Infrared Object Detection

Short-wave infrared (SWIR) imaging has emerged as a promising modality for autonomous driving, yet its practical benefits over RGB remain poorly characterized across diverse conditions. This paper presents a systematic comparative study of paired RGB and SWIR object detection on the RASMD dataset, covering four weather conditions and two real-time detection architectures, with various fine-tunings evaluated against a unified ground truth. Overall, RGB demonstrates comparable or superior performance in most scenarios, while RF-DETR exhibits greater robustness across varying conditions. Beyond aggregate metrics, we propose a sensor-dominance mining framework that combines multi-model agreement with targeted manual inspection to identify scenarios where one sensing modality provides more reliable detections using largely unannotated paired data. This analysis reveals that SWIR offers clear advantages in four safety-critical situations, including windshield glare, water droplets on the windshield, low-contrast object visibility, and long-range vehicle detection. The findings suggest that SWIR should be viewed as a complementary modality that enhances perception in rare but challenging conditions. The datasets will be available upon request, and all code and trained model weights are publicly released at https://github.com/comsee-research/swir-adverse-env-analysis.

Low-light UAV-based RGB-infrared oriented small-vehicle detection is important for nighttime traffic monitoring, emergency response, and urban inspection. Illumination variations, headlight glare, local shadows, and thermal-response degradation cause spatially varying modality reliability, while the small visual extent of vehicles further weakens boundaries, orientation cues, and thermal responses. Accordingly, selecting trustworthy observations based on local modality reliability while further exploiting complementary discriminative information in regions with ambiguous modality preference is key to constructing effective multimodal representations. Based on this insight, we propose ReDiffNet, a reliability-conditioned differential representation network in which modality reliability guides both evidence selection and complementary recovery. Specifically, degradation-aware reliability learning estimates relative spatial reliability, uncertainty-guided differential recovery exploits cross-modal differences to recover complementary cues in ambiguous regions, and reliability-conditioned reconstruction integrates retained and recovered evidence into a unified representation. ReDiffNet achieves 85.3% and 73.9% mAP50 on DroneVehicle and VEDAI, respectively, supporting its effectiveness.

In aerial RGB--IR object detection, effectively exploiting complementary information across modalities is critical for robust perception under complex illumination and environmental conditions. Existing multimodal detectors mainly focus on spatial-domain interaction or frequency-specific feature enhancement, while the cross-modal interaction patterns of different frequency components remain insufficiently explored. Moreover, spectral discrepancy itself may contain both useful complementary cues and unreliable modality-specific responses, making indiscriminate frequency fusion suboptimal. To address these issues, we propose FoCal, a frequency-oriented framework for aerial RGB--IR object detection. First, a Frequency-Aware Dual-Domain Calibration (FADC) module is developed to explicitly model frequency-dependent cross-modal interaction. Low-frequency components are collaboratively consolidated into a shared structural consensus, whereas high-frequency components preserve modality-specific information through selective cross-modal exchange. The resulting frequency-aware cues are further transferred to the original feature domain to regulate cross-modal calibration. Second, we introduce a Discrepancy-Guided Spectral Modulation (DGSM) module, which characterizes cross-modal spectral imbalance using confidence-weighted relative amplitude discrepancy and transforms it into a bounded signed gate for adaptive enhancement, preservation, or attenuation of the joint multimodal spectrum. Extensive experiments on DroneVehicle, ESCVehicle, and ATR-UMOD demonstrate the effectiveness of FoCal, yielding $\mathrm{mAP}_{50}$ values of 83.5%, 54.8%, and 64.6%, respectively. Meanwhile, with only 3.0M parameters, FoCal achieves 113.6 FPS while preserving leading detection accuracy, highlighting a favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-off. Code is available at {https://github.com/universeliang/FoCal.

Synthetic training data is crucial for developing vision AI when real-world data is scarce, as in thermal infrared (IR) aerial vehicle detection. While abundant UAV RGB imagery motivates RGB-to-IR translation for data augmentation, unobservable thermal traits (e.g., engine heat) make learning transferable mappings challenging. This work investigates whether modern generative translators can overcome this cross-modal gap to improve infrared vehicle detection on unseen UAV target domains. Translators are trained on paired RGB-IR source datasets and applied to RGB training images from held-out target datasets to generate synthetic IR data. Evaluated methods include supervised GANs, ControlNet-based diffusion models, and foundation-model editing via LoRA. The resulting synthetic IR imagery is used to train RF-DETR vehicle detectors, which are evaluated on unseen IR target test splits across five aerial datasets, with Kust4K and VTUAV serving as target domains. Synthetic IR consistently outperforms RGB and grayscale baselines. Stable Diffusion 3.5 with ControlNet yields the best results, improving mAP from 50.8 to 60.1 on Kust4K and from 25.6 to 38.4 on VTUAV compared to models trained only on source-domain IR data. Increasing output diversity via multiple seeds (+1.1 mAP) and prompt variations (+3.3 mAP) provides additional gains on VTUAV. Although a performance gap to real target IR data remains, generative RGB-to-IR translation effectively mitigates IR data scarcity and improves cross-domain aerial vehicle detection.

