Daily Papers

Detecting and tracking multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in thermal infrared video is inherently challenging due to low contrast, environmental noise, and small target sizes. This paper provides a straightforward approach to address multi-UAV tracking in thermal infrared video, leveraging recent advances in detection and tracking. Instead of relying on the YOLOv5 with the DeepSORT pipeline, we present a tracking framework built on YOLOv12 and BoT-SORT, enhanced with tailored training and inference strategies. We evaluate our approach following the metrics from the 4th Anti-UAV Challenge and demonstrate competitive performance. Notably, we achieve strong results without using contrast enhancement or temporal information fusion to enrich UAV features, highlighting our approach as a "Strong Baseline" for the multi-UAV tracking task. We provide implementation details, in-depth experimental analysis, and a discussion of potential improvements. The code is available at https://github.com/wish44165/YOLOv12-BoT-SORT-ReID .

The integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) offers synoptic visibility for traffic monitoring, yet scalable deployment is hindered by trajectory fragmentation, where vehicle identity persistence is lost across multi-UAV Fields of View (FOV). While state-of-the-art frameworks excel in optimizing local trajectory extraction and stability for single-drone imagery, they often function as isolated data silos that generate disjointed trajectories, thereby precluding network-level analysis such as Origin-Destination estimation. This paper presents a real-time Multi-Camera Multi-Vehicle Tracking (MCMT) system designed to handle global identity persistence. Addressing the visual ambiguity and computational cost of appearance-based Re-Identification (Re-ID) in nadir views, we introduce a lightweight Topology-Based Spatiotemporal Handover mechanism. We implement a high-throughput parallel pipeline leveraging YOLO11 and ByteTrack to process concurrent 4K streams. Our core contribution is a deterministic queue-based matching algorithm that utilizes geometric overlaps and virtual lane discretization to predictively manage identity handover via FIFO queues. Experimental results on complex urban environments, including intersections and merging traffic, demonstrate a Handover Success Rate (HOSR) of 99.8% in continuous traffic flows, significantly outperforming Re-ID baselines (74.1%) while validating edge deployment feasibility. The source code is available at https://github.com/JYe9/multi-camera-multi-vehicle-tracking-system.

Visual tracking is intrinsically a temporal problem. Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCF) have demonstrated excellent performance for high-speed generic visual object tracking. Built upon their seminal work, there has been a plethora of recent improvements relying on convolutional neural network (CNN) pretrained on ImageNet as a feature extractor for visual tracking. However, most of their works relying on ad hoc analysis to design the weights for different layers either using boosting or hedging techniques as an ensemble tracker. In this paper, we go beyond the conventional DCF framework and propose a Kernalised Multi-resolution Convnet (KMC) formulation that utilises hierarchical response maps to directly output the target movement. When directly deployed the learnt network to predict the unseen challenging UAV tracking dataset without any weight adjustment, the proposed model consistently achieves excellent tracking performance. Moreover, the transfered multi-reslution CNN renders it possible to be integrated into the RNN temporal learning framework, therefore opening the door on the end-to-end temporal deep learning (TDL) for visual tracking.

Severe image degradation under low-light nighttime conditions constitutes a core bottleneck preventing all-day applications for UAV-based single object tracking. Existing image enhancement methods often struggle to distinguish between target and background regions, which can easily lead to amplified background noise or compromise target features. To overcome this limitation, we propose TAE, a target-aware low-light enhancement framework tailored for nighttime object tracking. Guided explicitly by weak supervisory signals from tracking bounding boxes, the framework performs region-aware enhancement to ensure operations focus on the target area. It further adopts an adaptive RGB multi-curve fusion mechanism to achieve refined modeling and adaptive adjustment across different regions. To facilitate research in this domain, we also contribute DarkSOT, a new benchmark for nighttime UAV tracking, comprising 268 sequences across 9 target categories. Experimental results on the DarkSOT and UAVDark135 demonstrate that TAE significantly improves tracking performance in low-light nighttime scenarios, exhibiting strong robustness and generalization. The DarkSOT dataset is available at https://github.com/Fu0511/DarkSOT-Dataset.

Dynamic target tracking is essential for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in complex urban environments, where both the target and the camera viewpoint change continuously. Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies can track visible targets effectively, but their performance often degrades when buildings, vegetation, or roadside objects block the line of sight. During sustained occlusion, a policy may lose the target state, execute actions toward an incorrect region, and amplify this error through subsequent observations until re-acquisition becomes impossible. To this end, we present CosFly-VLA, a spatially aware VLA model that jointly grounds the target, estimates its visibility, and generates continuous flight actions through a structured prediction interface. To train this policy, we use a large-scale recipe over diverse data sources. Spatially Grounded Continued Pretraining (CPT) on a 500k mixed pool injects UAV-view depth, distance, and 3-D spatial reasoning. A three-stage Curriculum-based Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) process then specializes the tracker through multi-head warm-up followed by two-stage curriculum learning over natural and hard / long-occlusion data. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training subsequently teaches recovery-oriented reasoning traces before structured answers. Finally, a closed-loop Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage optimizes tracking behavior with a multi-component reward covering stand-off tracking, grounding quality, collision avoidance, and task success. Relative to OpenVLA, CosFly-VLA-0.8B reduces open-loop Average Displacement Error (ADE) by 34.1% on seen-test and 35.3% on unseen-test. Closed-loop optimization improves Success Rate (SR) by 29.8% and 2.5%, respectively. These results demonstrate progress from visible-frame imitation toward spatially grounded action-closed-loop control, evaluated under a shared oracle state history.

Recent aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) datasets have grown rapidly, but they primarily address goal-oriented navigation to static destinations, leaving UAV visual tracking -- continuously following a moving target while maintaining visibility -- largely without dedicated training data. We introduce CosFlyTrack, a large-scale multi-modal dataset and scalable generation pipeline for UAV visual tracking in urban environments. The dataset provides approximately 12,000 expert and perturbed UAV trajectories generated from 6,000 pedestrian paths, comprising 2.4 million timesteps (approximately 334 hours) with seven aligned data channels: RGB, metric depth, semantic segmentation, six-degree-of-freedom drone pose, target state with visibility flag, bilingual (Chinese-English) instructions, and trajectory-pair metadata. To generate high-quality expert trajectories, we develop MuCO, a multi-constraint optimizer that plans directly in continuous three-dimensional space with BVH-accelerated collision and visibility queries, jointly enforcing target visibility, viewpoint quality, collision avoidance, smoothness, and kinematic feasibility, avoiding the discretization artifacts and post-hoc smoothing of grid-based planners. Fine-tuning experiments on seven vision-language models show that CosFlyTrack improves tracking performance to 78.3 to 95.6 percent SR@1 meter, a 53 to 69 percentage point gain over zero-shot baselines, supporting the dataset as a training resource for dynamic target-following agents. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AutelRobotics/CosFly; evaluation scripts and pre-trained checkpoints are hosted at https://huggingface.co/AutelRobotics/CosFly-Track.

Event cameras offer microsecond-level temporal resolution and high dynamic range for low-altitude UAV perception. However, long-range UAVs often produce sparse, fragmented, and noise-contaminated event responses, where one semantic target may appear as multiple spatially separated blobs. Direct blob-level asynchronous tracking therefore suffers from duplicate trajectories and unstable identities. We propose ASUMOT, a motion-consistency-based asynchronous UAV detection and tracking framework operating directly on raw events. ASUMOT models each UAV as a set of motion-consistent event blobs. A local motion-consistency estimator triggers reliable candidates, a lightweight multi-task verifier provides UAV confidence and motion-direction cues, and motion-consistency clustering aggregates fragmented blobs into identity-consistent UAV tracks. We also introduce ES-UAV, a high-definition event-level UAV benchmark with dense semantic annotations. Experiments on public UAV tracking data and ES-UAV show that ASUMOT improves the accuracy--efficiency trade-off while preserving asynchronous event processing. Code and Dataset will be released.

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

We present HERCULES, an open-source simulator and data-collection pipeline for heterogeneous multi-robot autonomy. Built upon the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5)-based simulators AirSim and Cosys-AirSim, HERCULES resolves key architectural limitations of prior frameworks to enable concurrent unmanned aerial and ground vehicle (UAV-UGV) operation in large-scale, photorealistic, dynamic environments. It introduces a new waypoint-tracking UGV controller that mirrors existing UAV control interfaces, and provides a shared navigation stack for mapping, traversability analysis, planning, and control across heterogeneous platforms. Expanding inherited sensor suites, it adds physics-based long-wave infrared (LWIR) cameras and configurable night-vision modes for degraded visual environments. HERCULES provides lightweight APIs, ROS 2 wrappers, and rigorous time synchronization across sensors and platforms, and brings state-of-the-art game-engine capabilities into robotics simulation, integrating intelligent agents such as pedestrians, traffic, and wildlife with high-fidelity dynamic phenomena, including fire, flooding, and crop disease spread. HERCULES runs in two modes: passively, replaying offline-designed trajectories to generate reproducible multi-modal datasets, and actively, running an online planner in closed loop from live observations. Our experiments in heterogeneous multi-robot SLAM, collaborative perception, and exploration, using both HERCULES-generated data and active closed-loop execution, demonstrate its utility for advancing heterogeneous multi-robot autonomy. We publicly release our source code, experiment code, documentation, and datasets, including a heterogeneous multi-robot SLAM benchmark collected with two UAVs and two UGVs across kilometer-scale desert, forest, and city environments, at https://lunarlab-gatech.github.io/HERCULES-website.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are indispensable for infrastructure inspection, surveillance, and related tasks, yet they also introduce critical security challenges. This survey provides a wide-ranging examination of the anti-UAV domain, centering on three core objectives-classification, detection, and tracking-while detailing emerging methodologies such as diffusion-based data synthesis, multi-modal fusion, vision-language modeling, self-supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. We systematically evaluate state-of-the-art solutions across both single-modality and multi-sensor pipelines (spanning RGB, infrared, audio, radar, and RF) and discuss large-scale as well as adversarially oriented benchmarks. Our analysis reveals persistent gaps in real-time performance, stealth detection, and swarm-based scenarios, underscoring pressing needs for robust, adaptive anti-UAV systems. By highlighting open research directions, we aim to foster innovation and guide the development of next-generation defense strategies in an era marked by the extensive use of UAVs.

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

We present CosFly, a box-structured planning and multimodal simulation pipeline for aerial tracking, together with CosFly-Track, a large-scale UAV dataset for dynamic target tracking across diverse environments including urban centers, highways, rural landscapes, forests, and coastal towns. In our current implementation on CARLA, CosFly provides a modular 7-step construction pipeline that converts complex 3D worlds into structured obstacle representations for planning, then projects the resulting trajectories back into multi-modal sensor data -- including RGB images, high-precision depth maps, and semantic segmentation masks -- paired with natural language navigation instructions. A key feature is the support for configurable fixed-FOV zoom levels (one FOV setting drawn per trajectory and held constant throughout), enabling simulation of various focal lengths through camera-intrinsic adjustments. The pipeline covers the complete workflow from 3D map export through grid simplification, pedestrian and drone trajectory planning, multi-modal rendering with 6-DOF pose annotations, quality inspection, and teacher-student caption generation. We analyze two trajectory-planning paradigms for aerial target tracking: a conventional two-stage pipeline with front-end candidate generation and backend refinement, and a direct gradient-based formulation that optimizes multiple tracking constraints in a single objective. The public CosFly-Track release contains 250 validated trajectories and approximately 100,000 rendered images with complete 6-DOF drone pose annotations (position x, y, z and orientation yaw, pitch, roll). Together, the pipeline and dataset establish a scalable foundation for aerial-ground collaborative research, supporting dynamic target tracking, UAV navigation, and multi-modal perception across diverse environments.

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.

UAV tracking faces significant challenges in real-world scenarios, such as small-size targets and occlusions, which limit the performance of RGB-based trackers. Multispectral images (MSI), which capture additional spectral information, offer a promising solution to these challenges. However, progress in this field has been hindered by the lack of relevant datasets. To address this gap, we introduce the first large-scale Multispectral UAV Single Object Tracking dataset (MUST), which includes 250 video sequences spanning diverse environments and challenges, providing a comprehensive data foundation for multispectral UAV tracking. We also propose a novel tracking framework, UNTrack, which encodes unified spectral, spatial, and temporal features from spectrum prompts, initial templates, and sequential searches. UNTrack employs an asymmetric transformer with a spectral background eliminate mechanism for optimal relationship modeling and an encoder that continuously updates the spectrum prompt to refine tracking, improving both accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments show that our proposed UNTrack outperforms state-of-the-art UAV trackers. We believe our dataset and framework will drive future research in this area. The dataset is available on https://github.com/q2479036243/MUST-Multispectral-UAV-Single-Object-Tracking.

