WildBox: A Dataset and Benchmark for Aerial Monocular 3D Detection of African Savanna Wildlife

Vandita Shukla; Kilian Meier; Lucie Laporte-Devylder; Camille Rondeau Saint-Jean; Jenna M. Kline; Blair R. Costelloe; Devis Tuia; Fabio Remondino; Benjamin Risse

arXiv · 2606.21309

WildBox: A Dataset and Benchmark for Aerial Monocular 3D Detection of African Savanna Wildlife

Vandita Shukla·Kilian Meier·Lucie Laporte-Devylder·Camille Rondeau Saint-Jean·Jenna M. Kline·Blair R. Costelloe·Devis Tuia·Fabio Remondino·Benjamin Risse

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Abstract

We introduce WildBox, a dataset and benchmark for monocular 3D detection of wildlife from drone video, comprising 237,505 3D bounding box annotations across seven African savanna species grouped into six benchmark classes. Annotations follow a KITTI/Omni3D-compatible format in a per-segment scale-normalised camera frame, with instance identities maintained across each segment. We evaluate two open-vocabulary monocular 3D architectures, OVMono3D-LIFT and DetAny3D, under zero-shot, ground-truth 2D box prompt, and supervised fine-tuning protocols. Open-vocabulary 2D foundation models provide usable zero-shot wildlife localisation (50.55 AP@50), but zero-shot 3D detection collapses to 0.00 AP across both architectures and every 2D-input condition tested, including ground-truth 2D box prompts, thus isolating the failure to the 3D stage. Fine-tuning on WildBox recovers performance to 8.68 +/- 0.47 AP-BEV@0.50 and 13.17 +/- 0.69 AP3D macro. Depth contributes 84% of normalised Hausdorff distance after fine-tuning and over 99% in zero-shot, identifying monocular aerial depth as the dominant open problem in this regime. A coarse-to-fine curriculum, i.e. pretraining on a merged zebra class before fine-tuning on the Grevy's/plains split, improves macro 3D performance with less total compute, with the largest gains on the two zebra subclasses. WildBox is released with video-level splits, evaluation code, and baseline checkpoints to enable progress in 3D wildlife perception from drone video.

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Vandita Shukla, Kilian Meier, Lucie Laporte-Devylder, Camille Rondeau Saint-Jean, Jenna M. Kline, Blair R. Costelloe, Devis Tuia, Fabio Remondino, Benjamin Risse. 2026-06-19. WildBox: A Dataset and Benchmark for Aerial Monocular 3D Detection of African Savanna Wildlife. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21309

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