Long-wave Infrared Polarimetric Remote Sensing Image Fusion for Vehicle Detection

Abstract

Blurred vehicle contours and low contrast limit detection performance in infrared remote sensing imagery, while existing fusion methods may introduce polarization noise and fail to integrate complementary information effectively. To address these limitations, we propose a Mamba-based infrared polarimetric remote sensing image fusion model. Infrared polarization information reflects surface material properties and geometry, providing complementary information to infrared intensity. The proposed method first combines long-wave infrared total intensity S0 and the degree of linear polarization (DoLP), using a physics-inspired polarization-response proxy and spatial structural continuity to extract guidance features. It then employs bidirectional state space scanning along horizontal, vertical, and both diagonal orientations to enable cross-modal feature fusion across the entire image. Prior-guided multi-window structural similarity, reconstruction constraints, and a relative lower-bound loss for polarization saliency are jointly introduced to suppress noise while preserving global background structures and target polarization features. In addition, we construct AIR-LWIR-Pol, a dataset of 1,901 accurately registered image pairs acquired using an airborne division-of-aperture long-wave infrared polarimetric imaging system, and evaluate downstream vehicle detection using YOLO11. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the comparison methods on four fusion metrics, including entropy and structural similarity. Vehicle detection mAP50 and mAP50-95 reach 55.0% and 29.4%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining physical priors with state space modeling for long-wave infrared polarization image fusion and support its use for target detection in complex remote sensing scenes.