Air-to-air (A2A) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is fundamental to airborne remote sensing of low-altitude aerial targets. However, the deployment of continuous, real-time tracking systems on UAVs presents significant challenges. In A2A scenarios, traditional frame-based cameras suffer from severe performance degradation under low illumination, overexposure, and high-speed motion owing to their limited dynamic range and fixed temporal sampling. Although event cameras offer a promising alternative with microsecond temporal resolution and a high dynamic range, current research is bottlenecked by two primary issues: 1) the absence of dedicated A2A event-based datasets, and 2) the heavy reliance of existing trackers on GPU acceleration and extensive training data, rendering them impractical for resource-constrained UAVs. To bridge these gaps, we introduce AE-UAV, an air-to-air event-based UAV tracking benchmark. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first airborne-captured event camera dataset for A2A tracking, comprising 178 flight sequences with continuous-time cubic B-spline annotations. Furthermore, we propose the Fast-Slow Frequency-domain Tracking (FSFT) method. This lightweight, training-free framework seamlessly integrates frequency-domain template matching with search region prediction and detection-based drift correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FSFT operates at an ultra-fast 420 frames per second (FPS) on CPU-only hardware. It retains 93.97% of the accuracy of state-of-the-art GPU-dependent methods while delivering a 5.32-fold effective speedup and exhibiting superior temporal resolution generalization, thereby providing a highly efficient and robust solution for airborne remote sensing of aerial targets. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/MSP-xEN/AE-UAV.

Siamese network-based trackers have shown remarkable success in aerial tracking. Most previous works, however, usually perform template matching only between the initial template and the search region and thus fail to deal with rapidly changing targets that often appear in aerial tracking. As a remedy, this work presents Building Appearance Collection Tracking (BACTrack). This simple yet effective tracking framework builds a dynamic collection of target templates online and performs efficient multi-template matching to achieve robust tracking. Specifically, BACTrack mainly comprises a Mixed-Temporal Transformer (MTT) and an appearance discriminator. The former is responsible for efficiently building relationships between the search region and multiple target templates in parallel through a mixed-temporal attention mechanism. At the same time, the appearance discriminator employs an online adaptive template-update strategy to ensure that the collected multiple templates remain reliable and diverse, allowing them to closely follow rapid changes in the target's appearance and suppress background interference during tracking. Extensive experiments show that our BACTrack achieves top performance on four challenging aerial tracking benchmarks while maintaining an impressive speed of over 87 FPS on a single GPU. Speed tests on embedded platforms also validate our potential suitability for deployment on UAV platforms.

Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking (MC-MOT) utilizes information from multiple views to better handle problems with occlusion and crowded scenes. Recently, the use of graph-based approaches to solve tracking problems has become very popular. However, many current graph-based methods do not effectively utilize information regarding spatial and temporal consistency. Instead, they rely on single-camera trackers as input, which are prone to fragmentation and ID switch errors. In this paper, we propose a novel reconfigurable graph model that first associates all detected objects across cameras spatially before reconfiguring it into a temporal graph for Temporal Association. This two-stage association approach enables us to extract robust spatial and temporal-aware features and address the problem with fragmented tracklets. Furthermore, our model is designed for online tracking, making it suitable for real-world applications. Experimental results show that the proposed graph model is able to extract more discriminating features for object tracking, and our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets.

Current state-of-the-art autonomous driving vehicles mainly rely on each individual sensor system to perform perception tasks. Such a framework's reliability could be limited by occlusion or sensor failure. To address this issue, more recent research proposes using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to share perception information with others. However, most relevant works focus only on cooperative detection and leave cooperative tracking an underexplored research field. A few recent datasets, such as V2V4Real, provide 3D multi-object cooperative tracking benchmarks. However, their proposed methods mainly use cooperative detection results as input to a standard single-sensor Kalman Filter-based tracking algorithm. In their approach, the measurement uncertainty of different sensors from different connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) may not be properly estimated to utilize the theoretical optimality property of Kalman Filter-based tracking algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D multi-object cooperative tracking algorithm for autonomous driving via a differentiable multi-sensor Kalman Filter. Our algorithm learns to estimate measurement uncertainty for each detection that can better utilize the theoretical property of Kalman Filter-based tracking methods. The experiment results show that our algorithm improves the tracking accuracy by 17% with only 0.037x communication costs compared with the state-of-the-art method in V2V4Real. Our code and videos are available at https://github.com/eddyhkchiu/DMSTrack/ and https://eddyhkchiu.github.io/dmstrack.github.io/ .

Thermal infrared (TIR) imaging is essential for UAV swarm operations in visually degraded environments. However, tracking tiny UAVs remains challenging due to limited appearance cues, frequent occlusions, and rapid maneuvers. Despite significant progress driven by benchmarks such as the Anti-UAV challenge, existing methods primarily prioritize accuracy while overlooking the computational constraints of real-time edge deployment. The standard Kalman Filter (KF) offers the efficiency required for edge devices, yet its constant-velocity assumption often breaks down under highly dynamic UAV motion and thermal sensor jitter. More sophisticated nonlinear estimators can improve robustness but often introduce additional computational costs. To address this gap, we propose an edge-aware online tracking pipeline centered on the Adaptive Kinematic Kalman Filter (AKKF), which augments the linear KF with state-dependent kinematic modeling while preserving real-time efficiency. Combined with transient false-positive suppression and kinematics-driven predictive coasting, the presented pipeline improves trajectory continuity under challenging TIR conditions. Experiments on the Beyond Strong Baseline (BSB) benchmark provide a starting point for edge-aware UAV tracking by jointly evaluating tracking performance and computational efficiency, offering insights toward future real-time deployment.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) has advanced rapidly in urban surveillance and autonomous driving, yet many trackers rely on ReID- and transformer-based appearance encoders and are designed for standard FoV cameras. These assumptions break down for low-cost omnidirectional deployments, where equirectangular projection introduces seam discontinuities and targets appear to be small and fast-moving. We address multi-object tracking of flying animals captured in remote environments using omnidirectional cameras. We propose a lightweight framework that re-engineers SORT-based tracking for this geometry, including (i) a Seam-Aware Motion Model that keeps the Kalman state continuous across the seam, (ii) a composite seam-aware association cost that pairs a wrapped Euclidean term with GIoU, and (iii) OmniSmall, a new benchmark of omnidirectional wildlife footage. On our new dataset, with ground-truth detections, our modifications improved over OCSORT by +8.51 HOTA, +9.41 MOTA, and +10.17 IDF1; with YOLOX detections the gain narrows to +1.95 HOTA. Our proposed methods improved tracking performance on OmniSmall and remained competitive on JRDB without adding appearance encoders while keeping the tracking stage CPU-only. Our dataset and source code are available at: https://github.com/Xin-Shu/OmniSORT.git.

Effective solutions for intelligent data collection in terrestrial cellular networks are crucial, especially in the context of Internet of Things applications. The limited spectrum and coverage area of terrestrial base stations pose challenges in meeting the escalating data rate demands of network users. Unmanned aerial vehicles, known for their high agility, mobility, and flexibility, present an alternative means to offload data traffic from terrestrial BSs, serving as additional access points. This paper introduces a novel approach to efficiently maximize the utilization of multiple UAVs for data traffic offloading from terrestrial BSs. Specifically, the focus is on maximizing user association with UAVs by jointly optimizing UAV trajectories and users association indicators under quality of service constraints. Since, the formulated UAVs control problem is nonconvex and combinatorial, this study leverages the multi agent reinforcement learning framework. In this framework, each UAV acts as an independent agent, aiming to maintain inter UAV cooperative behavior. The proposed approach utilizes the finite state Markov decision process to account for UAVs velocity constraints and the relationship between their trajectories and state space. A low complexity distributed state action reward state action algorithm is presented to determine UAVs optimal sequential decision making policies over training episodes. The extensive simulation results validate the proposed analysis and offer valuable insights into the optimal UAV trajectories. The derived trajectories demonstrate superior average UAV association performance compared to benchmark techniques such as Q learning and particle swarm optimization.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is the task of estimating the state trajectories of an unknown and time-varying number of objects over a certain time window. Several algorithms have been proposed to tackle the multi-object smoothing task, where object detections can be conditioned on all the measurements in the time window. However, the best-performing methods suffer from intractable computational complexity and require approximations, performing suboptimally in complex settings. Deep learning based algorithms are a possible venue for tackling this issue but have not been applied extensively in settings where accurate multi-object models are available and measurements are low-dimensional. We propose a novel DL architecture specifically tailored for this setting that decouples the data association task from the smoothing task. We compare the performance of the proposed smoother to the state-of-the-art in different tasks of varying difficulty and provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first comparison between traditional Bayesian trackers and DL trackers in the smoothing problem setting.

Harnessing low-light enhancement and domain adaptation, nighttime UAV tracking has made substantial strides. However, over-reliance on image enhancement, limited high-quality nighttime data, and a lack of integration between daytime and nighttime trackers hinder the development of an end-to-end trainable framework. Additionally, current ViT-based trackers demand heavy computational resources due to their reliance on the self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel pure Mamba-based tracking framework (MambaNUT) that employs a state space model with linear complexity as its backbone, incorporating a single-stream architecture that integrates feature learning and template-search coupling within Vision Mamba. We introduce an adaptive curriculum learning (ACL) approach that dynamically adjusts sampling strategies and loss weights, thereby improving the model's ability of generalization. Our ACL is composed of two levels of curriculum schedulers: (1) sampling scheduler that transforms the data distribution from imbalanced to balanced, as well as from easier (daytime) to harder (nighttime) samples; (2) loss scheduler that dynamically assigns weights based on the size of the training set and IoU of individual instances. Exhaustive experiments on multiple nighttime UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MambaNUT achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring lower computational costs. The code will be available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/MambaNUT.

Visual object tracking is essential to intelligent robots. Most existing approaches have ignored the online latency that can cause severe performance degradation during real-world processing. Especially for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where robust tracking is more challenging and onboard computation is limited, the latency issue can be fatal. In this work, we present a simple framework for end-to-end latency-aware tracking, i.e., end-to-end predictive visual tracking (PVT++). Unlike existing solutions that naively append Kalman Filters after trackers, PVT++ can be jointly optimized, so that it takes not only motion information but can also leverage the rich visual knowledge in most pre-trained tracker models for robust prediction. Besides, to bridge the training-evaluation domain gap, we propose a relative motion factor, empowering PVT++ to generalize to the challenging and complex UAV tracking scenes. These careful designs have made the small-capacity lightweight PVT++ a widely effective solution. Additionally, this work presents an extended latency-aware evaluation benchmark for assessing an any-speed tracker in the online setting. Empirical results on a robotic platform from the aerial perspective show that PVT++ can achieve significant performance gain on various trackers and exhibit higher accuracy than prior solutions, largely mitigating the degradation brought by latency.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm systems necessitate efficient collaborative perception mechanisms for diverse operational scenarios. Current Bird's Eye View (BEV)-based approaches exhibit two main limitations: bounding-box representations fail to capture complete semantic and geometric information of the scene, and their performance significantly degrades when encountering undefined or occluded objects. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-UAV collaborative occupancy prediction framework. Our framework effectively preserves 3D spatial structures and semantics through integrating a Spatial-Aware Feature Encoder and Cross-Agent Feature Integration. To enhance efficiency, we further introduce Altitude-Aware Feature Reduction to compactly represent scene information, along with a Dual-Mask Perceptual Guidance mechanism to adaptively select features and reduce communication overhead. Due to the absence of suitable benchmark datasets, we extend three datasets for evaluation: two virtual datasets (Air-to-Pred-Occ and UAV3D-Occ) and one real-world dataset (GauUScene-Occ). Experiments results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly outperforming existing collaborative methods while reducing communication overhead to only a fraction of previous approaches.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is the problem of tracking the state of an unknown and time-varying number of objects using noisy measurements, with important applications such as autonomous driving, tracking animal behavior, defense systems, and others. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has been increasingly used in MOT for improving tracking performance, but mostly in settings where the measurements are high-dimensional and there are no available models of the measurement likelihood and the object dynamics. The model-based setting instead has not attracted as much attention, and it is still unclear if DL methods can outperform traditional model-based Bayesian methods, which are the state of the art (SOTA) in this context. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based DL tracker and evaluate its performance in the model-based setting, comparing it to SOTA model-based Bayesian methods in a variety of different tasks. Our results show that the proposed DL method can match the performance of the model-based methods in simple tasks, while outperforming them when the task gets more complicated, either due to an increase in the data association complexity, or to stronger nonlinearities of the models of the environment.

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.

