CLEAR-IR: Clarity-Enhanced Active Reconstruction of Infrared Imagery

arXiv:2510.04883v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents CLEAR-IR (Clarity Enhanced Active Reconstruction of Infrared Imagery), a novel framework for enabling robust robotic perception in dark environments using active infrared (IR) sensing. IR streams are less susceptible to noise than RGB in low light conditions but are dominated by structured light emitter patterns that hinder high level tasks such as object detection, tracking, and localisation. CLEAR-IR addresses this by reconstructing clean, RGB styled images from emitter populated IR inputs using a dual stream architecture inspired by DeepMAO, enabling standard RGB trained vision pipelines to operate without visible light. Evaluation across object detection, ArUco marker detection, and visual SLAM demonstrates that CLEAR-IR produces reliable perception in conditions ranging from well lit to completely dark, where passive RGB based enhancement methods fail entirely due to the physical absence of sensor signal.