FoCal: Frequency-Oriented Cross-Modal Interaction and Spectral Calibration for Aerial Visible-Infrared Object Detection
This study addresses the insufficient cross-modal frequency interaction and improper utilization of spectral discrepancies in aerial visible-infrared object detection by proposing the FoCal framework. FoCal introduces a pioneering frequency-aware dual-domain calibration mechanism alongside discrepancy-guided spectral modulation. By integrating cross-modal attention with adaptive gating, the framework achieves low-frequency consensus fusion while preserving high-frequency specificity, thereby accurately extracting complementary information across frequency bands and avoiding indiscriminate fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FoCal attains an mAP50 of 83.5% on benchmarks such as DroneVehicle. Notably, with only 3.0M parameters, it achieves an inference speed of 113.6 FPS, effectively balancing detection accuracy with computational efficiency for real-time deployment.