Rgb-Thermal Object Detection

Latest papers 30

Sep 24, 2026cs.CV

FoCal: Frequency-Oriented Cross-Modal Interaction and Spectral Calibration for Aerial Visible-Infrared Object Detection

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 mAP50\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.
Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

S2A:Semantic-to-Spatial Alignment for Alignment-Free RGB-T Salient Object Detection

Alignment-free RGB-T salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) aims to identify salient objects from unregistered RGB and thermal image pairs without costly pre-alignment. However, spatial misalignment breaks pixel-wise correspondence and causes feature contamination during cross-modal fusion. To address this issue, we propose S2A, a semantic-to-spatial alignment framework for alignment-free RGB-T SOD. Specifically, a global-guided hierarchical fusion module (GGHF) first exploits global semantic guidance to suppress background interference and refine hierarchical intra-modal features. Subsequently, the alignment-free cross-modal channel attention module (AFCA) globally exchanges complementary semantic information through channel-wise interaction, effectively overcoming the interference caused by local spatial misalignments. Finally, a spatial deformable cross-attention module (SDCA) predicts adaptive sampling offsets to recover local cross-modal spatial correspondence. Through this semantic-to-spatial paradigm, S2A first enables reliable cross-modal semantic interaction and subsequently performs local spatial calibration, effectively reducing misalignment-induced feature contamination. Without bells and whistles, S2A achieves highly competitive performance on multiple public alignment-free RGB-T benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in alleviating misalignment-induced feature contamination.
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

RA-SOD: Reliability-Aware RGB-T Salient Object Detection under Modality Degradation

RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) salient object detection leverages complementary cues from visible and thermal modalities to improve robustness in challenging environments. However, in real-world scenarios, the reliability of each modality is inherently unstable: RGB images degrade under low illumination, motion blur, and noise, while thermal imagery often suffers from contrast compression and sensor artifacts. Such degradation introduces unreliable perceptual evidence that can mislead cross-modal fusion and significantly deteriorate detection performance. To address this challenge, we propose RA-SOD, a reliability-aware RGB-T salient object detection framework that explicitly models modality reliability and integrates it into feature learning and cross-modal fusion. First, we introduce a reliability-conditioned representation that adaptively compensates degraded modality features while preserving structural cues. Second, an uncertainty-guided dual-stream refinement strategy progressively corrects cross-modal representations while suppressing unreliable evidence. Finally, we propose a pixel-wise modality competition mechanism that dynamically selects modality cues according to spatial reliability for fine-grained fusion. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks (VT821, VT1000, VT5000, and VT-IMAG) demonstrate that RA-SOD achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong robustness under severe modality degradation. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zaoxienian/RA-SOD.
Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

When Depth Hurts: Reliability-Aware Geometry Distillation for Depth-Free RGB-D Salient Object Detection

Depth can resolve appearance ambiguity in RGB-D salient object detection (SOD), yet sensor depth is not uniformly reliable. Missing regions, blurred boundaries, and structural artifacts can propagate through multimodal fusion and make an RGB-D detector less accurate than its RGB-only counterpart. Existing quality-aware approaches regulate observed depth but remain dependent on the same potentially defective modality. We propose \method, a reliability-aware geometry distillation framework developed for RGB-D SOD benchmarks without using dataset-provided depth during training or inference. A frozen Depth Anything V2 model serves only as a training-time teacher, transferring dense relative geometry, hierarchical spatial attention, and boundary structure to a compact edge-aware geometry branch. Pooled bidirectional interaction aligns geometry with appearance, and a pixel-wise reliability estimator selectively injects geometry that is compatible with the current RGB representation. The teacher is removed after training, leaving an RGB-only inference network. Trained on 2,985 RGB-mask pairs, \method{} achieves the best or tied-best result in 26 of 36 metric-dataset comparisons against ten recent RGB-D SOD methods, including a 13.4% relative MAE reduction on ReDWeb-S. When retrained on DUTS-TR, it also improves the strongest prior FF-measure by 4.2% on PASCAL-S, showing that the distilled geometry transfers beyond a particular sensor or dataset domain. Code will be released upon publication.
Aug 30, 2026cs.CV

