The Drone-vs-Bird Detection Grand Challenge at ICASSP 2023: A Review of Methods and Results

This paper presents the 6th edition of the “Drone-vs-Bird” detection challenge, jointly organized with the WOSDETC workshop within the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2023. The main objective of the challenge is to advance the current state-of-the-art in detecting the presence of one or more Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in real video scenes, while facing challenging conditions such as moving cameras, disturbing environmental factors, and the presence of birds flying in the foreground. For this purpose, a video dataset was provided for training the proposed solutions, and a separate test dataset was released a few days before the challenge deadline to assess their performance. The dataset has continually expanded over consecutive installments of the Drone-vs-Bird challenge and remains openly available to the research community, for non-commercial purposes. The challenge attracted novel signal processing solutions, mainly based on deep learning algorithms. The paper illustrates the results achieved by the teams that successfully participated in the 2023 challenge, offering a concise overview of the state-of-the-art in the field of drone detection using video signal processing. Additionally, the paper provides valuable insights into potential directions for future research, building upon the main pros and limitations of the solutions presented by the participating teams.