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

Infrared unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is challenging because the target is often small, low-contrast, and easily confused with thermal distractors or cluttered backgrounds. Recent Transformer-based trackers have achieved promising performance by learning strong appearance representations, but their responses can still be dominated by background structures when the target appearance is weak or ambiguous. A natural solution is to introduce temporal motion cues. However, in infrared UAV tracking, motion cues are not always reliable: camera jitter, dynamic backgrounds, sensor noise, and target disappearance may produce temporal variations that are stronger than the true target motion. Therefore, the key challenge is not simply how to use motion, but how to distinguish target-consistent motion from background-induced pseudo motion. To this end, we propose CMRTrack, a counterfactual motion reliability learning framework for robust infrared UAV tracking. CMRTrack first extracts temporal evidence from adjacent search regions using a lightweight motion evidence encoder. During training, a counterfactual target-erased history branch is introduced to construct hard motion references, encouraging the motion encoder to learn reliable target-consistent motion rather than arbitrary temporal changes. The learned motion evidence is then incorporated into a one-stream tracking framework through motion-guided token modulation and reliability-aware score fusion, enabling adaptive feature enhancement and response refinement. Extensive experiments on Anti-UAV410 demonstrate that CMRTrack consistently outperforms representative state-of-the-art trackers and significantly improves the OSTrack baseline, with ablation studies and qualitative analysis verifying the effectiveness of the proposed counterfactual motion reliability learning.

Single-stream architectures using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones show great potential for real-time UAV tracking recently. However, frequent occlusions from obstacles like buildings and trees expose a major drawback: these models often lack strategies to handle occlusions effectively. New methods are needed to enhance the occlusion resilience of single-stream ViT models in aerial tracking. In this work, we propose to learn Occlusion-Robust Representations (ORR) based on ViTs for UAV tracking by enforcing an invariance of the feature representation of a target with respect to random masking operations modeled by a spatial Cox process. Hopefully, this random masking approximately simulates target occlusions, thereby enabling us to learn ViTs that are robust to target occlusion for UAV tracking. This framework is termed ORTrack. Additionally, to facilitate real-time applications, we propose an Adaptive Feature-Based Knowledge Distillation (AFKD) method to create a more compact tracker, which adaptively mimics the behavior of the teacher model ORTrack according to the task's difficulty. This student model, dubbed ORTrack-D, retains much of ORTrack's performance while offering higher efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance. Codes is available at https://github.com/wuyou3474/ORTrack.

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

Small multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), mainly quadcopters, are nowadays ubiquitous in research on aerial autonomy, including serving as scaled-down models for much larger aircraft such as vertical-take-off-and-lift vehicles for urban air mobility. Among the various research use cases, first-person-view RC flight experiments allow for collecting data on how human pilots fly such aircraft, which could then be used to compare, contrast, validate, or train autonomous flight agents. While this could be uniquely beneficial, especially for studying UAV operation in contextually complex and safety-critical environments such as in human-UAV shared spaces, the lack of inexpensive and open-source hardware/software platforms that offer this capability along with low-level access to the underlying control software and data remains limited. To address this gap and significantly reduce barriers to human-guided autonomy research with UAVs, this paper presents an open-source software architecture implemented with an inexpensive in-house built quadcopter platform based on the F450 Quadcopter Frame. This setup uses two cameras to provide a dual-view FPV and an open-source flight controller, Pixhawk. The underlying software architecture, developed using the Python-based Kivy library, allows logging telemetry, GPS, control inputs, and camera frame data in a synchronized manner on the ground station computer. Since costs (time) and weather constraints typically limit numbers of physical outdoor flight experiments, this paper also presents a unique AirSim/Unreal Engine based simulation environment and graphical user interface aka digital twin, that provides a Hardware In The Loop setup via the Pixhawk flight controller. We demonstrate the usability and reliability of the overall framework through a set of diverse physical FPV flight experiments and corresponding flight tests in the digital twin.

The goal of multi-object tracking (MOT) is detecting and tracking all the objects in a scene, while keeping a unique identifier for each object. In this paper, we present a new robust state-of-the-art tracker, which can combine the advantages of motion and appearance information, along with camera-motion compensation, and a more accurate Kalman filter state vector. Our new trackers BoT-SORT, and BoT-SORT-ReID rank first in the datasets of MOTChallenge [29, 11] on both MOT17 and MOT20 test sets, in terms of all the main MOT metrics: MOTA, IDF1, and HOTA. For MOT17: 80.5 MOTA, 80.2 IDF1, and 65.0 HOTA are achieved. The source code and the pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/NirAharon/BOT-SORT

Multi-target multi-camera tracking is a crucial task that involves identifying and tracking individuals over time using video streams from multiple cameras. This task has practical applications in various fields, such as visual surveillance, crowd behavior analysis, and anomaly detection. However, due to the difficulty and cost of collecting and labeling data, existing datasets for this task are either synthetically generated or artificially constructed within a controlled camera network setting, which limits their ability to model real-world dynamics and generalize to diverse camera configurations. To address this issue, we present MTMMC, a real-world, large-scale dataset that includes long video sequences captured by 16 multi-modal cameras in two different environments - campus and factory - across various time, weather, and season conditions. This dataset provides a challenging test-bed for studying multi-camera tracking under diverse real-world complexities and includes an additional input modality of spatially aligned and temporally synchronized RGB and thermal cameras, which enhances the accuracy of multi-camera tracking. MTMMC is a super-set of existing datasets, benefiting independent fields such as person detection, re-identification, and multiple object tracking. We provide baselines and new learning setups on this dataset and set the reference scores for future studies. The datasets, models, and test server will be made publicly available.

Recently, Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has attracted rising attention, and accordingly, remarkable progresses have been achieved. However, the existing methods tend to use various basic models (e.g, detector and embedding model), and different training or inference tricks, etc. As a result, the construction of a good baseline for a fair comparison is essential. In this paper, a classic tracker, i.e., DeepSORT, is first revisited, and then is significantly improved from multiple perspectives such as object detection, feature embedding, and trajectory association. The proposed tracker, named StrongSORT, contributes a strong and fair baseline for the MOT community. Moreover, two lightweight and plug-and-play algorithms are proposed to address two inherent "missing" problems of MOT: missing association and missing detection. Specifically, unlike most methods, which associate short tracklets into complete trajectories at high computation complexity, we propose an appearance-free link model (AFLink) to perform global association without appearance information, and achieve a good balance between speed and accuracy. Furthermore, we propose a Gaussian-smoothed interpolation (GSI) based on Gaussian process regression to relieve the missing detection. AFLink and GSI can be easily plugged into various trackers with a negligible extra computational cost (1.7 ms and 7.1 ms per image, respectively, on MOT17). Finally, by fusing StrongSORT with AFLink and GSI, the final tracker (StrongSORT++) achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple public benchmarks, i.e., MOT17, MOT20, DanceTrack and KITTI. Codes are available at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/StrongSORT and https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmtracking.

Embodied visual tracking is crucial for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) executing complex real-world tasks. In dynamic urban scenarios with complex semantic requirements, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show great promise due to their cross-modal fusion and continuous action generation capabilities. To benchmark multimodal tracking in such environments, we construct a dedicated evaluation benchmark and a large-scale dataset encompassing over 890K frames, 176 tasks, and 85 diverse objects. Furthermore, to address temporal feature redundancy and the lack of spatial geometric priors in existing VLA models, we propose an improved VLA tracking model, UAV-Track VLA. Built upon the π_{0.5} architecture, our model introduces a temporal compression net to efficiently capture inter-frame dynamics. Additionally, a parallel dual-branch decoder comprising a spatial-aware auxiliary grounding head and a flow matching action expert is designed to decouple cross-modal features and generate fine-grained continuous actions. Systematic experiments in the CARLA simulator validate the superior end-to-end performance of our method. Notably, in challenging long-distance pedestrian tracking tasks, UAV-Track VLA achieves a 61.76\% success rate and 269.65 average tracking frames, significantly outperforming existing baselines. Furthermore, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization in unseen environments and reduces single-step inference latency by 33.4\% (to 0.0571s) compared to the original π_{0.5}, enabling highly efficient, real-time UAV control. Data samples and demonstration videos are available at: https://github.com/Hub-Tian/UAV-Track\_VLA.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer significant potential in dynamic, perception-intensive tasks such as search and rescue and environmental monitoring; however, their effectiveness is severely restricted by conventional pre-planned routing methods, which lack the flexibility to respond in real-time to evolving task demands, unexpected disturbances, and localized view limitations in real-world scenarios. To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning framework named Heterogeneous Graph Attention Multi-agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (HGAM), uniquely designed to enable adaptive real-time coordination between mission UAVs (MUAVs) and charging UAVs (CUAVs). HGAM specifically addresses the previously unsolved challenge of enabling precise, decentralized continuous-action coordination solely based on local, heterogeneous graph-based observations. Extensive simulations demonstrate that HGAM substantially surpasses existing methods, achieving, for example, a 30\% improvement in data collection coverage and a 20\% increase in charging efficiency, providing crucial insights and foundations for the future deployment of intelligent, flexible UAV networks in complex, dynamic environments.

This paper introduces MCTrack, a new 3D multi-object tracking method that achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across KITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo datasets. Addressing the gap in existing tracking paradigms, which often perform well on specific datasets but lack generalizability, MCTrack offers a unified solution. Additionally, we have standardized the format of perceptual results across various datasets, termed BaseVersion, facilitating researchers in the field of multi-object tracking (MOT) to concentrate on the core algorithmic development without the undue burden of data preprocessing. Finally, recognizing the limitations of current evaluation metrics, we propose a novel set that assesses motion information output, such as velocity and acceleration, crucial for downstream tasks. The source codes of the proposed method are available at this link: https://github.com/megvii-research/MCTrack}{https://github.com/megvii-research/MCTrack

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.

Multitarget Tracking (MTT) is the problem of tracking the states of an unknown number of objects using noisy measurements, with important applications to autonomous driving, surveillance, robotics, and others. In the model-based Bayesian setting, there are conjugate priors that enable us to express the multi-object posterior in closed form, which could theoretically provide Bayes-optimal estimates. However, the posterior involves a super-exponential growth of the number of hypotheses over time, forcing state-of-the-art methods to resort to approximations for remaining tractable, which can impact their performance in complex scenarios. Model-free methods based on deep-learning provide an attractive alternative, as they can, in principle, learn the optimal filter from data, but to the best of our knowledge were never compared to current state-of-the-art Bayesian filters, specially not in contexts where accurate models are available. In this paper, we propose a high-performing deep-learning method for MTT based on the Transformer architecture and compare it to two state-of-the-art Bayesian filters, in a setting where we assume the correct model is provided. Although this gives an edge to the model-based filters, it also allows us to generate unlimited training data. We show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art Bayesian filters in complex scenarios, while matching their performance in simpler cases, which validates the applicability of deep-learning also in the model-based regime. The code for all our implementations is made available at https://github.com/JulianoLagana/MT3 .

Vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a popular backbone for visual tracking. However, complete ViT architectures are too cumbersome to deploy for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking which extremely emphasizes efficiency. In this study, we discover that many layers within lightweight ViT-based trackers tend to learn relatively redundant and repetitive target representations. Based on this observation, we propose a similarity-guided layer adaptation approach to optimize the structure of ViTs. Our approach dynamically disables a large number of representation-similar layers and selectively retains only a single optimal layer among them, aiming to achieve a better accuracy-speed trade-off. By incorporating this approach into existing ViTs, we tailor previously complete ViT architectures into an efficient similarity-guided layer-adaptive framework, namely SGLATrack, for real-time UAV tracking. Extensive experiments on six tracking benchmarks verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and show that our SGLATrack achieves a state-of-the-art real-time speed while maintaining competitive tracking precision. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/SGLATrack.

This paper tackles the problem of positioning a swarm of UAVs inside a completely unknown terrain, having as objective to maximize the overall situational awareness. The situational awareness is expressed by the number and quality of unique objects of interest, inside the UAVs' fields of view. YOLOv3 and a system to identify duplicate objects of interest were employed to assign a single score to each UAVs' configuration. Then, a novel navigation algorithm, capable of optimizing the previously defined score, without taking into consideration the dynamics of either UAVs or environment, is proposed. A cornerstone of the proposed approach is that it shares the same convergence characteristics as the block coordinate descent (BCD) family of approaches. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed navigation scheme were evaluated utilizing a series of experiments inside the AirSim simulator. The experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed navigation algorithm was able to consistently navigate the swarm of UAVs to "strategic" monitoring positions and also adapt to the different number of swarm sizes. Source code is available at https://github.com/dimikout3/ConvCAOAirSim.

