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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11967 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11967/

## 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 (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11082/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Towards Unified World Models for Visual Navigation via Memory-Augmented Planning and Foresight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08713/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Anti-UAV Detection via Evidential Fusion and Conflict-Discounted Belief Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29235/) (2026)
- [GL-DT: Multi-UAV Detection and Tracking with Global-Local Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09092/) (2025)
- [How Far are Modern Trackers from UAV-Anti-UAV? A Million-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07385/) (2025)
- [SDD-YOLO: A Small-Target Detection Framework for Ground-to-Air Anti-UAV Surveillance with Edge-Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25218/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Aware Temporal Adaptation for UAV Anti-UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26511/) (2026)
- [LER-YOLO: Reliability-Aware Expert Routing for Misaligned RGB-Infrared UAV Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20667/) (2026)
- [Edge-Aware Thermal Infrared UAV Swarm Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12544/) (2026)
- [SkyEV: RGB-Event UAV detection and tracking dataset and baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18747/) (2026)
- [Acoustic UAV Detection in Battlefield Scenarios: Handling Noise, Domain Shift, and Weak Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14287/) (2026)
- [Beyond Clear Skies: Synthetic Seasonal and Weather Variations for Real-World Drone Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16191/) (2026)

## 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.