Multimodal Fusion Network Research Articles

The Analysis of Smarter Future

With the continuous development of technology, smart home control systems, as one of the applications of artificial intelligence in daily life, are receiving increasing attention. However, smart home control systems face challenges in practical applications, such as complex scenarios and multimodal information. In this context, this paper introduces Visual Question Answering (VQA) technology to enhance the intelligence and user experience of smart home control systems. Despite the potential advantages of VQA technology in smart home control systems, current models still have certain shortcomings in handling local image information and integrating visual-language multimodal features. To address this, this paper proposes an innovative Transformer-based Multimodal Fusion Network (TMFNet) model. TMFNet aims to overcome the limitations of existing models in dealing with complex smart home scenarios by introducing a global-local feature attention mechanism, deep encoding-decoding modules, and multimodal representation modules.

Degradation-Guided Multi-Modal Fusion Network for Depth Map Super-Resolution

Depth map super-resolution (DSR) is a technique aimed at restoring high-resolution (HR) depth maps from low-resolution (LR) depth maps. In this process, color images are commonly used as guidance to enhance the restoration procedure. However, the intricate degradation of LR depth poses a challenge, and previous image-guided DSR approaches, which implicitly model the degradation in the spatial domain, often fall short of producing satisfactory results. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach called the Degradation-Guided Multi-modal Fusion Network (DMFNet). DMFNet explicitly characterizes the degradation and incorporates multi-modal fusion in both spatial and frequency domains to improve the depth quality. Specifically, we first introduce the deep degradation regularization loss function, which enables the model to learn the explicit degradation from the LR depth maps. Simultaneously, DMFNet converts the color images and depth maps into spectrum representations to provide comprehensive multi-domain guidance. Consequently, we present the multi-modal fusion block to restore the depth maps by leveraging both the RGB-D spectrum representations and the depth degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DMFNet achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on four benchmarks, namely the NYU-v2, Middlebury, Lu, and RGB-D-D datasets.

TAG-fusion: Two-stage attention guided multi-modal fusion network for semantic segmentation

In the current research, leveraging auxiliary modalities, such as depth information or point cloud information, to improve RGB semantic segmentation has shown significant potential. However, existing methods mainly use convolutional modules for aggregating features from auxiliary modalities, thereby lacking sufficient exploitation of long-range dependencies. Moreover, fusion strategies are typically limited to singular approaches. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based multimodal fusion framework to better utilize auxiliary modalities for enhancing semantic segmentation results. Specifically, we employ a dual-stream architecture for extracting features from RGB and auxiliary modalities, respectively. We incorporate both early fusion and deep feature fusion techniques. At each layer, we introduce mixed attention mechanisms to leverage features from other modalities, guiding and enhancing the current modality's features before propagating them to the subsequent stage of feature extraction. After the extraction of features from different modalities, we employ an enhanced cross-attention mechanism for feature interaction, followed by channel fusion to obtain the final semantic features. Subsequently, we provide separate supervision to the network on the RGB stream, auxiliary stream, and fusion stream to facilitate the learning of representations for different modalities. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework exhibits superior performance across diverse modalities. Specifically, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the NYU Depth V2, SUN-RGBD, DELIVER and MFNet datasets.

Fish behavior recognition based on an audio-visual multimodal interactive fusion network

In light of the challenges imposed by fish behavior recognition, which arise from environmental noise and dim lighting in aquaculture environments and adversely affect the effectiveness of unimodal recognition methods based on either sound or visual cues, this paper proposes a fish behavior recognition model, Mul-SEResNet50, based on the fusion of audio and visual information. To address issues such as image blurring and indistinct sounds in aquaculture environments, which hinder the effectiveness of multimodal fusion and complementary modalities, a multimodal interaction fusion (MIF) module is introduced. This module integrates audio-visual modalities at multiple stages to achieve a more comprehensive joint feature representation. To enhance complementarity during the fusion process, we designed a U-shaped bilinear fusion structure to fully utilize multimodal information, capture cross-modal associations, and extract high-level features. Furthermore, to address the potential loss of key features, a temporal aggregation and pooling (TAP) layer is introduced to preserve more fine-grained features by extracting both the maximum and average values within pooling regions. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, both ablation experiments and comparative experiments are conducted. The results demonstrate that Mul-SEResNet50 achieves a 5.04 % accuracy improvement over SEResNet50 without sacrificing detection speed. Compared to the state-of-the-art U-FusionNet-ResNet50 +SENet model, Mul-SEResNet50 achieves accuracy and F1 score improvements of 0.47 % and 1.32 %, respectively. These findings confirm the efficacy of the proposed model in terms of accurately recognizing fish behavior, facilitating the precise monitoring of fish behavior.

