Efficient RGB-T Object Detection via Sparse Cross-Modality Fusion

Chao Tian, Zikun Zhou, Chao Yang, Guoqing Zhu, Zhenyu He

RGB-T detectors leverage the complementary strengths of visible and thermal infrared modalities, achieving robust performance under challenging conditions. Many of them resort to heavy dual backbones and exhaustive cross-modality fusion across the entire image, leading to impractically high computational costs. We observe that most image regions are smooth backgrounds (e.g., sky, ground) that can be easily handled by lightweight single-modality models. In light of this observation, we propose a sparse fusion mechanism for efficient RGB-T detection: first rapidly scanning the image to identify the proposals and then carefully examining the remaining sparse proposals via feature fusion. We propose a two-stage framework to instantiate this mechanism, which performs detection in two stages: 1) a lightweight and modality-specific detection stage that produces high-recall RoIs, and 2) a fusion-driven examination and refinement stage that filters out the false positives and refines the bounding boxes. This design enables the detector to adaptively allocate more computational resources to the potential foregrounds, improving the efficiency while ensuring detection accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves competitive performance with substantially fewer parameters and lower cost, while maintaining strong scalability to high-resolution images.