Thermal Infrared detection is widely used in autonomous driving, medical AI, etc., but its security has only attracted attention recently. We propose infrared adversarial clothing designed to evade thermal person detectors in real-world scenarios. The design of the adversarial clothing is based on 3D modeling, which makes it easier to simulate multiangle scenes near the real world compared to 2D modeling. We optimized the black patch layout pattern of 3D clothing based on the adversarial example technique and made physical adversarial clothing using the aerogel. The idea is to paste a set of square aerogel patches, which display black squares in thermal images, in the inner side of clothing at specific locations with specific orientations. To enhance realism, we propose a method to build infrared 3D models with real infrared photos and develop texture maps for 3D models to simulate varied infrared characteristics over time and location. In physical attacks, we achieved an attack success rate of 80.11% indoors and 76.85% outdoors against YOLOv9. In contrast, randomly placed patches yielded much lower success rates (26.53% indoors and 23.03% outdoors). The adversarial clothing also showed good transferability to unknown detectors with an ensemble attack method, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Joint use of RGB and infrared (IR) imagery can improve UAV-view object detection, but most existing methods fuse multimodal features with static or fixed weights and therefore overlook spatially varying modality reliability. We propose EGM-Det, an entropy-guided multimodal adaptive fusion framework for RGB-IR object detection. EGM-Det employs a dual-stream architecture to preserve modality-specific representations and introduces an Entropy Offset Gate Fusion module for adaptive multi-scale fusion. The module derives shallow entropy priors from input intensity, local entropy, and cross-modal discrepancy, and uses them to guide local offset alignment and spatial-channel gated fusion. It therefore selectively aggregates reliable RGB and infrared cues instead of uniformly combining heterogeneous features. We further introduce cross-modal distillation to regularize the learned fusion gates and reduce fusion degradation. Each student branch extracts complementary knowledge from the cross-modality teacher branch matched to the main branch, while entropy-adaptive supervision emphasizes uncertain modality decisions. Experiments on DroneVehicle, LLVIP, and VEDAI demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across all three benchmarks; in particular, EGM-Det outperforms prior approaches by more than 10 percentage points on VEDAI.

Multimodal object detection proves effective in remote sensing, especially the RGB-Infrared paradigm. The parallel feature extractors provide rich multimodal information for robust detection, yet introduce substantial channel redundancy and computational overhead. Existing pruning methods can reduce channel redundancy, but they are designed for unimodal backbones, overlooking cross-modal interactions and dynamic scene-wise redundancy. In this paper, we propose InterPruner, the first interactive structured channel pruning framework for RGB-infrared object detectors. Specifically, we first derive a Taylor-Implicit Criterion(TIC) to quantify channel importance via high-order Taylor expansion and the implicit function theorem. Then, a Modality Interaction Redundancy Analyzer (MIRA) identifies redundant channels via mutual compensability assessment. Finally, a Scene-Prior Channel Anchor (SPCA) uses language priors as semantic anchors to measure channel-scene relevance for dynamic channel importance estimation. Cross-modality channel pruning for RGB-Infrared detection is yet unexplored. Extensive experiments on RGB-infrared object detection dataset demonstrate that InterPruner maintains high performance with negligible degradation. Specifically, it even achieves a 0.6% mAP increase on the FLIR dataset when pruning 50% of the channels. Code will be available on GitHub to facilitate future work.