Multi-Modal Fusion Network with Multi-Head Self-Attention for Injection Training Evaluation in Medical Education

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted traditional medical training, particularly in critical areas such as the injection process, which require expert supervision. To address the challenges posed by reduced face-to-face interactions, this study introduces a multi-modal fusion network designed to evaluate the timing and motion aspects of the injection training process in medical education. The proposed framework integrates 3D reconstructed data and 2D images of hand movements during the injection process. The 3D data are preprocessed and encoded by a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to extract temporal features, while a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) processes the 2D images to capture detailed image features. These encoded features are then fused and refined through a proposed multi-head self-attention module, which enhances the model’s ability to capture and weigh important temporal and image dynamics in the injection process. The final classification of the injection process is conducted by a classifier module. The model’s performance was rigorously evaluated using video data from 255 subjects with assessments made by professional physicians according to the Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skill—Global Rating Score (OSATS-GRS)[B] criteria for time and motion evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed data fusion model achieves an accuracy of 0.7238, an F1-score of 0.7060, a precision of 0.7339, a recall of 0.7238, and an AUC of 0.8343. These findings highlight the model’s potential as an effective tool for providing objective feedback in medical injection training, offering a scalable solution for the post-pandemic evolution of medical education.

MAFNet: Multimodal Asymmetric Fusion Network for Radar Echo Extrapolation

Radar echo extrapolation (REE) is a crucial method for convective nowcasting, and current deep learning (DL)-based methods for REE have shown significant potential in severe weather forecasting tasks. Existing DL-based REE methods use extensive historical radar data to learn the evolution patterns of echoes, they tend to suffer from low accuracy. This is because data of radar modality face difficulty adequately representing the state of weather systems. Inspired by multimodal learning and traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods, we propose a Multimodal Asymmetric Fusion Network (MAFNet) for REE, which uses data from radar modality to model echo evolution, and data from satellite and ground observation modalities to model the background field of weather systems, collectively guiding echo extrapolation. In the MAFNet, we first extract overall convective features through a global shared encoder (GSE), followed by two branches of local modality encoder (LME) and local correlation encoders (LCEs) that extract convective features from radar, satellite, and ground observation modalities. We employ an multimodal asymmetric fusion module (MAFM) to fuse multimodal features at different scales and feature levels, enhancing radar echo extrapolation performance. Additionally, to address the temporal resolution differences in multimodal data, we design a time alignment module based on dynamic time warping (DTW), which aligns multimodal feature sequences temporally. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, the MAFNet achieves average improvements of 1.86% in CSI and 3.18% in HSS on the MeteoNet dataset, and average improvements of 4.84% in CSI and 2.38% in HSS on the RAIN-F dataset.

ACDF-YOLO: Attentive and Cross-Differential Fusion Network for Multimodal Remote Sensing Object Detection

Object detection in remote sensing images has received significant attention for a wide range of applications. However, traditional unimodal remote sensing images, whether based on visible light or infrared, have limitations that cannot be ignored. Visible light images are susceptible to ambient lighting conditions, and their detection accuracy can be greatly reduced. Infrared images often lack rich texture information, resulting in a high false-detection rate during target identification and classification. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multimodal fusion network detection model, named ACDF-YOLO, basedon the lightweight and efficient YOLOv5 structure, which aims to amalgamate synergistic data from both visible and infrared imagery, thereby enhancing the efficiency of target identification in remote sensing imagery. Firstly, a novel efficient shuffle attention module is designed to assist in extracting the features of various modalities. Secondly, deeper multimodal information fusion is achieved by introducing a new cross-modal difference module to fuse the features that have been acquired. Finally, we combine the two modules mentioned above in an effective manner to achieve ACDF. The ACDF not only enhances the characterization ability for the fused features but also further refines the capture and reinforcement of important channel features. Experimental validation was performed using several publicly available multimodal real-world and remote sensing datasets. Compared with other advanced unimodal and multimodal methods, ACDF-YOLO separately achieved a 95.87% and 78.10% mAP0.5 on the LLVIP and VEDAI datasets, demonstrating that the deep fusion of different modal information can effectively improve the accuracy of object detection.

