MambaRefine-YOLO: A Dual-Modality Small Object Detector for UAV Imagery

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Main Authors: Cao, Shuyu, Chen, Minxin, Song, Yucheng, Chen, Zhaozhong, Zhang, Xinyou
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cao, Shuyu
Chen, Minxin
Song, Yucheng
Chen, Zhaozhong
Zhang, Xinyou
author_facet Cao, Shuyu
Chen, Minxin
Song, Yucheng
Chen, Zhaozhong
Zhang, Xinyou
contents Small object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery is a persistent challenge, hindered by low resolution and background clutter. While fusing RGB and infrared (IR) data offers a promising solution, existing methods often struggle with the trade-off between effective cross-modal interaction and computational efficiency. In this letter, we introduce MambaRefine-YOLO. Its core contributions are a Dual-Gated Complementary Mamba fusion module (DGC-MFM) that adaptively balances RGB and IR modalities through illumination-aware and difference-aware gating mechanisms, and a Hierarchical Feature Aggregation Neck (HFAN) that uses a ``refine-then-fuse'' strategy to enhance multi-scale features. Our comprehensive experiments validate this dual-pronged approach. On the dual-modality DroneVehicle dataset, the full model achieves a state-of-the-art mAP of 83.2%, an improvement of 7.9% over the baseline. On the single-modality VisDrone dataset, a variant using only the HFAN also shows significant gains, demonstrating its general applicability. Our work presents a superior balance between accuracy and speed, making it highly suitable for real-world UAV applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19134
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MambaRefine-YOLO: A Dual-Modality Small Object Detector for UAV Imagery
Cao, Shuyu
Chen, Minxin
Song, Yucheng
Chen, Zhaozhong
Zhang, Xinyou
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Small object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery is a persistent challenge, hindered by low resolution and background clutter. While fusing RGB and infrared (IR) data offers a promising solution, existing methods often struggle with the trade-off between effective cross-modal interaction and computational efficiency. In this letter, we introduce MambaRefine-YOLO. Its core contributions are a Dual-Gated Complementary Mamba fusion module (DGC-MFM) that adaptively balances RGB and IR modalities through illumination-aware and difference-aware gating mechanisms, and a Hierarchical Feature Aggregation Neck (HFAN) that uses a ``refine-then-fuse'' strategy to enhance multi-scale features. Our comprehensive experiments validate this dual-pronged approach. On the dual-modality DroneVehicle dataset, the full model achieves a state-of-the-art mAP of 83.2%, an improvement of 7.9% over the baseline. On the single-modality VisDrone dataset, a variant using only the HFAN also shows significant gains, demonstrating its general applicability. Our work presents a superior balance between accuracy and speed, making it highly suitable for real-world UAV applications.
title MambaRefine-YOLO: A Dual-Modality Small Object Detector for UAV Imagery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19134