通过跨模态蒸馏增强热成像目标检测,提升小物体识别能力。
Contrast-Guided Cross-Modal Distillation for Thermal Object Detection
- 训练时引入对比损失,优化同类聚集、异类分离的特征表示
- 用RGB教师模型引导热成像特征学习,提升纹理薄弱区域表现
- 无需多模态输入,适合单热成像部署场景
夜间热成像目标检测仍面临挑战:低对比度和弱高频信息导致重复、重叠框,漏检小目标及类别混淆。现有方法或通过将热成像转为可见光依赖像素保真度,受颜色或结构伪影影响;或在推理时融合可见光与热成像,需额外传感器、精确标定且计算开销高。两者均未直接优化检测器所用的热成像表征。本文保持单模态推理,在训练阶段引入仅训练用的目标函数:通过拉近同类别特征、推远异类特征,抑制重复与混淆检测;并通过将学生模型多层级特征与已训练的RGB教师模型对齐,注入跨模态语义先验,强化无纹理的热成像特征,且测试时无需可见光输入。实验表明,该方法优于先前方法,达到当前最优性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Robust perception at night remains challenging for thermal-infrared detection: low contrast and weak high-frequency cues lead to duplicate, overlapping boxes, missed small objects, and class confusion. Prior remedies either translate TIR to RGB and hope pixel fidelity transfers to detection -- making performance fragile to color or structure artifacts -- or fuse RGB and TIR at test time, which requires extra sensors, precise calibration, and higher runtime cost. Both lines can help in favorable conditions, but do not directly shape the thermal representation used by the detector. We keep mono-modality inference and tackle the root causes during training. Specifically, we introduce training-only objectives that sharpen instance-level decision boundaries by pulling together features of the same class and pushing apart those of different classes -- suppressing duplicate and confusing detections -- and that inject cross-modal semantic priors by aligning the student's multi-level pyramid features with an RGB-trained teacher, thereby strengthening texture-poor thermal features without visible input at test time. In experiments, our method outperformed prior approaches and achieved state-of-the-art performance.
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