Visible-infrared object detection relies on complementary RGB and thermal cues, but its performance is often degraded by cross-modal spatial misalignment. Most existing methods rely on implicit feature adaptation to handle weakly misaligned scenarios, while large-offset geometric discrepancies remain insufficiently addressed. In this paper, we propose a Joint Feature-domain Registration and Detection network (JFRDet), an end-to-end visible-infrared oriented object detector tailored for severely cross-modal geometric discrepancies. JFRDet introduces a Cross-Modal Affine Alignment (CMAA) module to estimate an image-level affine transformation for explicit multi-level feature alignment. Note that illumination changes directly affect the reliability of RGB cues, an Illumination-Guided Complementary Fusion (IGCF) module adaptively exploits modality reliability under varying illumination conditions for cross-modal fusion. Then, an Alignment Quality-Consistency Gating (AQCG) strategy stabilizes joint optimization by modulating detection supervision according to alignment reliability and gradient consistency. We further construct DroneVehicle Misaligned (DVMA), a benchmark for evaluating visible-infrared oriented object detection under severe cross-modal geometric misalignment. The proposed JFRDet achieves 69.7% $\mathrm{mAP}_{50}$ on DVMA, which represents state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. The code and dataset will be available on GitHub.

RGB-infrared (RGB-IR) object detection benefits from complementary visible and thermal cues, but effective fusion remains challenging under illumination changes, weather variation, and cluttered scenes. Existing RGB-IR fusion methods often trade expressive patch-level interaction for lighter but more constrained adaptation mechanisms. We empirically observe that pretrained register tokens contain both modality-shared and modality-specific information on paired RGB-IR inputs, suggesting that they can serve as a compact substrate for cross-modal communication. Building on this observation, we propose RegisterBridgeMM, a register-mediated fusion framework organized as a three-stage register lifecycle. Aggregate preserves per-modality register summarization inherited from pretraining; Bridge performs bidirectional register-to-patch reading with consensus-residual regulation; and Project translates the resulting register summary into spatially adaptive calibration of patch features. This register pathway avoids dense patch-to-patch cross-modal interaction while preserving the pretrained patch representation. With both backbone streams frozen, RegisterBridgeMM achieves the highest mAP50-95 among the evaluated methods on all four benchmarks: LLVIP, M3FD, DroneVehicle, and FLIR-Aligned.

RGB-thermal (RGB-T) object detection aims to fuse complementary information from visible and thermal modalities to achieve robust detection under varying illumination and weather conditions. Current methods typically employ attention mechanisms or transformers to perform cross-modal fusion independently at each feature scale, directly combining RGB and thermal features in the spatial domain. However, they still face significant limitations: cross-level knowledge inheritance caused by independent fusion at each scale,suppressing noise continuously due to the lack of bidirectional optimization, and information degradation induced by the absence of frequency-spatial collaboration. To address these issues, we propose DRPFNet, a Dual-domain Residual Progressive Fusion Network that constructs a unified information flow optimization system from three synergistic levels:structure, feature, and enhancement. At the structural level, we establish cross-scale propagation through bottom-up knowledge accumulation and bidirectional enhancement,ensuring smooth information flow. At the feature level, we collaboratively extract RGB high-frequency edges and thermal low-frequency structures via frequency band separation and edge guidance, guaranteeing representation quality. At the enhancement level, we enhance foreground-background discrimination through edge-guided dual-domain refinement,achieving precise object localization.Extensive experiments on two public RGB-T datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with competitive efficiency, validating the effectiveness of this hierarchical collaborative strategy.

The complementary information between RGB and IR images can significantly enhance object detection performance under extreme conditions. Existing methods prefer dual-stream CNN backbones built upon YOLO for feature extraction and focus on the design of feature fusion. In this paper, we introduce the Laplacian Decoupled Feature Enhancement block (LDFE) to fuse features from different stages of the dual-stream CNN backbone. By design, LDFE simultaneously considers the characteristics of modalities and structures for feature fusion by employing global-local decomposition, denoising, fusion, and reconstruction, sequentially. The LDFE first separates features into global and local components based on Laplacian Pyramid, and then performs denoising and fusion based on Global State Space Enhancement module (GS2E) and Local Convolutional Correlation Enhancement module (LC2E) separately. Specifically, the GS2E conducts a two-branch architecture for the main and auxiliary modalities. It dynamically suppresses noise in the main modality through cross-modal attention derived from the auxiliary modality, while employing a State Space Model to capture long-range dependencies within the global feature representations of the main modality. To obtain bidirectional interaction, the two modalities systematically alternate their main/auxiliary roles. Moreover, the LC2E suppresses noise in local features and leverages spatial and channel dimension along with triple convolution to extract fine-grained details for fusion. These innovative designs achieve a significant performance improvement, with mAP surpassing the SOTA methods 6.2%, 3.7%, 4.7%, 2.3%, 4.1% and 2.0% on M3FD, DroneVehicle, LLVIP, FLIR-Aligned, KAIST and VEDAI datasets,respectively.

