A Novel Object Detection Algorithm Combined YOLOv11 with Dual-Encoder Feature Aggregation

To address the limitations of unimodal visual detection in complex scenarios involving low illumination, occlusion, and texture-sparse environments, this paper proposes an improved YOLOv11-based dual-branch RGB-D fusion framework. The symmetric architecture processes RGB images and depth maps in parallel, integrating a Dual-Encoder Cross-Attention (DECA) module for cross-modal feature weighting and a Dual-Encoder Feature Aggregation (DEPA) module for hierarchical fusion-where the RGB branch captures texture semantics while the depth branch extracts geometric priors. To comprehensively validate the effectiveness and generalization capability of the proposed framework, we designed a multi-stage evaluation strategy leveraging complementary benchmark datasets. On the M³FD dataset, the model was evaluated under both RGB-depth and RGB-infrared configurations to verify core fusion performance and extensibility to diverse modalities. Additionally, the VOC2007 dataset was augmented with pseudo-depth maps generated by Depth Anything, assessing adaptability under monocular input constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves mAP50 scores of 82.59% on VOC2007 and 81.14% on M3FD in RGB-infrared mode, outperforming the baseline YOLOv11 by 5.06% and 9.15%, respectively. Notably, in the RGB-depth configuration on M³FD, the model attains a mAP50 of 77.37% with precision of 88.91%, highlighting its robustness in geometric-aware detection tasks. Ablation studies confirm the critical roles of the Dynamic Branch Enhancement (DBE) module in adaptive feature calibration and the Dual-Encoder Attention (DEA) mechanism in multi-scale fusion, significantly enhancing detection stability under challenging conditions. With only 2.47M parameters, the framework provides an efficient and scalable solution for high-precision spatial perception in autonomous driving and robotics applications.