UAV Detection in Low-Altitude Scenarios Based on the Fusion of Unaligned Dual-Spectrum Images

The threat posed by unauthorized drones to public airspace has become increasingly critical. To address the challenge of UAV detection in unaligned visible–infrared dual-spectral images, we present a novel framework that comprises two sequential stages: image alignment and object detection. The Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) algorithm is applied for feature matching, combined with the gray centroid method to remove mismatched feature points. A plane-adaptive pixel remapping algorithm is further developed to achieve images fusion. In addition, an enhanced YOLOv11 model with a modified loss function is employed to achieve robust object detection in the fused images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method enables precise pixel-level dual-spectrum fusion and reliable UAV detection under diverse and complex conditions.