# Cross-View Open-Vocabulary Object Detection in Aerial Imagery

Source: [Cross-View Open-Vocabulary Object Detection in Aerial Imagery](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa7bde1e209131cea8ae5a>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T05:50:18.755Z

Authors: Jyoti Kini, Rohit Gupta, Mubarak Shah

Published: 2025-10-04T16:12:03.000Z

## Abstract

Traditional object detection models are typically trained on a fixed set of classes, limiting their flexibility and making it costly to incorporate new categories. Open-vocabulary object detection addresses this limitation by enabling models to identify unseen classes without explicit training. Leveraging pretrained models contrastively trained on abundantly available ground-view image-text classification pairs provides a strong foundation for open-vocabulary object detection in aerial imagery. Domain shifts, viewpoint variations, and extreme scale differences make direct knowledge transfer across domains ineffective, requiring specialized adaptation strategies. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for adapting open-vocabulary representations from ground-view images to solve object detection in aerial imagery through structured domain alignment. The method introduces contrastive image-to-image alignment to enhance the similarity between aerial and ground-view embeddings and employs multi-instance vocabulary associations to align aerial images with text embeddings. Extensive experiments on the xView, DOTAv2, VisDrone, DIOR, and HRRSD datasets are used to validate our approach. Our open-vocabulary model achieves improvements of +6.32 mAP on DOTAv2, +4.16 mAP on VisDrone (Images), and +3.46 mAP on HRRSD in the zero-shot setting when compared to finetuned closed-vocabulary dataset-specific model performance, thus paving the way for more flexible and scalable object detection systems in aerial applications.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03858>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03858.pdf>)
