# Aligned Radiometric RGB-Thermal Fusion for UAV Facade Anomaly Screening

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12521 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12521/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)
- [Delivering Arbitrary-Modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01480/) (2023)
- [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)
- [DAMSDet: Dynamic Adaptive Multispectral Detection Transformer with Competitive Query Selection and Adaptive Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00326/) (2024)
- [Visible-Thermal Tiny Object Detection: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14482/) (2024)
- [UAVScenes: A Multi-Modal Dataset for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22412/) (2025)
- [COMO: Cross-Mamba Interaction and Offset-Guided Fusion for Multimodal Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18076/) (2024)
- [WaveMamba: Wavelet-Driven Mamba Fusion for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18173/) (2025)
- [Causal Mode Multiplexer: A Novel Framework for Unbiased Multispectral Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01300/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Early-Fusion Strategies for Improved Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16038/) (2024)
- [Fieldscale: Locality-Aware Field-based Adaptive Rescaling for Thermal Infrared Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15395/) (2024)
- [Multispectral State-Space Feature Fusion: Bridging Shared and Cross-Parametric Interactions for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14643/) (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)
- [Thermal Chameleon: Task-Adaptive Tone-mapping for Radiometric Thermal-Infrared images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18340/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unmanned aerial vehicle facade inspection can combine red, green, and blue (RGB) imagery with thermal measurements to screen surface and subsurface anomalies. However, geometric discrepancies between the sensors and thermal image rendering can obscure spatial correspondence and weak temperature contrasts. This article presents a sensor-level pipeline comprising per-sensor correction, RGB-to-thermal registration, common-support cropping, and signed local contrast encoding of 16-bit radiometric measurements. The encoding preserves the distinction between locally hotter and colder regions and supplies the fourth input channel of a compact single-stream detector. We introduce M3T, a dataset of 674 paired RGB and radiometric thermal samples from five facade-inspection projects covering eight component and anomaly categories. The median residual registration error is 3.384 pixels, and a controlled-displacement analysis characterizes how the local contrast response changes under controlled displacement. Project-grouped four-fold evaluation yields mean average precision of 0.168 over intersection-over-union thresholds from 0.5 to 0.95, using 28.50 billion floating-point operations per image. A separate single-split ablation shows improved delamination detection over RGB-only and alternative thermal inputs, although aggregate accuracy does not improve over RGB alone. Evaluation on RGBT-Tiny shows mixed performance with rendered thermal imagery. These results characterize the category-specific benefits and limitations of aligned radiometric contrast for compact facade screening.