SPLG-Mamba: Structure-Preserving Local-Global Mamba Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

Salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) requires dense predictions that preserve object completeness and structural continuity under complex backgrounds, scale variation, and irregular object shapes. Existing methods often localize salient regions, but their predictions may still suffer from structural degradation, including fragmented, incomplete, or locally missing foreground responses. This degradation is closely related to hierarchical feature propagation, where shallow details can introduce texture-induced background responses, deep semantics may over-smooth weak structures, and uncontrolled cross-scale fusion can disturb coherent regions. To address this issue, we propose a novel Structure-Preserving Local-Global Mamba Network, SPLG-Mamba, for ORSI-SOD. Specifically, SPLG-Mamba integrates Smooth-Detail Recalibration (SDR), hierarchy-aware Local-Global Mamba, and Gated Cross-Scale Fusion (GCSF). SDR recalibrates smoothed responses and detail residuals before state-space modeling, Local-Global Mamba assigns local modeling to shallow feature levels and global modeling to deep feature levels, and GCSF controls cross-scale detail injection during decoding. Experiments on ORSSD, EORSSD, and ORSI-4199 demonstrate state-of-the-art results and improved structural completeness and continuity. The code is available at https://github.com/yxu9910/SPLG-Mamba
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

EGM-Det: Entropy-Guided Multimodal Adaptive Fusion for UAV RGB-IR Object Detection

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.
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

ProtoHGF-Net: Prototype HyperGraph Fusion with Intra-modal Calibration for RGBT Object Detection

RGB-Thermal (RGBT) object detection enables robust perception in complex scenes by leveraging the complementary strengths of visible textures and thermal cues. However, existing methods mainly rely on dense cross-modal interactions over full-resolution features, which inevitably introduce background interference and hinder the learning of target-relevant representations. In this paper, we propose the Prototype HyperGraph Fusion Network (ProtoHGF-Net), a novel framework that redefines cross-modal fusion as prototype-level semantic interaction rather than the dense cross-modal interaction paradigm. Specifically, we design Prototype HyperGraph Fusion to perform cross-modal interaction in a compact prototype-level semantic space. This design enables more selective fusion among target-relevant prototypes. To support this prototype-level fusion, we propose Teacher-Mask Calibration Distillation, which calibrates modality features before fusion using modality-specific teachers and target-aware masks. This strategy suppresses backgrou- nd-dominant responses and produces more target-focused features. Extensive experiments on DroneVehicle, DVTOD, and FLIR demonstrate that ProtoHGF-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance with 85.9% mAP50mAP_{50}, 88.2% mAP50mAP_{50}, and 79.1% mAP50mAP_{50}, respectively. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ZiMo-Chen/ProtoHGF}{GitHub}.
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

MVTrack: Ultrafast Appearance-Free Moving Object Tracking from Compressed Bitstreams

Deploying modern video trackers at scale is bottlenecked by the computational cost of RGB-based object detectors. To this end, we present MVTrack, an ultrafast tracker for moving objects that operates directly on H.264 bitstreams. MVTrack combines MVDet, a lightweight detector for motion vector fields, with MVLink, a minimalist kinematic association module. On VIRAT, MVTrack outperforms YOLO26n while using 60×\times fewer parameters, requiring 40×\times fewer FLOPs, and reducing CPU latency by 8.6×\times. These results demonstrate that compressed video data alone can enable accurate and scalable surveillance tracking, thereby bypassing the need for pixel reconstruction.
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

InterPruner: Interactive Structured Pruning via Taylor-Implicit Criterion and Language-Prior Modulator for Multimodal Object Detection

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.
Aug 6, 2026cs.CV

CFGPNet: Cross-Attention-Based Fused Gradient Programmed Network Framework for Multispectral Object Detection