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

Tracking 3D objects accurately and consistently is crucial for autonomous vehicles, enabling more reliable downstream tasks such as trajectory prediction and motion planning. Based on the substantial progress in object detection in recent years, the tracking-by-detection paradigm has become a popular choice due to its simplicity and efficiency. State-of-the-art 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) approaches typically rely on non-learned model-based algorithms such as Kalman Filter but require many manually tuned parameters. On the other hand, learning-based approaches face the problem of adapting the training to the online setting, leading to inevitable distribution mismatch between training and inference as well as suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose 3DMOTFormer, a learned geometry-based 3D MOT framework building upon the transformer architecture. We use an Edge-Augmented Graph Transformer to reason on the track-detection bipartite graph frame-by-frame and conduct data association via edge classification. To reduce the distribution mismatch between training and inference, we propose a novel online training strategy with an autoregressive and recurrent forward pass as well as sequential batch optimization. Using CenterPoint detections, our approach achieves 71.2% and 68.2% AMOTA on the nuScenes validation and test split, respectively. In addition, a trained 3DMOTFormer model generalizes well across different object detectors. Code is available at: https://github.com/dsx0511/3DMOTFormer.

We introduce the first data-driven multi-view 3D point tracker, designed to track arbitrary points in dynamic scenes using multiple camera views. Unlike existing monocular trackers, which struggle with depth ambiguities and occlusion, or prior multi-camera methods that require over 20 cameras and tedious per-sequence optimization, our feed-forward model directly predicts 3D correspondences using a practical number of cameras (e.g., four), enabling robust and accurate online tracking. Given known camera poses and either sensor-based or estimated multi-view depth, our tracker fuses multi-view features into a unified point cloud and applies k-nearest-neighbors correlation alongside a transformer-based update to reliably estimate long-range 3D correspondences, even under occlusion. We train on 5K synthetic multi-view Kubric sequences and evaluate on two real-world benchmarks: Panoptic Studio and DexYCB, achieving median trajectory errors of 3.1 cm and 2.0 cm, respectively. Our method generalizes well to diverse camera setups of 1-8 views with varying vantage points and video lengths of 24-150 frames. By releasing our tracker alongside training and evaluation datasets, we aim to set a new standard for multi-view 3D tracking research and provide a practical tool for real-world applications. Project page available at https://ethz-vlg.github.io/mvtracker.

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) poses significant challenges in computer vision. Despite its wide application in robotics, autonomous driving, and smart manufacturing, there is limited literature addressing the specific challenges of running MOT on embedded devices. State-of-the-art MOT trackers designed for high-end GPUs often experience low processing rates (<11fps) when deployed on embedded devices. Existing MOT frameworks for embedded devices proposed strategies such as fusing the detector model with the feature embedding model to reduce inference latency or combining different trackers to improve tracking accuracy, but tend to compromise one for the other. This paper introduces HopTrack, a real-time multi-object tracking system tailored for embedded devices. Our system employs a novel discretized static and dynamic matching approach along with an innovative content-aware dynamic sampling technique to enhance tracking accuracy while meeting the real-time requirement. Compared with the best high-end GPU modified baseline Byte (Embed) and the best existing baseline on embedded devices MobileNet-JDE, HopTrack achieves a processing speed of up to 39.29 fps on NVIDIA AGX Xavier with a multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA) of up to 63.12% on the MOT16 benchmark, outperforming both counterparts by 2.15% and 4.82%, respectively. Additionally, the accuracy improvement is coupled with the reduction in energy consumption (20.8%), power (5%), and memory usage (8%), which are crucial resources on embedded devices. HopTrack is also detector agnostic allowing the flexibility of plug-and-play.

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.

Drones equipped with cameras are emerging as a powerful tool for large-scale aerial 3D scanning, but existing automatic flight planners do not exploit all available information about the scene, and can therefore produce inaccurate and incomplete 3D models. We present an automatic method to generate drone trajectories, such that the imagery acquired during the flight will later produce a high-fidelity 3D model. Our method uses a coarse estimate of the scene geometry to plan camera trajectories that: (1) cover the scene as thoroughly as possible; (2) encourage observations of scene geometry from a diverse set of viewing angles; (3) avoid obstacles; and (4) respect a user-specified flight time budget. Our method relies on a mathematical model of scene coverage that exhibits an intuitive diminishing returns property known as submodularity. We leverage this property extensively to design a trajectory planning algorithm that reasons globally about the non-additive coverage reward obtained across a trajectory, jointly with the cost of traveling between views. We evaluate our method by using it to scan three large outdoor scenes, and we perform a quantitative evaluation using a photorealistic video game simulator.

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.

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is essential for an autonomous mobile agent to safely navigate a scene. In order to maximize the perception capabilities of the autonomous agent, we aim to develop a 3D MOT framework that fuses camera and LiDAR sensor information. Building on our prior LiDAR-only work, ShaSTA, which models shape and spatio-temporal affinities for 3D MOT, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion approach for learning affinities. At its core, this work proposes a fusion technique that generates a rich sensory signal incorporating information about depth and distant objects to enhance affinity estimation for improved data association, track lifecycle management, false-positive elimination, false-negative propagation, and track confidence score refinement. Our main contributions include a novel fusion approach for combining camera and LiDAR sensory signals to learn affinities, and a first-of-its-kind multimodal sequential track confidence refinement technique that fuses 2D and 3D detections. Additionally, we perform an ablative analysis on each fusion step to demonstrate the added benefits of incorporating the camera sensor, particular for small, distant objects that tend to suffer from the depth-sensing limits and sparsity of LiDAR sensors. In sum, our technique achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark amongst multimodal 3D MOT algorithms using CenterPoint detections.

Cross-view multi-object tracking aims to link objects between frames and camera views with substantial overlaps. Although cross-view multi-object tracking has received increased attention in recent years, existing datasets still have several issues, including 1) missing real-world scenarios, 2) lacking diverse scenes, 3) owning a limited number of tracks, 4) comprising only static cameras, and 5) lacking standard benchmarks, which hinder the investigation and comparison of cross-view tracking methods. To solve the aforementioned issues, we introduce DIVOTrack: a new cross-view multi-object tracking dataset for DIVerse Open scenes with dense tracking pedestrians in realistic and non-experimental environments. Our DIVOTrack has ten distinct scenarios and 550 cross-view tracks, surpassing all cross-view multi-object tracking datasets currently available. Furthermore, we provide a novel baseline cross-view tracking method with a unified joint detection and cross-view tracking framework named CrossMOT, which learns object detection, single-view association, and cross-view matching with an all-in-one embedding model. Finally, we present a summary of current methodologies and a set of standard benchmarks with our DIVOTrack to provide a fair comparison and conduct a comprehensive analysis of current approaches and our proposed CrossMOT. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/shengyuhao/DIVOTrack.

Counting and tracking dense crowds in large-scale scenes is a highly practical yet challenging problem. Existing methods mostly rely on fixed-camera datasets with limited scene coverage, making them inadequate for crowd analysis in large-scale scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce MovingDroneCrowd++, the largest video-level dataset dedicated to dense crowd counting and tracking with fast-moving drones, captured under diverse flight altitudes, camera angles, and illumination conditions. Existing methods, however, still fail to achieve satisfactory video individual counting or tracking performance under these challenging aerial conditions. To this end, we propose GD3A (Global Density map Decomposition via group-wise Descriptor Association), a video individual counting method that first establishes pixel-level correspondences between pedestrian descriptors across frames via optimal transport with an adaptive dustbin score. Then, group-wise association is adopted to guide the decomposition of the global density map into shared, inflow, and outflow density maps. We further introduce a pedestrian tracking method, DVTrack (Descriptor Voting Track), which converts descriptor-level matching into instance-level association through descriptor voting. Our methods rely on the association results of group-wise multiple descriptors for each pedestrian rather than a single vector. Since intra-group matching errors do not affect the final counting and tracking results, our methods are more robust in dense crowds and challenging aerial conditions. Experiments show that our methods achieve substantial gains in both crowd counting and tracking on moving-drone videos with dense crowds and complex motions, reducing counting error by 47.4% and improving tracking accuracy by 64.6%. Code, dataset, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/fyw1999/MovingDroneCrowd.

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

Coordinated flight of multiple drones allows to achieve tasks faster such as search and rescue and infrastructure inspection. Thus, pushing the state-of-the-art of aerial swarms in navigation speed and robustness is of tremendous benefit. In particular, being able to account for unexplored/unknown environments when planning trajectories allows for safer flight. In this work, we propose the first high-speed, decentralized, and synchronous motion planning framework (HDSM) for an aerial swarm that explicitly takes into account the unknown/undiscovered parts of the environment. The proposed approach generates an optimized trajectory for each planning agent that avoids obstacles and other planning agents while moving and exploring the environment. The only global information that each agent has is the target location. The generated trajectory is high-speed, safe from unexplored spaces, and brings the agent closer to its goal. The proposed method outperforms four recent state-of-the-art methods in success rate (100% success in reaching the target location), flight speed (67% faster), and flight time (42% lower). Finally, the method is validated on a set of Crazyflie nano-drones as a proof of concept.

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.

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

Segment Anything 2 (SAM2) enables robust single-object tracking using segmentation. To extend this to multi-object tracking (MOT), we propose SAM2MOT, introducing a novel Tracking by Segmentation paradigm. Unlike Tracking by Detection or Tracking by Query, SAM2MOT directly generates tracking boxes from segmentation masks, reducing reliance on detection accuracy. SAM2MOT has two key advantages: zero-shot generalization, allowing it to work across datasets without fine-tuning, and strong object association, inherited from SAM2. To further improve performance, we integrate a trajectory manager system for precise object addition and removal, and a cross-object interaction module to handle occlusions. Experiments on DanceTrack, UAVDT, and BDD100K show state-of-the-art results. Notably, SAM2MOT outperforms existing methods on DanceTrack by +2.1 HOTA and +4.5 IDF1, highlighting its effectiveness in MOT. Code is available at https://github.com/TripleJoy/SAM2MOT.

As spatial intelligence continues to evolve, heterogeneous multi-agent systems-particularly the collaboration between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), have demonstrated strong potential in complex applications such as search and rescue, urban surveillance, and environmental monitoring. However, existing simulation platforms are primarily designed for single-agent dynamics and lack dedicated frameworks for interactive air-ground collaborative simulation. In this paper, we present AirsimAG, a high-fidelity air-ground collaborative simulation platform built upon an extensively customized AirSim framework. The platform enables synchronized multi-agent simulation and supports heterogeneous sensing and control interfaces for UAV-UGV systems. To demonstrate its capabilities, we design a set of representative air-ground collaborative tasks, including mapping, planning, tracking, formation, and exploration. We further provide quantitative analyses based on these tasks to illustrate the platform effectiveness in supporting multi-agent coordination and cross-modal data consistency. The AirsimAG simulation platform is publicly available at https://github.com/BIULab-BUAA/AirSimAG.

The global positioning system (GPS) has become an indispensable navigation method for field operations with unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in marine environments. However, GPS may not always be available outdoors because it is vulnerable to natural interference and malicious jamming attacks. Thus, an alternative navigation system is required when the use of GPS is restricted or prohibited. To this end, we present a novel method that utilizes an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to assist in localizing USVs in GNSS-restricted marine environments. In our approach, the UAV flies along the shoreline at a consistent altitude, continuously tracking and detecting the USV using a deep learning-based approach on camera images. Subsequently, triangulation techniques are applied to estimate the USV's position relative to the UAV, utilizing geometric information and datalink range from the UAV. We propose adjusting the UAV's camera angle based on the pixel error between the USV and the image center throughout the localization process to enhance accuracy. Additionally, visual measurements are integrated into an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for robust state estimation. To validate our proposed method, we utilize a USV equipped with onboard sensors and a UAV equipped with a camera. A heterogeneous robotic interface is established to facilitate communication between the USV and UAV. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through a series of experiments conducted during the ``Muhammad Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge (MBZIRC-2024)'' in real marine environments, incorporating noisy measurements and ocean disturbances. The successful outcomes indicate the potential of our method to complement GPS for USV navigation.

Unmodeled aerodynamic disturbances pose a key challenge for multirotor flight when multiple vehicles are in close proximity to each other. However, certain missions require two multirotors to approach each other within 1-2 body-lengths of each other and hold formation -- we consider one such practical instance: vertically docking two multirotors in the air. In this leader-follower setting, the follower experiences significant downwash interference from the leader in its final docking stages. To compensate for this, we employ a learnt downwash model online within an optimal feedback controller to accurately track a docking maneuver and then hold formation. Through real-world flights with different maneuvers, we demonstrate that this compensation is crucial for reducing the large vertical separation otherwise required by conventional/naive approaches. Our evaluations show a tracking error of less than 0.06m for the follower (a 3-4x reduction) when approaching vertically within two body-lengths of the leader. Finally, we deploy the complete system to effect a successful physical docking between two airborne multirotors in a single smooth planned trajectory.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), their capabilities in various automation domains, particularly Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operations, have garnered increasing attention. Current research remains predominantly constrained to small-scale UAV applications, with most studies focusing on isolated components such as path planning for toy drones, while lacking comprehensive investigation of medium- and long-range UAV systems in real-world operational contexts. Larger UAV platforms introduce distinct challenges, including stringent requirements for airport-based take-off and landing procedures, adherence to complex regulatory frameworks, and specialized operational capabilities with elevated mission expectations. This position paper presents the Next-Generation LLM for UAV (NeLV) system -- a comprehensive demonstration and automation roadmap for integrating LLMs into multi-scale UAV operations. The NeLV system processes natural language instructions to orchestrate short-, medium-, and long-range UAV missions through five key technical components: (i) LLM-as-Parser for instruction interpretation, (ii) Route Planner for Points of Interest (POI) determination, (iii) Path Planner for waypoint generation, (iv) Control Platform for executable trajectory implementation, and (v) UAV monitoring. We demonstrate the system's feasibility through three representative use cases spanning different operational scales: multi-UAV patrol, multi-POI delivery, and multi-hop relocation. Beyond the current implementation, we establish a five-level automation taxonomy that charts the evolution from current LLM-as-Parser capabilities (Level 1) to fully autonomous LLM-as-Autopilot systems (Level 5), identifying technical prerequisites and research challenges at each stage.