Specific Emitter Identification Algorithm Based on Time–Frequency Sequence Multimodal Feature Fusion Network

Specific emitter identification is a challenge in the field of radar signal processing. Its aims to extract individual fingerprint features of the signal. However, early works are all designed using either signal or time–frequency image and heavily rely on the calculation of hand-crafted features or complex interactions in high-dimensional feature space. This paper introduces the time–frequency multimodal feature fusion network, a novel architecture based on multimodal feature interaction. Specifically, we designed a time–frequency signal feature encoding module, a wvd image feature encoding module, and a multimodal feature fusion module. Additionally, we propose a feature point filtering mechanism named FMM for signal embedding. Our algorithm demonstrates high performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art mainstream identification methods. The results indicate that our algorithm outperforms others, achieving the highest accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, surpassing the second-best by 9.3%, 8.2%, 9.2%, and 9%. Notably, the visual results show that the proposed method aligns with the signal generation mechanism, effectively capturing the distinctive fingerprint features of radar data. This paper establishes a foundational architecture for the subsequent multimodal research in SEI tasks.

ETBHD‐HMF: A Hierarchical Multimodal Fusion Architecture for Enhanced Text‐Based Hair Design

AbstractText‐based hair design (TBHD) represents an innovative approach that utilizes text instructions for crafting hairstyle and colour, renowned for its flexibility and scalability. However, enhancing TBHD algorithms to improve generation quality and editing accuracy remains a current research difficulty. One important reason is that existing models fall short in alignment and fusion designs. Therefore, we propose a new layered multimodal fusion network called ETBHD‐HMF, which decouples the input image and hair text information into layered hair colour and hairstyle representations. Within this network, the channel enhancement separation (CES) module is proposed to enhance important signals and suppress noise for text representation obtained from CLIP, thus improving generation quality. Based on this, we develop the weighted mapping fusion (WMF) sub‐networks for hair colour and hairstyle. This sub‐network applies the mapper operations to input image and text representations, acquiring joint information. The WMF then selectively merges image representation and joint information from various style layers using weighted operations, ultimately achieving fine‐grained hairstyle designs. Additionally, to enhance editing accuracy and quality, we design a modality alignment loss to refine and optimize the information transmission and integration of the network. The experimental results of applying the network to the CelebA‐HQ dataset demonstrate that our proposed model exhibits superior overall performance in terms of generation quality, visual realism, and editing accuracy. ETBHD‐HMF (27.8 PSNR, 0.864 IDS) outperformed HairCLIP (26.9 PSNR, 0.828 IDS), with a 3% higher PSNR and a 4% higher IDS.

MFFNet: Multimodal feature fusion network for RGB-D transparent object detection

Transparent objects are ubiquitous in everyday life, but how to detect them is full of challenges. Transparent objects hardly reflect light, and they usually transmit the appearance of their surroundings, making it difficult to distinguish them from their surroundings. Existing methods usually use only RGB (Red Green Blue) images as input, ignoring the role of depth maps in transparent object detection. In this article, we try to improve the detection performance of transparent objects by fusing RGB and depth information. Specifically, we propose a multimodal fusion network that fuses RGB and depth modalities in a complementary way. Moreover, extensive experiments and ablation studies on the RGB-D (RGB-Depth) transparent object dataset demonstrate the excellent performance of our method.

3D Multimodal Fusion Network with Disease-induced Joint Learning for Early Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis.

Multimodal neuroimaging provides complementary information critical for accurate early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, the inherent variability between multimodal neuroimages hinders the effective fusion of multimodal features. Moreover, achieving reliable and interpretable diagnoses in the field of multimodal fusion remains challenging. To address them, we propose a novel multimodal diagnosis network based on multi-fusion and disease-induced learning (MDL-Net) to enhance early AD diagnosis by efficiently fusing multimodal data. Specifically, MDL-Net proposes a multi-fusion joint learning (MJL) module, which effectively fuses multimodal features and enhances the feature representation from global, local, and latent learning perspectives. MJL consists of three modules, global-aware learning (GAL), local-aware learning (LAL), and outer latent-space learning (LSL) modules. GAL via a self-adaptive Transformer (SAT) learns the global relationships among the modalities. LAL constructs local-aware convolution to learn the local associations. LSL module introduces latent information through outer product operation to further enhance feature representation. MDL-Net integrates the disease-induced region-aware learning (DRL) module via gradient weight to enhance interpretability, which iteratively learns weight matrices to identify AD-related brain regions. We conduct the extensive experiments on public datasets and the results confirm the superiority of our proposed method. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/qzf0320/MDL-Net.

