Recent Advances for Aerial Object Detection: A Survey

Aerial object detection, as object detection in aerial images captured from an overhead perspective, has been widely applied in urban management, industrial inspection, and other aspects. However, the performance of existing aerial object detection algorithms is hindered by variations in object scales and orientations attributed to the aerial perspective. This survey presents a comprehensive review of recent advances in aerial object detection. We start with some basic concepts of aerial object detection and then summarize the five imbalance problems of aerial object detection, including scale imbalance, spatial imbalance, objective imbalance, semantic imbalance, and class imbalance. Moreover, we classify and analyze relevant methods and especially introduce the applications of aerial object detection in practical scenarios. Finally, the performance evaluation is presented on two popular aerial object detection datasets VisDrone-DET and DOTA, and we discuss several future directions that could facilitate the development of aerial object detection.