# YOLOBirDrone: Dataset for Bird vs Drone Detection and Classification and a YOLO based enhanced learning architecture

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08319 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08319/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Review of YOLO Architectures in Computer Vision: From YOLOv1 to YOLOv8 and YOLO-NAS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00501/) (2023)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)
- [RT-DETRv2: Improved Baseline with Bag-of-Freebies for Real-Time Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17140/) (2024)
- [A General Survey on Attention Mechanisms in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14263/) (2022)
- [Attention Mechanism in Neural Networks: Where it Comes and Where it Goes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13154/) (2022)
- [A Review of Object Detection Models based on Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01614/) (2019)
- [EPSANet: An Efficient Pyramid Squeeze Attention Block on Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14447/) (2021)
- [YOLOv1 to YOLOv10: A comprehensive review of YOLO variants and their application in the agricultural domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10139/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The use of aerial drones for commercial and defense applications has benefited in many ways and is therefore utilized in several different application domains. However, they are also increasingly used for targeted attacks, posing a significant safety challenge and necessitating the development of drone detection systems. Vision-based drone detection systems currently have an accuracy limitation and struggle to distinguish between drones and birds, particularly when the birds are small in size. This research work proposes a novel YOLOBirDrone architecture that improves the detection and classification accuracy of birds and drones. YOLOBirDrone has different components, including an adaptive and extended layer aggregation (AELAN), a multi-scale progressive dual attention module (MPDA), and a reverse MPDA (RMPDA) to preserve shape information and enrich features with local and global spatial and channel information. A large-scale dataset, BirDrone, is also introduced in this article, which includes small and challenging objects for robust aerial object identification. Experimental results demonstrate an improvement in performance metrics through the proposed YOLOBirDrone architecture compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms, with detection accuracy reaching approximately 85% across various scenarios.