Multimodal fusion network for ICU patient outcome prediction

Over the past decades, massive Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have been accumulated in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and many other healthcare scenarios. The rich and comprehensive information recorded presents an exceptional opportunity for patient outcome predictions. Nevertheless, due to the diversity of data modalities, EHRs exhibit a heterogeneous characteristic, raising a difficulty to organically leverage information from various modalities. It is an urgent need to capture the underlying correlations among different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Multimodal Fusion Network (MFNet) for ICU patient outcome prediction. First, we incorporate multiple modality-specific encoders to learn different modality representations. Notably, a graph guided encoder is designed to capture underlying global relationships among medical codes, and a text encoder with pre-fine-tuning strategy is adopted to extract appropriate text representations. Second, we propose to pairwise merge multimodal representations with a tailored hierarchical fusion mechanism. The experiments conducted on the eICU-CRD dataset validate that MFNet achieves superior performance on mortality prediction and Length of Stay (LoS) prediction compared with various representative and state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, comprehensive ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness of each component of MFNet.

A multimodal dual-branch fusion network for fetal hypoxia detection

Labor is the most severe test of a fetus’s ability to survive hypoxia. Even low-risk full-term fetuses may endure variable degrees of hypoxia as a result of intrapartum uterine contractions. It is imperative for clinicians to expeditiously identify fetal hypoxia and implement timely interventions. However, due to the intricacy and intra-class variability of fetal heart rate (FHR) data, distinguishing normal babies from acidotic fetuses is extremely challenging. This research proposes a novel multimodal dual-branch fusion network to improve the accuracy of fetal hypoxia identification. The dual-branch network is constructed through the signal slicing method. Additionally, we present a novel attention guidance module that leverages spatial attention to capture hypoxia-related information from two branches of signal. Ultimately, the network integrates maternal electronic medical records, FHR features, and FHR signals to achieve multimodal fusion of the input features. Furthermore, label smoothing can yield better calibrated networks, thus improving classification performance even further. On the public dataset, this method obtained a sensitivity of 72.58 %, a specificity of 71.08 %, a quality index of 71.59 %, and an area under the curve of 74.70 %. This method combines maternal-fetal medicine and artificial intelligence, represents a new strategy to recognize fetal acidosis.

CL-fusionBEV: 3D object detection method with camera-LiDAR fusion in Bird’s Eye View

In the wave of research on autonomous driving, 3D object detection from the Bird’s Eye View (BEV) perspective has emerged as a pivotal area of focus. The essence of this challenge is the effective fusion of camera and LiDAR data into the BEV. Current approaches predominantly train and predict within the front view and Cartesian coordinate system, often overlooking the inherent structural and operational differences between cameras and LiDAR sensors. This paper introduces CL-FusionBEV, an innovative 3D object detection methodology tailored for sensor data fusion in the BEV perspective. Our approach initiates with a view transformation, facilitated by an implicit learning module that transitions the camera’s perspective to the BEV space, thereby aligning the prediction module. Subsequently, to achieve modal fusion within the BEV framework, we employ voxelization to convert the LiDAR point cloud into BEV space, thereby generating LiDAR BEV spatial features. Moreover, to integrate the BEV spatial features from both camera and LiDAR, we have developed a multi-modal cross-attention mechanism and an implicit multi-modal fusion network, designed to enhance the synergy and application of dual-modal data. To counteract potential deficiencies in global reasoning and feature interaction arising from multi-modal cross-attention, we propose a BEV self-attention mechanism that facilitates comprehensive global feature operations. Our methodology has undergone rigorous evaluation on a substantial dataset within the autonomous driving domain, the nuScenes dataset. The outcomes demonstrate that our method achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 73.3% and a nuScenes Detection Score (NDS) of 75.5%, particularly excelling in the detection of cars and pedestrians with high accuracies of 89% and 90.7%, respectively. Additionally, CL-FusionBEV exhibits superior performance in identifying occluded and distant objects, surpassing existing comparative methods.

FuseNet: a multi-modal feature fusion network for 3D shape classification

FuseNet: a multi-modal feature fusion network for 3D shape classification

Multi-task disagreement-reducing multimodal sentiment fusion network

Existing multimodal sentiment analysis models can effectively capture sentimental commonalities between different modalities and possess high sentimental acquisition capability. However, there are still shortcomings in the model's analysis and recognition abilities when dealing with samples that exhibit sentimental polarity disagreement between different modalities. Additionally, the dominance of the text modality in multimodal models, particularly those pre-trained with BERT, can hinder the learning of other modalities due to its richer semantic information. This issue becomes particularly pronounced in cases where there is a conflict between multimodal and textual sentimental polarities, often leading to suboptimal analytical results. Besides, the classification ability of each modality is also suppressed by single-task learning. In this paper, We propose a Multi-Task disagreement-Reducing Multimodal Sentiment Fusion Network (MtDr-MSF), designed to enhance the semantic information of non-text modalities and reduce the dominant impact of the textual modality on the model, and to improve the learning capabilities of unimodal networks. We conducted experiments on multimodal sentiment analysis datasets, CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and CH-SIMS. The results show that our method outperforms the current SOTA method.