Multispectral object detection combines visible and thermal imagery to improve perception under challenging illumination and environmental conditions. However, differences in modality appearance and reliability can introduce redundant or conflicting responses, limiting the use of complementary information. Complex fusion mechanisms further increase computational cost, creating a persistent trade-off between detection accuracy and efficiency. To address these challenges, CFGPNet is proposed, a cross-attention-based fused gradient programmed network. The framework incorporates re-parameterized RepViT blocks into the YOLOv9 architecture to strengthen spatial and channel representations while maintaining efficient feature extraction. Cross Computation Efficient Attention (CrossCEA) exchanges spatial attention maps between modalities at multiple detection scales, allowing each stream to emphasize regions supported by the other while preserving modality-specific information. Attention Selection and Aggregation Fusion (ASAF) combines dense feature aggregation with selection of the strongest responses from multiple attention branches to form compact, discriminative fused representations. A programmable gradient information pathway provides auxiliary supervision during training to improve feature learning. This pathway is removed after training, adding no parameters or operations at inference. Experiments on FLIR, M3FD, LLVIP, VEDAI, and MFAD demonstrate favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs across three model scales, with the smallest variant requiring 15.3 million parameters and 56.9 GFLOPs. The code is available at https://github.com/NimaHatami99/CFGPNet.
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

RegisterBridgeMM: A Register-Centric Framework for RGB-Infrared Object Detection

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.
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

DRPFNet: Dual-domain Residual Progressive Fusion Network for RGB-Thermal Object Detection

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.
Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

Is It Time for the Renaissance of Salient Object Detection in the Era of MLLMs?

The zero-shot capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are pushing salient object detection (SOD) beyond task-specific supervision. To disentangle MLLMs beyond conventional mask-based evaluation, we decompose SOD into localization and segmentation, and re-engineer datasets with phrases, boxes, and attributes, establishing a diagnostic benchmark for MLLM saliency perception (SaliLLM). SaliLLM uncovers a striking capability mismatch: MLLMs outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in localization, yet remain substantially weaker in segmentation. Further analyses attribute this gap primarily to mismatches between MLLMs and annotations over foreground cardinality, granularity, and extent. Motivated by this diagnosis, we recast zero-shot SOD as protocol-aligned Foreground Organization and introduce the first training-free framework that leverages Gestalt-inspired Collaborative attention for Unified SOD (FOCUS). FOCUS couples top-down Bayesian-surprise calibration of protocol-conditioned foreground granularity with bottom-up propagation of MLLMs evidence over entity-centric perceptual manifolds induced by self-supervised features, yielding coherent object extents as prompts for a general segmenter. Across 13 RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T SOD benchmarks, FOCUS generally surpasses SOTA methods without training, reducing mean absolute error by 11%, 34%, and 48% compared with fully, weakly, and self-supervised methods, respectively. Our findings signal the renaissance of SOD: from task-specific supervision to zero-shot foreground organization. Code is available in the supplementary material.
Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

RDVSv2: A Large-scale Benchmark for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection

We introduce RDVSv2, a large-scale benchmark for RGB-D video salient object detection (RGB-D VSOD) with dense frame-level annotations. Existing datasets in this emerging field are often limited in scale and annotation quality, while also relying on less geometry-consistent depth cues. To address these limitations, RDVSv2 is built from publicly accessible stereoscopic online videos and contains 249 video sequences with 29,077 annotated frames. It includes depth maps derived from stereoscopic videos, together with frame-wise salient object masks annotated with eye-tracking guidance. Compared with existing datasets, RDVSv2 is much larger in scale and covers more diverse and challenging scenarios. In addition, we establish a strong baseline for RGB-D VSOD based on Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2). Specifically, we employ a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategy to adapt the SAM2 encoder to jointly encode RGB, depth, and optical flow cues. Extensive experiments show that RDVSv2 is substantially more challenging for existing RGB-D VSOD methods. Meanwhile, the proposed baseline achieves state-of-the-art results on RDVSv2 and existing RGB-D VSOD benchmarks. We hope that RDVSv2 and the provided baseline will serve as useful resources for future research on RGB-D VSOD and related multi-modal video understanding tasks. Our dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/ltynick/RDVSv2.
Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

Spectral-Spatial Synergistic Guided Network for Hyperspectral Salient Object Detection

