for post-disaster damage assessment often rely on static, labor-intensive data collection strategies that can be prohibitively expensive and struggle to adapt to dynamic post-disaster conditions. In this study, we propose a cost-aware Bayesian optimization framework combined with level-set estimation that continuously guides autonomous data collectors, e.g., an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), toward the most informative regions. By dynamically updating damage estimates across different geographic zones, our approach systematically reduces uncertainty while minimizing operational costs. The proposed framework is first validated using a controlled synthetic toy study, demonstrating the agent's ability to efficiently trace damage boundaries, recover the underlying damage map, and rapidly reduce predictive uncertainty. Furthermore, the approach is evaluated using high-fidelity disaster data generated by the Regional Resilience Determination (R2D) software. The results of the algorithm provide accurate and timely damage estimates that support informative and fast emergency response.
Eduardo de los Santos, Andre S. Kelbouscas, Ricardo B. Grando +1cs.CV cs.RO
The development of vision-based wildfire detection systems for unmanned aerial vehicles is constrained by the limited availability of diverse real-world training images. This paper investigates the impact of dataset composition on embedded real-time UAV wildfire detection using compact YOLO models as a controlled validation family. Four training configurations were evaluated: real non-augmented, real augmented, hybrid non-augmented, and hybrid augmented, where the hybrid sets combine real wildfire images with AI-generated samples. The objective is to determine whether synthetic data mixing and image augmentation improve practical detection performance under resource-constrained deployment conditions. Experimental results show that the best overall operating point was obtained with the real non-augmented dataset, which achieved the strongest balance between recall and mean average precision for UAV-based wildfire detection. The results also show that neither hybridization with synthetic data nor augmentation produced a better final deployment choice. These findings suggest that, for embedded UAV wildfire detection, dataset realism and domain alignment are more valuable than increasing training set size through synthetic expansion.
Recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have created new opportunities for disaster response, where responders must interpret large volumes of sensor data under time pressure. Current VLM applications include social media monitoring for situational awareness, generation of draft action plans, and translation of technical alerts into public-facing messages. While these efforts can accelerate information flow, they remain largely limited to decision-support roles. Such approaches can increase operator burden because humans must still translate outputs into coordinated actions across teams and robotic assets. This study explores the viability of embedding VLMs as coordination agents within the human-UAV loop. The proposed architecture integrates natural language interaction, mission-level task coordination, software-in-the-loop implementation, and communication aligned with the Incident Command System (ICS). Rather than functioning solely as advisory tools, VLMs facilitate communication between human operators, mission control logic, and UAV task execution. The framework was developed using a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach, with use case and block definition diagrams representing system roles, internal structure, and component interactions. Three key elements, the VLM Coordinator Agent, UAV Mission Control, and Task Allocator, were implemented within an integrated simulation and control environment. A preliminary human-factors evaluation with seven participants showed reduced perceived workload across mental demand, effort, and frustration, along with high ratings for AI trust and communication clarity. By integrating MBSE, software-in-the-loop testing, and human-factors evaluation, this work advances scalable human-autonomy teaming for high-stakes disaster response, with broader implications for aerospace autonomy and civil safety.
Multi-agent planning problems arise in a variety of engineering applications, such as multi-robot wildfire fighting and unmanned aerial inspection in factories. A particular challenge is the existence of spatio-temporal (i.e., when and/or where an agent should do what) and topological constraints (i.e., how agents should interact), as typically formalized via the notion of graphs. Over the last years, various frameworks have been proposed that can capture such constraints via spatio-temporal logics. We focus here on spatio-temporal logic with graph operators (STL-GO), a recent formalism that supports reasoning about multiple agents and their topologies, such as sensing, communication, and task topologies. In this paper, we consider the problem of planning multi-agent paths that satisfy constraints written in STL-GO. This problem is particularly challenging due to the need of encoding multiple, potentially time-varying graphs via the graph operators inherent to STL-GO. We present two encodings of this problem, one based on mixed-integer programming (MIP) and another based on satisfiability modulo theory (SMT), with soundness guarantees. We provide a unified interface for specifying agent constraints, their graph topologies, and the STL-GO specification, enabling seamless use of both methods and facilitating direct comparison between them. We evaluate both encodings on a multi-UAV search-and-rescue benchmark, ablating over team size and graph complexity, highlighting the expressiveness of the proposed encodings under dynamic multi- graph interactions.
