mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Deep Learning for UAV-based Object Detection and Tracking: A Survey

arXiv 2110.12638 ↗First posted 25 Oct 2021cs.CVcited by 33

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.

Key facts. Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 106 of its 243 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2021.

Builds on

106 of 243 references.

References · 106

  1. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
  2. 2015Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networkscited by 9,639
  3. 2016Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detectioncited by 5,036
  4. 2015You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detectioncited by 4,852
  5. 2017MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applicationscited by 3,845
  6. 2015SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detectorcited by 3,130
  7. 2015Fast R-CNNcited by 2,933
  8. 2018YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvementcited by 2,659
  9. 2016Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networkscited by 2,546
  10. 2013Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentationcited by 2,162
  11. 2019Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimationcited by 1,339
  12. 2017Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detectioncited by 1,276
38 more
  1. 2019Objects as Pointscited by 1,175
  2. 2017PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volumecited by 968
  3. 2017Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metriccited by 910
  4. 2016Simple Online and Realtime Trackingcited by 868
  5. 2018CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypointscited by 763
  6. 2017DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Imagescited by 623
  7. 2016Optical Flow Estimation using a Spatial Pyramid Networkcited by 424
  8. 2019Tracking without bells and whistlescited by 382
  9. 2019Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmarkcited by 340
  10. 2016ECO: Efficient Convolution Operators for Trackingcited by 239
  11. 2018The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Trackingcited by 208
  12. 2016Deep Feature Flow for Video Recognitioncited by 186
  13. 2017Flow-Guided Feature Aggregation for Video Object Detectioncited by 177
  14. 2017Arbitrary-Oriented Scene Text Detection via Rotation Proposalscited by 176
  15. 2017Drone-based Object Counting by Spatially Regularized Regional Proposal Networkcited by 156
  16. 2017Detect to Track and Track to Detectcited by 131
  17. 2017Single-Shot Refinement Neural Network for Object Detectioncited by 129
  18. 2020More Diverse Means Better: Multimodal Deep Learning Meets Remote Sensing Imagery Classificationcited by 126
  19. 2018TextBoxes++: A Single-Shot Oriented Scene Text Detectorcited by 119
  20. 2020Graph Convolutional Networks for Hyperspectral Image Classificationcited by 113
  21. 2017End-to-end representation learning for Correlation Filter based trackingcited by 90
  22. 2018ESPNetv2: A Light-weight, Power Efficient, and General Purpose Convolutional Neural Networkcited by 90
  23. 2018Rotation-Sensitive Regression for Oriented Scene Text Detectioncited by 88
  24. 2016A Unified Multi-scale Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Fast Object Detectioncited by 83
  25. 2019Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Imagescited by 83
  26. 2017Polar Transformer Networkscited by 81
  27. 2018Vision Meets Drones: A Challengecited by 81
  28. 2016Learning by tracking: Siamese CNN for robust target associationcited by 79
  29. 2019Online Multi-Object Tracking with Dual Matching Attention Networkscited by 77
  30. 2017Tracking The Untrackable: Learning To Track Multiple Cues with Long-Term Dependenciescited by 76
  31. 2017Perceptual Generative Adversarial Networks for Small Object Detectioncited by 76
  32. 2019Motion Guided Attention for Video Salient Object Detectioncited by 72
  33. 2016Seq-NMS for Video Object Detectioncited by 68
  34. 2017Oriented Response Networkscited by 68
  35. 2016T-CNN: Tubelets with Convolutional Neural Networks for Object Detection from Videoscited by 67
  36. 2016TI-POOLING: transformation-invariant pooling for feature learning in Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 67
  37. 2018An Augmented Linear Mixing Model to Address Spectral Variability for Hyperspectral Unmixingcited by 66
  38. 2015Staple: Complementary Learners for Real-Time Trackingcited by 60

50 most cited of 106 All 106 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 5; 2023: 8; 2024: 13; 2025: 4; 2026: 3.

