The perception capability of robotic systems relies on the richness of the dataset. Although Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), trained on large datasets, demonstrates strong perception potential in perception tasks, its inherent training paradigm prevents it from being suitable for RGB-T tasks. To address these challenges, we propose SHIFNet, a novel SAM2-driven Hybrid Interaction Paradigm that unlocks the potential of SAM2 with linguistic guidance for efficient RGB-Thermal perception. Our framework consists of two key components: (1) Semantic-Aware Cross-modal Fusion (SACF) module that dynamically balances modality contributions through text-guided affinity learning, overcoming SAM2's inherent RGB bias; (2) Heterogeneous Prompting Decoder (HPD) that enhances global semantic information through a semantic enhancement module and then combined with category embeddings to amplify cross-modal semantic consistency. With 32.27M trainable parameters, SHIFNet achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance on public benchmarks, reaching 89.8% on PST900 and 67.8% on FMB, respectively. The framework facilitates the adaptation of pre-trained large models to RGB-T segmentation tasks, effectively mitigating the high costs associated with data collection while endowing robotic systems with comprehensive perception capabilities. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/iAsakiT3T/SHIFNet.
Semantic segmentation, as a crucial component of complex visual interpretation, plays a fundamental role in autonomous vehicle vision systems. Recent studies have significantly improved the accuracy of semantic segmentation by exploiting complementary information and developing multimodal methods. Despite the gains in accuracy, multimodal semantic segmentation methods suffer from high computational complexity and low inference speed. Therefore, it is a challenging task to implement multimodal methods in driving applications. To address this problem, we propose the Cosine Similarity Fusion Network (CSFNet) as a real-time RGB-X semantic segmentation model. Specifically, we design a Cosine Similarity Attention Fusion Module (CS-AFM) that effectively rectifies and fuses features of two modalities. The CS-AFM module leverages cross-modal similarity to achieve high generalization ability. By enhancing the fusion of cross-modal features at lower levels, CS-AFM paves the way for the use of a single-branch network at higher levels. Therefore, we use dual and single-branch architectures in an encoder, along with an efficient context module and a lightweight decoder for fast and accurate predictions. To verify the effectiveness of CSFNet, we use the Cityscapes, MFNet, and ZJU datasets for the RGB-D/T/P semantic segmentation. According to the results, CSFNet has competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art methods while being state-of-the-art in terms of speed among multimodal semantic segmentation models. It also achieves high efficiency due to its low parameter count and computational complexity. The source code for CSFNet will be available at https://github.com/Danial-Qashqai/CSFNet.
Semantic analysis on visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) images has gained attention for its ability to be more accurate and robust under low-illumination and complex weather conditions. Due to the lack of pre-trained foundation models on the large-scale infrared image datasets, existing methods prefer to design task-specific frameworks and directly fine-tune them with pre-trained foundation models on their RGB-IR semantic relevance datasets, which results in poor scalability and limited generalization. In this work, we propose a general and efficient framework called UniRGB-IR to unify RGB-IR semantic tasks, in which a novel adapter is developed to efficiently introduce richer RGB-IR features into the pre-trained RGB-based foundation model. Specifically, our framework consists of a RGB-based foundation model, a Multi-modal Feature Pool (MFP) module and a Supplementary Feature Injector (SFI) module. The MFP and SFI modules cooperate with each other as an adapter to effectively complement the RGB-based features with the rich RGB-IR features. During training process, we freeze the entire foundation model to inherit prior knowledge and only optimize the proposed adapter. Furthermore, to verify the effectiveness of our framework, we utilize the vanilla vision transformer (ViT-Base) as the pre-trained foundation model to perform extensive experiments. Experimental results on various RGB-IR downstream tasks demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance. The source code and results are available at https://github.com/PoTsui99/UniRGB-IR.git.