Hyperspectral salient object detection aims to identify visually salient regions from hyperspectral images. Existing methods often fail because they fundamentally misunderstand the data, confusing incidental spectral variations caused by external factors such as illumination with essential spectral differences caused by the intrinsic material properties of the object. This leads to fragile representations and noisy predictions. To this end, we propose a lightweight and efficient Spectral-Spatial Synergistic Guided Network (S3GNet), with structure perception as the core, to build a closed-loop information flow around spectrum robust modeling, cross-stream co-perception and multi-scale refinement decoding. S3GNet introduces a parameter-free Spectral Structure-Aware Module that leverages spectral derivatives and regional hierarchical modeling to extract intrinsic features of robustness against illumination variations. Our Stream-Aware Attention Module achieves effective spectral-spatial collaboration through inter-stream global interaction and intra-stream spatial guidance. Furthermore, a Progressive Gated Refinement Decoder ensures precise object boundaries and detail recovery by optimally integrating multi-scale features. Experimental results show that S3GNet achieves superior performance in both computational efficiency and detection accuracy compared to existing methods.
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

Weakly-Supervised RGB-D Salient Object Detection via SAM-driven Pseudo Annotation and State Space Interaction-based Diffusion

Weakly-supervised RGB-D Salient Object Detection (SOD) is explored to reduce the heavy burden of pixel-level annotations. But scribble annotations lack the structure and details of objects, resulting in inaccurate saliency maps. In this paper, we propose a novel scribble-supervised RGB-D SOD method, consisting of a Segment Anything Model (SAM)-driven pseudo annotation generation method (\emph{SAM-PAG}) and a state space interaction-based conditional diffusion model (\emph{S2S^2Diff}). Specifically, SAM-PAG is tailored to address the issue of sparse supervision information. In SAM-PAG, we adopt the advanced SAM to expand sparse scribbles to dense pixel-level pseudo annotations through the dual-branch structure and the consistency of segmentation masks. In S2S^2Diff, we adopt the diffusion model to iteratively refine the noisy saliency maps with the guidance of conditional information, generating accurate saliency maps. Naturally, the core of our S2S^2Diff lies in the acquisition of conditional features and the denoising of saliency maps. For the former, we employ a cross-modal conditional generation module to interweave cross-modal features through frequency integration and implicit-explicit state space interaction, effectively achieving global conditional features. For the latter, we employ a context injection module to mitigate noise interference and to enhance object information with the conditional context. With the close cooperation of SAM-PAG and S2S^2Diff, our method outperforms relevant scribble-supervised methods and achieves competitive performance compared to fully-supervised methods on seven datasets. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/Switch457/WeakS2Diff_SOD.
Jul 9, 2026cs.CV

Dual-Correlation Hypergraph Network for Unaligned RGBT Video Object Detection and A Large-scale Benchmark

RGB-Thermal (RGBT) Video Object Detection (VOD) has gained significant attention because of the limitations of conventional RGB-based VOD methods under challenging conditions, such as low light, heavy fog, and adverse weather, etc. However, spatial misalignment commonly exists between RGBT image pairs. To address this, we propose a Dual-Correlation Hypergraph Network (DCHNet) that captures high-dimensional complementary information by explicitly modeling two types of correlations: temporal correlation across consecutive frames and spatial correlation from cross-modal features. Specifically, we first design a Patch-based Spatial Alignment Module (PSAM) to sequentially align the multimodal features at the local region level. Subsequently, we propose a Dual Hypergraph Fusion Module (DHFM), which constructs temporal and multimodal hypergraphs, respectively, to enhance object characteristic through dual-correlation learning. Furthermore, the field currently lacks a large-scale, scene-diverse benchmark dataset for comprehensive evaluation. Therefore, we construct DVT-VOD1000, a large-scale RGBT VOD dataset containing 1,000 video sequences with 103,464 RGBT image pairs. The dataset covers diverse scenarios, including campuses, parks, traffics, rural areas, night scenes, rainy weather, and snowy weather. Comprehensive experiments on VT-VOD50 and our DVT-VOD1000 demonstrate that DCHNet achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy. The dataset and source code will be made publicly available on https://github.com/tzz-ahu/ to support academic research.
Jul 9, 2026cs.CV