Sagar Lekhak, Prasanna Reddy Pulakurthi, Emmett J. Ientiluccics.CV eess.IV
Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is useful for material discrimination, but operational mine screening also depends on how many false alarms must be inspected before targets are found. This paper studies PFM-1 landmine detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) visible and near-infrared (VNIR) HSI using spectral angle mapper (SAM), matched filter (MF), adaptive coherence estimator (ACE), and constrained energy minimization (CEM). We compare a ground-measured SVC signature, a fully informed in-scene core-pixel signature, and a simulated human-in-the-loop signature bootstrap. Besides receiver operating characteristic area under the curve and average precision, we report target-discovery curves and spatial candidate-review counts. Full-review bootstrapping reaches the fully informed in-scene signature case after all seven target regions are verified, but the required inspection effort varies strongly: ACE confirms all regions in two rounds and nine candidate inspections, whereas the SAM variants need thousands of candidate reviews for their final target locations. Code is available at https://github.com/SagarLekhak/IEEE_WHISPERS_2026_UAV_HSI_PFM1.
Multi-view Multi-object Association and Tracking (MvMoAT) associates objects across camera views and tracks them over time, supporting identity persistence and forensic trajectory reconstruction in multi-platform cooperative perception. Unlike conventional multiple object tracking, MvMoAT faces frequent viewpoint shifts that distort appearance and undermine cross-view association and temporal tracking. We propose FUSION, a viewpoint-robust Feature Unification framework for multi-view aSsociation and IdentificatiON. Its Multi-cue Adaptive Combination (MAC) module adaptively integrates viewpoint-invariant cues with appearance features to improve cross-view association, while Online Multi-view Feature Synchronization (OMFS) aggregates pedestrian features across historical and cross-view frames for temporally consistent tracking. We also introduce RealMvMoAT, a large-scale benchmark featuring substantial inter- and intra-camera viewpoint variation. It contains 504.9K frames from 7 cameras (5 UAV and 2 ground views) across 10 scenes, with over 7.3M identity-labeled bounding boxes. All cameras exhibit random and substantial motion. To the best of our knowledge, RealMvMoAT is the largest MvMoAT dataset to date. Its scale, viewpoint diversity, complex platform motion, and realistic trajectories provide a comprehensive resource for future research. Experiments on RealMvMoAT and six public benchmarks show that FUSION achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Global visual localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using remote-sensing reference maps has attracted increasing attention. However, acquisition-time and imaging-platform differences between UAV and reference imagery induce substantial cross-domain appearance and viewpoint shifts, challenging robust six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation. We address these shifts by sampling UAV-viewpoint reference views from Google 3D Tiles across locations, altitudes, and orientations. A two-stage cross-domain fine-tuning recipe adapts SALAD using pose-near positives and geographically distant hard negatives, while local geometric consistency re-ranks the Top-K candidates. We further propose Retrieval-In-Matching (RIM), which freezes the adapted DINOv2-B retriever and distils a local-descriptor decoder that reuses its token field alongside a shallow VGG19 detail stream. One query-side DINOv2-B forward thus serves both SALAD retrieval and local description, eliminating a second foundation-model backbone while preserving retrieval descriptors by construction. We evaluate RIM zero-shot on the reconstructed EPFL Urbanscape and self-collected Chang'an Park datasets, both geographically disjoint from the training data. RIM outperforms ten recent retrieval baseline families. At 25/50 m under the full 3D distance metric, it improves Recall@1 over SALAD by 8.55/13.77 percentage points on EPFL and 4.45/8.94 points on Park. At Top-K=5, the complete measured localization query, including retrieval, candidate matching, and robust geometric verification, takes 67.9 ms end-to-end: 1.8 times faster than the strongest separate sparse-matching baseline and over 40 times faster than RoMa, while achieving comparable re-ranking accuracy. These results establish an efficient and deployable pipeline for UAV global visual localization in GNSS-challenged environments.