Papers › Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion for RGB-Thermal Perception Tasks

Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion for RGB-Thermal Perception Tasks

28 Mar 2023arXiv:2303.15710archive 2025-07-28

Mingjian Liang, Junjie Hu, Chenyu Bao, Hua Feng, Fuqin Deng, Tin Lun Lam

Recently, RGB-Thermal based perception has shown significant advances. Thermal information provides useful clues when visual cameras suffer from poor lighting conditions, such as low light and fog. However, how to effectively fuse RGB images and thermal data remains an open challenge. Previous works involve naive fusion strategies such as merging them at the input, concatenating multi-modality features inside models, or applying attention to each data modality. These fusion strategies are straightforward yet insufficient. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion method named Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion (EAEF) that fully takes advantage of each type of data. Specifically, we consider the following cases: i) both RGB data and thermal data, ii) only one of the types of data, and iii) none of them generate discriminative features. EAEF uses one branch to enhance feature extraction for i) and iii) and the other branch to remedy insufficient representations for ii). The outputs of two branches are fused to form complementary features. As a result, the proposed fusion method outperforms state-of-the-art by 1.6\% in mIoU on semantic segmentation, 3.1\% in MAE on salient object detection, 2.3\% in mAP on object detection, and 8.1\% in MAE on crowd counting. The code is available at https://github.com/FreeformRobotics/EAEFNet.

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Code

freeformrobotics/eaefnet officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

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Tasks

Crowd CountingObject DetectionSalient Object DetectionSemantic SegmentationThermal Image Segmentationobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Thermal Image Segmentation MFN Dataset EAEFNet (ResNet-152) mIOU 58.9 #12 of 55 Archive leaderboard report
Thermal Image Segmentation MFN Dataset EAFFNet (ResNet-50) mIOU 55.9 #31 of 55 Archive leaderboard report
Thermal Image Segmentation Noisy RS RGB-T Dataset EAEFNet mIoU 60.0 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

MAE

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