LDFE: Laplacian Decoupled Feature Enhancement Block for Dual-Stream CNN-based RGB-IR Object Detection

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.
Jul 4, 2026cs.CV

InfraNet: Quality-Aware RGB Guidance for Efficient Infrared Object Detection

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, M3^3FD, 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.
Jul 4, 2026cs.CV

IPDiff: Diffusion-driven ORSI Salient Object Detection with Information Reconstruction and Multi-Prior Guidance

Existing Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Image (ORSI-SOD) methods mainly adopt the static inference strategy, which uses fixed trained model parameters for saliency inference in the testing phase. This means that even if the generated saliency map has errors, it cannot be further optimized. In this paper, we propose the novel IPDiff, a Diffusion-driven ORSI-SOD method with Information Reconstruction and Multi-Prior Guidance. We build IPDiff based on a unique dynamic optimization strategy, which endows IPDiff with the ability to iteratively optimize saliency maps with a dynamic parameter. Specifically, we formulate ORSI-SOD as a conditional diffusion problem in IPDiff. IPDiff first extracts informative conditional priors from ORSIs, including the saliency prior and the hierarchical priors, in the prior network with the assistance of the information reconstruction-driven attention module. The saliency prior can provide positional information of salient objects, while the hierarchical priors can provide specific detail and semantic information of salient objects. Under the guidance of these priors, IPDiff then iteratively denoises random noise as the timestep dynamically changes in the denoising network, generating saliency maps that are close to ground truths. Notably, we simultaneously supervise IPDiff in both spatial and spectral domains through a hybrid loss function to achieve efficient network training. Comprehensive experiments on public ORSSD, EORSSD, and ORSI-4199 datasets demonstrate that our proposed IPDiff achieves the best performance compared to 46 state-of-the-art methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/IPDiff.
Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

Efficient RGB-T Object Detection via Sparse Cross-Modality Fusion

RGB-T detectors leverage the complementary strengths of visible and thermal infrared modalities, achieving robust performance under challenging conditions. Many of them resort to heavy dual backbones and exhaustive cross-modality fusion across the entire image, leading to impractically high computational costs. We observe that most image regions are smooth backgrounds (e.g., sky, ground) that can be easily handled by lightweight single-modality models. In light of this observation, we propose a sparse fusion mechanism for efficient RGB-T detection: first rapidly scanning the image to identify the proposals and then carefully examining the remaining sparse proposals via feature fusion. We propose a two-stage framework to instantiate this mechanism, which performs detection in two stages: 1) a lightweight and modality-specific detection stage that produces high-recall RoIs, and 2) a fusion-driven examination and refinement stage that filters out the false positives and refines the bounding boxes. This design enables the detector to adaptively allocate more computational resources to the potential foregrounds, improving the efficiency while ensuring detection accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves competitive performance with substantially fewer parameters and lower cost, while maintaining strong scalability to high-resolution images.
Jun 25, 2026cs.CV

Liquid Fusion of Heterogeneous Representations Towards General Salient Object Detection

General Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to identify and segment visually interesting objects from uni-modality or multi-modality scenes, recently advanced by cutting-edge State Space Models (SSMs). However, a critical limitation of current approaches is their neglect of the inherent spectral biases exhibited by different neural network paradigms. By digging to the dataset-level spectral analysis of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and SSMs, their semantic representations are inherently complementary based on their complementary frequency preferences. Inspired by this, we harmonize heterogeneous representations from SSMs and CNNs to bridge their spectral biases for general salient object detection. To this end, inspired by the dynamic information propagation of Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs), we introduce a liquid fusion to dynamically integrates features from two backbones, including VMamba and ConvNeXt, referred to Liquid Fusion Network (LFNet). Concretely, by treating the continuous VMamba features and ConvNeXt features as evolving states and exogenous stimulus, respectively, LFNet employs a dynamic gating mechanism for content-aware feature aggregation. Crucially, this state-stimulus paradigm enables to scale to multi-modal cues, resulting in flexibility in general SOD. Besides, a Saliency-Guided Upsampling (SGU) operator to propagate the features to the shallow layer, which leverages a spectral-spatial co-design to suppress upsampling artifacts while preserving semantics. Extensive experiments across five diverse tasks (RGB, RGB-D, RGB-T, VSOD, and VDT) demonstrate that LFNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, offering a superior trade-off between detection accuracy and model efficiency. Code has been released at https://github.com/cke520/LFNet.
Jun 18, 2026cs.CV

