PRI-Net: A Lightweight Multimodal Framework for 3D UAV Localization
TL;DR
PRI-Net is proposed, an efficient and lightweight multimodal fusion framework for UAV localization that integrates point cloud splatting, residual attention fusion, and an information bottleneck that achieves high localization accuracy with lightweight architectures, while reducing feature dimensionality and improving edge-to-server UAV sensing efficiency and robustness.
Abstract
Accurate 3D localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) remains challenging for existing multimodal approaches due to sparse LiDAR geometry, modality-imbalanced fusion, and redundant feature transmission over constrained edge-to-server links. To address these limitations, we propose PRI-Net, an efficient and lightweight multimodal fusion framework for UAV localization that integrates point cloud splatting, residual attention fusion, and an information bottleneck. Specifically, a 3D point cloud splatting (3DPCS) strategy is introduced to transform sparse LiDAR observations into geometrically consistent dense depth maps. A residual attention fusion (RAF) module is then designed to alleviate modal bias by using an image branch for coarse estimation and a gated fusion branch for refinement. In addition, a multimodal information bottleneck (MIB) module compacts features by filtering task-irrelevant redundancy. Experiments show that PRI-Net achieves high localization accuracy with lightweight architectures, while reducing feature dimensionality and improving edge-to-server UAV sensing efficiency and robustness.