Unlocking Thermal Aerial Imaging: Synthetic Enhancement of UAV Datasets

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kulas, Antonella Barisic, Jurasovic, Andreja, Bogdan, Stjepan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kulas, Antonella Barisic
Jurasovic, Andreja
Bogdan, Stjepan
author_facet Kulas, Antonella Barisic
Jurasovic, Andreja
Bogdan, Stjepan
contents Thermal imaging from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) holds significant potential for applications in search and rescue, wildlife monitoring, and emergency response, especially under low-light or obscured conditions. However, the scarcity of large-scale, diverse thermal aerial datasets limits the advancement of deep learning models in this domain, primarily due to the high cost and logistical challenges of collecting thermal data. In this work, we introduce a novel procedural pipeline for generating synthetic thermal images from an aerial perspective. Our method integrates arbitrary object classes into existing thermal backgrounds by providing control over the position, scale, and orientation of the new objects, while aligning them with the viewpoints of the background. We enhance existing thermal datasets by introducing new object categories, specifically adding a drone class in urban environments to the HIT-UAV dataset and an animal category to the MONET dataset. In evaluating these datasets for object detection task, we showcase strong performance across both new and existing classes, validating the successful expansion into new applications. Through comparative analysis, we show that thermal detectors outperform their visible-light-trained counterparts and highlight the importance of replicating aerial viewing angles. Project page: https://github.com/larics/thermal_aerial_synthetic.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06797
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unlocking Thermal Aerial Imaging: Synthetic Enhancement of UAV Datasets
Kulas, Antonella Barisic
Jurasovic, Andreja
Bogdan, Stjepan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Thermal imaging from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) holds significant potential for applications in search and rescue, wildlife monitoring, and emergency response, especially under low-light or obscured conditions. However, the scarcity of large-scale, diverse thermal aerial datasets limits the advancement of deep learning models in this domain, primarily due to the high cost and logistical challenges of collecting thermal data. In this work, we introduce a novel procedural pipeline for generating synthetic thermal images from an aerial perspective. Our method integrates arbitrary object classes into existing thermal backgrounds by providing control over the position, scale, and orientation of the new objects, while aligning them with the viewpoints of the background. We enhance existing thermal datasets by introducing new object categories, specifically adding a drone class in urban environments to the HIT-UAV dataset and an animal category to the MONET dataset. In evaluating these datasets for object detection task, we showcase strong performance across both new and existing classes, validating the successful expansion into new applications. Through comparative analysis, we show that thermal detectors outperform their visible-light-trained counterparts and highlight the importance of replicating aerial viewing angles. Project page: https://github.com/larics/thermal_aerial_synthetic.
title Unlocking Thermal Aerial Imaging: Synthetic Enhancement of UAV Datasets
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06797