U2^2Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U2^2Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U2^2Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.
May 15, 2026cs.CV

Learning Dynamic Structural Specialization for Underwater Salient Object Detection

Underwater salient object detection (USOD) has attracted increasing attention for underwater visual scene understanding and vision-guided robotic applications. However, existing USOD methods still struggle with underwater image degradations, which often lead to inaccurate object localization, fragmented salient regions, and coarse boundary prediction. To address these challenges, this paper proposes DSS-USOD, a novel RGB-based USOD method built upon dynamic structural specialization. DSS-USOD extracts a shared base representation from a single underwater image, decomposes it into boundary-sensitive and region-coherent structural features, and dynamically coordinates their contributions according to local structural context. Specifically, the extracted shared base representation is decomposed into a boundary-sensitive branch for modeling fine-grained boundary details and a region-coherent branch for capturing region-level structural consistency. A spatial coordination module is then introduced to adaptively regulate the relative contributions of the two branches according to local structural context. Moreover, cooperative structural supervision is introduced to promote branch specialization and stabilize spatial coordination, enabling DSS-USOD to better balance boundary precision and region coherence under degraded underwater conditions. Extensive experiments show that DSS-USOD achieves superior performance on benchmark datasets. Finally, real-world deployment on an underwater robot validates the practical effectiveness of DSS-USOD for underwater object inspection.
May 12, 2026cs.CV

M4^4-SAM: Multi-Modal Mixture-of-Experts with Memory-Augmented SAM for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection

The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has emerged as a foundation model for universal segmentation. Owing to its generalizable visual representations, SAM2 has been successfully applied to various downstream tasks. However, extending SAM2 to the RGB-D video salient object detection (RGB-D VSOD) task encounters three challenges including limited spatial modeling of linear LoRA, insufficient employment of SAM's multi-scale features, and dependence of initialization on explicit prompts. To address the issues, we present Multi-Modal Mixture-of-Experts with Memory-Augmented SAM (M4^4-SAM), which equips SAM2 with modality-related PEFT, hierarchical feature fusion, and prompt-free memory initialization. Firstly, we inject Modality-Aware MoE-LORA, which employs convolutional experts to encode local spatial priors and introduces a modality dispatcher for efficient multi-modal fine-tuning, into SAM2's encoder. Secondly, we deploy Gated Multi-Level Feature Fusion, which hierarchically aggregates multi-scale encoder features with an adaptive gating mechanism, to balance spatial details and semantic context. Finally, to conduct zero-shot VSOD without manual prompts, we utilize a Pseudo-Guided Initialization, where a coarse mask is regarded as a pseudo prior and used to bootstrap the memory bank. Extensive experiments demonstrate that M4^4-SAM achieves the state-of-the-art performance across all evaluation metrics on three public RGB-D VSOD datasets.
May 11, 2026cs.CV

Thermal-Det: Language-Guided Cross-Modal Distillation for Open-Vocabulary Thermal Object Detection

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.
May 8, 2026cs.CV

UniV2D: Bridging Visual Restoration and Semantic Perception for Underwater Salient Object Detection

