A lightweight remote sensing image fusion method for vehicle perception

Remote sensing image fusion plays a crucial role in enhancing image information. However, the limitations of existing fusion technologies in terms of computational resources and storage capacity make real-time processing difficult. Therefore, a lightweight fusion method based on knowledge distillation is proposed for vehicle remote sensing image fusion. The knowledge distillation technology is used to transfer the complex teacher model knowledge to the lightweight student model, which realizes the significant reduction of model complexity while maintaining high fusion accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs well on DroneVehicle dataset and the model weight is only 0.641M.2025 The Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences. Publishing Services by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).