PONet: A Compact RGB-IR Fusion Network for Vehicle Detection on OrangePi AIpro

Multi-modal object detection that fuses RGB (Red-Green-Blue) and infrared (IR) data has emerged as an effective approach for addressing challenging visual conditions such as low illumination, occlusion, and adverse weather. However, most existing multi-modal detectors prioritize accuracy while negle...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Junyu Huang, Jialing Lian, Fangyu Cao, Jiawei Chen, Renbo Luo, Jinxin Yang, Qian Shi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-07-01
Series:Remote Sensing
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/17/15/2650
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Summary:Multi-modal object detection that fuses RGB (Red-Green-Blue) and infrared (IR) data has emerged as an effective approach for addressing challenging visual conditions such as low illumination, occlusion, and adverse weather. However, most existing multi-modal detectors prioritize accuracy while neglecting computational efficiency, making them unsuitable for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this limitation, we propose PONet, a lightweight and efficient multi-modal vehicle detection network tailored for real-time edge inference. PONet incorporates Polarized Self-Attention to improve feature adaptability and representation with minimal computational overhead. In addition, a novel fusion module is introduced to effectively integrate RGB and IR modalities while preserving efficiency. Experimental results on the VEDAI dataset demonstrate that PONet achieves a competitive detection accuracy of 82.2% mAP@0.5 while sustaining a throughput of 34 FPS on the OrangePi AIpro 20T device. With only 3.76 M parameters and 10.2 GFLOPs (Giga Floating Point Operations), PONet offers a practical solution for edge-oriented remote sensing applications requiring a balance between detection precision and computational cost.
ISSN:2072-4292