# Small Target Detection Based on Mask-Enhanced Attention Fusion of Visible and Infrared Remote Sensing Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06925 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06925/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)
- [ICAFusion: Iterative Cross-Attention Guided Feature Fusion for Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07504/) (2023)
- [C2Former: Calibrated and Complementary Transformer for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16175/) (2023)
- [Translation, Scale and Rotation: Cross-Modal Alignment Meets RGB-Infrared Vehicle Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13801/) (2022)
- [Refining activation downsampling with SoftPool](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00440/) (2021)
- [Spatio-Contextual Deep Network Based Multimodal Pedestrian Detection For Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12713/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Targets in remote sensing images are usually small, weakly textured, and easily disturbed by complex backgrounds, challenging high-precision detection with general algorithms. Building on our earlier ESM-YOLO, this work presents ESM-YOLO+ as a lightweight visible infrared fusion network. To enhance detection, ESM-YOLO+ includes two key innovations. (1) A Mask-Enhanced Attention Fusion (MEAF) module fuses features at the pixel level via learnable spatial masks and spatial attention, effectively aligning RGB and infrared features, enhancing small-target representation, and alleviating cross-modal misalignment and scale heterogeneity. (2) Training-time Structural Representation (SR) enhancement provides auxiliary supervision to preserve fine-grained spatial structures during training, boosting feature discriminability without extra inference cost. Extensive experiments on the VEDAI and DroneVehicle datasets validate ESM-YOLO+'s superiority. The model achieves 84.71% mAP on VEDAI and 74.0% mAP on DroneVehicle, while greatly reducing model complexity, with 93.6% fewer parameters and 68.0% lower GFLOPs than the baseline. These results confirm that ESM-YOLO+ integrates strong performance with practicality for real-time deployment, providing an effective solution for high-performance small-target detection in complex remote sensing scenes.