COXNet: Cross-Layer Fusion With Adaptive Alignment and Scale Integration for RGBT Tiny Object Detection

Detecting tiny objects in multimodal Red-Green-Blue-Thermal (RGBT) imagery is a critical challenge in computer vision, particularly in surveillance, search and rescue, and autonomous navigation. Drone-based scenarios exacerbate these challenges due to spatial misalignment, low-light conditions, occlusion, and cluttered backgrounds. Current methods struggle to leverage the complementary information between visible and thermal modalities effectively. We propose COXNet, a novel framework for RGBT tiny object detection, addressing these issues through three core innovations: i) the Cross-Layer Fusion Module, fusing high-level visible and low-level thermal features for enhanced semantic and spatial accuracy; ii) the Dynamic Alignment and Scale Refinement module, correcting cross-modal spatial misalignments and preserving multi-scale features; and iii) an optimized label assignment strategy using the GeoShape Similarity Measure for better localization. COXNet achieves a 3.32% mAP<sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">50</sub> improvement on the RGBTDronePerson dataset over state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness for robust detection in complex environments.