Structure-Aware Heterogeneous Dual-Stream Network with Wavelet-Guided Fusion for UAV Infrared–Visible Object Detection

To address the susceptibility of single-modality approaches to illumination variations and imaging conditions in low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) detection, this study proposes a structure-aware heterogeneous dual-stream detection network based on infrared and visible-light fusion. First, a multimodal UAV detection dataset oriented toward complex low-altitude scenarios is constructed, providing a data foundation for cross-modal detection research. Then, a structure-aware heterogeneous dual-stream feature extraction framework is designed to enable collaborative modeling of visible-light and infrared features through modality-specific encoding. In the visible-light branch, a Structure-Aware Gated Enhancement Block (SAGE Block) is introduced to enhance the representation of fine-grained structural and edge information. In the cross-modal fusion stage, a Bidirectional Wavelet-Guided Fusion Module (BWFM) is proposed to decouple structural semantics and detailed information in the frequency domain. Adaptive fusion is further achieved through low-frequency cross-modal interaction and high-frequency detail-preservation strategies. Finally, the proposed method is experimentally validated on the proposed Multispectral UAV Detection Dataset (MUDD) and the Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Fusion Dataset (M3FD).. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an mAP@0.5 of 0.9680 and an mAP@0.5:0.95 of 0.6794 on the proposed MUDD, as well as an mAP@0.5:0.95 of 0.6072 on the M3FD dataset, demonstrating competitive detection accuracy and generalization capability. Ablation experiments further indicate that the SAGE Block, BWFM, and the low-frequency cross-modal fusion and high-frequency detail-preservation strategies within BWFM all contribute positively to performance improvement.