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) object tracking has emerged as a popular research field with broad practical applications. Modern UAVs are increasingly equipped with both visible light and thermal infrared sensors. However, due to constraints in communication bandwidth, computational resources and power consumption, current systems often activate one modality and switch between modalities to maintain robust tracking in complex scenarios. Such modality switch inevitably leads to significant appearance change and sudden spatial shift, posing great challenges for existing tracking algorithms. To handle this problem, we propose a novel State-Aware Representation Learning Approach called SARLA, which perceives the inconsistent modality states of current frame with template and last frame in the target representations to adapt to the sudden changes in both appearance and position, for robust cross-modal object tracking. In particular, we propose the Modality State Aware Representation Module (MSARM) and Spatial State Aware Representation Module (SSARM). MSARM guides the model to learn appearance correlation, bridging the modality gap, while SSARM models cross-frame spatial correlation to mitigate sudden spatial shift impacts. In addition, we design a spatial shift prediction loss to further handle the effects of spatial variation caused by modality switch. To promote the development of this research field, we establish a large-scale video benchmark called CM-UOT, which consists of 1079 cross-modal sequences with an average video length greater than 621 frames and encompasses over 671K frames in total. Extensive experiments on CM-UOT dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed SARLA against 20 excellent tracking methods. The source code, datasets, and evaluation protocols associated with this work are publicly available at: https://github.com/hongsmile365/sarla-.
PairUAV relative localization maps two UAV images to a polar navigation command. Although heading and range share the same pairwise pose context, treating them as homogeneous coordinates forces both outputs to use the same decoder evidence and optimization state. Controlled readout probes reveal a different structure: the two axes favor different decoder-depth combinations, their best checkpoints disagree on 80.8% of a validation trajectory, and range errors exhibit a distinct high-error tail. We introduce method, Polar Axis-Conditioned Estimation, which retains a shared Reloc3r-style pair representation while assigning axis-specific readout interfaces. Heading uses mid/late relational evidence, whereas range remains attached to a direct late metric path. On the official hidden test, the strongest released raw predictor scores 0.002460; the complementary PAAER predictor scores 0.002514 with a slightly lower angle error. Deterministic challenge packaging, reported separately from learned estimation, yields the final score of 0.001874. Code, checkpoints, predictions, and reconstruction tools are available at https://github.com/zerong7777-boop/PairUAV-PACE.
Multimodal large language models have achieved strong performance across diverse vision-language tasks, yet their capabilities in UAV scenarios remain insufficiently explored. Recent UAV-oriented benchmarks have begun to evaluate MLLMs in aerial scenarios, but they typically focus on scene understanding, event recognition, or navigation completion, rather than jointly assessing the dual-cognition capability required for UAV agents: reasoning about both the UAV's own state and the external environment in multiview spatio-temporal contexts. To address this gap, we present UAV-DualCog, a benchmark for aerial multiview spatio-temporal reasoning built on this dual-cognition perspective. UAV-DualCog includes both image and video tasks to jointly evaluate self-state and environment-state reasoning, while requiring spatial or temporal grounding beyond discrete answer prediction. We also develop an automated pipeline that constructs data from scene-level semantic point clouds, yielding a scalable benchmark with diverse scenes, hundreds of landmarks, and thousands of QA samples. Extensive evaluations show that current MLLMs remain far from reliable in UAV dual cognition. Self-state reasoning, viewpoint transformation, precise spatial grounding, and temporal interval localization are persistent bottlenecks, and additional validation with thinking/frontier models and a human baseline confirms that the benchmark is understandable to humans but challenging for existing models. We further construct UAV-DualCog-Train from disjoint scenes and show through a lightweight optimization probe that it provides useful structured supervision, suggesting its value not only as an evaluation benchmark but also as a data resource for advancing MLLM-based UAV agents. Project website and supplementary materials: https://uav-dualcog.lozumi.com
Imitation learning (IL) has achieved remarkable success in complex decision-making tasks. However, its performance is highly sensitive to distribution shifts, which can pose significant safety risks. We propose a distributionally robust and safe IL framework that explicitly addresses both policy-induced and uncertainty-induced distribution shifts. Our approach develops a unified framework leveraging Taylor Series Imitation Learning (TaSIL) to mitigate policy-induced shifts and distributionally robust adaptive control to handle uncertainty-induced shifts. This architecture enables the formulation of an IL problem that optimizes performance under distributional uncertainty while systematically accounting for safety constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) case study where the UAV performs a task in an uncertain environment while avoiding unsafe regions.
