Despite rapid progress in UAV-based infrared vehicle detection, achieving reliable target recognition remains challenging due to dynamic viewpoint variations and platform instability. The inherent limitations of infrared imaging, particularly low contrast ratios and thermal crossover effects, significantly compromise detection accuracy. Moreover, the computational constraints of edge computing platforms pose a fundamental challenge in balancing real-time processing requirements with detection performance. Here, we present MonoSeg, a novel instance segmentation framework optimized for UAV perspective infrared vehicle detection. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) the Ghost Feature Bottle Cross module (GFBC), which enhances backbone feature extraction efficiency while significantly reducing computational over-head; (2) the Scale Feature Recombination module (SFR), which optimizes feature selection in the Neck stage through adaptive multi-scale fusion; and (3) Comprehensive Loss function that enforces precise instance boundary delineation. Extensive experimental evaluation on bench-mark datasets demonstrates that MonoSeg achieves state-of-the-art performance across standard metrics, including Box mAP and Mask mAP, while maintaining substantially lower computational requirements compared to existing methods.
Keywords: UAV perspective; infrared image target recognition; instance segmentation; low computation.