Multispectral Object Detection Based on Multilevel Feature Fusion and Dual Feature Modulation

Multispectral object detection is a crucial technology in remote sensing image processing, particularly in low-light environments. Most current methods extract features at a single scale, resulting in the fusion of invalid features and the failure to detect small objects. To address these issues, we propose a multispectral object detection network based on multilevel feature fusion and dual feature modulation (GMD-YOLO). Firstly, a novel dual-channel CSPDarknet53 network is used to extract deep features from visible-infrared images. This network incorporates a Ghost module, which generates additional feature maps through a series of linear operations, achieving a balance between accuracy and speed. Secondly, the multilevel feature fusion (MLF) module is designed to utilize cross-modal information through the construction of hierarchical residual connections. This approach strengthens the complementarity between different modalities, allowing the network to improve multiscale representation capabilities at a more refined granularity level. Finally, a dual feature modulation (DFM) decoupling head is introduced to enhance small object detection. This decoupled head effectively meets the distinct requirements of classification and localization tasks. GMD-YOLO is validated on three public visible-infrared datasets: DroneVehicle, KAIST, and LLVIP. DroneVehicle and LLVIP achieved mAP@0.5 of 78.0% and 98.0%, outperforming baseline methods by 3.6% and 4.4%, respectively. KAIST exhibited an MR of 7.73% with an FPS of 61.7. Experimental results demonstrated that our method surpasses existing advanced methods and exhibits strong robustness.