Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) frequently operate under complex illumination conditions during urban and industrial security patrols, including low light, fog, and strong backlighting. These conditions severely degrade the performance of existing dual-modal object detection methods. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a lightweight dual-modal object detection algorithm called M2CA-FFM, built upon multi-directional Mamba cross-attention feature fusion. First, a multi-directional Mamba enhancement module is developed to model spatial feature sequences via four-directional scanning. Second, a dedicated spectral enhancement module is designed to process spectral components in a differentiated manner. Together, these two modules enhance single-modal features from both the spatial and frequency domains, leading to improved feature robustness. For dual-modal object detection, we propose a Mixed Scanning Fusion Module that dynamically generates scanning paths focused on the target regions. This dynamic mechanism complements the fixed four-direction scanning and strengthens global modeling, enabling efficient fusion and deep complementarity between visible light and infrared features. Extensive experiments are conducted on a self-built dataset (OPVM-VIRD) and three public benchmarks (FLIR, M3FD, and VEDAI). Our method consistently outperforms current mainstream dual-modal detection algorithms across all datasets. On the OPVM-VIRD dataset, it achieves an mAP50 of 95.7%, which is 2.2% higher than the best result obtained with other fusion methods. Preliminary verification on the edge computing platform Atlas 200I DK A2 shows that the algorithm has significant lightweight advantages, with a parameter volume of only 72.07 M and a computational complexity of 134.41 GFLOPs, demonstrating the reasoning potential to meet real-time processing requirements. Overall, the proposed M2CA-FFM method offers a real-time detection strategy with strong generalization capabilities, holding significant practical value for around-the-clock security patrols in urban and industrial parks.
Luo et al. (Sun,) studied this question.