LKD-YOLOv8: A Lightweight Knowledge Distillation-Based Method for Infrared Object Detection

Currently, infrared object detection is utilized in a broad spectrum of fields, including military applications, security, and aerospace. Nonetheless, the limited computational power of edge devices presents a considerable challenge in achieving an optimal balance between accuracy and computational efficiency in infrared object detection. In order to enhance the accuracy of infrared target detection and strengthen the implementation of robust models on edge platforms for rapid real-time inference, this paper presents LKD-YOLOv8, an innovative infrared object detection method that integrates YOLOv8 architecture with masked generative distillation (MGD), further augmented by the lightweight convolution design and attention mechanism for improved feature adaptability. Linear deformable convolution (LDConv) strengthens spatial feature extraction by dynamically adjusting kernel offsets, while coordinate attention (CA) refines feature alignment through channel-wise interaction. We employ a large-scale model (YOLOv8s) as the teacher to imparts knowledge and supervise the training of a compact student model (YOLOv8n). Experiments show that LKD-YOLOv8 achieves a 1.18% mAP@0.5:0.95 improvement over baseline methods while reducing the parameter size by 7.9%. Our approach effectively balances accuracy and efficiency, rendering it applicable for resource-constrained edge devices in infrared scenarios.