arXiv:2611.16724 · v1
What Limits Thermal Infrared Drone Detection? A Cross-Dataset Benchmark Analysis
摘要
Thermal infrared (IR) imaging enables drone detection with reduced dependence on ambient illumination, supporting continuous surveillance beyond the limitations of visible-spectrum sensing. However, substantial and often undocumented variability in camera systems, processing pipelines, and annotation practices across public IR drone datasets complicates the assessment of detector performance and cross-domain generalization. To examine these sources of variability and their implications for drone detection, we systematically characterize existing IR datasets and establish an artifact taxonomy reflecting their origins across the acquisition and processing pipeline, encompassing optical and sensor effects, tone mapping and image enhancement, and recording-related artifacts. Focusing on long-wave IR data, we investigate the impact of training data composition and model characteristics on YOLO-based detection performance, generalization, and condition-dependent failure modes. Our results demonstrate that detection performance is governed more strongly by training data composition than by YOLO generation or model capacity, while cross-dataset generalization exhibits pronounced asymmetries. Even the best-performing configuration fails to detect over 40\% of drones, with elevated miss rates for very small targets, cluttered urban backgrounds, and thermal crossover, highlighting the shortcomings of existing datasets.
作者备注：Accepted at 2027 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision Workshops (WACVW), Workshop "Real World Surveillance: Applications and Challenges, 7th"