UAV-OVVIS: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Also Need Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation

Mingyu Dou, Shi Qiu, Ming Hu, Yifan Chen, Zhe Sun

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) videos are widely used in traffic monitoring, urban management, and emergency rescue. However, existing UAV video perception is largely limited to box-level detection and tracking over predefined categories, making it difficult to jointly support flexible queries and fine-grained instance-level understanding of temporal dynamics in open scenarios. To this end, we introduce a new task, UAV Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (UAV-OVVIS), which aims to discover targets in UAV videos according to open-vocabulary queries and output instance segmentation trajectories with globally consistent identities. Considering the scarcity of instance-level annotations in UAV scenarios, we propose AeroTrack, a training-free framework that coordinates existing visual foundation models to realize UAV-OVVIS. AeroTrack performs target discovery and segmentation through periodic open-vocabulary detection and short-segment mask propagation, and introduces Lifecycle-aware ID Association (LIA) to recover global identities under segment-wise inference. Based on this framework, we instantiate five feasible variants and construct AeroVIS, a UAV-OVVIS evaluation benchmark containing 9 UAV object categories and 8,279 trajectories. Experiments show that AeroTrack achieves better overall performance than the evaluated OV-VIS methods transferred to AeroVIS, while demonstrating good open-vocabulary transferability and dense-target handling capability in long UAV videos. The AeroTrack framework and the AeroVIS dataset will be open-sourced upon acceptance.