mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Securing the Skies: A Comprehensive Survey on Anti-UAV Methods, Benchmarking, and Future Directions

arXiv 2504.11967 ↗First posted 16 Apr 2025cs.CV cs.AI cs.ROcited by 11

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Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 64 of its 179 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2025.

Builds on

64 of 179 references.

References · 64

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38 more
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50 most cited of 64 All 64 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 8.

11 papers.

  1. 2025Towards Unified World Models for Visual Navigation via Memory-Augmented Planning and Foresightcited by 14
  2. 2026Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Anti-UAV Detection via Evidential Fusion and Conflict-Discounted Belief Aggregationcited by 3
  3. 2025GL-DT: Multi-UAV Detection and Tracking with Global-Local Integrationcited by 2
  4. 2025How Far are Modern Trackers from UAV-Anti-UAV? A Million-Scale Benchmark and New Baselinecited by 1
  5. 2026SDD-YOLO: A Small-Target Detection Framework for Ground-to-Air Anti-UAV Surveillance with Edge-Efficient Deploymentcited by 1
  6. 2026Semantic-Aware Temporal Adaptation for UAV Anti-UAV Trackingcited by 1
  7. 2026LER-YOLO: Reliability-Aware Expert Routing for Misaligned RGB-Infrared UAV Detectioncited by 0
  8. 2026Edge-Aware Thermal Infrared UAV Swarm Trackingcited by 0
  9. 2026SkyEV: RGB-Event UAV detection and tracking dataset and baselinecited by 0
  10. 2026Acoustic UAV Detection in Battlefield Scenarios: Handling Noise, Domain Shift, and Weak Labelscited by 0
  11. 2026Beyond Clear Skies: Synthetic Seasonal and Weather Variations for Real-World Drone Detectioncited by 0

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