33 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2022UIU-Net: U-Net in U-Net for Infrared Small Object Detectioncited by 127
  2. 2022Deep Learning in Multimodal Remote Sensing Data Fusion: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 73
  3. 2023WaterScenes: A Multi-Task 4D Radar-Camera Fusion Dataset and Benchmarks for Autonomous Driving on Water Surfacescited by 35
  4. 2022Universal Adversarial Examples in Remote Sensing: Methodology and Benchmarkcited by 24
  5. 2024A Comprehensive Survey for Hyperspectral Image Classification: The Evolution from Conventional to Transformers and Mamba Modelscited by 19
  6. 2023Multiview Aerial Visual Recognition (MAVREC): Can Multi-view Improve Aerial Visual Perception?cited by 18
  7. 2024SIRST-5K: Exploring Massive Negatives Synthesis with Self-supervised Learning for Robust Infrared Small Target Detectioncited by 17
  8. 2024Discrete Latent Perspective Learning for Segmentation and Detectioncited by 16
  9. 2024BioDrone: A Bionic Drone-based Single Object Tracking Benchmark for Robust Visioncited by 13
  10. 2022Siamese Object Tracking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: A Review and Comprehensive Analysiscited by 11
  11. 2025Securing the Skies: A Comprehensive Survey on Anti-UAV Methods, Benchmarking, and Future Directionscited by 11
  12. 2022Archangel: A Hybrid UAV-based Human Detection Benchmark with Position and Pose Metadatacited by 9
21 more
  1. 2023Oriented object detection in optical remote sensing images using deep learning: a surveycited by 8
  2. 2024RemoteDet-Mamba: A Hybrid Mamba-CNN Network for Multi-modal Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagescited by 7
  3. 2023Efficient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Imagery via Attention-based Feature Distillationcited by 6
  4. 2023Memory Maps for Video Object Detection and Tracking on UAVscited by 4
  5. 2024UEMM-Air: Make Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Perform More Multi-modal Taskscited by 4
  6. 2024Domain-invariant Progressive Knowledge Distillation for UAV-based Object Detectioncited by 4
  7. 2024Lost in UNet: Improving Infrared Small Target Detection by Underappreciated Local Featurescited by 3
  8. 2024Multimodal Collaboration Networks for Geospatial Vehicle Detection in Dense, Occluded, and Large-Scale Eventscited by 2
  9. 2024SL-YOLO: A Stronger and Lighter Drone Target Detection Modelcited by 2
  10. 2023YOLO-Drone:Airborne real-time detection of dense small objects from high-altitude perspectivecited by 1
  11. 2023Deep Learning-Based Object Detection in Maritime Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery: Review and Experimental Comparisonscited by 1
  12. 2024STCMOT: Spatio-Temporal Cohesion Learning for UAV-Based Multiple Object Trackingcited by 1
  13. 2024DREB-Net: Dual-stream Restoration Embedding Blur-feature Fusion Network for High-mobility UAV Object Detectioncited by 1
  14. 2026A Review of Vision-Based Vehicle Detection for UAV-Based Traffic Monitoring: Experimental Insights and Future Directionscited by 1
  15. 2023Exploring the Effectiveness of Dataset Synthesis: An application of Apple Detection in Orchardscited by 0
  16. 2024STF: Spatio-Temporal Fusion Module for Improving Video Object Detectioncited by 0
  17. 2025HierLight-YOLO: A Hierarchical and Lightweight Object Detection Network for UAV Photographycited by 0
  18. 2025DPTrack:Directional Kernel-Guided Prompt Learning for Robust Nighttime Aerial Trackingcited by 0
  19. 2025DMTrack: Deformable State-Space Modeling for UAV Multi-Object Tracking with Kalman Fusion and Uncertainty-Aware Associationcited by 0
  20. 2026Perception-to-Pursuit: Track-Centric Temporal Reasoning for Open-World Drone Detection and Autonomous Chasingcited by 0
  21. 2026Alignment-Aware and Reliability-Gated Multimodal Fusion for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Detection Across Heterogeneous Thermal-Visual Sensorscited by 0