Towards UAV Detection in the Real World: A New Multispectral Dataset UAVNet-MS and a New Method
Yihang Luo, Jun Chen, Chao Xiao, Yingqian Wang, Zhaoxu Li, Qiang Ling, Xu He, Nuo Chen, Gaowei Guo, Hongge Li, Miao Li, Longguang Wang, Yulan Guo, Li Liu, Wei An, Zhijie Chen
Abstract
The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has created urgent demand for precise UAV monitoring. Existing RGB-based systems rely on spatial cues that degrade at small scales, particularly with high inter-type similarity, target-clutter ambiguity, and low contrast. Multispectral imaging (MSI) encodes material-aware spectral signatures, yet MSI-based fine-grained small-UAV detection remains underexplored due to lack of dedicated datasets. We introduce UAVNet-MS, the first multispectral dataset for fine-grained small-UAV detection, comprising 15,618 temporally synchronized RGB-MSI data cubes (1440x1080) with bounding box annotations. The dataset features challenging small objects (93.7% <= 32^2 pixels, average 18^2 pixels, ~0.02% image area) under low contrast. We propose MFDNet, a dual-stream baseline addressing array-induced parallax and spatial-spectral fusion. Extensive evaluation under RGB-only, MSI-only, and RGB+MSI protocols against 20 detectors shows MFDNet achieves +6.2% AP50 improvement over best RGB-only methods, demonstrating spectral cues provide complementary material evidence beyond spatial cues. This work provides foundational dataset, strong baseline, and benchmark for multispectral UAV monitoring research.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.