  For vehicle autonomy, driver assistance and situational awareness, it is
necessary to operate at day and night, and in all weather conditions. In
particular, long wave infrared (LWIR) sensors that receive predominantly
emitted radiation have the capability to operate at night as well as during the
day. In this work, we employ a polarised LWIR (POL-LWIR) camera to acquire data
from a mobile vehicle, to compare and contrast four different convolutional
neural network (CNN) configurations to detect other vehicles in video
sequences. We evaluate two distinct and promising approaches, two-stage
detection (Faster-RCNN) and one-stage detection (SSD), in four different
configurations. We also employ two different image decompositions: the first
based on the polarisation ellipse and the second on the Stokes parameters
themselves. To evaluate our approach, the experimental trials were quantified
by mean average precision (mAP) and processing time, showing a clear trade-off
between the two factors. For example, the best mAP result of 80.94% was
achieved using Faster-RCNN, but at a frame rate of 6.4 fps. In contrast,
MobileNet SSD achieved only 64.51% mAP, but at 53.4 fps.