Autonomous UAV systems increasingly rely on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to operate in complex real-world environments. Such embodied scenarios require not only understanding the surrounding space but also maintaining a coherent representation of the agent itself. However, existing UAV-oriented approaches and benchmarks remain largely environment-centric, primarily focusing on spatial understanding tasks, with the agent's self-awareness remaining implicit. To address this gap, we introduce SIS-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating embodied spatial intelligence in UAV scenarios under a unified self-in-space formulation. SIS-Bench organizes evaluation along two complementary dimensions, space and self, and a three-level hierarchy of perception, memory, and reasoning. It contains 4,856 question--answer pairs across 13 tasks derived from 1,646 real-world UAV videos through a task-conditioned construction pipeline with expert verification.Extensive evaluations reveal that current MLLMs exhibit fundamental limitations in modeling dynamic and agent-centered processes. In particular, we observe a clear imbalance between spatial cognition and self-awareness, as well as a progressive performance degradation across cognitive levels.Motivated by these findings, we further explore a motion-aware representation that incorporates self-related dynamics through optical flow and visual feature fusion. Experimental results show that modeling agent motion consistently improves perception and memory performance, not only in spatial cognition but also in self-awareness, and generalizes to downstream UAV decision-making tasks.Our results highlight the importance of self-awareness for advancing embodied spatial intelligence, and provide both a new benchmark and empirical evidence for motion-aware self-in-space modeling.
Leon-Friedrich Thomas, Mikael Änäkkälä, Antti Lajunencs.CV
Although self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising way to reduce annotation effort in close-range remote sensing, its effectiveness for high-resolution multispectral unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery remains underexplored due to limited data. This study evaluated SSL pretraining for precision agriculture using cm-scale multispectral drone imagery collected across multiple sensors, years, and regions. Transformer-based encoders were pretrained with Momentum Contrast v3 (MoCo-v3) and Masked Autoencoders on a harmonized dataset combining msuav500K with newly collected multi-year UAV imagery from agricultural fields in Finland. Pretraining used four spectral bands (Green, Red, Red-Edge, Near-Infrared) for cross-sensor compatibility. The models were evaluated on crop-weed semantic segmentation using the WeedMap dataset with 5--100% training data. The following two subsets served as downstream tasks: Task A (Germany, RedEdge-M), where all pretrained models were compared under partial and full fine-tuning, and Task B (Switzerland, Sequoia), where the best encoder from Task A was assessed. Our Swin Transformer pretrained with MoCo-v3 achieved the strongest performance on both tasks, surpassing the Swin Transformer model of Doornbos et al. pretrained on a pre-release of msuav500K. Our pretrained Swin Transformer further demonstrated cross-sensor and cross-region generalization. We additionally provide a public multi-year multispectral UAV dataset from Finland to support future research.
In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones have gained rapid response in terms of security, search and rescue (SAR), border surveillance, etc. Existing monitoring frameworks often struggle to maintain detection consistency when targets undergo significant scale variations due to altitude changes, leading to critical information gaps. To address this issue, this work proposes an integrated real-time detection pipeline for detecting targets through the wireless live drone video feed. Build upon YOLOv8-nano architecture, extensive flight experiments were conducted to determine the detection performance across multiple flight altitudes. Trained on VisDrone2019 dataset, the results of YOLOv8-nano model achieves 57.4%, 41%, 44.8% and 20.3% in precision, recall, mAP and mAP50:95 respectively. While demonstrating on real environment, this analysis revealed that the algorithm achieves near-total detection reliability at altitudes between 16 and 25 meters with the detection frame rate consistently maintained above 41 FPS and reaching a peak of 50 FPS. However, the goal of this work is to enable real-time person detection from an aerial platform via wireless transmission. This approach effectively addresses the dual challenges of identifying targets at varying scales and ensuring near-to-accurate localization during aerial observation.
