# Dual-Stream Spectral Decoupling Distillation for Remote Sensing Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04413 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04413/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 27 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [Focal and Global Knowledge Distillation for Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11837/) (2021)
- [CrossKD: Cross-Head Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11369/) (2023)
- [SuperYOLO: Super Resolution Assisted Object Detection in Multimodal Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13351/) (2022)
- [Wavelet Knowledge Distillation: Towards Efficient Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06321/) (2022)
- [Distilling Object Detectors with Feature Richness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00674/) (2021)
- [FreeKD: Knowledge Distillation via Semantic Frequency Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12079/) (2023)
- [Localization Distillation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05957/) (2022)
- [ORSIm Detector: A Novel Object Detection Framework in Optical Remote Sensing Imagery Using Spatial-Frequency Channel Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07925/) (2019)
- [MaDiNet: Mamba Diffusion Network for SAR Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07500/) (2024)
- [Cross-Layer Feature Pyramid Transformer for Small Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19696/) (2024)
- [Efficient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Imagery via Attention-based Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18676/) (2023)
- [Distilling Object Detectors With Global Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09022/) (2022)
- [LO-Det: Lightweight Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07709/) (2022)

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

- [FreqKD: Frequency-Decoupled Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11572/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge distillation is an effective and hardware-friendly method, which plays a key role in lightweighting remote sensing object detection. However, existing distillation methods often encounter the issue of mixed features in remote sensing images (RSIs), and neglect the discrepancies caused by subtle feature variations, leading to entangled knowledge confusion. To address these challenges, we propose an architecture-agnostic distillation method named Dual-Stream Spectral Decoupling Distillation (DS2D2) for universal remote sensing object detection tasks. Specifically, DS2D2 integrates explicit and implicit distillation grounded in spectral decomposition. Firstly, the first-order wavelet transform is applied for spectral decomposition to preserve the critical spatial characteristics of RSIs. Leveraging this spatial preservation, a Density-Independent Scale Weight (DISW) is designed to address the challenges of dense and small object detection common in RSIs. Secondly, we show implicit knowledge hidden in subtle student-teacher feature discrepancies, which significantly influence predictions when activated by detection heads. This implicit knowledge is extracted via full-frequency and high-frequency amplifiers, which map feature differences to prediction deviations. Extensive experiments on DIOR and DOTA datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Specifically, on DIOR dataset, DS2D2 achieves improvements of 4.2% in AP50 for RetinaNet and 3.8% in AP50 for Faster R-CNN, outperforming existing distillation approaches. The source code will be available at https://github.com/PolarAid/DS2D2.