Multi-modal semantic segmentation significantly enhances AI agents' perception and scene understanding, especially under adverse conditions like low-light or overexposed environments. Leveraging additional modalities (X-modality) like thermal and depth alongside traditional RGB provides complementary information, enabling more robust and reliable prediction. In this work, we introduce Sigma, a Siamese Mamba network for multi-modal semantic segmentation utilizing the advanced Mamba. Unlike conventional methods that rely on CNNs, with their limited local receptive fields, or Vision Transformers (ViTs), which offer global receptive fields at the cost of quadratic complexity, our model achieves global receptive fields with linear complexity. By employing a Siamese encoder and innovating a Mamba-based fusion mechanism, we effectively select essential information from different modalities. A decoder is then developed to enhance the channel-wise modeling ability of the model. Our proposed method is rigorously evaluated on both RGB-Thermal and RGB-Depth semantic segmentation tasks, demonstrating its superiority and marking the first successful application of State Space Models (SSMs) in multi-modal perception tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zifuwan/Sigma.
Data-fusion networks have shown significant promise for RGB-thermal scene parsing. However, the majority of existing studies have relied on symmetric duplex encoders for heterogeneous feature extraction and fusion, paying inadequate attention to the inherent differences between RGB and thermal modalities. Recent progress in vision foundation models (VFMs) trained through self-supervision on vast amounts of unlabeled data has proven their ability to extract informative, general-purpose features. However, this potential has yet to be fully leveraged in the domain. In this study, we take one step toward this new research area by exploring a feasible strategy to fully exploit VFM features for RGB-thermal scene parsing. Specifically, we delve deeper into the unique characteristics of RGB and thermal modalities, thereby designing a hybrid, asymmetric encoder that incorporates both a VFM and a convolutional neural network. This design allows for more effective extraction of complementary heterogeneous features, which are subsequently fused in a dual-path, progressive manner. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary task to further enrich the local semantics of the fused features, thereby improving the overall performance of RGB-thermal scene parsing. Our proposed HAPNet, equipped with all these components, demonstrates superior performance compared to all other state-of-the-art RGB-thermal scene parsing networks, achieving top ranks across three widely used public RGB-thermal scene parsing datasets. We believe this new paradigm has opened up new opportunities for future developments in data-fusion scene parsing approaches.
RGB-T semantic segmentation is a key technique for autonomous driving scenes understanding. For the existing RGB-T semantic segmentation methods, however, the effective exploration of the complementary relationship between different modalities is not implemented in the information interaction between multiple levels. To address such an issue, the Context-Aware Interaction Network (CAINet) is proposed for RGB-T semantic segmentation, which constructs interaction space to exploit auxiliary tasks and global context for explicitly guided learning. Specifically, we propose a Context-Aware Complementary Reasoning (CACR) module aimed at establishing the complementary relationship between multimodal features with the long-term context in both spatial and channel dimensions. Further, considering the importance of global contextual and detailed information, we propose the Global Context Modeling (GCM) module and Detail Aggregation (DA) module, and we introduce specific auxiliary supervision to explicitly guide the context interaction and refine the segmentation map. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets of MFNet and PST900 demonstrate that the proposed CAINet achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YingLv1106/CAINet.
Multimodal (e.g., RGB-Depth/RGB-Thermal) fusion has shown great potential for improving semantic segmentation in complex scenes (e.g., indoor/low-light conditions). Existing approaches often fully fine-tune a dual-branch encoder-decoder framework with a complicated feature fusion strategy for achieving multimodal semantic segmentation, which is training-costly due to the massive parameter updates in feature extraction and fusion. To address this issue, we propose a surprisingly simple yet effective dual-prompt learning network (dubbed DPLNet) for training-efficient multimodal (e.g., RGB-D/T) semantic segmentation. The core of DPLNet is to directly adapt a frozen pre-trained RGB model to multimodal semantic segmentation, reducing parameter updates. For this purpose, we present two prompt learning modules, comprising multimodal prompt generator (MPG) and multimodal feature adapter (MFA). MPG works to fuse the features from different modalities in a compact manner and is inserted from shadow to deep stages to generate the multi-level multimodal prompts that are injected into the frozen backbone, while MPG adapts prompted multimodal features in the frozen backbone for better multimodal semantic segmentation. Since both the MPG and MFA are lightweight, only a few trainable parameters (3.88M, 4.4% of the pre-trained backbone parameters) are introduced for multimodal feature fusion and learning. Using a simple decoder (3.27M parameters), DPLNet achieves new state-of-the-art performance or is on a par with other complex approaches on four RGB-D/T semantic segmentation datasets while satisfying parameter efficiency. Moreover, we show that DPLNet is general and applicable to other multimodal tasks such as salient object detection and video semantic segmentation. Without special design, DPLNet outperforms many complicated models. Our code will be available at github.com/ShaohuaDong2021/DPLNet.
