DroneFINE: Domain-Aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Detectors for Drone Images

With the widespread application of drones in recent years, object detection of aerial images has attracted increasing attention, especially open-vocabulary aerial detection which is not restricted to predefined categories. Due to the scarcity of drone's viewpoint images and their significant differences from natural images, it is difficult to achieve satisfying results by directly applying vanilla open-vocabulary detection methods designed for natural scenarios. Some studies propose to transfer knowledge from pre-trained models by using lightweight networks or generating pseudo labels, but they tend to rely on models trained on natural images, neglecting the potential of foundation models specifically tailored for remote sensing and aerial imagery. To address this limitation, we propose DisDop, a unified framework that systematically distills multi-level domain priors from remote sensing foundation models (e.g., RemoteCLIP and DINOv3) into a lightweight detector. Specifically, we first distill visual priors through a teacher fusion strategy that combines RemoteCLIP's cross-modal alignment capability with DINOv3's fine-grained local feature extraction ability, transferring their complementary strengths to the detector's backbone. Second, we distill textual priors embedded in RemoteCLIP's text encoder by explicitly modeling inter-category semantic relationships, while incorporating global contextual priors to enhance local feature representation for small objects. Through this multi-level prior distillation framework, our DisDop achieves new state-of-the-art performance on open-vocabulary aerial detection benchmarks. Extensive ablation analysis also demonstrates the rationality and effectiveness of our proposed modules.

Fine-grained cross-modal understanding in drone views is essential for aerial vision-language navigation. However, the inherent wide field of view and overhead perspective of drone scenarios impose dual challenges on vision-language understanding. At the macro level, overwhelming background clutter in visual representations leads to Cross-Modal Focus Misalignment, where the model prioritizes global environmental similarities over specific object details. At the micro level, Visual Isomorphism creates ambiguity, where candidates share similar geometric structures yet differ only in subtle attributes. To address these challenges, we propose the Granularity-Aware Region Alignment and Semantic Prototype (GRASP) learning framework, enhancing discriminative capability through two synergistic strategies. Specifically, we introduce Region-Focused Alignment (RFA) to promote object-centric cross-modal alignment while suppressing background interference. Concurrently, to tackle visual isomorphism, we propose Semantic Perturbation Enhanced Matching (SPEM), which leverages a foreground-purified Semantic Prototype Codebook (SPC) to construct semantically perturbed negatives for fine-grained semantic discrimination. Extensive experiments on the GeoText-1652 benchmark and the unseen ERA dataset demonstrate that GRASP achieves competitive performance in drone-view fine-grained image-text retrieval, validating its effectiveness for cross-modal understanding in aerial scenarios. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/UCAS-JC/GRASP.

Language-guided aerial perception aims to understand user-specified tiny targets in complex unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) scenes. In real UAV deployment, the UAV must respond while it flies, so such perception runs in an online streaming manner, where frames arrive sequentially and the model responds to each one without access to future frames. However, applying current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to this setting raises two challenges. First, targets viewed from the air are often tiny, yet the visual compression in existing MLLMs treats all regions equally and discards their fine-grained details. Second, understanding a continuous stream requires past-frame context, yet retaining the entire history is infeasible on resource-constrained onboard hardware, whereas discarding it causes the target to drift or disappear. We address the tiny object and streaming challenges from both data and method perspectives. From the data perspective, we present \textbf{DroneEyes}, the \textbf{first} pixel-level and open-vocabulary referring-segmentation dataset for tiny aerial targets, comprising $2,140$ high-definition videos and $176,623$ pairs across Object Description and Referring Expression tasks, with dense per-frame masks. From the method perspective, we propose \textbf{SkyAnchor}, an MLLM with two designs to the above challenges: a Semantics-Aware Token Router that preserves small-target under a reduced visual-token budget, and a Hierarchical Memory Bank that keeps the target consistently understood on streams.