# Mitigating the Impact of Prominent Position Shift in Drone-based RGBT Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09311/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Balanced Multimodal Learning via On-the-fly Gradient Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15332/) (2022)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic End-to-end Noise Correction for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07788/) (2019)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptive Teacher for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13216/) (2021)
- [MMRotate: A Rotated Object Detection Benchmark using PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13317/) (2022)
- [Meta Label Correction for Noisy Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03809/) (2019)
- [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)
- [ICAFusion: Iterative Cross-Attention Guided Feature Fusion for Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07504/) (2023)
- [Illumination-aware Faster R-CNN for Robust Multispectral Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05347/) (2018)
- [C2Former: Calibrated and Complementary Transformer for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16175/) (2023)
- [Fusion of Multispectral Data Through Illumination-aware Deep Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09972/) (2018)
- [Translation, Scale and Rotation: Cross-Modal Alignment Meets RGB-Infrared Vehicle Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13801/) (2022)
- [Cross Domain Object Detection by Target-Perceived Dual Branch Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01291/) (2022)
- [Learning from Noisy Anchors for One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05086/) (2019)
- [HRFuser: A Multi-resolution Sensor Fusion Architecture for 2D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15157/) (2022)
- [2PCNet: Two-Phase Consistency Training for Day-to-Night Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13853/) (2023)
- [Robust Object Detection With Inaccurate Bounding Boxes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09697/) (2022)
- [Training Object Detectors With Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07202/) (2019)
- [Spatial Self-Distillation for Object Detection with Inaccurate Bounding Boxes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12101/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Pedestrian Detection with Large Misalignment Based on Modal-Wise Regression and Multi-Modal IoU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11196/) (2021)
- [Maximizing Conditional Independence for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03212/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DOD-SA: Infrared-Visible Decoupled Object Detection with Single-Modality Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10445/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Drone-based RGBT object detection plays a crucial role in many around-the-clock applications. However, real-world drone-viewed RGBT data suffers from the prominent position shift problem, i.e., the position of a tiny object differs greatly in different modalities. For instance, a slight deviation of a tiny object in the thermal modality will induce it to drift from the main body of itself in the RGB modality. Considering RGBT data are usually labeled on one modality (reference), this will cause the unlabeled modality (sensed) to lack accurate supervision signals and prevent the detector from learning a good representation. Moreover, the mismatch of the corresponding feature point between the modalities will make the fused features confusing for the detection head. In this paper, we propose to cast the cross-modality box shift issue as the label noise problem and address it on the fly via a novel Mean Teacher-based Cross-modality Box Correction head ensemble (CBC). In this way, the network can learn more informative representations for both modalities. Furthermore, to alleviate the feature map mismatch problem in RGBT fusion, we devise a Shifted Window-Based Cascaded Alignment (SWCA) module. SWCA mines long-range dependencies between the spatially unaligned features inside shifted windows and cascaded aligns the sensed features with the reference ones. Extensive experiments on two drone-based RGBT object detection datasets demonstrate that the correction results are both visually and quantitatively favorable, thereby improving the detection performance. In particular, our CBC module boosts the precision of the sensed modality ground truth by 25.52 aSim points. Overall, the proposed detector achieves an mAP_50 of 43.55 points on RGBTDronePerson and surpasses a state-of-the-art method by 8.6 mAP50 on a shift subset of DroneVehicle dataset. The code and data will be made publicly available.