Current deep neural networks (DNNs) for autonomous driving computer vision are typically trained on specific datasets that only involve a single type of data and urban scenes. Consequently, these models struggle to handle new objects, noise, nighttime conditions, and diverse scenarios, which is essential for safety-critical applications. Despite ongoing efforts to enhance the resilience of computer vision DNNs, progress has been sluggish, partly due to the absence of benchmarks featuring multiple modalities. We introduce a novel and versatile dataset named InfraParis that supports multiple tasks across three modalities: RGB, depth, and infrared. We assess various state-of-the-art baseline techniques, encompassing models for the tasks of semantic segmentation, object detection, and depth estimation. More visualizations and the download link for InfraParis are available at \href{https://ensta-u2is.github.io/infraParis/}{https://ensta-u2is.github.io/infraParis/}.
Leveraging information across diverse modalities is known to enhance performance on multimodal segmentation tasks. However, effectively fusing information from different modalities remains challenging due to the unique characteristics of each modality. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion strategy that can effectively fuse information from different modality combinations. We also propose a new model named Multi-Modal Segmentation TransFormer (MMSFormer) that incorporates the proposed fusion strategy to perform multimodal material and semantic segmentation tasks. MMSFormer outperforms current state-of-the-art models on three different datasets. As we begin with only one input modality, performance improves progressively as additional modalities are incorporated, showcasing the effectiveness of the fusion block in combining useful information from diverse input modalities. Ablation studies show that different modules in the fusion block are crucial for overall model performance. Furthermore, our ablation studies also highlight the capacity of different input modalities to improve performance in the identification of different types of materials. The code and pretrained models will be made available at https://github.com/csiplab/MMSFormer.
Infrared and visible image fusion is a powerful technique that combines complementary information from different modalities for downstream semantic perception tasks. Existing learning-based methods show remarkable performance, but are suffering from the inherent vulnerability of adversarial attacks, causing a significant decrease in accuracy. In this work, a perception-aware fusion framework is proposed to promote segmentation robustness in adversarial scenes. We first conduct systematic analyses about the components of image fusion, investigating the correlation with segmentation robustness under adversarial perturbations. Based on these analyses, we propose a harmonized architecture search with a decomposition-based structure to balance standard accuracy and robustness. We also propose an adaptive learning strategy to improve the parameter robustness of image fusion, which can learn effective feature extraction under diverse adversarial perturbations. Thus, the goals of image fusion (\textit{i.e.,} extracting complementary features from source modalities and defending attack) can be realized from the perspectives of architectural and learning strategies. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our scheme substantially enhances the robustness, with gains of 15.3% mIOU of segmentation in the adversarial scene, compared with advanced competitors. The source codes are available at https://github.com/LiuZhu-CV/PAIF.
Multi-modality image fusion and segmentation play a vital role in autonomous driving and robotic operation. Early efforts focus on boosting the performance for only one task, \emph{e.g.,} fusion or segmentation, making it hard to reach~`Best of Both Worlds'. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose a \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{i}nteractive \textbf{F}eature learning architecture for image fusion and \textbf{Seg}mentation, namely SegMiF, and exploit dual-task correlation to promote the performance of both tasks. The SegMiF is of a cascade structure, containing a fusion sub-network and a commonly used segmentation sub-network. By slickly bridging intermediate features between two components, the knowledge learned from the segmentation task can effectively assist the fusion task. Also, the benefited fusion network supports the segmentation one to perform more pretentiously. Besides, a hierarchical interactive attention block is established to ensure fine-grained mapping of all the vital information between two tasks, so that the modality/semantic features can be fully mutual-interactive. In addition, a dynamic weight factor is introduced to automatically adjust the corresponding weights of each task, which can balance the interactive feature correspondence and break through the limitation of laborious tuning. Furthermore, we construct a smart multi-wave binocular imaging system and collect a full-time multi-modality benchmark with 15 annotated pixel-level categories for image fusion and segmentation. Extensive experiments on several public datasets and our benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method outputs visually appealing fused images and perform averagely $7.66\%$ higher segmentation mIoU in the real-world scene than the state-of-the-art approaches. The source code and benchmark are available at \url{https://github.com/JinyuanLiu-CV/SegMiF}.
