Abstract
In foggy environments, infrared images suffer from reduced contrast, degraded details, and blurred objects, which impair detection accuracy and real-time performance. To tackle these issues, we propose IDDNet, a lightweight infrared object detection network that integrates multi-scale fusion dehazing. IDDNet includes a multi-scale fusion dehazing (MSFD) module, which uses multi-scale feature fusion to eliminate haze interference while preserving key object details. A dedicated dehazing loss function, DhLoss, further improves the dehazing effect. In addition to MSFD, IDDNet incorporates three main components: (1) bidirectional polarized self-attention, (2) a weighted bidirectional feature pyramid network, and (3) multi-scale object detection layers. This architecture ensures high detection accuracy and computational efficiency. A two-stage training strategy optimizes the model's performance, enhancing its accuracy and robustness in foggy environments. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that IDDNet achieves 89.4% precision and 83.9% AP, showing its superior accuracy, processing speed, generalization, and robust detection performance.