Underwater salient object detection (USOD) plays a vital role in marine vision tasks but remains fundamentally challenging due to severe visual degradation, such as selective absorption and medium scattering. Conventional pipelines typically adopt a sequential "enhance-then-detect" paradigm. However, isolating low-level visual restoration from high-level semantic perception often leads to semantic inconsistency, where the restored images may not be optimal for detection and can even introduce task-irrelevant noise. To break this sequential bottleneck, we propose UniV2D, a Unified Vision-to-Detection Network that jointly optimizes visual restoration and salient object detection within a mutually beneficial framework. Unlike traditional methods that rely on disjointed pipelines or rigid physical priors, UniV2D introduces a semantic-driven learning paradigm: high-level saliency semantics actively guide the restoration process, while the restored visual cues reciprocally enhance saliency perception. Specifically, UniV2D features a hierarchical dual-branch architecture. It first employs a self-calibrated decoder to predict initial saliency masks alongside a mask-aware restoration module to reconstruct image content. Subsequently, a saliency-guided refinement module equipped with cross-level modulation is utilized to align structural fidelity with semantic consistency. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniV2D significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, establishing a new standard for joint underwater perception.
May 7, 2026cs.CV

RAWild: Sensor-Agnostic RAW Object Detection via Physics-Guided Curve and Grid Modeling

Camera sensor RAW data offers intrinsic advantages for object detection, including deeper bit depth, preserved physical information, and freedom from image signal processor (ISP) distortions. However, varying exposure conditions, spectral sensitivities, and bit depths across devices introduce substantially larger domain gaps than sRGB, making sensor-agnostic generalization a fundamental challenge. In this study, we present \textbf{RAWild}, a physics-guided global-local tone mapping framework for sensor-agnostic RAW object detection. By factoring sensor-induced variations into a global tonal correction and a spatially adaptive local color adjustment, both driven by RAW distribution priors, our framework enables a single network to train jointly across heterogeneous sensors. To further support cross-sensor generalization, we construct a physics-based RAW simulation pipeline that synthesizes realistic sensor outputs spanning diverse spectral sensitivities, illuminants, and sensor non-idealities. Extensive experiments across multiple RAW benchmarks covering bit depths from 10 to 24 demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under single-dataset, mixed-dataset, and challenging robustness settings.
Apr 19, 2026cs.CV

DGSSM: Diffusion guided state-space models for multimodal salient object detection

Salient object detection (SOD) requires modeling both long-range contextual dependencies and fine-grained structural details, which remains challenging for convolutional, transformer-based, and Mamba-based state space models. While recent Mamba-based state space approaches enable efficient global reasoning, they often struggle to recover precise object boundaries. In contrast, diffusion models capture strong structural priors through iterative denoising, but their use in discriminative dense prediction is still limited due to computational cost and integration challenges. In this work, we propose DGSSM, a diffusion-guided state space (Mamba) framework that formulates multimodal salient object detection as a progressive denoising process. The framework integrates diffusion structural priors with multi-scale state space encoding, adaptive saliency prompting, and an iterative Mamba diffusion refinement mechanism to improve boundary accuracy. A boundary-aware refinement head and self-distillation strategy further enhance spatial coherence and feature consistency. Extensive experiments on 13 public benchmarks across RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T settings demonstrate that DGSSM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics while maintaining a compact model size. These results suggest that diffusion-guided state space modeling is an effective and generalizable paradigm for multimodal dense prediction tasks.
Jun 29, 2018cs.CV

Hyperspectral Image Dataset for Benchmarking on Salient Object Detection

Many works have been done on salient object detection using supervised or unsupervised approaches on colour images. Recently, a few studies demonstrated that efficient salient object detection can also be implemented by using spectral features in visible spectrum of hyperspectral images from natural scenes. However, these models on hyperspectral salient object detection were tested with a very few number of data selected from various online public dataset, which are not specifically created for object detection purposes. Therefore, here, we aim to contribute to the field by releasing a hyperspectral salient object detection dataset with a collection of 60 hyperspectral images with their respective ground-truth binary images and representative rendered colour images (sRGB). We took several aspects in consideration during the data collection such as variation in object size, number of objects, foreground-background contrast, object position on the image, and etc. Then, we prepared ground truth binary images for each hyperspectral data, where salient objects are labelled on the images. Finally, we did performance evaluation using Area Under Curve (AUC) metric on some existing hyperspectral saliency detection models in literature. The dataset is publicly available on our GitHub repository and Hugging Face dataset hub. Repository: https://github.com/nevrez/HS-SOD; (Old original repository https://github.com/gistairc/HS-SOD) Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/gsvrg/HS-SOD.