# DrIFT: Autonomous Drone Dataset with Integrated Real and Synthetic Data, Flexible Views, and Transformed Domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04789 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04789/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05065/) (2017)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Generate To Adapt: Aligning Domains using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01705/) (2017)
- [SHIFT: A Synthetic Driving Dataset for Continuous Multi-Task Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08367/) (2022)
- [A Review and Comparative Study on Probabilistic Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10671/) (2020)
- [A Robust Learning Approach to Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02361/) (2019)
- [Model Adaptation with Synthetic and Real Data for Semantic Dense Foggy Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01265/) (2018)
- [Multivariate Confidence Calibration for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13546/) (2020)
- [Self-Training and Adversarial Background Regularization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00597/) (2019)
- [Beyond Sharing Weights for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06432/) (2016)
- [BayesOD: A Bayesian Approach for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03838/) (2019)
- [Guiding Pseudo-labels with Uncertainty Estimation for Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03770/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00236/) (2021)
- [Learning Domain Adaptive Object Detection with Probabilistic Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06293/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty-guided Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07591/) (2022)
- [Vision-based Anti-UAV Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10851/) (2022)
- [Estimating and Evaluating Regression Predictive Uncertainty in Deep Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05036/) (2021)
- [Anti-UAV: A Large Multi-Modal Benchmark for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08466/) (2021)
- [ConfMix: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Object Detection via Confidence-based Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11539/) (2022)
- [MUAD: Multiple Uncertainties for Autonomous Driving, a benchmark for multiple uncertainty types and tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01437/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Drone Detection and Tracking With Visible, Thermal and Acoustic Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07396/) (2020)
- [Towards Building Self-Aware Object Detectors via Reliable Uncertainty Quantification and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00934/) (2023)
- [A Deep Learning Approach to Drone Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00863/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Drone Detection with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04564/) (2025)
- [UAV-MM3D: A Large-Scale Synthetic Benchmark for 3D Perception of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Multi-Modal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22404/) (2025)
- [LAA3D: A Benchmark of Detecting and Tracking Low-Altitude Aircraft in 3D Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19057/) (2025)
- [Visual Marker Search for Autonomous Drone Landing in Diverse Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11078/) (2026)
- [Beyond Clear Skies: Synthetic Seasonal and Weather Variations for Real-World Drone Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16191/) (2026)
- [DroneGround: Open-Vocabulary Drone Payload Characterization Using Synthetic Data and Grounded Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07780/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dependable visual drone detection is crucial for the secure integration of drones into the airspace. However, drone detection accuracy is significantly affected by domain shifts due to environmental changes, varied points of view, and background shifts. To address these challenges, we present the DrIFT dataset, specifically developed for visual drone detection under domain shifts. DrIFT includes fourteen distinct domains, each characterized by shifts in point of view, synthetic-to-real data, season, and adverse weather. DrIFT uniquely emphasizes background shift by providing background segmentation maps to enable background-wise metrics and evaluation. Our new uncertainty estimation metric, MCDO-map, features lower postprocessing complexity, surpassing traditional methods. We use the MCDO-map in our uncertainty-aware unsupervised domain adaptation method, demonstrating superior performance to SOTA unsupervised domain adaptation techniques. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/CARG-uOttawa/DrIFT.git.