TCCDNet: A Multimodal Pedestrian Detection Network Integrating Cross-Modal Complementarity with Deep Feature Fusion

Multimodal pedestrian detection has garnered significant attention due to its potential applications in complex scenarios. The complementarity characteristics between infrared and visible modalities can enhance detection performance. However, the design of cross-modal fusion mechanisms and the in-depth exploration of inter-modal complementarity still pose challenges. To address this, we propose TCCDNet, a novel network integrating cross-modal complementarity. Specifically, the efficient multi-scale attention C2f (EMAC) is designed for the backbone, which combines the C2f structure with an efficient multi-scale attention mechanism to achieve feature weighting and fusion, thereby enhancing the model’s feature extraction capacity. Subsequently, the cross-modal complementarity (CMC) module is proposed, which enhances feature discriminability and object localization accuracy through a synergistic mechanism combining channel attention and spatial attention. Additionally, a deep semantic fusion module (DSFM) based on a cross-attention mechanism is incorporated to achieve deep semantic feature fusion. The experimental results demonstrate that TCCDNet achieves a MR−2 of 7.87% on the KAIST dataset, representing a 3.83% reduction compared to YOLOv8. For the other two multimodal pedestrian detection datasets, TCCDNet attains mAP50 scores of 83.8% for FLIR ADAS and 97.3% for LLVIP, outperforming the baseline by 3.6% and 1.9% respectively. These results fully validate the effectiveness and advancement of the proposed method.