Do Open-Vocabulary Detectors Transfer to Aerial Imagery? A Comparative Evaluation D
AI benchmark · Geospatial
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What is Do Open-Vocabulary Detectors Transfer to Aerial Imagery? A Comparative Evaluation?
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) enables zero-shot recognition of novel categories through vision-language models, achieving strong performance on natural images. However, transferability to aerial imagery remains unexplored. We present the first systematic benchmark evaluating five state-of-the-art OVD models on the LAE-80C aerial dataset (3,592 images, 80 categories) under strict zero-shot conditions. Our experimental protocol isolates semantic confusion from visual localization through Global, Oracle, and Single-Category inference modes. Results reveal severe domain transfer failure: the best model (OWLv2) achieves only 27.6% F1-score with 69% false positive rate. Critically, reducing vocabulary size from 80 to 3.2 classes yields 15x improvement, demonstrating that semantic confusion is the primary bottleneck. Prompt engineering strategies such as domain-specific prefixing and synonym expansion, fail to provide meaningful performance gains. Performance varies dramatically across datasets (F1: 0.53 on DIOR, 0.12 on FAIR1M), exposing brittleness to imaging conditions. These findings establish baseline expectations and highlight the need for domain-adaptive approaches in aerial OVD.
Tier D
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- 9 models scored
- no proper name (a paper title or description)
- in curated RL directories (1 pt)
How we got to tier D
- Adoption: 9 models scored; no proper name (a paper title or description). Tier D.
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- In curated RL directories: 1 point, a floor of none.
- Not yet confirmed by a line from its own site or paper.
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