Robust object detection under adverse visual conditions remains a long-standing challenge for multi-modal perception systems. Existing fusion-based methods typically require both RGB and infrared (IR) inputs, and treat them equally during both training and inference, which compromises their robustness when the RGB modality becomes unreliable or unavailable. In this case, we propose \textbf{InfraNet}, an IR-centric quality-aware framework that regulates RGB guidance during training and supports flexible RGB--IR or IR-only deployment. InfraNet employs an asymmetric architecture where the primary IR pathway extracts multi-scale infrared features for predictions, while the auxiliary RGB pathway provides reliability-controlled supervisory signals. The core of InfraNet is \textbf{QualGate}, a quality-aware fusion module that learns a task-oriented control signal to suppress unreliable RGB guidance and compensate IR features during cross-modal training. Built upon InfraNet, we design two architectural variants: a lightweight IR-only architecture InfraNet-IR and an RGB--IR architecture InfraNet-RGB-IR. Our method is evaluated through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets (LLVIP, FLIR-Aligned, M$^3$FD, and DroneVehicle), showing strong or competitive accuracy in challenging low-light and adverse weather conditions. Notably, InfraNet maintains high efficiency in IR-only inference, making it both accurate and computationally efficient.

Current road safety systems primarily focus on minimizing post-collision damage. However, advances in algorithmic perception are shifting focus toward early collision prediction, especially in lowvisibility conditions like nighttime or fog, where thermal infrared sensing outperforms both human vision and RGB imaging. While available RGB-infrared datasets such as FLIR ADAS and LLVIP are good benchmarks, they mostly consist of clear weather and overly simple scenarios. In this article, we introduce the LYNRED-MDS: Multimodal Detection Subset, a subset of the LYNRED Mobility Dataset, comprised of 4000 RGB-infrared image pairs captured under diverse weather, lighting, and road conditions around Grenoble, France. Our dataset spans varied driving contexts (urban, rural, mountainous, etc.) and a vehicle fleet compliant with Western European standards. Thermal cross-dataset evaluation using a YOLOv8n baseline suggests that our dataset offers strong generalization potential for pedestrian detection in driving scenarios. By covering critical edge cases, our dataset supports the development of more reliable and deployable vision systems for advanced driver-assistance systems.

Transfer learning from large-scale RGB foundation models to infrared (IR) imagery through knowledge distillation (KD) remains challenging due to fundamental differences in image formation physics. We investigate the spectral structure of the RGB--IR modality gap and observe that feature divergence is not uniform across spatial frequencies: low-frequency components (shape, layout) show greater cross-modal alignment than high-frequency components (texture, fine edges), which reflect modality-specific characteristics. Based on this analysis, we propose FreqKD, a frequency-decoupled distillation framework that applies asymmetric supervision adapted to each band's cross-modal consistency. The method employs strict mean squared error (MSE) on the low-frequency band to preserve shared structural information and a relaxed log-MSE loss (weighted at 0.1) on the high-frequency band to provide edge guidance while tolerating texture differences. Spectral divergence analysis on 500 paired samples shows that high-frequency divergence exceeds low-frequency divergence by a factor of 2.4x on average across all analysed transformer layers. On KAIST multispectral pedestrian detection, FreqKD achieves 64.1 mAP50, improving 2.4 points over the DINOv2 baseline. The learned representation transfers across datasets (FLIR ADAS, +2.1 mAP50), tasks (MFNet segmentation, +1.85 mean intersection-over-union), and architectures (ResNet-50, +1.0 mAP50). Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/freq_decoupled_kd-5E5A

Computational imaging enables compact infrared systems, but deep-learning pipelines that combine image reconstruction and object detection often introduce substantial inference latency. Most existing acceleration strategies compress the reconstruction network while overlooking physical priors from the optical path, leaving a trade-off between accuracy and speed. We present Physics-aware Dual-Integrated Network (PDI-Net), a low-latency framework that integrates infrared reconstruction with object detection and further embeds optical priors into the learning process. PDI-Net uses a supervised U-Net during training, while a semi-U-Net encoder shares features directly with a YOLO-based detector during inference, avoiding full image reconstruction. To bridge the gap between fidelity-oriented reconstruction features and detection-oriented semantics, we introduce a physics-aware large-small bridge (PALS-Bridge), which uses field-dependent point spread function priors to adaptively modulate multiscale convolutional branches. A physics-informed optical degradation simulation pipeline is also developed for training and validation. The method is deployed on a single-lens infrared camera, reducing system weight by about 50% compared with traditional multi-lens designs. On the M3FD benchmark under low-SNR conditions, PDI-Net reduces inference time by 84.06% compared with the Rec+Det with pruning strategy while improving [email protected]:0.95 by 5.07%. These results demonstrate compact, low-latency computational infrared imaging for real-time object detection on resource-constrained platforms.

