# WebUAV-3M: A Benchmark for Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep UAV Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07425 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07425/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [GOT-10k: A Large High-Diversity Benchmark for Generic Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11981/) (2018)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11703/) (2018)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Benchmark for Large-scale Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07845/) (2018)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [Learning Discriminative Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07220/) (2019)
- [TrackingNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10794/) (2018)
- [ATOM: Accurate Tracking by Overlap Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07628/) (2018)
- [Fast Online Object Tracking and Segmentation: A Unifying Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05050/) (2018)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [ECO: Efficient Convolution Operators for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09224/) (2016)
- [Probabilistic Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12565/) (2020)
- [Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11681/) (2021)
- [Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10721/) (2020)
- [Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.07945/) (2015)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [Siamese Box Adaptive Network for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06761/) (2020)
- [Distractor-aware Siamese Networks for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06048/) (2018)
- [SiamFC++: Towards Robust and Accurate Visual Tracking with Target Estimation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06188/) (2019)
- [Acquisition of Localization Confidence for Accurate Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11590/) (2018)
- [Deeper and Wider Siamese Networks for Real-Time Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01660/) (2019)
- [SiamCAR: Siamese Fully Convolutional Classification and Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07241/) (2019)
- [The Sound of Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05979/) (2019)
- [MetaIQA: Deep Meta-learning for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05508/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Segment Anything Model for Vision and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08196/) (2023)
- [UAVs Meet LLMs: Overviews and Perspectives Toward Agentic Low-Altitude Mobility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02341/) (2025)
- [All in One: Exploring Unified Vision-Language Tracking with Multi-Modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03373/) (2023)
- [Learning Spatial-Frequency Transformer for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08829/) (2022)
- [WebUOT-1M: Advancing Deep Underwater Object Tracking with A Million-Scale Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19818/) (2024)
- [RingMo-Aerial: An Aerial Remote Sensing Foundation Model With Affine Transformation Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13366/) (2024)
- [DTVLT: A Multi-modal Diverse Text Benchmark for Visual Language Tracking Based on LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02492/) (2024)
- [How Texts Help? A Fine-grained Evaluation to Reveal the Role of Language in Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15600/) (2024)
- [ReasoningTrack: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Long-term Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05221/) (2025)
- [Awesome Multi-modal Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14200/) (2024)
- [Underwater Camouflaged Object Tracking Meets Vision-Language SAM2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16902/) (2024)
- [MambaTrack: Exploiting Dual-Enhancement for Night UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15761/) (2024)
- [UAVBench and UAVIT-1M: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs for Low-Altitude UAV Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14336/) (2026)
- [Camouflaged Object Tracking: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13877/) (2024)
- [COST: Contrastive One-Stage Transformer for Vision-Language Small Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01321/) (2025)
- [Omni Survey for Multimodality Analysis in Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13000/) (2025)
- [An LLM-based Framework for Human-Swarm Teaming Cognition in Disaster Search and Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04042/) (2025)
- [Learning an Adaptive and View-Invariant Vision Transformer for Real-Time UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20002/) (2024)
- [How Far are Modern Trackers from UAV-Anti-UAV? A Million-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07385/) (2025)
- [Semantic-Aware Temporal Adaptation for UAV Anti-UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26511/) (2026)
- [MAVD: The First Open Large-Scale Mandarin Audio-Visual Dataset with Depth Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02263/) (2023)
- [Predicting the Best of N Visual Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15707/) (2024)
- [Towards UAV Detection in the Real World: A New Multispectral Dataset UAVNet-MS and a New Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20963/) (2026)
- [UAV-OVVIS: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Also Need Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08075/) (2026)
- [UniRef-UAV: A Multimodal Benchmark for Universal Referring in UAV Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08267/) (2026)
- [Cross-Modal UAV Object Tracking: State-Aware Representation Learning and A Unified Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18768/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is of great significance for a wide range of applications, such as delivery and agriculture. Previous benchmarks in this area mainly focused on small-scale tracking problems while ignoring the amounts of data, types of data modalities, diversities of target categories and scenarios, and evaluation protocols involved, greatly hiding the massive power of deep UAV tracking. In this work, we propose WebUAV-3M, the largest public UAV tracking benchmark to date, to facilitate both the development and evaluation of deep UAV trackers. WebUAV-3M contains over 3.3 million frames across 4,500 videos and offers 223 highly diverse target categories. Each video is densely annotated with bounding boxes by an efficient and scalable semiautomatic target annotation (SATA) pipeline. Importantly, to take advantage of the complementary superiority of language and audio, we enrich WebUAV-3M by innovatively providing both natural language specifications and audio descriptions. We believe that such additions will greatly boost future research in terms of exploring language features and audio cues for multimodal UAV tracking. In addition, a fine-grained UAV tracking-under-scenario constraint (UTUSC) evaluation protocol and seven challenging scenario subtest sets are constructed to enable the community to develop, adapt and evaluate various types of advanced trackers. We provide extensive evaluations and detailed analyses of 43 representative trackers and envision future research directions in the field of deep UAV tracking and beyond. The dataset, toolkits and baseline results are available at urlhttps://github.com/983632847/WebUAV-3M.