# Translation, Scale and Rotation: Cross-Modal Alignment Meets RGB-Infrared Vehicle Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13801 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13801/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05612/) (2019)
- [Align Deep Features for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09397/) (2020)
- [Arbitrary-Oriented Scene Text Detection via Rotation Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01086/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Rotated Object Detection with Gaussian Wasserstein Distance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11952/) (2021)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)
- [Gliding vertex on the horizontal bounding box for multi-oriented object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09358/) (2019)
- [Learning High-Precision Bounding Box for Rotated Object Detection via Kullback-Leibler Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01883/) (2021)
- [RGB-T Object Tracking:Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08982/) (2018)
- [Improving Multispectral Pedestrian Detection by Addressing Modality Imbalance Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03043/) (2020)
- [Multispectral Deep Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02644/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Refinement Network for Oriented and Densely Packed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09973/) (2020)
- [Oriented Object Detection in Aerial Images with Box Boundary-Aware Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07043/) (2020)
- [Fusion of Multispectral Data Through Illumination-aware Deep Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09972/) (2018)
- [Cross-Modal Collaborative Representation Learning and a Large-Scale RGBT Benchmark for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04529/) (2020)
- [Oriented Objects as pairs of Middle Lines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10694/) (2019)
- [Learning Cross-Modal Deep Representations for Robust Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02431/) (2017)
- [SIPSA-Net: Shift-Invariant Pan Sharpening with Moving Object Alignment for Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02400/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Fusion-Mamba for Cross-modality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09146/) (2024)
- [C2Former: Calibrated and Complementary Transformer for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16175/) (2023)
- [E2E-MFD: Towards End-to-End Synchronous Multimodal Fusion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09323/) (2024)
- [DMM: Disparity-guided Multispectral Mamba for Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08132/) (2024)
- [UniRGB-IR: A Unified Framework for Visible-Infrared Semantic Tasks via Adapter Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17360/) (2024)
- [Removal then Selection: A Coarse-to-Fine Fusion Perspective for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10731/) (2024)
- [WaveMamba: Wavelet-Driven Mamba Fusion for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18173/) (2025)
- [Cross-Modality Proposal-guided Feature Mining for Unregistered RGB-Thermal Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12111/) (2023)
- [CountFormer: Multi-View Crowd Counting Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02047/) (2024)
- [M4-SAR: A Multi-Resolution, Multi-Polarization, Multi-Scene, Multi-Source Dataset and Benchmark for optical-SAR Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10931/) (2025)
- [M-SpecGene: Generalized Foundation Model for RGBT Multispectral Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16318/) (2025)
- [Seeing Through the Noise: Improving Infrared Small Target Detection and Segmentation from Noise Suppression Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06878/) (2025)
- [RemoteDet-Mamba: A Hybrid Mamba-CNN Network for Multi-modal Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13532/) (2024)
- [Vision Mamba in Remote Sensing: A Comprehensive Survey of Techniques, Applications and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00630/) (2025)
- [Fusion Meets Diverse Conditions: A High-diversity Benchmark and Baseline for UAV-based Multimodal Object Detection with Condition Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13620/) (2025)
- [DPDETR: Decoupled Position Detection Transformer for Infrared-Visible Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06123/) (2024)
- [Optimizing Multispectral Object Detection: A Bag of Tricks and Comprehensive Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18288/) (2024)
- [Cross-modal Offset-guided Dynamic Alignment and Fusion for Weakly Aligned UAV Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16737/) (2025)
- [SLGNet: Synergizing Structural Priors and Language-Guided Modulation for Multimodal Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02249/) (2026)
- [RGB-T Object Detection via Group Shuffled Multi-receptive Attention and Multi-modal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18955/) (2024)
- [Selective Structured State Space for Multispectral-fused Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14043/) (2025)
- [COXNet: Cross-Layer Fusion with Adaptive Alignment and Scale Integration for RGBT Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09533/) (2025)
- [DEPFusion: Dual-Domain Enhancement and Priority-Guided Mamba Fusion for UAV Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07327/) (2025)
- [Classification Committee for Active Deep Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08476/) (2023)
- [Mitigating the Impact of Prominent Position Shift in Drone-based RGBT Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09311/) (2025)
- [Decoupled Cross-Modal Alignment Network for Text-RGBT Person Retrieval and A High-Quality Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07950/) (2025)
- [AlignFreeNet: Is Cross-Modal Pre-Alignment Necessary? An End-to-End Alignment-Free Lightweight Network for Visible-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20146/) (2025)
- [DOD-SA: Infrared-Visible Decoupled Object Detection with Single-Modality Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10445/) (2025)
- [Exploring Scale Shift in Crowd Localization under the Context of Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19330/) (2025)
- [Unifying Heterogeneous Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Detection Via Language-Pivoted Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01758/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Integrating multispectral data in object detection, especially visible and infrared images, has received great attention in recent years. Since visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) images can provide complementary information to handle light variations, the paired images are used in many fields, such as multispectral pedestrian detection, RGB-IR crowd counting and RGB-IR salient object detection. Compared with natural RGB-IR images, we find detection in aerial RGB-IR images suffers from cross-modal weakly misalignment problems, which are manifested in the position, size and angle deviations of the same object. In this paper, we mainly address the challenge of cross-modal weakly misalignment in aerial RGB-IR images. Specifically, we firstly explain and analyze the cause of the weakly misalignment problem. Then, we propose a Translation-Scale-Rotation Alignment (TSRA) module to address the problem by calibrating the feature maps from these two modalities. The module predicts the deviation between two modality objects through an alignment process and utilizes Modality-Selection (MS) strategy to improve the performance of alignment. Finally, a two-stream feature alignment detector (TSFADet) based on the TSRA module is constructed for RGB-IR object detection in aerial images. With comprehensive experiments on the public DroneVehicle datasets, we verify that our method reduces the effect of the cross-modal misalignment and achieve robust detection results.