Haiwen Feng

Visible and infrared images follow different imaging mechanisms, so direct concatenation or one-shot attention fusion can mistake background texture and thermal interference for complementary evidence. FCI-DETR splits detection into three linked stages: preserving modality-specific structure before fusion, calibrating cross-modal responses during fusion, and injecting infrared context by scale after fusion. It reaches 88.6%, 84.3%, 86.7% and 81.5% mAP50 on M3FD, DroneVehicle, VEDAI and FLIR, and beats a same-backbone RGB+IR RT-DETR baseline by 6.0 points on M3FD under a fixed protocol.

Visible and infrared images follow different imaging mechanisms, so direct concatenation or one-shot attention fusion can mistake background texture and thermal interference for complementary evidence. FCI-DETR splits detection into three linked stages: preserving modality-specific structure before fusion, calibrating cross-modal responses during fusion, and injecting infrared context by scale after fusion. It reaches 88.6%, 84.3%, 86.7% and 81.5% mAP50 on M3FD, DroneVehicle, VEDAI and FLIR, and beats a same-backbone RGB+IR RT-DETR baseline by 6.0 points on M3FD under a fixed protocol.