TF-YOLO: A Transformer–Fusion-Based YOLO Detector for Multimodal Pedestrian Detection in Autonomous Driving Scenes

Abstract

Recent research demonstrates that the fusion of multimodal images can improve the performance of pedestrian detectors under low-illumination environments. However, existing multimodal pedestrian detectors cannot adapt to the variability of environmental illumination. When the lighting conditions of the application environment do not match the experimental data illumination conditions, the detection performance is likely to be stuck significantly. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel transformer–fusion-based YOLO detector to detect pedestrians under various illumination environments, such as nighttime, smog, and heavy rain. Specifically, we develop a novel transformer–fusion module embedded in a two-stream backbone network to robustly integrate the latent interactions between multimodal images (visible and infrared images). This enables the multimodal pedestrian detector to adapt to changing illumination conditions. Experimental results on two well-known datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach exhibits superior performance. The proposed TF-YOLO drastically improves the average precision of the state-of-the-art approach by 3.3% and reduces the miss rate of the state-of-the-art approach by about 6% on the challenging multi-scenario multi-modality dataset.