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/.

Agricultural UAV research requires simulators that integrate realistic 3D scenes, high-fidelity vehicle dynamics, and robotics middleware, while remaining practical to deploy across heterogeneous development machines. We present Droneulator, a portable UAV simulator architecture that combines RotorPy for multirotor dynamics with Godot 4 for rendering and sensor generation. Droneulator exposes both PX4-based control and a lightweight WebSocket command path, and publishes synchronised visual and state streams through a Zenoh-based ROS~2-compatible pipeline. This integration enables a single stack to support inspection-oriented data capture, ROS~2/PX4 local planning, and reinforcement learning experiments without modifying the simulator infrastructure. We present quantified validation of the current system across three agricultural UAV workflows: tree-scale image collection for 3D reconstruction with COLMAP, local planning around canopy obstacles using EGO-Planner, and closed-loop reinforcement learning through a custom Gymnasium environment. In the reported setup, the results show that the simulator can sustain low-latency sensing, support reconstruction-oriented data collection under varying capture density, execute collision-free local planning around canopy obstacles, and support stable depth-sensing-based policy training for obstacle-aware navigation. Together, these results show the potential of Droneulator for agricultural UAV inspection, planning, and learning within one deployable stack.

To track the 3D locations and trajectories of the other traffic participants at any given time, modern autonomous vehicles are equipped with multiple cameras that cover the vehicle's full surroundings. Yet, camera-based 3D object tracking methods prioritize optimizing the single-camera setup and resort to post-hoc fusion in a multi-camera setup. In this paper, we propose a method for panoramic 3D object tracking, called CC-3DT, that associates and models object trajectories both temporally and across views, and improves the overall tracking consistency. In particular, our method fuses 3D detections from multiple cameras before association, reducing identity switches significantly and improving motion modeling. Our experiments on large-scale driving datasets show that fusion before association leads to a large margin of improvement over post-hoc fusion. We set a new state-of-the-art with 12.6% improvement in average multi-object tracking accuracy (AMOTA) among all camera-based methods on the competitive NuScenes 3D tracking benchmark, outperforming previously published methods by 6.5% in AMOTA with the same 3D detector.

Autonomous systems require robust Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) capabilities to operate reliably in dynamic environments. MOT ensures consistent object identity assignment and precise spatial delineation. Recent advances in foundation models, such as SAM2, have demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization for video segmentation, but their direct application to MOTS (MOT+Segmentation) remains limited by insufficient identity management and memory efficiency. This work introduces Seg2Track-SAM2, a framework that integrates pre-trained object detectors with SAM2 and a novel Seg2Track module to address track initialization, track management, and reinforcement. The proposed approach requires no fine-tuning and remains detector-agnostic. Experimental results on KITTI MOT and KITTI MOTS benchmarks show that Seg2Track-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, ranking fourth overall in both car and pedestrian classes on KITTI MOTS, while establishing a new benchmark in association accuracy (AssA). Furthermore, a sliding-window memory strategy reduces memory usage by up to 75% with negligible performance degradation, supporting deployment under resource constraints. These results confirm that Seg2Track-SAM2 advances MOTS by combining robust zero-shot tracking, enhanced identity preservation, and efficient memory utilization. The code is available at https://github.com/hcmr-lab/Seg2Track-SAM2

Accurate state estimation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is crucial for ensuring reliable and safe operation, as anomalies occurring during mission execution may induce discrepancies between expected and observed system behaviors, thereby compromising mission success or posing potential safety hazards. It is essential to continuously monitor and detect such conditions in order to ensure a timely response and maintain system reliability. In this work, we focus on UAV state estimation anomalies and provide a large-scale real-world UAV dataset to facilitate research aimed at improving the development of anomaly detection. Unlike existing datasets that primarily rely on injected faults into simulated data, this dataset comprises 1396 real flight logs totaling over 52 hours of flight time, collected across diverse indoor and outdoor environments using a collection of PX4-based UAVs equipped with a variety of sensor configurations. The dataset comprises both normal and anomalous flights without synthetic manipulation, making it uniquely suitable for realistic anomaly detection tasks. A structured classification is proposed that categorizes UAV state estimation anomalies into four classes: mechanical and electrical, external position, global position, and altitude anomalies. These classifications reflect collective, contextual, and outlier anomalies observed in multivariate sensor data streams, including IMU, GPS, barometer, magnetometer, distance sensors, visual odometry, and optical flow, that can be found in the PX4 logging mechanism. It is anticipated that this dataset will play a key role in the development, training, and evaluation of anomaly detection and isolation systems to address the critical gap in UAV reliability research.

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.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims at estimating bounding boxes and identities of objects in videos. Most methods obtain identities by associating detection boxes whose scores are higher than a threshold. The objects with low detection scores, e.g. occluded objects, are simply thrown away, which brings non-negligible true object missing and fragmented trajectories. To solve this problem, we present a simple, effective and generic association method, tracking by associating almost every detection box instead of only the high score ones. For the low score detection boxes, we utilize their similarities with tracklets to recover true objects and filter out the background detections. When applied to 9 different state-of-the-art trackers, our method achieves consistent improvement on IDF1 score ranging from 1 to 10 points. To put forwards the state-of-the-art performance of MOT, we design a simple and strong tracker, named ByteTrack. For the first time, we achieve 80.3 MOTA, 77.3 IDF1 and 63.1 HOTA on the test set of MOT17 with 30 FPS running speed on a single V100 GPU. ByteTrack also achieves state-of-the-art performance on MOT20, HiEve and BDD100K tracking benchmarks. The source code, pre-trained models with deploy versions and tutorials of applying to other trackers are released at https://github.com/ifzhang/ByteTrack.

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.

Deep learning-based object detectors have driven notable progress in multi-object tracking algorithms. Yet, current tracking methods mainly focus on simple, regular motion patterns in pedestrians or vehicles. This leaves a gap in tracking algorithms for targets with nonlinear, irregular motion, like athletes. Additionally, relying on the Kalman filter in recent tracking algorithms falls short when object motion defies its linear assumption. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel online and robust multi-object tracking approach named deep ExpansionIoU (Deep-EIoU), which focuses on multi-object tracking for sports scenarios. Unlike conventional methods, we abandon the use of the Kalman filter and leverage the iterative scale-up ExpansionIoU and deep features for robust tracking in sports scenarios. This approach achieves superior tracking performance without adopting a more robust detector, all while keeping the tracking process in an online fashion. Our proposed method demonstrates remarkable effectiveness in tracking irregular motion objects, achieving a score of 77.2% HOTA on the SportsMOT dataset and 85.4% HOTA on the SoccerNet-Tracking dataset. It outperforms all previous state-of-the-art trackers on various large-scale multi-object tracking benchmarks, covering various kinds of sports scenarios. The code and models are available at https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/Deep-EIoU.

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.

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

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is vital for many applications including autonomous driving vehicles and service robots. With the commonly used tracking-by-detection paradigm, 3D MOT has made important progress in recent years. However, these methods only use the detection boxes of the current frame to obtain trajectory-box association results, which makes it impossible for the tracker to recover objects missed by the detector. In this paper, we present TrajectoryFormer, a novel point-cloud-based 3D MOT framework. To recover the missed object by detector, we generates multiple trajectory hypotheses with hybrid candidate boxes, including temporally predicted boxes and current-frame detection boxes, for trajectory-box association. The predicted boxes can propagate object's history trajectory information to the current frame and thus the network can tolerate short-term miss detection of the tracked objects. We combine long-term object motion feature and short-term object appearance feature to create per-hypothesis feature embedding, which reduces the computational overhead for spatial-temporal encoding. Additionally, we introduce a Global-Local Interaction Module to conduct information interaction among all hypotheses and models their spatial relations, leading to accurate estimation of hypotheses. Our TrajectoryFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Waymo 3D MOT benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/poodarchu/EFG .

This paper explores a pragmatic approach to multiple object tracking where the main focus is to associate objects efficiently for online and realtime applications. To this end, detection quality is identified as a key factor influencing tracking performance, where changing the detector can improve tracking by up to 18.9%. Despite only using a rudimentary combination of familiar techniques such as the Kalman Filter and Hungarian algorithm for the tracking components, this approach achieves an accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art online trackers. Furthermore, due to the simplicity of our tracking method, the tracker updates at a rate of 260 Hz which is over 20x faster than other state-of-the-art trackers.

It's a practical approach using the ground-aerial collaborative system to enhance the localization robustness of flying robots in cluttered environments, especially when visual sensors degrade. Conventional approaches estimate the flying robot's position using fixed cameras observing pre-attached markers, which could be constrained by limited distance and susceptible to capture failure. To address this issue, we improve the ground-aerial localization framework in a more comprehensive manner, which integrates active vision, single-ranging, inertial odometry, and optical flow. First, the designed active vision subsystem mounted on the ground vehicle can be dynamically rotated to detect and track infrared markers on the aerial robot, improving the field of view and the target recognition with a single camera. Meanwhile, the incorporation of single-ranging extends the feasible distance and enhances re-capture capability under visual degradation. During estimation, a dimension-reduced estimator fuses multi-source measurements based on polynomial approximation with an extended sliding window, balancing computational efficiency and redundancy. Considering different sensor fidelities, an adaptive sliding confidence evaluation algorithm is implemented to assess measurement quality and dynamically adjust the weighting parameters based on moving variance. Finally, extensive experiments under conditions such as smoke interference, illumination variation, obstacle occlusion, prolonged visual loss, and extended operating range demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves robust online localization, with an average root mean square error of approximately 0.09 m, while maintaining resilience to capture loss and sensor failures.

The field of multi-object tracking has recently seen a renewed interest in the good old schema of tracking-by-detection, as its simplicity and strong priors spare it from the complex design and painful babysitting of tracking-by-attention approaches. In view of this, we aim at extending tracking-by-detection to multi-modal settings, where a comprehensive cost has to be computed from heterogeneous information e.g., 2D motion cues, visual appearance, and pose estimates. More precisely, we follow a case study where a rough estimate of 3D information is also available and must be merged with other traditional metrics (e.g., the IoU). To achieve that, recent approaches resort to either simple rules or complex heuristics to balance the contribution of each cost. However, i) they require careful tuning of tailored hyperparameters on a hold-out set, and ii) they imply these costs to be independent, which does not hold in reality. We address these issues by building upon an elegant probabilistic formulation, which considers the cost of a candidate association as the negative log-likelihood yielded by a deep density estimator, trained to model the conditional joint probability distribution of correct associations. Our experiments, conducted on both simulated and real benchmarks, show that our approach consistently enhances the performance of several tracking-by-detection algorithms.

Conventional multi-object tracking (MOT) systems are predominantly designed for pedestrian tracking and often exhibit limited generalization to other object categories. This paper presents a generalized tracking framework capable of handling multiple object types, with a particular emphasis on vehicle tracking in complex traffic scenes. The proposed method incorporates two key components: (1) an occlusion-aware re-identification mechanism that enhances identity preservation for heavily occluded objects, and (2) a road-structure-aware tracklet refinement strategy that utilizes semantic scene priors such as lane directions, crosswalks, and road boundaries to improve trajectory continuity and accuracy. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark dataset comprising diverse vehicle classes with frame-level tracking annotations, specifically curated to support evaluation of vehicle-focused tracking methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves robust performance on both the newly introduced dataset and several public benchmarks, highlighting its effectiveness in general-purpose object tracking. While our framework is designed for generalized multi-class tracking, it also achieves strong performance on conventional benchmarks, with HOTA scores of 66.4 on MOT17 and 65.7 on MOT20 test sets. Code and Benchmark are available: github.com/Hamidreza-Hashempoor/FastTracker, huggingface.co/datasets/Hamidreza-Hashemp/FastTracker-Benchmark.