In modern warfare, drones are becoming an essential part of intelligence gathering and carrying out precise attacks in different kinds of hostile environments. Their ability to operate in real-time and hostile environments from a safe distance makes them invaluable for surveillance and military operations. The KIIT-MiTA dataset is comprised of images of different military scenarios taken from drones, and these provide a foundation for detecting military objects, but it does not take into account the various types of real-world scenarios. With that in mind, to evaluate how the models are performing under varying conditions, four different types of datasets are created: Gray Scale, Thermal Vision, Night Vision, and Obscura Vision. These simulate the real-world environments such as low visibility, heat-based imagery, and nighttime conditions. The YOLOv11-small model is trained and used to detect objects across diverse settings. This research boosts the performance and reliability of drone-based operations by contributing to the development of advanced detection systems in both defensive and offensive missions.

Detecting small unmanned aerial vehicles from RGB-infrared remote-sensing pairs remains challenging due to tiny target scale, cluttered backgrounds, and spatial misalignment between heterogeneous sensors. Existing bimodal detectors often align or fuse features without assessing the reliability of local cross-sensor correspondence, allowing mismatch artifacts to propagate into the detection head. To address this issue, we propose LER-YOLO, a reliability-aware sparse mixture-of-experts framework for misaligned RGB-infrared UAV detection. LER-YOLO first introduces an Uncertainty-Aware Target Alignment module that resamples visible features toward the infrared reference and estimates a spatial reliability map. This reliability prior is then used by a Reliability-Guided Sparse MoE Fusion module to adaptively select k experts from RGB-dominant, infrared-dominant, and interactive fusion experts, enabling trustworthy cross-modal interaction while suppressing unreliable fusion. Experiments on the public MBU benchmark under a YOLOv5s-family protocol show that LER-YOLO achieves 89.7+/-0.2% AP50 over three independent seeds, with a best result of 89.9%. Extensive ablations, parameter-matched comparisons, synthetic-shift evaluations, and complexity analysis demonstrate that the gains mainly come from reliability-guided expert routing rather than increased model capacity.

Infrared object detection is crucial for perception in autonomous driving and surveillance but remains vulnerable to physical adversarial attacks. Unlike in the RGB domain, where attacks rely on color texture, infrared attacks must manipulate thermal signatures, making the geometry shape of heat-blocking materials the primary adversarial information carrier. Current shape-based methods suffer from a fundamental trade-off between representational capability and optimization power, limiting their attack effectiveness.In this work, we overcome this dilemma by introducing learnable Fourier shapes to the infrared domain. We utilize an end-to-end differentiable framework where a compact set of Fourier coefficients, defining the shape boundary, is analytically mapped to a pixel-space mask via the winding number theorem. This enables efficient gradient-based optimization to generate potent shapes that cause human targets to evade detection. Extensive digital and physical experiments provide a comprehensive evaluation and validate our superior performance. Our resulting physical patch achieves striking robustness, successfully evading detectors across diverse distances, angles, poses, and individuals, and achieves over 88% attack success rate at distances greater than 25m (conf.=0.5). Code is available at https://github.com/Yongyx99/Fourier-shape-attack.

Existing open-vocabulary detectors focus on RGB images and fail to generalize to thermal imagery, where low texture and emissivity variations challenge RGB-based semantics. We present Thermal-Det, the first large language model (LLM) supervised open-vocabulary detector tailored for thermal images. To enable large-scale training, we develop a synthetic dataset by converting GroundingCap-1M into the thermal domain and filtering captions to remove RGB-specific terms, yielding over one million thermally aligned samples with bounding boxes, grounding texts, and detailed captions. Thermal-Det jointly optimizes detection, captioning, and cross-modal distillation objectives. A frozen RGB teacher provides geometric and semantic pseudo-supervision for paired but unlabeled RGB-thermal data, transferring open-vocabulary knowledge without manual annotation. The model further employs a Thermal-Text Alignment Head for text calibration and a Modality-Fused Cross-Attention module for dual-modality reasoning. Unlike prior domain-adaptation methods, the detector is fully fine-tuned to internalize thermal contrast patterns while preserving language alignment. Experiments on public benchmarks show consistent 2-4% AP gains over existing open-vocabulary detectors, establishing a strong foundation for scalable, language-driven thermal perception.

