M-FSAD-KD: Full-Link Multi-Granularity Distillation for SAR Object Detection
Multi-modal synthetic aperture radar (SAR)–optical object detectors raise detection accuracy by fusing complementary physical responses, but require both modalities to be simultaneously available at inference. When the optical stream becomes unavailable—under heavy cloud cover, night-time conditions, or downlink disruption—the detector reverts to SAR-only operation and accuracy degrades sharply. A natural remedy is to distil a multi-modal teacher into a SAR-only student via privileged-information knowledge distillation. However, we observe that the leading channel-wise feature-level method (CWD) reduces the student’s accuracy below the non-distilled baseline, with its smallest-target AP collapsing to near zero, because SAR speckle and target high-frequency edges share the same band and the alignment loss is dominated by broadband speckle energy. We refer to this failure mode as the speckle-fitting trap, formalize it as a gradient-pollution effect, and validate it through spectral and feature-manifold diagnostics. To counter the trap, we propose M-FSAD-KD, a full-link distillation framework whose neck-stage Fourier-gated alignment transfers low-frequency structural content while preserving target-edge high-frequency content; a joint spatial–channel attention mask, a shallow backbone adapter, and a response-level knowledge distillation (KD) term complete the chain. With a MAIENet teacher on OGSOD-1.0, the advantage of M-FSAD-KD over the strongest response-level KD baseline scales with student capacity: it matches KD on a 2.39 M-parameter student (both ≈48% mean average precision at an intersection-over-union (IoU) threshold of 0.5 (mAP50), averaged over multiple seeds) and exceeds it by 2.0 absolute points on a 19.98 M-parameter student (+8 over the non-distilled baseline), where it is the best of all distillation methods; at full convergence the 19.98 M-parameter student reaches 81.9% mAP50, within 8.9 absolute points of the multi-modal teacher. A frozen-feature transfer test to an out-of-domain SAR benchmark (SSDD ship detection) further shows that distilling from the multi-modal teacher yields substantially more transferable SAR features—about ten absolute points above the non-distilled backbone—with M-FSAD-KD transferring best. Cross-architecture validation with a dual-stream DEYOLO teacher yields 48.6% mAP50 at the student—1.1 absolute points below the MAIENet result—indicating that the framework transfers across the two representative teacher architectures tested (single-stream and dual-stream).