Object detection is a fundamental component in numerous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications, yet it has long been plagued by hindrances like occlusion or target pixel scarcity. Active Object Detection (AOD) provides a novel paradigm to address these challenges via active vision, while UAV-based AOD research remains scarce due to the lack of high-quality datasets and benchmarks for algorithm development and evaluation. To fill this gap, this paper presents ATRNet-LUDO, the first large-scale real-world dataset for UAV-Ground Active Object Detection (UGAOD). It contains 121,000 multi-view panoramic multi-target aerial images and 1.21 million local single-target slices, covering 10 vehicle targets across 40 scenarios. It enables the construction of diverse training and testing environments for UAV agent interaction and active observation policy learning. Based on this dataset, we establish a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for AOD policy learning methods. Most existing AOD policies rely on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) but suffer from poor generalization. Evaluations on our benchmark reveal a significant generalization gap between training and testing performance, highlighting an urgent need for solutions. To this end, we leverage the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) to construct a world model that enhances state representation learning, and propose AOD-JEPA by incorporating AOD-specific prior knowledge. Extensive experiments validate its effectiveness and superiority. We hope ATRNet-LUDO and the benchmark will advance research in the UGAOD field. The dataset and code are soon available at https://github.com/Leo000ooo/LUDO_dataset.
Akbar Anbar Jafari, Cagri Ozcinar, Gholamreza Anbarjafarics.CV
Follow-me person tracking must run on the drone itself, where affordable companion computers offer only a few effective int8 GFLOP/s. At typical follow distances a person spans 10-60 pixels, indistinguishable from clutter and beyond the reach of single-frame appearance detectors. The missing evidence is temporal and belongs in the input representation, computed analytically, rather than in learned temporal machinery. EMTS-Det is a five-stage system that estimates ego-motion, converts each frame into ego-motion-normalized residual-motion channels, detects person centers with a 22k-parameter, 7.6-MFLOP network, tracks a locked target with a Kalman filter in stabilized coordinates, and verifies tracks with a 1-D convolutional classifier of human motion (ROC AUC 0.941). Training uses a synthetic-motion curriculum with motion channels generated by the deployed ego-motion code. Multi-seed ablations locate the value in generalization: on held-out VisDrone-DET a luminance-only variant collapses to 0.051 AP25 versus 0.415, as does YOLOv8n fine-tuned identically despite 1,100 times the compute, while the deployed int8 detector reaches 0.694 AP25 in-domain and 0.444 on this split. Temporal-shift modules lower accuracy, so the deployed detector is stateless. Silent int8 calibration failures are documented; min-max calibration with propagated caches matches float within 0.008 AP. On a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W the pipeline runs at 31.85 FPS with 0.462 AP25 and 0.714 recall over 1,000 real-world UAV videos, versus 1.95 FPS and 0.172 AP25 for YOLOv8n. A 57-second field sequence shows auto-lock at 1.3 s, 97.9% lock recall, and recovery from all nine occlusions with zero false re-locks.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) videos are widely used in traffic monitoring, urban management, and emergency rescue. However, existing UAV video perception mainly relies on box-level localization and trajectory association under predefined categories, making it difficult to simultaneously support flexible queries and fine-grained instance-level dynamic understanding in open scenarios. To this end, we introduce a new task, UAV Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (UAV-OVVIS), which discovers targets in UAV videos according to open-vocabulary queries and outputs instance-level segmentation trajectories with globally consistent identities. Considering the scarcity of instance-level annotations in UAV scenarios, we propose AeroTrack, a training-free unified framework. AeroTrack centers on periodic open-vocabulary detection, short-segment mask propagation, and cross-segment identity unification, reusing existing visual foundation models to enable UAV-OVVIS. Based on this framework, we instantiate five AeroTrack variants and construct AeroVIS, an evaluation benchmark for UAV-OVVIS containing 9 UAV object categories and 8,279 trajectories. Experiments show that AeroTrack substantially outperforms existing general video instance segmentation methods in UAV scenarios and demonstrates strong open-vocabulary robustness and generalization. To support future research, we release AeroTrack and AeroVIS as a unified framework and benchmark for UAV-OVVIS.
