Lightweight Cross-Modal Multispectral Pedestrian Detection Based on Spatial Reweighted Attention Mechanism

Multispectral pedestrian detection technology leverages infrared images to provide reliable information for visible light images, demonstrating significant advantages in low-light conditions and background occlusion scenarios. However, while continuously improving cross-modal feature extraction and fusion, ensuring the model’s detection speed is also a challenging issue. We have devised a deep learning network model for cross-modal pedestrian detection based on Resnet50, aiming to focus on more reliable features and enhance the model’s detection efficiency. This model employs a spatial attention mechanism to reweight the input visible light and infrared image data, enhancing the model’s focus on different spatial positions and sharing the weighted feature data across different modalities, thereby reducing the interference of multi-modal features. Subsequently, lightweight modules with depthwise separable convolution are incorporated to reduce the model’s parameter count and computational load through channel-wise and point-wise convolutions. The network model algorithm proposed in this paper was experimentally validated on the publicly available KAIST dataset and compared with other existing methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves favorable performance in various complex environments, affirming the effectiveness of the multispectral pedestrian detection technology proposed in this paper.