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

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—isolating the failure to the 3D stage. Fine-tuning on WildBox recovers performance to 8.68$\pm$0.47 AP-BEV@0.50 and 13.17$\pm$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—pretraining on a merged zebra class before fine-tuning on the Grévy'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.