The Drone-vs-Bird Detection Grand Challenge at IJCNN 2025

The widespread adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has raised critical security and safety concerns, particularly in sensitive areas and air traffic management. Modern counter-drone systems integrate multiple sensing modalities, but their development is hindered by the lack of comprehensive, publicly available datasets. To address this, the Drone-vs-Bird Detection Grand Challenge provides a manually annotated UAV dataset to advance research in drone detection. Since its inception in 2017, the competition has attracted global interest, fostering the development of advanced detection methods. This paper presents an overview of the 8th edition as data competition hosted at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2025. The data competition generated high engagement with 16 competing algorithms successfully submitted. The variability of the results underscores the complexity of the task and the need for future research. Over almost a decade, this data competition has been bridging the domains of signal processing, computer vision, and deep learning, paving the way for next-generation counter-drone solutions.