Autonomous drones are rapidly transforming modern warfare and civil applications alike. This paper presents the development of an integrated intelligent drone system designed to serve as a personal assistant. Leveraging the DJI Tello drone platform, we implemented a modular architecture that integrates three core artificial intelligence functionalities: facial detection, facial recognition, and depth estimation from monocular vision. A web-based interface enables seamless drone control and real-time video monitoring, while a Python-based server processes visual data and executes inference pipelines using lightweight neural models optimized for embedded systems. Unlike existing commercial solutions, this system emphasizes accessibility, low-cost hardware, and open-source technologies. The system demonstrates robust performance in real-world conditions, including person tracking, indoor scanning, and autonomous line following using virtual sensors. This project validates the applicability of advanced AI techniques in real-time robotic systems and illustrates the feasibility of deploying them on constrained hardware, providing a foundation for future research in autonomous UAVs for military, rescue, and surveillance missions.
With the rapid advancement of aerospace embodied intelligence, enabling Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to autonomously understand and reason about complex environments has become increasingly important. However, existing UAV-based spatial reasoning approaches face critical limitations: single-view perception renders them vulnerable to occlusions and perspective distortions, while most VLMs lack explicit geometric modeling, relying on semantic cues and yielding inconsistent reasoning under viewpoint and scale variations. To address these challenges, we propose SatAgent, a UAV-Satellite collaborative spatial reasoning model inspired by the dual-pathway mechanism of the human visual system. By jointly leveraging satellite and UAV perspectives, SatAgent enables robust, accurate reasoning in complex urban environments. We first introduce a Geometric-Aware 3D Reconstruction Encoder that elevates 2D UAV features into explicit 3D spatial representations. Next, we design a multi-view topology-semantic alignment module integrating cross-view features within a unified BEV coordinate system. We further introduce a multi-view consistency loss encouraging viewpoint-invariant representations. Finally, we construct SatAgent-SR130K, the first large-scale UAV-Satellite collaborative multi-view spatial reasoning dataset. Experiments show SatAgent outperforms state-of-the-art general-purpose foundation models and specialized spatial reasoning models by 25.91\% and 11.69\%, respectively, across diverse tasks, achieving particularly high accuracy in complex geometric relationship reasoning.
Existing digitization of buildings with reflective glass facades suffers from geometric reconstruction distortion, unrealistic view-dependent texture rendering, and difficulties in object-based semantic enhancement. Therefore, we propose RefGlass-GS, a fusion framework that enables end-to-end UAV-based photorealistic, semantic, and interactive digitization of reflective glass facades. The contributions include: (1) proposing an individual glass panel segmentation method based on maximum a posteriori estimation with structural regularities, robust to severe reflection and background interference; (2) formulating a UAV viewpoint planning optimization function that maximizes the coverage of view-dependent appearance for sufficient data capture; (3) developing an optimized Gaussian Splatting framework with a Reflection MLP, a novel deferred shading function, and two enhanced regularization terms for effective modeling of high-frequency near-field reflections; (4) introducing a standardized data organization paradigm for structuring GS-based representations into object-based models, facilitating interactive facility management on digital twin platforms. Experiments on real-world reflective glass facade scenes validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. Specifically, the glass panel segmentation achieves an improvement of 0.1927 in mIoU over SOTA methods, and only our method enables instance-level panel extraction. The UAV view planning improves novel view synthesis for reflective facades by 13.15 dB in PSNR compared to commercially used nap-of-the-object planning methods. The RefGlass-GS modeling outperforms SOTA Gaussian Splatting approaches for reflective scenes with an average improvement of 5.08 dB in PSNR.