Infrastructure-assisted 3D detection networks based on camera-lidar early fusion strategy

Target detection in autonomous driving is a pivotal domain of the current research focus. The process fundamentally relies on on-board sensors tasked to identify proximate objects. However, long-range perception instability and the partial obstruction by traffic participants further complicate the challenge. These factors collectively affected the effectiveness of targeted detection from the cooperative vehicle-infrastructure system (CVIS) and urgently need to be addressed. Starting from infrastructure-side assisted detection, we propose a 3D detection network based on multi-sensor sensing. Our approach consists of three sub-networks: Diversity Balanced Feature Fusion Network (MRBNeXt), Early Multimodal Fusion Network (VBRFusion), and TwoStage Lightweight Detection Network (TSL). MRBNeXt focuses on extracting raw images fused into multilevel semantic representations to address the drawbacks of needing a rich feature-level representation; VBRFusion proposes a two-branch structure that acts on the point cloud voxelization to aggregate high-dimensional features. The point features are mapped to the sampled graphical semantic features via the coordinate features to complete the early fusion and thus improve the feature quality of a single modality. In the proposed area network, TSL enhances the sensory field processing of multidimensional features using the context-aware module in a two-stage approach to achieve fast target recognition at different scale levels. Finally, we perform comparative ablation experiments on the DAIR-V2X vehicle-infrastructure dataset. The results validated our approach and demonstrated its effectiveness and enhancement in detection accuracy at the infrastructure end compared to current state-of-the-art methods. This improvement significantly boosted the performance of 3D target detection tasks in complex traffic scenarios and provided a more robust justification for the subsequent development of vehicle-side-infrastructure-side collaborative 3D target detection.

Sentiment analysis of social media comments based on multimodal attention fusion network

Social media comments are no longer in a single textual modality, but heterogeneous data in multiple modalities, such as vision, sound, and text, which is why multimodal sentiment analysis strategies has been introduced. However, among the multimodal sentiment analysis domains, a majority of the current multimodal sentiment analysis models employ the Transformer architecture due to its great impact and benefits, thereby leading to an augmentation in resource overhead. In this paper, a multimodal attention fusion (MAF) network model is proposed for sentiment analysis of multimodal data. MAF is mainly composed of the cross attention and residual unit. The Cross Attention Unit is designed to select one core modality out of three modes, while the remaining modes serve as base modalities. The core modality is then combined with the base modality information to facilitate significant interaction between the two modalities, resulting in three sets of two-by-two attention computations. Moreover, a residual unit is employed to integrate the overall information into the attentional information. This approach not only enables modality-to-modality interaction, but also supplements the overall information. In the end, experiments are conducted on two publicly available multimodal sentiment analysis datasets from Carnegie Mellon University(CMU), CMU-MOSEI (abbreviated as MOSEI) and CMU-MOSI (abbreviated as MOSI), to validate that the method achieves high performance while removing the complex structure, and is comparable to the State-Of-The-Art(SOTA) model with high-performance A100 and V100 Graphics Processing Units(GPU) in an ordinary hardware environment.

A transformer-encoder-based multimodal multi-attention fusion network for sentiment analysis

A transformer-encoder-based multimodal multi-attention fusion network for sentiment analysis

E-Learning system application in art entrepreneurship teaching based on multimodal feature fusion and neural network

College student entrepreneurship teams can leverage the advantages of mobile internet resource integration and online collaborative production platforms to easily integrate various resources, thereby achieving rapid start-up and development of entrepreneurial projects. This also makes the threshold for college students to start businesses lower and easier to achieve. This article designs an interactive aesthetic education and entrepreneurship teaching system based on multimodal feature fusion and interactive systems. The core concept of the interactive aesthetic education and entrepreneurship teaching system is multimodal feature fusion and interactive system. Multimodal feature fusion can integrate different teaching resources, so that students can better understand the factors that need to be considered in the entrepreneurial process and practice. Interactive systems can enable closer interaction and communication between students and teachers, thereby better understanding and mastering entrepreneurial knowledge and skills. The design and implementation of a systematic system will help enhance the entrepreneurial ability and quality of college students, help them better understand the entrepreneurial process and factors that need to be considered in practice, and provide entrepreneurial practice reference for students in Chinese universities who have the intention of designing entrepreneurship.