AeroIntent: A Synchronized Multimodal Benchmark for UAV Mission Intent Recognition

Abstract

Reliable recognition of mission-level UAV intent from multimodal observations is essential for low-altitude airspace surveillance and security. Existing multimodal UAV datasets primarily support detection, tracking, and localization, leaving limited support for evaluating mission-intent recognition across held-out trajectory programs and incomplete radar histories. We introduce AeroIntent, a simulation-based benchmark comprising 990 synchronized multimodal sequences generated by 22 trajectory programs across five mission intents. The benchmark provides radar, RGB, infrared, and depth observations, together with program-disjoint, radar-gap, and observation-prefix evaluation protocols. Building on this benchmark, we propose AeroMIR, a structured Multimodal Intent Reasoner that integrates radar trajectories, derived behavioral features, selected visual evidence, and task knowledge for candidate-based UAV intent recognition. Under a strict program-disjoint protocol evaluating unseen tactical realizations, AeroMIR achieves a mean accuracy of 71.56% and a mean Macro-F1 of 69.84% across three seeds, outperforming the strongest trajectory-only baseline by 7.79 Macro-F1 points and a conventional radar-RGB late-fusion baseline by 19.32 points. AeroMIR also demonstrates strong performance under controlled radar gaps and early intent recognition settings. AeroIntent and AeroMIR provide a reproducible foundation for multimodal UAV intent recognition. The benchmark is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AeroIntent