Mobin Habibpour, John Spodnik, Niloufar Alipour Talemi +1cs.CV cs.RO
Wildfire monitoring from UAVs requires reliable reasoning over complex aerial scenes, where smoke, scale variation, and occlusions often limit RGB-only interpretation. We introduce FlameVQA, a multiple-choice visual question answering benchmark for UAV-based wildfire intelligence built on FLAME 3, leveraging paired RGB imagery and radiometric thermal TIFFs for temperature-grounded, safety-critical reasoning. FlameVQA includes 34 multiple-choice questions per image spanning six operational capability groups, covering tasks such as detection, localization, distribution/coverage estimation, cross-modal reasoning, and flight planning. To ensure label reliability, we combine MLLM-assisted annotation with deterministic thermal rules and cross-question consistency checks, followed by human auditing. We also evaluate representative MLLMs on FlameVQA to provide baselines for future work. Results show strong performance when explicit cross-modal cues are available, but notable failures on presence detection under heavy smoke and on coverage estimation. These findings suggest that current MLLMs require domain-specific adaptation to better support disaster and wildfire monitoring. The dataset and benchmark code are open-source at github.com/mobiiin/WildFire_VQA
Oussema Dhaouadi, Zuria Bauer, Johannes Michael Meier +3cs.CV
Continuous 6-DoF pose estimation is essential for autonomous UAV operations. Yet, existing visual odometry and SLAM methods accumulate drift and yield only relative, up-to-scale trajectories. Single-frame geo-localization, in turn, discards temporal continuity and remains too slow for real-time use. We present OrthoTrack, a training-free system that estimates continuous 6-DoF UAV trajectories using only publicly available orthophotos and surface models as a map prior. OrthoTrack matches keyframes against the orthophoto and lifts correspondences to metric 3D via the surface model. It then propagates these map-anchored correspondences to intermediate frames with optical flow, producing absolute, metrically scaled poses at every frame without GPS or post-hoc alignment. We also introduce the MovingDrone Dataset, a large-scale benchmark pairing photorealistic UAV sequences with dense 6-DoF ground truth and co-registered multi-modal geodata including multi-temporal orthophotos. On MovingDrone and real-world benchmarks, OrthoTrack runs in real time on a single GPU. It outperforms all baselines by a large margin, even those receiving oracle scale and alignment. By relying on publicly available geodata, OrthoTrack enables deployment to new regions without site-specific adaptation.
UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly. This formulation makes it difficult to assess a critical capability of aerial embodied agents, namely whether a UAV can accurately ground a visible target and translate vision-language evidence into precise 3D motion once the target enters its field of view. To address this limitation, we introduce UAV-VLN-FOV, a target-visible navigation task that isolates the see-and-reach stage and enables a more diagnostic evaluation of terminal reaching ability. We further propose 3DG-VLN, a vision-language waypoint prediction framework guided by dynamic 3D direction cues to enhance fine-grained visual grounding and spatial direction alignment for precise target reaching. Specifically, 3DG-VLN adaptively processes high-resolution front-view and downward-view observations to preserve fine-grained visual and geometric details for target grounding. It also updates the target-relative direction online during closed-loop navigation, allowing the agent to maintain spatial alignment with the target and reduce accumulated direction drift. To support this task, we construct a dedicated high-resolution benchmark which contains 2,717 trajectories with target-oriented high-level instructions, high-resolution front-view and downward-view egocentric observations, and continuous 3D waypoint annotations. Experiments show that 3DG-VLN outperforms competitive UAV-VLN baselines, achieving a 13.82\% improvement in success rate. Real-world trials further demonstrate the potential of 3DG-VLN for practical see-and-reach navigation. The source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/xuefanfu/3DG-VLN.
Autonomous UAV operations on ships require reliable vision-based relative pose estimation, yet at-sea validation is costly, weather-dependent, and risky. This paper presents a hardware-validated vision-in-the-loop framework that enables fully autonomous indoor flight while emulating photorealistic maritime environments. Rendered maritime views are processed onboard by a deep transformer-based monocular pose estimator. Delayed vision measurements are fused with high-rate IMU data using a delayed Kalman filter to provide consistent state estimates for geometric control. The system captures critical embedded effects, including perception latency, asynchronous updates, and computational constraints, that are absent in pure simulation. Autonomous takeoff, trajectory tracking, and landing experiments demonstrate stable closed-loop flight. The results establish a safe and hardware-realistic intermediate stage for developing maritime UAV autonomy prior to shipboard deployment.