Reliable UAV object detection requires robustness to illumination changes, motion blur, and scene dynamics that suppress RGB cues. Thermal long-wave infrared (LWIR) sensing preserves contrast in low light, and event cameras retain microsecond-level temporal edges, but integrating all three modalities in a unified detector has not been systematically studied. We present a tri-modal framework that processes RGB, thermal, and event data with a dual-stream hierarchical vision transformer. At selected encoder depths, a Modality-Aware Gated Exchange (MAGE) applies inter-sensor channel and spatial gating, and a Bidirectional Token Exchange (BiTE) module performs bidirectional token-level attention with depthwise-pointwise refinement, producing resolution-preserving fused maps for a standard feature pyramid and two-stage detector. We introduce a 10,489-frame UAV dataset with synchronized and pre-aligned RGB-thermal-event streams and 24,223 annotated vehicles across day and night flights. Through 61 controlled ablations, we evaluate fusion placement, mechanism (baseline MAGE+BiTE, CSSA, GAFF), modality subsets, and backbone capacity. Tri-modal fusion improves over all dual-modal baselines, with fusion depth having a significant effect and a lightweight CSSA variant recovering most of the benefit at minimal cost. This work provides the first systematic benchmark and modular backbone for tri-modal UAV-based object detection.

Infrared gas leak detection is important for industrial safety and environmental monitoring, but automatic detection remains challenging because gas plumes are often faint, small, semi-transparent, and weakly bounded. This study proposes an Edge-Aware and Content-Adaptive Feature Fusion Detector (ECAF-Det) for infrared gas leak detection in weak-plume and cluttered thermal scenes. The main methodological contributions of ECAF-Det comprise three task-oriented components. A local--global feature enhancement block preserves fine boundary cues and long-range plume continuity. A multi-scale edge perception module transforms directional-gradient and Gabor-response cues into hierarchical boundary-sensitive structural priors. A content-adaptive sparse routing path aggregation network dynamically regulates multi-scale feature propagation and limits the contribution of less informative cross-scale responses. Experiments on the IIG dataset show that ECAF-Det improves overall and small-plume detection while maintaining moderate computational complexity. On this dataset, ECAF-Det achieves an average precision (AP) of 29.8%, an AP at an IoU threshold of 0.5 AP50 of 84.3%, and a small-object AP of 25.3%. Compared with the Real-Time Detection Transformer with a ResNet-18 backbone (RT-DETR-R18), these values represent improvements of 3.0, 6.5, and 5.4 percentage points, respectively. The model requires 43.7 giga floating-point operations (GFLOPs) and 14.3 M parameters. On the LangGas dataset, ECAF-Det achieves an AP of 36.3% and an AP50 of 68.5%. The AI contribution lies in edge-aware representation learning and content-adaptive sparse feature routing for weak infrared plume perception. The engineering application is automated infrared gas leak detection for industrial safety monitoring, early warning, and remote inspection.

Multi-modal object detection is essential for robust scene understanding in challenging conditions, including low-light and adverse environments. Recent vision foundation models (e.g., DINOv3) have exhibited strong representation capabilities, yet adapting them to multi-modal scenarios remains challenging. Existing dense cross-modal fusion strategies often force heterogeneous modalities to interact indiscriminately, which may introduce redundant information and disrupt the valuable pre-trained representations. To address this issue, we revisit multi-modal fusion from the perspective of socialized learning and propose adapter to DINOv3 (A2DINOv3), a multi-expert collaboration framework with a Socialized Collaboration Protocol (SCP). Specifically, RGB and infrared branches are modeled as heterogeneous experts that independently preserve their specialized knowledge while exchanging complementary information through selective and constrained interactions. This design mitigates harmful cross-modal interference and prevents degradation of pre-trained priors during adaptation. Furthermore, a zero-initialization strategy is introduced to gradually activate cross-modal collaboration, enabling a smooth transition from modality-specific learning to cooperative representation learning. Extensive experiments on four multi-modal benchmarks, including aerial detection (GAIIC), autonomous driving (FLIR), low-light surveillance (LLVIP), and diverse real-world scenarios (M3FD), demonstrate that A2DINOv3 consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal object detection.