Small Object Aerial Person Detection Dataset: The aerial dataset publication comprises a collection of frames captured from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during flights over the University of Cyprus campus and Civil Defense exercises. The dataset is primarily intended for people detection, with a focus on detecting small objects due to the top-view perspective of the images. The dataset includes annotations generated in popular formats such as YOLO, COCO, and VOC, making it highly versatile and accessible for a wide range of applications. Overall, this aerial dataset publication represents a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working in the field of computer vision and machine learning, particularly those focused on people detection and related applications. Subset Images People Training 2092 40687 Validation 523 10589 Testing 521 10432 It is advised to further enhance the dataset so that random augmentations are probabilistically applied to each image prior to adding it to the batch for training. Specifically, there are a number of possible transformations such as geometric (rotations, translations, horizontal axis mirroring, cropping, and zooming), as well as image manipulations (illumination changes, color shifting, blurring, sharpening, and shadowing).