Abstract

In all-weather Earth observation and complex unstructured environments, traditional single-modal remote sensing object detection often fails due to low illumination and strong background interference. While RGB–infrared fusion provides complementary information, existing methods are typically computationally intensive and struggle with dense small objects and modality discrepancies, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained platforms. To address these challenges, we propose ISDG-Net, a lightweight and efficient visible-infrared dual-modal object detection framework specifically tailored for edge deployment. ISDG-Net integrates four core components: (1) a channel-separated inverted bottleneck backbone (IBC-Conv) that reduces parameter redundancy while preserving modality-specific semantics; (2) a dynamic sparse attention module (DySparse) based on Bi-Level Routing Attention, enabling long-range dependency modeling with low computational cost; (3) an adaptive spatial fusion detection head (Detect-SASD) that aligns visible and infrared features at the pixel level to resolve semantic inconsistency and scale mismatch; and (4) a geometry-aware IoU selector (GIS) that mitigates over-suppression in crowded scenes by incorporating multi-dimensional geometric constraints into post-processing. Extensive experiments on the VEDAI, M3FD, and LLVIP datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of ISDG-Net. It achieves 55.1% and 77.1% mAP@0.5 on VEDAI and M3FD, respectively, and 93.7% mAP@0.5 with 89.7% recall on LLVIP, while maintaining a compact model size of 4.2 M parameters and 11.3 GFLOPs. These results validate that accurate RGB–infrared detection is achievable under strict resource constraints, making ISDG-Net well-suited for deployment in edge-based remote sensing systems.

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