DHANet: Dual-Stream Hierarchical Interaction Networks for Multimodal Drone Object Detection

Drone-based remote sensing has become pivotal for high-resolution dynamic monitoring. However, the differences between day and night modes will trigger a mismatch in multi-scale object features under extreme lighting conditions. In this paper, we propose a dual-stream hierarchical interaction network for multimodal drone object detection, called DHANet, which enhances the distinguishability between multi-scale objects and background for each modality. Specifically, DHANet is designed with a Modality-Adaptive Asymmetric Attention Module (M-AAM) that enhances object-level semantic representations through global and local attention mechanisms. The M-AAM employs global context attention and local positional attention to replace conventional multi-scale context extraction, thereby effectively integrating spatial-channel information of objects. Furthermore, the network is equipped with a Multimodal Scale-Attentive Convolution (M-SC) module that dynamically generates modality-specific feature aggregation weights. This design enables global cross-modality information fusion while reducing computational complexity. Experimental results on two multimodal remote sensing benchmark datasets (DroneVehicle and VEDAI) and two natural datasets (LLVIP and FLIR) demonstrate the robustness and generalizability of DHANet. The codes will be openly and freely available at https://github.com/Victoria-xin1009/-IEEE TGRS DHANet for the sake of reproducibility.