Diffusion Mechanism and Knowledge Distillation Object Detection in Multimodal Remote Sensing Imagery

Multimodal remote sensing images provide complementary information, enhancing the effectiveness of object detection tasks in open-world scenarios. To address the imbalance of information richness between modalities in multimodal object detection, we propose a simple yet effective multisource image object detection method (DKDNet). Our contributions are twofold: 1) we introduce diffusion deformation convolution (DDConv), which combines deformation convolution with adaptive long-range receptive fields to further enhance the ability to perceive object pose variations and capture distant information. 2) We propose the bidirectional feature distillation and information complementary fusion network (BDFusion), where different modalities exchange information through a knowledge distillation strategy, explicitly enhancing the information interaction between modalities. Finally, we adaptively build spatial domain complementarity between different modalities via self-correction, revealing implicit correlations. Experimental results on the publicly available vehicle detection in aerial imagery (VEDAI) dataset and the optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection dataset (OSSDD), collected in the Suez Canal region, demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance with acceptable inference time, making it suitable for various real-world scenarios.