# Open-Vocabulary Object Detection in UAV Imagery: A Review and Future Perspectives

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13359/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01933/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [Recent Advances in Open Set Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08581/) (2018)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04340/) (2018)
- [xView: Objects in Context in Overhead Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07856/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DroneFINE: Domain-Aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Detectors for Drone Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00338/) (2026)
- [Open-Text Aerial Detection: A Unified Framework For Aerial Visual Grounding And Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07827/) (2026)
- [Lightweight Multimodal Adaptation of Vision Language Models for Species Recognition and Habitat Context Interpretation in Drone Thermal Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06124/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to its extensive applications, aerial image object detection has long been a hot topic in computer vision. In recent years, advancements in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) technology have further propelled this field to new heights, giving rise to a broader range of application requirements. However, traditional UAV aerial object detection methods primarily focus on detecting predefined categories, which significantly limits their applicability. The advent of cross-modal text-image alignment (e.g., CLIP) has overcome this limitation, enabling open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD), which can identify previously unseen objects through natural language descriptions. This breakthrough significantly enhances the intelligence and autonomy of UAVs in aerial scene understanding. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of OVOD in the context of UAV aerial scenes. We begin by aligning the core principles of OVOD with the unique characteristics of UAV vision, setting the stage for a specialized discussion. Building on this foundation, we construct a systematic taxonomy that categorizes existing OVOD methods for aerial imagery and provides a comprehensive overview of the relevant datasets. This structured review enables us to critically dissect the key challenges and open problems at the intersection of these fields. Finally, based on this analysis, we outline promising future research directions and application prospects. This survey aims to provide a clear road map and a valuable reference for both newcomers and seasoned researchers, fostering innovation in this rapidly evolving domain. We keep tracing related works at https://github.com/zhouyang2002/OVOD-in-UVA-imagery