RGB-thermal semantic segmentation is one potential solution to achieve reliable semantic scene understanding in adverse weather and lighting conditions. However, the previous studies mostly focus on designing a multi-modal fusion module without consideration of the nature of multi-modality inputs. Therefore, the networks easily become over-reliant on a single modality, making it difficult to learn complementary and meaningful representations for each modality. This paper proposes 1) a complementary random masking strategy of RGB-T images and 2) self-distillation loss between clean and masked input modalities. The proposed masking strategy prevents over-reliance on a single modality. It also improves the accuracy and robustness of the neural network by forcing the network to segment and classify objects even when one modality is partially available. Also, the proposed self-distillation loss encourages the network to extract complementary and meaningful representations from a single modality or complementary masked modalities. Based on the proposed method, we achieve state-of-the-art performance over three RGB-T semantic segmentation benchmarks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/UkcheolShin/CRM_RGBTSeg.
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.
For semantic segmentation in urban scene understanding, RGB cameras alone often fail to capture a clear holistic topology in challenging lighting conditions. Thermal signal is an informative additional channel that can bring to light the contour and fine-grained texture of blurred regions in low-quality RGB image. Aiming at practical RGB-T (thermal) segmentation, we systematically propose a Spatial-aware Demand-guided Recursive Meshing (SpiderMesh) framework that: 1) proactively compensates inadequate contextual semantics in optically-impaired regions via a demand-guided target masking algorithm; 2) refines multimodal semantic features with recursive meshing to improve pixel-level semantic analysis performance. We further introduce an asymmetric data augmentation technique M-CutOut, and enable semi-supervised learning to fully utilize RGB-T labels only sparsely available in practical use. Extensive experiments on MFNet and PST900 datasets demonstrate that SpiderMesh achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard RGB-T segmentation benchmarks.
Multimodal fusion can make semantic segmentation more robust. However, fusing an arbitrary number of modalities remains underexplored. To delve into this problem, we create the DeLiVER arbitrary-modal segmentation benchmark, covering Depth, LiDAR, multiple Views, Events, and RGB. Aside from this, we provide this dataset in four severe weather conditions as well as five sensor failure cases to exploit modal complementarity and resolve partial outages. To make this possible, we present the arbitrary cross-modal segmentation model CMNeXt. It encompasses a Self-Query Hub (SQ-Hub) designed to extract effective information from any modality for subsequent fusion with the RGB representation and adds only negligible amounts of parameters (~0.01M) per additional modality. On top, to efficiently and flexibly harvest discriminative cues from the auxiliary modalities, we introduce the simple Parallel Pooling Mixer (PPX). With extensive experiments on a total of six benchmarks, our CMNeXt achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DeLiVER, KITTI-360, MFNet, NYU Depth V2, UrbanLF, and MCubeS datasets, allowing to scale from 1 to 81 modalities. On the freshly collected DeLiVER, the quad-modal CMNeXt reaches up to 66.30% in mIoU with a +9.10% gain as compared to the mono-modal baseline. The DeLiVER dataset and our code are at: https://jamycheung.github.io/DELIVER.html.
Semantic segmentation is important for scene understanding. To address the scenes of adverse illumination conditions of natural images, thermal infrared (TIR) images are introduced. Most existing RGB-T semantic segmentation methods follow three cross-modal fusion paradigms, i.e. encoder fusion, decoder fusion, and feature fusion. Some methods, unfortunately, ignore the properties of RGB and TIR features or the properties of features at different levels. In this paper, we propose a novel feature fusion-based network for RGB-T semantic segmentation, named \emph{LASNet}, which follows three steps of location, activation, and sharpening. The highlight of LASNet is that we fully consider the characteristics of cross-modal features at different levels, and accordingly propose three specific modules for better segmentation. Concretely, we propose a Collaborative Location Module (CLM) for high-level semantic features, aiming to locate all potential objects. We propose a Complementary Activation Module for middle-level features, aiming to activate exact regions of different objects. We propose an Edge Sharpening Module (ESM) for low-level texture features, aiming to sharpen the edges of objects. Furthermore, in the training phase, we attach a location supervision and an edge supervision after CLM and ESM, respectively, and impose two semantic supervisions in the decoder part to facilitate network convergence. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that the superiority of our LASNet over relevant state-of-the-art methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/LASNet.
