DroneDAR: Long-Range Drone Distance Estimation Using Monocular Vision and Bounding-Box Features

Accurate distance estimation for small drones in long-range imagery is important for tracking and situational awareness, yet remains challenging due to extreme target scale variation, background clutter, and noisy visual cues. This paper studies monocular drone distance estimation using image crops together with bounding-box geometry, a practical setting in which a detector provides a candidate drone region and the model predicts range from appearance and box-derived features. We evaluate a Droneranger-style baseline, and introduce a new DroneDAR (Drone Detection And Ranging) model that combines a convolutional backbone with explicit bounding-box cues through a lightweight gating mechanism. Experiments analyze how backbone capacity, crop resolution, and regression loss functions affect performance across distance regimes. We further examine common failure modes at long distances, including sensitivity to bounding-box noise and reduced texture detail in the crop. The results provide guidance for designing and training range estimators that remain robust under real-world long-range conditions and highlight directions for improving reliability when drones occupy only a few pixels.

LRDDv3: High-Resolution Long-Range Drone Detection Dataset with Range Information and Thermal Data

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have quickly become common in various airspaces, representing a wide range of applications from recreation flying to commercial photography and package delivery. With the increasing prevalence of UAVs, it becomes critical that both manned and unmanned aircraft can detect UAVs and other flying objects from long range to effectively track movement and ensure safe operation in shared spaces. While several datasets have been introduced for drone detection, the need for expanded high-quality data persists, especially in the area of high-resolution long-range drone data. To address this, we introduce a high-resolution dataset of 102,532 long-range RGB images of drones, sampled at 5 FPS from 128 distinct video clips taken mid flight during 17 different data collection days spread over 8 months to ensure a wide variety of lighting scenarios, flight locations, and background elements. The dataset boasts comprehensive drone range information across the dataset, as well as 29,630 IR images, all paired with RGB counterparts from the base dataset. As one of the first drone detection datasets to leverage 4K image resolution and paired 640x512 IR images, our work represents a significant advancement to enable the detection of drones at long range. For access to the complete dataset, please visit https://research.coe.drexel.edu/ece/imaple/lrddv3/