We present a complete infrastructure-less magneto-inductive (MI) localization system enabling a lightweight UAV to autonomously hover, track, and land with centimeter precision on a mobile quadruped robot acting as a dynamic docking pad. This work advances the vision of heterogeneous robot collaboration, where ultra-lightweight flying robots serve as mobile perception agents for ground-based Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs). By extending the sensing horizon and providing complementary viewpoints, the UAVs enhance exploration efficiency and improve the quality of data collection in large-scale, unknown environments. The proposed system aims to complements traditional localization modalities with a compact, embedded, and infrastructure-less magnetic sensing approach, providing accurate short-range relative positioning to bridge the gap between coarse navigation and precise UAV docking. A single lightweight receive coil and a fully embedded estimation pipeline on the UAV deliver 20 Hz relative pose estimates in the UGV's frame, achieving a 3D position root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 5 cm. The system uses real-time estimation and a warm-started solver to estimate the 3D position, which is then fused with inertial and optical-flow measurements in the onboard extended Kalman filter. Real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of the framework, demonstrating significant improvements in UAV--UGV teaming in infrastructure-less scenarios compared to state-of-the-art methods, requiring no external anchors or global positioning. In dynamic scenarios, the UAV tracks and docks with a moving UGV while maintaining a 7.2 cm RMSE and achieving successful autonomous landings.

This paper addresses limitations in 3D tracking-by-detection methods, particularly in identifying legitimate trajectories and reducing state estimation drift in Kalman filters. Existing methods often use threshold-based filtering for detection scores, which can fail for distant and occluded objects, leading to false positives. To tackle this, we propose a novel track validity mechanism and multi-stage observational gating process, significantly reducing ghost tracks and enhancing tracking performance. Our method achieves a 29.47% improvement in Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) on the KITTI validation dataset with the Second detector. Additionally, a refined Kalman filter term reduces localization noise, improving higher-order tracking accuracy (HOTA) by 4.8%. The online framework, RobMOT, outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple detectors, with HOTA improvements of up to 3.92% on the KITTI testing dataset and 8.7% on the validation dataset, while achieving low identity switch scores. RobMOT excels in challenging scenarios, tracking distant objects and prolonged occlusions, with a 1.77% MOTA improvement on the Waymo Open dataset, and operates at a remarkable 3221 FPS on a single CPU, proving its efficiency for real-time multi-object tracking.

High-speed online trajectory planning for UAVs poses a significant challenge due to the need for precise modeling of complex dynamics while also being constrained by computational limitations. This paper presents a multi-fidelity reinforcement learning method (MFRL) that aims to effectively create a realistic dynamics model and simultaneously train a planning policy that can be readily deployed in real-time applications. The proposed method involves the co-training of a planning policy and a reward estimator; the latter predicts the performance of the policy's output and is trained efficiently through multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization. This optimization approach models the correlation between different fidelity levels, thereby constructing a high-fidelity model based on a low-fidelity foundation, which enables the accurate development of the reward model with limited high-fidelity experiments. The framework is further extended to include real-world flight experiments in reinforcement learning training, allowing the reward model to precisely reflect real-world constraints and broadening the policy's applicability to real-world scenarios. We present rigorous evaluations by training and testing the planning policy in both simulated and real-world environments. The resulting trained policy not only generates faster and more reliable trajectories compared to the baseline snap minimization method, but it also achieves trajectory updates in 2 ms on average, while the baseline method takes several minutes.

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.

Tracking by detection has been the prevailing paradigm in the field of Multi-object Tracking (MOT). These methods typically rely on the Kalman Filter to estimate the future locations of objects, assuming linear object motion. However, they fall short when tracking objects exhibiting nonlinear and diverse motion in scenarios like dancing and sports. In addition, there has been limited focus on utilizing learning-based motion predictors in MOT. To address these challenges, we resort to exploring data-driven motion prediction methods. Inspired by the great expectation of state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, in long-term sequence modeling with near-linear complexity, we introduce a Mamba-based motion model named Mamba moTion Predictor (MTP). MTP is designed to model the complex motion patterns of objects like dancers and athletes. Specifically, MTP takes the spatial-temporal location dynamics of objects as input, captures the motion pattern using a bi-Mamba encoding layer, and predicts the next motion. In real-world scenarios, objects may be missed due to occlusion or motion blur, leading to premature termination of their trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we further expand the application of MTP. We employ it in an autoregressive way to compensate for missing observations by utilizing its own predictions as inputs, thereby contributing to more consistent trajectories. Our proposed tracker, MambaTrack, demonstrates advanced performance on benchmarks such as Dancetrack and SportsMOT, which are characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion.

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/.

In recent years, numerous effective multi-object tracking (MOT) methods are developed because of the wide range of applications. Existing performance evaluations of MOT methods usually separate the object tracking step from the object detection step by using the same fixed object detection results for comparisons. In this work, we perform a comprehensive quantitative study on the effects of object detection accuracy to the overall MOT performance, using the new large-scale University at Albany DETection and tRACking (UA-DETRAC) benchmark dataset. The UA-DETRAC benchmark dataset consists of 100 challenging video sequences captured from real-world traffic scenes (over 140,000 frames with rich annotations, including occlusion, weather, vehicle category, truncation, and vehicle bounding boxes) for object detection, object tracking and MOT system. We evaluate complete MOT systems constructed from combinations of state-of-the-art object detection and object tracking methods. Our analysis shows the complex effects of object detection accuracy on MOT system performance. Based on these observations, we propose new evaluation tools and metrics for MOT systems that consider both object detection and object tracking for comprehensive analysis.

Many Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) approaches exploit motion information to associate all the detected objects across frames. However, many methods that rely on filtering-based algorithms, such as the Kalman Filter, often work well in linear motion scenarios but struggle to accurately predict the locations of objects undergoing complex and non-linear movements. To tackle these scenarios, we propose a motion-based MOT approach with an enhanced temporal motion predictor, ETTrack. Specifically, the motion predictor integrates a transformer model and a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to capture short-term and long-term motion patterns, and it predicts the future motion of individual objects based on the historical motion information. Additionally, we propose a novel Momentum Correction Loss function that provides additional information regarding the motion direction of objects during training. This allows the motion predictor rapidly adapt to motion variations and more accurately predict future motion. Our experimental results demonstrate that ETTrack achieves a competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art trackers on DanceTrack and SportsMOT, scoring 56.4% and 74.4% in HOTA metrics, respectively.

Heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms consist of dozens to hundreds of drones with different roles and varying hardware and software requirements collaborating towards a shared mission. While traditional approaches for synchronized software updates assume swarms to be unstructured and homogeneous, the heterogeneous nature of modern swarms and the emerging need of drones to update their deep learning (perception) models with new objectives or data as a mission unfolds, has made efficient software update methods crucial for swarms to adapt to dynamic environments. To address these challenges, we introduce the SwarmUpdate framework for software updates in heterogeneous UAV swarms, composed of two key components: SwarmSync and SwarmModelPatch. SwarmSync is a hierarchical software update synchronization strategy to distribute a software update to the right subset of drones within a swarm, while SwarmModelPatch is a deep learning model patching method that reduces the size of a (deep learning model) update by only allowing some layers of the model to be updated (freezing the other layers). In this paper, we systematically evaluate the performance of SwarmSync through large-scale simulations in the ARGoS swarm simulator, comparing SwarmSync to auction-based (SOUL) and gossip-based rebroadcasting (Gossip) baselines, and SwarmModelPatch to a non-incremental model patching strategy.

Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning (mCPP) algorithms in popular commercial software typically treat a Region of Interest (RoI) only as a 2D plane, ignoring important3D structure characteristics. This leads to incomplete 3Dreconstructions, especially around occluded or vertical surfaces. In this paper, we propose a modular algorithm that can extend commercial two-dimensional path planners to facilitate terrain-aware planning by adjusting altitude and camera orientations. To demonstrate it, we extend the well-known DARP (Divide Areas for Optimal Multi-Robot Coverage Path Planning) algorithm and produce DARP-3D. We present simulation results in multiple 3D environments and a real-world flight test using DJI hardware. Compared to baseline, our approach consistently captures improved 3D reconstructions, particularly in areas with significant vertical features. An open-source implementation of the algorithm is available here:https://github.com/konskara/TerraPlan

This paper proposes a novel mission planning platform, capable of efficiently deploying a team of UAVs to cover complex-shaped areas, in various remote sensing applications. Under the hood lies a novel optimization scheme for grid-based methods, utilizing Simulated Annealing algorithm, that significantly increases the achieved percentage of coverage and improves the qualitative features of the generated paths. Extensive simulated evaluation in comparison with a state-of-the-art alternative methodology, for coverage path planning (CPP) operations, establishes the performance gains in terms of achieved coverage and overall duration of the generated missions. On top of that, DARP algorithm is employed to allocate sub-tasks to each member of the swarm, taking into account each UAV's sensing and operational capabilities, their initial positions and any no-fly-zones possibly defined inside the operational area. This feature is of paramount importance in real-life applications, as it has the potential to achieve tremendous performance improvements in terms of time demanded to complete a mission, while at the same time it unlocks a wide new range of applications, that was previously not feasible due to the limited battery life of UAVs. In order to investigate the actual efficiency gains that are introduced by the multi-UAV utilization, a simulated study is performed as well. All of these capabilities are packed inside an end-to-end platform that eases the utilization of UAVs' swarms in remote sensing applications. Its versatility is demonstrated via two different real-life applications: (i) a photogrametry for precision agriculture and (ii) an indicative search and rescue for first responders missions, that were performed utilizing a swarm of commercial UAVs. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/savvas-ap/mCPP-optimized-DARP

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has been a long-standing challenge in video understanding. A natural and intuitive approach is to split this task into two parts: object detection and association. Most mainstream methods employ meticulously crafted heuristic techniques to maintain trajectory information and compute cost matrices for object matching. Although these methods can achieve notable tracking performance, they often require a series of elaborate handcrafted modifications while facing complicated scenarios. We believe that manually assumed priors limit the method's adaptability and flexibility in learning optimal tracking capabilities from domain-specific data. Therefore, we introduce a new perspective that treats Multiple Object Tracking as an in-context ID Prediction task, transforming the aforementioned object association into an end-to-end trainable task. Based on this, we propose a simple yet effective method termed MOTIP. Given a set of trajectories carried with ID information, MOTIP directly decodes the ID labels for current detections to accomplish the association process. Without using tailored or sophisticated architectures, our method achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks by solely leveraging object-level features as tracking cues. The simplicity and impressive results of MOTIP leave substantial room for future advancements, thereby making it a promising baseline for subsequent research. Our code and checkpoints are released at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MOTIP.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have revolutionized inspection tasks by offering a safer, more efficient, and flexible alternative to traditional methods. However, battery limitations often constrain their effectiveness, necessitating the development of optimized flight paths and data collection techniques. While existing approaches like coverage path planning (CPP) ensure comprehensive data collection, they can be inefficient, especially when inspecting multiple non connected Regions of Interest (ROIs). This paper introduces the Fast Inspection of Scattered Regions (FISR) problem and proposes a novel solution, the multi UAV Disjoint Areas Inspection (mUDAI) method. The introduced approach implements a two fold optimization procedure, for calculating the best image capturing positions and the most efficient UAV trajectories, balancing data resolution and operational time, minimizing redundant data collection and resource consumption. The mUDAI method is designed to enable rapid, efficient inspections of scattered ROIs, making it ideal for applications such as security infrastructure assessments, agricultural inspections, and emergency site evaluations. A combination of simulated evaluations and real world deployments is used to validate and quantify the method's ability to improve operational efficiency while preserving high quality data capture, demonstrating its effectiveness in real world operations. An open source Python implementation of the mUDAI method can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/soc12/mUDAI) and the collected and processed data from the real world experiments are all hosted on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/13866483). Finally, this online platform (https://sites.google.com/view/mudai-platform/) allows interested readers to interact with the mUDAI method and generate their own multi UAV FISR missions.

Traffic forecasting is a fundamental task in transportation research, however the scope of current research has mainly focused on a single data modality of loop detectors. Recently, the advances in Artificial Intelligence and drone technologies have made possible novel solutions for efficient, accurate and flexible aerial observations of urban traffic. As a promising traffic monitoring approach, drone-captured data can create an accurate multi-sensor mobility observatory for large-scale urban networks, when combined with existing infrastructure. Therefore, this paper investigates the problem of multi-source traffic speed prediction, simultaneously using drone and loop detector data. A simple yet effective graph-based model HiMSNet is proposed to integrate multiple data modalities and learn spatio-temporal correlations. Detailed analysis shows that predicting accurate segment-level speed is more challenging than the regional speed, especially under high-demand scenarios with heavier congestions and varying traffic dynamics. Utilizing both drone and loop detector data, the prediction accuracy can be improved compared to single-modality cases, when the sensors have lower coverages and are subject to noise. Our simulation study based on vehicle trajectories in a real urban road network has highlighted the added value of integrating drones in traffic forecasting and monitoring.