Segmentation of thermal facial images is a challenging task. This is because facial features often lack salience due to high-dynamic thermal range scenes and occlusion issues. Limited availability of datasets from unconstrained settings further limits the use of the state-of-the-art segmentation networks, loss functions and learning strategies which have been built and validated for RGB images. To address the challenge, we propose Self-Adversarial Multi-scale Contrastive Learning (SAM-CL) framework as a new training strategy for thermal image segmentation. SAM-CL framework consists of a SAM-CL loss function and a thermal image augmentation (TiAug) module as a domain-specific augmentation technique. We use the Thermal-Face-Database to demonstrate effectiveness of our approach. Experiments conducted on the existing segmentation networks (UNET, Attention-UNET, DeepLabV3 and HRNetv2) evidence the consistent performance gains from the SAM-CL framework. Furthermore, we present a qualitative analysis with UBComfort and DeepBreath datasets to discuss how our proposed methods perform in handling unconstrained situations.
This paper proposes a new glass segmentation method utilizing paired RGB and thermal images. Due to the large difference between the transmission property of visible light and that of the thermal energy through the glass where most glass is transparent to the visible light but opaque to thermal energy, glass regions of a scene are made more distinguishable with a pair of RGB and thermal images than solely with an RGB image. To exploit such a unique property, we propose a neural network architecture that effectively combines an RGB-thermal image pair with a new multi-modal fusion module based on attention, and integrate CNN and transformer to extract local features and non-local dependencies, respectively. As well, we have collected a new dataset containing 5551 RGB-thermal image pairs with ground-truth segmentation annotations. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on fusing RGB and thermal data for glass segmentation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Dong-Huo/RGB-T-Glass-Segmentation.
Scene understanding based on image segmentation is a crucial component of autonomous vehicles. Pixel-wise semantic segmentation of RGB images can be advanced by exploiting complementary features from the supplementary modality (X-modality). However, covering a wide variety of sensors with a modality-agnostic model remains an unresolved problem due to variations in sensor characteristics among different modalities. Unlike previous modality-specific methods, in this work, we propose a unified fusion framework, CMX, for RGB-X semantic segmentation. To generalize well across different modalities, that often include supplements as well as uncertainties, a unified cross-modal interaction is crucial for modality fusion. Specifically, we design a Cross-Modal Feature Rectification Module (CM-FRM) to calibrate bi-modal features by leveraging the features from one modality to rectify the features of the other modality. With rectified feature pairs, we deploy a Feature Fusion Module (FFM) to perform sufficient exchange of long-range contexts before mixing. To verify CMX, for the first time, we unify five modalities complementary to RGB, i.e., depth, thermal, polarization, event, and LiDAR. Extensive experiments show that CMX generalizes well to diverse multi-modal fusion, achieving state-of-the-art performances on five RGB-Depth benchmarks, as well as RGB-Thermal, RGB-Polarization, and RGB-LiDAR datasets. Besides, to investigate the generalizability to dense-sparse data fusion, we establish an RGB-Event semantic segmentation benchmark based on the EventScape dataset, on which CMX sets the new state-of-the-art. The source code of CMX is publicly available at https://github.com/huaaaliu/RGBX_Semantic_Segmentation.
RGB thermal scene parsing has recently attracted increasing research interest in the field of computer vision. However, most existing methods fail to perform good boundary extraction for prediction maps and cannot fully use high level features. In addition, these methods simply fuse the features from RGB and thermal modalities but are unable to obtain comprehensive fused features. To address these problems, we propose an edge-aware guidance fusion network (EGFNet) for RGB thermal scene parsing. First, we introduce a prior edge map generated using the RGB and thermal images to capture detailed information in the prediction map and then embed the prior edge information in the feature maps. To effectively fuse the RGB and thermal information, we propose a multimodal fusion module that guarantees adequate cross-modal fusion. Considering the importance of high level semantic information, we propose a global information module and a semantic information module to extract rich semantic information from the high-level features. For decoding, we use simple elementwise addition for cascaded feature fusion. Finally, to improve the parsing accuracy, we apply multitask deep supervision to the semantic and boundary maps. Extensive experiments were performed on benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EGFNet and its superior performance compared with state of the art methods. The code and results can be found at https://github.com/ShaohuaDong2021/EGFNet.