EfficientIR-Det Towards Efficient and Accurate DETR for UAV Infrared Object Detection

Infrared (IR) object detection on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms is fundamentally challenged by low signal-to-noise ratios and extremely tight onboard computational budgets. Conventional CNNs lack sufficient global context, while Transformers suffer from quadratic complexity, hindering real-time deployment. To address these bottlenecks, we propose EfficientIR-Det, a lightweight end-to-end detector featuring a holistic optimization of the backbone, encoder, and sampling mechanisms. Specifically, we design a Partial Star Network (PSN) backbone that achieves implicit high-dimensional feature expansion via element-wise multiplication to amplify weak IR signals with minimal redundancy. Furthermore, a Hierarchical Mamba (HiMamba) encoder leverages selective state-space modeling to provide linear-complexity global enhancement with superior hardware efficiency. To refine cross-scale representations, we introduce an Adaptive Gated Sampling (AGS) module and a Hierarchical Sampling Strategy (HSS) to optimize feature fusion and sampling budget allocation toward dim-small targets. On HIT-UAV, EfficientIR-Det achieves 88.4% mAP@0.5, outperforming the RT-DETR-R18 baseline by 3.3 points while reducing FLOPs and parameters by 48.9% and 44.2%, respectively. On the larger-scale DroneVehicle dataset, it consistently leads with a 74.1% mAP@0.5 and a high inference speed of 140.8 FPS. Our results offer a promising research scheme for robust, real-time infrared perception on edge-constrained UAV platforms.