Drone light shows are redefining aerial entertainment, yet their widespread adoption is bottlenecked by labor-intensive, manual animation. While generative AI promises an automated alternative, current frameworks fail to provide photorealism with fluid, dynamic motion. To address this limitation, we introduce SWAN, an end-to-end pipeline that synthesizes photorealistic, large-scale, and collision-free drone choreographies directly from text prompts. SWAN converts text into realistic reference videos and translates these pixel-space dynamics into physical swarm kinematics using a novel, adaptive point-tracking algorithm. Unlike existing trackers, this method maintains spatial coherence through severe occlusions and rapid topological shifts. A dedicated planner then allocates these trajectories to individual drones, while a subsequent safety filter ensures collision-free execution. We demonstrate scalability by safely orchestrating simulated 2,000-drone formations and validate physical feasibility on a dense real-world swarm of 49 quadcopters, operating everything entirely on standard consumer hardware. Combined, this work demonstrates how generative AI can be leveraged to automate multi-robot choreography design, providing an accessible new framework for drone light shows.

Exploring robust and efficient association methods has always been an important issue in multiple-object tracking (MOT). Although existing tracking methods have achieved impressive performance, congestion and frequent occlusions still pose challenging problems in multi-object tracking. We reveal that performing sparse decomposition on dense scenes is a crucial step to enhance the performance of associating occluded targets. To this end, we propose a pseudo-depth estimation method for obtaining the relative depth of targets from 2D images. Secondly, we design a depth cascading matching (DCM) algorithm, which can use the obtained depth information to convert a dense target set into multiple sparse target subsets and perform data association on these sparse target subsets in order from near to far. By integrating the pseudo-depth method and the DCM strategy into the data association process, we propose a new tracker, called SparseTrack. SparseTrack provides a new perspective for solving the challenging crowded scene MOT problem. Only using IoU matching, SparseTrack achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on the MOT17 and MOT20 benchmarks. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/hustvl/SparseTrack.

Visual object tracking plays a critical role in visual-based autonomous systems, as it aims to estimate the position and size of the object of interest within a live video. Despite significant progress made in this field, state-of-the-art (SOTA) trackers often fail when faced with adversarial perturbations in the incoming frames. This can lead to significant robustness and security issues when these trackers are deployed in the real world. To achieve high accuracy on both clean and adversarial data, we propose building a spatial-temporal continuous representation using the semantic text guidance of the object of interest. This novel continuous representation enables us to reconstruct incoming frames to maintain semantic and appearance consistency with the object of interest and its clean counterparts. As a result, our proposed method successfully defends against different SOTA adversarial tracking attacks while maintaining high accuracy on clean data. In particular, our method significantly increases tracking accuracy under adversarial attacks with around 90% relative improvement on UAV123, which is even higher than the accuracy on clean data.

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has been notoriously difficult to evaluate. Previous metrics overemphasize the importance of either detection or association. To address this, we present a novel MOT evaluation metric, HOTA (Higher Order Tracking Accuracy), which explicitly balances the effect of performing accurate detection, association and localization into a single unified metric for comparing trackers. HOTA decomposes into a family of sub-metrics which are able to evaluate each of five basic error types separately, which enables clear analysis of tracking performance. We evaluate the effectiveness of HOTA on the MOTChallenge benchmark, and show that it is able to capture important aspects of MOT performance not previously taken into account by established metrics. Furthermore, we show HOTA scores better align with human visual evaluation of tracking performance.

To support the Low Altitude Economy (LAE), precise unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) localization in urban areas where global positioning system (GPS) signals are unavailable. Vision-based methods offer a viable alternative but face severe bandwidth, memory and processing constraints on lightweight UAVs. Inspired by mammalian spatial cognition, we propose a task-oriented communication framework, where UAVs equipped with multi-camera systems extract compact multi-view features and offload localization tasks to edge servers. We introduce the Orthogonally-constrained Variational Information Bottleneck encoder (O-VIB), which incorporates automatic relevance determination (ARD) to prune non-informative features while enforcing orthogonality to minimize redundancy. This enables efficient and accurate localization with minimal transmission cost. Extensive evaluation on a dedicated LAE UAV dataset shows that O-VIB achieves high-precision localization under stringent bandwidth budgets. Code and dataset will be made publicly available: github.com/fangzr/TOC-Edge-Aerial.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) has traditionally focused on estimating trajectories of all objects in a video, without selectively reasoning about user-specified targets under semantic instructions. In this work, we introduce a query-driven tracking paradigm that formulates tracking as a spatiotemporal reasoning problem conditioned on natural language queries. Given a reference frame, a video sequence, and a textual query, the goal is to localize and track only the target(s) specified in the query while maintaining temporal coherence and identity consistency. To support this setting, we construct RMOT26, a large-scale benchmark with grounded queries and sequence-level splits to prevent identity leakage and enable robust evaluation of generalization. We further present QTrack, an end-to-end vision-language model that integrates multimodal reasoning with tracking-oriented localization. Additionally, we introduce a Temporal Perception-Aware Policy Optimization strategy with structured rewards to encourage motion-aware reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for reasoning-centric, language-guided tracking. Code and data are available at https://github.com/gaash-lab/QTrack

Multi-object tracking aims to maintain object identities over time by associating detections across video frames. Two dominant paradigms exist in literature: tracking-by-detection methods, which are computationally efficient but rely on handcrafted association heuristics, and end-to-end approaches, which learn association from data at the cost of higher computational complexity. We propose Track-Detection Link Prediction (TDLP), a tracking-by-detection method that performs per-frame association via link prediction between tracks and detections, i.e., by predicting the correct continuation of each track at every frame. TDLP is architecturally designed primarily for geometric features such as bounding boxes, while optionally incorporating additional cues, including pose and appearance. Unlike heuristic-based methods, TDLP learns association directly from data without handcrafted rules, while remaining modular and computationally efficient compared to end-to-end trackers. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that TDLP consistently surpasses state-of-the-art performance across both tracking-by-detection and end-to-end methods. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis comparing link prediction with metric learning-based association and show that link prediction is more effective, particularly when handling heterogeneous features such as detection bounding boxes. Our code is available at https://github.com/Robotmurlock/TDLP{https://github.com/Robotmurlock/TDLP}.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) in sports is highly challenging due to irregular player motion, uniform appearances, and frequent occlusions. These difficulties are further exacerbated by the geometric distortion and extreme scale variation introduced by static fisheye cameras. In this work, we present GTATrack, a hierarchical tracking framework that win first place in the SoccerTrack Challenge 2025. GTATrack integrates two core components: Deep Expansion IoU (Deep-EIoU) for motion-agnostic online association and Global Tracklet Association (GTA) for trajectory-level refinement. This two-stage design enables both robust short-term matching and long-term identity consistency. Additionally, a pseudo-labeling strategy is used to boost detector recall on small and distorted targets. The synergy between local association and global reasoning effectively addresses identity switches, occlusions, and tracking fragmentation. Our method achieved a winning HOTA score of 0.60 and significantly reduced false positives to 982, demonstrating state-of-the-art accuracy in fisheye-based soccer tracking. Our code is available at https://github.com/ron941/GTATrack-STC2025.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) endeavors to precisely estimate the positions and identities of multiple objects over time. The prevailing approach, tracking-by-detection (TbD), first detects objects and then links detections, resulting in a simple yet effective method. However, contemporary detectors may occasionally miss some objects in certain frames, causing trackers to cease tracking prematurely. To tackle this issue, we propose BUSCA, meaning `to search', a versatile framework compatible with any online TbD system, enhancing its ability to persistently track those objects missed by the detector, primarily due to occlusions. Remarkably, this is accomplished without modifying past tracking results or accessing future frames, i.e., in a fully online manner. BUSCA generates proposals based on neighboring tracks, motion, and learned tokens. Utilizing a decision Transformer that integrates multimodal visual and spatiotemporal information, it addresses the object-proposal association as a multi-choice question-answering task. BUSCA is trained independently of the underlying tracker, solely on synthetic data, without requiring fine-tuning. Through BUSCA, we showcase consistent performance enhancements across five different trackers and establish a new state-of-the-art baseline across three different benchmarks. Code available at: https://github.com/lorenzovaquero/BUSCA.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) with camera-LiDAR fusion demands accurate results of object detection, affinity computation and data association in real time. This paper presents an efficient multi-modal MOT framework with online joint detection and tracking schemes and robust data association for autonomous driving applications. The novelty of this work includes: (1) development of an end-to-end deep neural network for joint object detection and correlation using 2D and 3D measurements; (2) development of a robust affinity computation module to compute occlusion-aware appearance and motion affinities in 3D space; (3) development of a comprehensive data association module for joint optimization among detection confidences, affinities and start-end probabilities. The experiment results on the KITTI tracking benchmark demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in terms of both tracking accuracy and processing speed.

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.

The aim of multiple object tracking (MOT) is to detect all objects in a video and bind them into multiple trajectories. Generally, this process is carried out in two steps: detecting objects and associating them across frames based on various cues and metrics. Many studies and applications adopt object appearance, also known as re-identification (ReID) features, for target matching through straightforward similarity calculation. However, we argue that this practice is overly naive and thus overlooks the unique characteristics of MOT tasks. Unlike regular re-identification tasks that strive to distinguish all potential targets in a general representation, multi-object tracking typically immerses itself in differentiating similar targets within the same video sequence. Therefore, we believe that seeking a more suitable feature representation space based on the different sample distributions of each sequence will enhance tracking performance. In this paper, we propose using history-aware transformations on ReID features to achieve more discriminative appearance representations. Specifically, we treat historical trajectory features as conditions and employ a tailored Fisher Linear Discriminant (FLD) to find a spatial projection matrix that maximizes the differentiation between different trajectories. Our extensive experiments reveal that this training-free projection can significantly boost feature-only trackers to achieve competitive, even superior tracking performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while also demonstrating impressive zero-shot transfer capabilities. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal and further encourages future investigation into the importance and customization of ReID models in multiple object tracking. The code will be released at https://github.com/HELLORPG/HATReID-MOT.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are cyber-physical systems whose attack surface spans networked avionics and on-board sensor fusion: a compromised GPS or battery module can mimic a benign mission segment and evade naive anomaly detectors. We present a leakage-free evaluation of quantum machine learning for UAV anomaly detection on the multi-sensor TLM:UAV benchmark. Three contributions support the study. (i) A group-aware temporal protocol (B2) partitions the dataset into ten contiguous TimeUS blocks and evaluates over ten seeds, eliminating the inflation produced by random stratified splits that mix neighbouring samples. (ii) A three-mode feature audit (full/loose/strict) quantifies how much accuracy stems from instantaneous physical signals versus contextual proxies (cumulative energy, battery state, GPS trajectory). (iii) A hybrid XGBoost + Data Reuploading (DRU) classifier is benchmarked against five paired non-linear controls (raw, PCA, polynomial-2, random-RBF, and an untrained DRU map) under identical budgets. The standalone DRU does not consistently match the strongest classical baseline across seeds; however, the trained-DRU hybrid is the only model whose mean F1 macro shifts upward from full to strict (+0.05), a directional signal that the per-seed standard deviations prevent from being interpreted as a statistically established difference. The trained-DRU hybrid also records the lowest mean false-alarm rate under proxy-free evaluation, subject to the inter-seed variance reported. We frame this as an incremental, reproducible quantum-enhanced hybrid benefit, and provide an open Qiskit 2.x implementation as a benchmark for cybersecurity analytics in NISQ-era aerospace systems.

Low-altitude mobility, exemplified by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has introduced transformative advancements across various domains, like transportation, logistics, and agriculture. Leveraging flexible perspectives and rapid maneuverability, UAVs extend traditional systems' perception and action capabilities, garnering widespread attention from academia and industry. However, current UAV operations primarily depend on human control, with only limited autonomy in simple scenarios, and lack the intelligence and adaptability needed for more complex environments and tasks. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable problem-solving and generalization capabilities, offering a promising pathway for advancing UAV intelligence. This paper explores the integration of LLMs and UAVs, beginning with an overview of UAV systems' fundamental components and functionalities, followed by an overview of the state-of-the-art in LLM technology. Subsequently, it systematically highlights the multimodal data resources available for UAVs, which provide critical support for training and evaluation. Furthermore, it categorizes and analyzes key tasks and application scenarios where UAVs and LLMs converge. Finally, a reference roadmap towards agentic UAVs is proposed, aiming to enable UAVs to achieve agentic intelligence through autonomous perception, memory, reasoning, and tool utilization. Related resources are available at https://github.com/Hub-Tian/UAVs_Meet_LLMs.

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.

