# UAV-CB: A Complex-Background RGB-T Dataset and Local Frequency Bridge Network for UAV Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17492 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17492/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (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)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [Multispectral Deep Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02644/) (2016)
- [C2Former: Calibrated and Complementary Transformer for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16175/) (2023)
- [YOLOv13: Real-Time Object Detection with Hypergraph-Enhanced Adaptive Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17733/) (2025)
- [Cascade RPN: Delving into High-Quality Region Proposal Network with Adaptive Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06720/) (2019)
- [Translation, Scale and Rotation: Cross-Modal Alignment Meets RGB-Infrared Vehicle Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13801/) (2022)
- [ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20208/) (2023)
- [Vision-based Anti-UAV Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10851/) (2022)
- [Anti-UAV: A Large Multi-Modal Benchmark for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08466/) (2021)
- [Visible-Thermal Tiny Object Detection: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14482/) (2024)
- [Referring Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07532/) (2023)
- [MMAUD: A Comprehensive Multi-Modal Anti-UAV Dataset for Modern Miniature Drone Threats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03706/) (2024)
- [Causal Mode Multiplexer: A Novel Framework for Unbiased Multispectral Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01300/) (2024)
- [Drones Help Drones: A Collaborative Framework for Multi-Drone Object Trajectory Prediction and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14674/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Multi-Modal Object Detection from the Perspective of Mono-Modality Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11780/) (2025)
- [When Pedestrian Detection Meets Multi-Modal Learning: Generalist Model and Benchmark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10125/) (2024)
- [MM-CamObj: A Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset for Camouflaged Object Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16084/) (2024)
- [FD2-Net: Frequency-Driven Feature Decomposition Network for Infrared-Visible Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09258/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Early-Fusion Strategies for Improved Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16038/) (2024)
- [CST Anti-UAV: A Thermal Infrared Benchmark for Tiny UAV Tracking in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23473/) (2025)
- [SFDFusion: An Efficient Spatial-Frequency Domain Fusion Network for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22837/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in low-altitude environments is essential for perception and defense systems but remains highly challenging due to complex backgrounds, camouflage, and multimodal interference. In real-world scenarios, UAVs are frequently visually blended with surrounding structures such as buildings, vegetation, and power lines, resulting in low contrast, weak boundaries, and strong confusion with cluttered background textures. Existing UAV detection datasets, though diverse, are not specifically designed to capture these camouflage and complex-background challenges, which limits progress toward robust real-world perception. To fill this gap, we construct UAV-CB, a new RGB-T UAV detection dataset deliberately curated to emphasize complex low-altitude backgrounds and camouflage characteristics. Furthermore, we propose the Local Frequency Bridge Network (LFBNet), which models features in localized frequency space to bridge both the frequency-spatial fusion gap and the cross-modality discrepancy gap in RGB-T fusion. Extensive experiments on UAV-CB and public benchmarks demonstrate that LFBNet achieves state-of-the-art detection performance and strong robustness under camouflaged and cluttered conditions, offering a frequency-aware perspective on multimodal UAV perception in real-world applications.