# Towards UAV Detection in the Real World: A New Multispectral Dataset UAVNet-MS and a New Method

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20963/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07755/) (2021)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [RGB-T Object Tracking:Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08982/) (2018)
- [Slicing Aided Hyper Inference and Fine-tuning for Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06934/) (2022)
- [LasHeR: A Large-scale High-diversity Benchmark for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13202/) (2021)
- [Visible-Thermal UAV Tracking: A Large-Scale Benchmark and New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04120/) (2022)
- [Multispectral Fusion for Object Detection with Cyclic Fuse-and-Refine Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12664/) (2020)
- [Material Based Object Tracking in Hyperspectral Videos: Benchmark and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04179/) (2018)
- [TJU-DHD: A Diverse High-Resolution Dataset for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09170/) (2020)
- [Visible-Thermal Tiny Object Detection: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14482/) (2024)
- [WebUAV-3M: A Benchmark for Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07425/) (2022)
- [Advances in Multimodal Adaptation and Generalization: From Traditional Approaches to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18592/) (2025)
- [MUST: The First Dataset and Unified Framework for Multispectral UAV Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17699/) (2025)
- [ATRNet-STAR: A Large Dataset and Benchmark Towards Remote Sensing Object Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13354/) (2025)
- [Parameter-Inverted Image Pyramid Networks for Visual Perception and Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07783/) (2025)
- [SpecDETR: A transformer-based hyperspectral point object detection network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10148/) (2024)
- [Oriented Tiny Object Detection: A Dataset, Benchmark, and Dynamic Unbiased Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11582/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has created urgent demand for precise UAV monitoring. Existing RGB-based systems rely on spatial cues that degrade at small scales, particularly with high inter-type similarity, target-clutter ambiguity, and low contrast. Multispectral imaging (MSI) encodes material-aware spectral signatures, yet MSI-based fine-grained small-UAV detection remains underexplored due to lack of dedicated datasets. We introduce UAVNet-MS, the first multispectral dataset for fine-grained small-UAV detection, comprising 15,618 temporally synchronized RGB-MSI data cubes (1440x1080) with bounding box annotations. The dataset features challenging small objects (93.7% <= 32^2 pixels, average 18^2 pixels, ~0.02% image area) under low contrast. We propose MFDNet, a dual-stream baseline addressing array-induced parallax and spatial-spectral fusion. Extensive evaluation under RGB-only, MSI-only, and RGB+MSI protocols against 20 detectors shows MFDNet achieves +6.2% AP50 improvement over best RGB-only methods, demonstrating spectral cues provide complementary material evidence beyond spatial cues. This work provides foundational dataset, strong baseline, and benchmark for multispectral UAV monitoring research.