Without manually annotated identities, unsupervised multi-object trackers are inferior to learning reliable feature embeddings. It causes the similarity-based inter-frame association stage also be error-prone, where an uncertainty problem arises. The frame-by-frame accumulated uncertainty prevents trackers from learning the consistent feature embedding against time variation. To avoid this uncertainty problem, recent self-supervised techniques are adopted, whereas they failed to capture temporal relations. The interframe uncertainty still exists. In fact, this paper argues that though the uncertainty problem is inevitable, it is possible to leverage the uncertainty itself to improve the learned consistency in turn. Specifically, an uncertainty-based metric is developed to verify and rectify the risky associations. The resulting accurate pseudo-tracklets boost learning the feature consistency. And accurate tracklets can incorporate temporal information into spatial transformation. This paper proposes a tracklet-guided augmentation strategy to simulate tracklets' motion, which adopts a hierarchical uncertainty-based sampling mechanism for hard sample mining. The ultimate unsupervised MOT framework, namely U2MOT, is proven effective on MOT-Challenges and VisDrone-MOT benchmark. U2MOT achieves a SOTA performance among the published supervised and unsupervised trackers.

As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become increasingly prevalent in both consumer and defense applications, the need for reliable, modality-specific classification systems grows in urgency. This paper addresses the challenge of data scarcity in UAV audio classification by expanding on prior work through the integration of pre-trained deep learning models, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, and targeted data augmentation techniques. Using a custom dataset of 3,100 UAV audio clips (15,500 seconds) spanning 31 distinct drone types, we evaluate the performance of transformer-based and convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures under various fine-tuning configurations. Experiments were conducted with five-fold cross-validation, assessing accuracy, training efficiency, and robustness. Results show that full fine-tuning of the EfficientNet-B0 model with three augmentations achieved the highest validation accuracy (95.95), outperforming both the custom CNN and transformer-based models like AST. These findings suggest that combining lightweight architectures with PEFT and well-chosen augmentations provides an effective strategy for UAV audio classification on limited datasets. Future work will extend this framework to multimodal UAV classification using visual and radar telemetry.

In the modern era of automation and robotics, autonomous vehicles are currently the focus of academic and industrial research. With the ever increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicles getting involved in activities in the civilian and commercial domain, there is an increased need for autonomy in these systems too. Due to guidelines set by the governments regarding the operation ceiling of civil drones, road-tracking based navigation is garnering interest . In an attempt to achieve the above mentioned tasks, we propose an imitation learning based, data-driven solution to UAV autonomy for navigating through city streets by learning to fly by imitating an expert pilot. Derived from the classic image classification algorithms, our classifier has been constructed in the form of a fast 39-layered Inception model, that evaluates the presence of roads using the tomographic reconstructions of the input frames. Based on the Inception-v3 architecture, our system performs better in terms of processing complexity and accuracy than many existing models for imitation learning. The data used for training the system has been captured from the drone, by flying it in and around urban and semi-urban streets, by experts having at least 6-8 years of flying experience. Permissions were taken from required authorities who made sure that minimal risk (to pedestrians) is involved in the data collection process. With the extensive amount of drone data that we collected, we have been able to navigate successfully through roads without crashing or overshooting, with an accuracy of 98.44%. The computational efficiency of MAVNet enables the drone to fly at high speeds of upto 6m/sec. We present the same results in this research and compare them with other state-of-the-art methods of vision and learning based navigation.

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

The growing scale of modern farms has increased the need for efficient and adaptive multi-agent coverage strategies for pest, weed, and disease management. Traditional methods such as manual inspection and blanket pesticide spraying often lead to excessive chemical use, resource waste, and environmental impact. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer a promising platform for precision agriculture through targeted spraying and improved operational efficiency, existing UAV-based approaches remain limited by battery life, payload capacity, and scalability, especially in large fields where single-UAV or uniformly distributed spraying is insufficient. Although multi-UAV coordination has been explored, many current frameworks still assume uniform spraying and do not account for infestation severity, UAV dynamics, non-uniform resource allocation, or energy-efficient coordination. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) framework that integrates Optimal Transport (OT) theory with multi-UAV coverage control for large-scale agricultural spraying. The method supports non-uniform, priority-aware resource allocation based on infestation intensity, reducing unnecessary chemical application. UAVs are modeled as a linear time-varying (LTV) system to capture variations in mass and inertia during spraying missions. The D2OC control law, derived using Lagrangian mechanics, enables efficient coordination, balanced workload distribution, and improved mission duration. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms uniform spraying and Spectral Multiscale Coverage (SMC) in coverage efficiency, chemical reduction, and operational sustainability, providing a scalable solution for smart agriculture.

Object perception from multi-view cameras is crucial for intelligent systems, particularly in indoor environments, e.g., warehouses, retail stores, and hospitals. Most traditional multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) detection and tracking methods rely on 2D object detection, single-view multi-object tracking (MOT), and cross-view re-identification (ReID) techniques, without properly handling important 3D information by multi-view image aggregation. In this paper, we propose a 3D object detection and tracking framework, named BEV-SUSHI, which first aggregates multi-view images with necessary camera calibration parameters to obtain 3D object detections in bird's-eye view (BEV). Then, we introduce hierarchical graph neural networks (GNNs) to track these 3D detections in BEV for MTMC tracking results. Unlike existing methods, BEV-SUSHI has impressive generalizability across different scenes and diverse camera settings, with exceptional capability for long-term association handling. As a result, our proposed BEV-SUSHI establishes the new state-of-the-art on the AICity'24 dataset with 81.22 HOTA, and 95.6 IDF1 on the WildTrack dataset.

Multi-object tracking is a classic field in computer vision. Among them, pedestrian tracking has extremely high application value and has become the most popular research category. Existing methods mainly use motion or appearance information for tracking, which is often difficult in complex scenarios. For the motion information, mutual occlusions between objects often prevent updating of the motion state; for the appearance information, non-robust results are often obtained due to reasons such as only partial visibility of the object or blurred images. Although learning how to perform tracking in these situations from the annotated data is the simplest solution, the existing MOT dataset fails to satisfy this solution. Existing methods mainly have two drawbacks: relatively simple scene composition and non-realistic scenarios. Although some of the video sequences in existing dataset do not have the above-mentioned drawbacks, the number is far from adequate for research purposes. To this end, we propose a difficult large-scale dataset for multi-pedestrian tracking, shot mainly from the first-person view and all from real-life complex scenarios. We name it ``CrowdTrack'' because there are numerous objects in most of the sequences. Our dataset consists of 33 videos, containing a total of 5,185 trajectories. Each object is annotated with a complete bounding box and a unique object ID. The dataset will provide a platform to facilitate the development of algorithms that remain effective in complex situations. We analyzed the dataset comprehensively and tested multiple SOTA models on our dataset. Besides, we analyzed the performance of the foundation models on our dataset. The dataset and project code is released at: https://github.com/loseevaya/CrowdTrack .

In the multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)- assisted downlink communication, it is challenging for UAV base stations (UAV BSs) to realize trajectory design and resource assignment in unknown environments. The cooperation and competition between UAV BSs in the communication network leads to a Markov game problem. Multi-agent reinforcement learning is a significant solution for the above decision-making. However, there are still many common issues, such as the instability of the system and low utilization of historical data, that limit its application. In this paper, a novel graph-attention multi-agent trust region (GA-MATR) reinforcement learning framework is proposed to solve the multi-UAV assisted communication problem. Graph recurrent network is introduced to process and analyze complex topology of the communication network, so as to extract useful information and patterns from observational information. The attention mechanism provides additional weighting for conveyed information, so that the critic network can accurately evaluate the value of behavior for UAV BSs. This provides more reliable feedback signals and helps the actor network update the strategy more effectively. Ablation simulations indicate that the proposed approach attains improved convergence over the baselines. UAV BSs learn the optimal communication strategies to achieve their maximum cumulative rewards. Additionally, multi-agent trust region method with monotonic convergence provides an estimated Nash equilibrium for the multi-UAV assisted communication Markov game.

Recent advances in cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) methods have shown strong potential for supporting unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation in GNSS-denied environments. However, existing work predominantly focuses on matching UAV views to onboard map tiles, which introduces an inherent trade-off between accuracy and storage overhead, and overlooks the importance of the UAV's heading during navigation. Moreover, the substantial discrepancies and varying overlaps in cross-view scenarios have been insufficiently considered, limiting their generalization to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present Bearing-UAV, a purely vision-driven cross-view navigation method that jointly predicts UAV absolute location and heading from neighboring features, enabling accurate, lightweight, and robust navigation in the wild. Our method leverages global and local structural features and explicitly encodes relative spatial relationships, making it robust to cross-view variations, misalignment, and feature-sparse conditions. We also present Bearing-UAV-90k, a multi-city benchmark for evaluating cross-view localization and navigation. Extensive experiments show encouraging results that Bearing-UAV yields lower localization error than previous matching/retrieval paradigm across diverse terrains. Our code and dataset will be made publicly available.

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

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a rising topic in video processing technologies and has important application value in consumer electronics. Currently, tracking-by-detection (TBD) is the dominant paradigm for MOT, which performs target detection and association frame by frame. However, the association performance of TBD methods degrades in complex scenes with heavy occlusions, which hinders the application of such methods in real-world scenarios.To this end, we incorporate pseudo-depth cues to enhance the association performance and propose Pseudo-Depth SORT (PD-SORT). First, we extend the Kalman filter state vector with pseudo-depth states. Second, we introduce a novel depth volume IoU (DVIoU) by combining the conventional 2D IoU with pseudo-depth. Furthermore, we develop a quantized pseudo-depth measurement (QPDM) strategy for more robust data association. Besides, we also integrate camera motion compensation (CMC) to handle dynamic camera situations. With the above designs, PD-SORT significantly alleviates the occlusion-induced ambiguous associations and achieves leading performances on DanceTrack, MOT17, and MOT20. Note that the improvement is especially obvious on DanceTrack, where objects show complex motions, similar appearances, and frequent occlusions. The code is available at https://github.com/Wangyc2000/PD_SORT.

Camera traps have become a common tool for wildlife monitoring efforts in ecological research and biodiversity conservation. Wildlife classification models have benefited from the increase in wildlife visual data. These models reach high levels of accuracy on curated, high-quality datasets. However, their performance remains sensitive to real-world environmental constraints. They often produce inconsistent predictions when performing inference on temporally coherent sequences. The predicted label for a single individual shifts rapidly between frames. This study exploits the temporal nature of camera-trap data to augment inferred predictions from a wildlife classification model. Specifically, we adopt several standard Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) models to link detections across consecutive frames. The curated trajectories are used to fuse the softmax class probabilities. The fused probability score produces a single consensus class label estimate that overrides misclassifications caused by noise. The analysis of the experimental results shows that our proposed strategy improves over a standalone classifier over all datasets and for each metric. Specifically, the best-performing MOT models gain a weighted F1-Score of 5.1%, 3.1% and 2.0% over the classifier across three MOT datasets.

In this work, we introduce OmniDrones, an efficient and flexible platform tailored for reinforcement learning in drone control, built on Nvidia's Omniverse Isaac Sim. It employs a bottom-up design approach that allows users to easily design and experiment with various application scenarios on top of GPU-parallelized simulations. It also offers a range of benchmark tasks, presenting challenges ranging from single-drone hovering to over-actuated system tracking. In summary, we propose an open-sourced drone simulation platform, equipped with an extensive suite of tools for drone learning. It includes 4 drone models, 5 sensor modalities, 4 control modes, over 10 benchmark tasks, and a selection of widely used RL baselines. To showcase the capabilities of OmniDrones and to support future research, we also provide preliminary results on these benchmark tasks. We hope this platform will encourage further studies on applying RL to practical drone systems.

Multiple object tracking in complex scenarios - such as coordinated dance performances, team sports, or dynamic animal groups - presents unique challenges. In these settings, objects frequently move in coordinated patterns, occlude each other, and exhibit long-term dependencies in their trajectories. However, it remains a key open research question on how to model long-range dependencies within tracklets, interdependencies among tracklets, and the associated temporal occlusions. To this end, we introduce Samba, a novel linear-time set-of-sequences model designed to jointly process multiple tracklets by synchronizing the multiple selective state-spaces used to model each tracklet. Samba autoregressively predicts the future track query for each sequence while maintaining synchronized long-term memory representations across tracklets. By integrating Samba into a tracking-by-propagation framework, we propose SambaMOTR, the first tracker effectively addressing the aforementioned issues, including long-range dependencies, tracklet interdependencies, and temporal occlusions. Additionally, we introduce an effective technique for dealing with uncertain observations (MaskObs) and an efficient training recipe to scale SambaMOTR to longer sequences. By modeling long-range dependencies and interactions among tracked objects, SambaMOTR implicitly learns to track objects accurately through occlusions without any hand-crafted heuristics. Our approach significantly surpasses prior state-of-the-art on the DanceTrack, BFT, and SportsMOT datasets.