Griffin: Aerial-Ground Cooperative Detection and Tracking Dataset and Benchmark

Abstract

While cooperative perception can overcome the limitations of single-vehicle systems, the practical implementation of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure systems is often impeded by significant economic barriers. Aerial-ground cooperation (AGC), which pairs ground vehicles with drones, presents a more economically viable and rapidly deployable alternative. However, this emerging field has been held back by a critical lack of high-quality public datasets and benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we present Griffin, a comprehensive AGC 3D perception dataset, featuring over 250 dynamic scenes (37k+ frames). It incorporates varied drone altitudes (20-60m), diverse weather conditions, realistic drone dynamics via CARLA-AirSim co-simulation, and critical occlusion-aware 3D annotations. Accompanying the dataset is a unified benchmarking framework for cooperative detection and tracking, with protocols to evaluate communication efficiency, altitude adaptability, and robustness to communication latency, data loss and localization noise. By experiments through different cooperative paradigms, we demonstrate the effectiveness and limitations of current methods and provide crucial insights for future research.