Cross-modality feature fusion for night pedestrian detection

Night pedestrian detection with visible image only suffers from the dilemma of high miss rate due to poor illumination conditions. Cross-modality fusion can ameliorate this dilemma by providing complementary information to each other through infrared and visible images. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal fusion framework based on YOLOv5, which is aimed at addressing the challenges of night pedestrian detection under low-light conditions. The framework employs a dual-stream architecture that processes visible images and infrared images separately. Through the Cross-Modal Feature Rectification Module (CMFRM), visible and infrared features are finely tuned on a granular level, leveraging their spatial correlations to focus on complementary information and substantially reduce uncertainty and noise from different modalities. Additionally, we have introduced a two-stage Feature Fusion Module (FFM), with the first stage introducing a cross-attention mechanism for cross-modal global reasoning, and the second stage using a mixed channel embedding to produce enhanced feature outputs. Moreover, our method involves multi-dimensional interaction, not only correcting feature maps in terms of channel and spatial dimensions but also applying cross-attention at the sequence processing level, which is critical for the effective generalization of cross-modal feature combinations. In summary, our research significantly enhances the accuracy and robustness of nighttime pedestrian detection, offering new perspectives and technical pathways for visual information processing in low-light environments.