# Caltech Aerial RGB-Thermal Dataset in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08997 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08997/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [Separable Self-attention for Mobile Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02680/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [ThermalGen: Style-Disentangled Flow-Based Generative Models for RGB-to-Thermal Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24878/) (2025)
- [MonoTher-Depth: Enhancing Thermal Depth Estimation via Confidence-Aware Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16127/) (2025)
- [AnyThermal: Towards Learning Universal Representations for Thermal Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06203/) (2026)
- [UASTHN: Uncertainty-Aware Deep Homography Estimation for UAV Satellite-Thermal Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01035/) (2025)
- [TherA: Thermal-Aware Visual-Language Prompting for Controllable RGB-to-Thermal Infrared Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19430/) (2026)
- [Semantics from Space: Satellite-Guided Thermal Semantic Segmentation Annotation for Aerial Field Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14056/) (2024)
- [Quantifying the synthetic and real domain gap in aerial scene understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19913/) (2024)
- [Cross-modal State Space Modeling for Real-time RGB-thermal Wild Scene Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17869/) (2025)
- [TUNI: Unifying Pre-training and Fine-tuning with Modality-Aware Mutual Learning and Rectification for RGB-T Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10005/) (2025)
- [SegFly: A Dataset and 2D-3D-2D Paradigm for Aerial RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17920/) (2026)
- [FusionRS: A Large-Scale RGB-Infrared-Style Remote Sensing Dataset for Cross-Modal Vision-Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17020/) (2026)
- [Open-RGBT: Open-vocabulary RGB-T Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation in Open-world Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06626/) (2024)
- [AetherVision-Bench: An Open-Vocabulary RGB-Infrared Benchmark for Multi-Angle Segmentation across Aerial and Ground Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03709/) (2025)
- [ThermalDiffusion: Visual-to-Thermal Image-to-Image Translation for Autonomous Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20969/) (2025)
- [HiddenObject: Modality-Agnostic Fusion for Multimodal Hidden Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21135/) (2025)
- [LER-YOLO: Reliability-Aware Expert Routing for Misaligned RGB-Infrared UAV Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20667/) (2026)
- [RGB-to-IR image translation for infrared vehicle detection in unseen UAV domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02556/) (2026)
- [VoxelFix: Post-Hoc Semantic Correction of Completed 3D Voxel Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05114/) (2026)
- [Hub-Spectral Activation of Latent Multimodal Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17094/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first publicly-available RGB-thermal dataset designed for aerial robotics operating in natural environments. Our dataset captures a variety of terrain across the United States, including rivers, lakes, coastlines, deserts, and forests, and consists of synchronized RGB, thermal, global positioning, and inertial data. We provide semantic segmentation annotations for 10 classes commonly encountered in natural settings in order to drive the development of perception algorithms robust to adverse weather and nighttime conditions. Using this dataset, we propose new and challenging benchmarks for thermal and RGB-thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation, RGB-T image translation, and motion tracking. We present extensive results using state-of-the-art methods and highlight the challenges posed by temporal and geographical domain shifts in our data. The dataset and accompanying code is available at https://github.com/aerorobotics/caltech-aerial-rgbt-dataset.