Matched Frames Subset of the BAMBI UAV Wildlife Dataset

This dataset is part of the BAMBI (Biodiversity Airborne Monitoring Based on Intelligent UAV sampling; https://www.bambi.eco/) project. It contains multimodal nadir UAV recordings of forest wildlife captured with thermal and RGB sensors. This sub dataset provides a cross-modal evaluation subset derived from the BAMBI UAV wildlife dataset and its initial, iterative versions. It contains 5,305 matched RGB–thermal labelled image pairs with 13,057 co-registered bounding box annotations, enabling direct comparison between both sensing modalities. The pairs were generated using a multi-stage template matching pipeline that spatially aligns detections between thermal and RGB frames despite sensor synchronization offsets. Each matched pair contains corresponding crops and bounding boxes representing the same detected animal instance in both modalities. The dataset supports research on multimodal wildlife detection, cross-modal perception, modality comparison, and RGB–thermal fusion methods in challenging forest environments captured from nadir UAV imagery. The subset is designed as a paired benchmark for evaluating RGB and thermal models under identical spatial conditions, facilitating reproducible experiments on cross-modal learning and modality-specific performance in wildlife monitoring tasks. To create this matched dataset (labels_thermal_matched and labels_rgb_matched), we iteratively created initial versions with labels_thermal_original first, which was refined to labels_thermal_merged later. Based on that the initial RGB dataset (labels_rgb) was created, which was used to destill the final matched versions. You can find models trained on this dataset on HugginFace: https://huggingface.co/cpraschl/bambi-models The files follow the naming convention <flight_id>_<frame_idx>.<suffix>, where the flight_id corresponds to the videos published as part of the original dataset. The original dataset is split in multiple parts and can be found here: 10.5281/zenodo.18692354 10.5281/zenodo.18698508 10.5281/zenodo.18703312 10.5281/zenodo.18705705 10.5281/zenodo.18707610 10.5281/zenodo.18711217 10.5281/zenodo.18715162 10.5281/zenodo.18717601 You can find scripts for working with the original dataset at https://github.com/bambi-eco/Dataset. e.g. downloading the corresponding flight videos and allowing to extract the specific frames.