Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

Overview

Multi-scale feature fusion studies how to combine coarse contextual information with fine spatial, temporal, or spectral details. Common approaches include feature pyramids and skip connections, attention or gated fusion, cross-scale alignment, and adaptive routing across CNN, Transformer, and state-space models. These methods are used in settings such as small-object detection, medical and remote-sensing segmentation, time-series forecasting, and multimodal perception. A central challenge is preserving useful detail while aligning scales and avoiding redundant computation, with results often depending on the task, data, and model size.

Latest papers

187 papers14 papers in the last four weeks, down 30% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Aug 3, 2025

DMSC: Dynamic Multi-Scale Coordination Framework for Time Series Forecasting

Time Series Forecasting (TSF) faces persistent challenges in modeling intricate temporal dependencies across different scales. Despite recent advances leveraging different decomposition operations and novel architectures based on CNN, MLP or Transformer, existing methods still struggle with static decomposition strategies, fragmented dependency modeling, and inflexible fusion mechanisms, limiting their ability to model intricate temporal dependencies. To explicitly solve the mentioned three problems respectively, we propose a novel Dynamic Multi-Scale Coordination Framework (DMSC) with Multi-Scale Patch Decomposition block (EMPD), Triad Interaction Block (TIB) and Adaptive Scale Routing MoE block (ASR-MoE). Specifically, EMPD is designed as a built-in component to dynamically segment sequences into hierarchical patches with exponentially scaled granularities, eliminating predefined scale constraints through input-adaptive patch adjustment. TIB then jointly models intra-patch, inter-patch, and cross-variable dependencies within each layer's decomposed representations. EMPD and TIB are jointly integrated into layers forming a multi-layer progressive cascade architecture, where coarse-grained representations from earlier layers adaptively guide fine-grained feature extraction in subsequent layers via gated pathways. And ASR-MoE dynamically fuses multi-scale predictions by leveraging specialized global and local experts with temporal-aware weighting. Comprehensive experiments on thirteen real-world benchmarks demonstrate that DMSC consistently maintains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and superior computational efficiency for TSF tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/1327679995/DMSC.
Jun 15, 2025

MGDFIS: Multi-scale Global-detail Feature Integration Strategy for Small Object Detection

Small-object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery requires preserving weak local evidence while using broader context to separate tiny foreground targets from cluttered backgrounds. Existing multi-scale fusion methods improve feature aggregation, but they often add computation or blur fine details during repeated cross-scale fusion. The central challenge is to balance low-SNR target preservation, clutter suppression, and efficient cross-scale context exchange. To address this challenge, we propose the Multi-scale Global-detail Feature Integration Strategy (MGDFIS), a neck-level feature-fusion strategy that couples global context exchange, local-detail recovery, and pixel-level foreground-background recalibration. MGDFIS integrates three coordinated modules: FusionLock-TSS Attention for stabilizing spectral-spatial responses, Global-detail Integration for combining long-range mixing with local detail capture, and Dynamic Pixel Attention for reweighting compact foreground regions. On the controlled VisDrone setting, YOLO26m + MGDFIS improves AP50:95 from 25.7 to 30.2 and AP50 from 37.2 to 44.2 over the YOLO26m baseline, with 96.1 GFLOPs. Additional dataset-specific evaluations report 38.9 AP50 and 21.9 AP50:95 on UAVDT and 97.4 AP50 on CARPK. The code is available at: https://github.com/JackBaixue/MGDFIS.
Jun 4, 2025

Intra- and Cross-Scale Feature Interaction Network for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

Referring remote sensing image segmentation (RRSIS) is a challenging multimodal task that requires accurate localization and pixel-level segmentation of targets specified by natural-language expressions. Existing RRSIS datasets remain limited in image resolution, scene diversity, and category coverage, which restricts the generalization ability and practical applicability of current methods. To advance this field, we introduce NWPU-Refer, the largest and most diverse bilingual RRSIS dataset to date. It contains 15,003 high-resolution images (1024--2048 px) collected from more than 30 countries across five continents, together with 49,745 annotated targets covering single-object, multi-object, and no-target scenarios. We further propose the Multi-scale Referring Segmentation Network (MRSNet), a framework tailored to the characteristics of remote sensing imagery. Specifically, MRSNet incorporates an Intra-scale Feature Interaction Module (IFIM) to refine fine-grained features within each encoder stage and a Hierarchical Feature Interaction Module (HFIM) to integrate cross-scale information while preserving spatial structure. Extensive experiments on NWPU-Refer and RRSIS-D demonstrate that MRSNet achieves strong and competitive performance across multiple metrics, especially under strict IoU thresholds and IoU-based evaluation, validating the effectiveness of the proposed dataset and model. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/CVer-Yang/NWPU-Refer.
May 2, 2025

SMDDFNet: State-space Modeling and Dynamic Dual Fusion Network for Traffic Sign Detection

Traffic sign detection is a challenging visual signal processing task for advanced driver assistance, where small objects, scale variation, and occlusion limit conventional detectors with fixed receptive fields. This paper proposes State-space Modeling and Dynamic Dual Fusion Network (SMDDFNet), a deep learning detector for traffic sign images. SMDDFNet integrates a Dynamic Dual Fusion (DDF) module and a state-space modeling backbone to enhance multi-scale feature representation. DDF combines efficient multi-scale attention with content-aware dynamic filtering in the frequency domain, while the backbone captures long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. A multi-scale feature fusion neck further aggregates pyramid features for robust localization of small signs. Experiments on TT100K, GTSDB, PASCAL VOC, and the Roboflow~100 vehicle subset show that SMDDFNet achieves competitive accuracy against recent detectors while retaining real-time throughput. The source code is available at https://github.com/rainbowyuyu/SMDDFNet
Apr 7, 2025

MSA-UNet3+: Multi-Scale Attention UNet3+ with New Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Loss for Coronary DSA Image Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of coronary Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) images is essential for diagnosing and treating coronary artery disease (CAD). Despite advances in deep learning, challenges such as high intra-class variance and class imbalance limit precise vessel delineation. Existing approaches for coronary DSA segmentation cannot effectively address these issues. Furthermore, existing segmentation network encoders do not directly generate semantic embeddings, which could enable the decoder to reconstruct segmentation masks more effectively. We propose a Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Loss (SPCL) that combines supervised and prototypical contrastive learning to enhance coronary DSA image segmentation. The supervised contrastive loss enforces semantic embeddings in the encoder, improving feature differentiation. The prototypical contrastive loss enables the model to focus on the foreground class while alleviating high intra-class variance and class imbalance by concentrating only on hard-to-classify background samples. We implement the proposed SPCL within MSA-UNet3+, a Multi-Scale Attention-Enhanced UNet3+ architecture. The architecture integrates a Multi-Scale Attention Encoder (M-encoder), a Multi-Scale Dilated Bottleneck (MSD-Bottleneck) for multi-scale feature extraction, and a Contextual Attention Fusion Module (CAFM) to preserve fine-grained details while improving contextual understanding. Experiments on a private coronary DSA dataset demonstrate that MSA-UNet3+ outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving the highest Dice coefficient and F1-score while significantly reducing ASD and ACD. The framework provides precise vessel segmentation for accurate identification of coronary stenosis and supports informed diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. The code will be released at https://github.com/rayanmerghani/MSA-UNet3plus.
Mar 3, 2025

CrossFusion: A Multi-Scale Cross-Attention Convolutional Fusion Model for Cancer Survival Prediction

Cancer survival prediction from whole slide images (WSIs) is a challenging task in computational pathology due to the large size, irregular shape, and high granularity of the WSIs. These characteristics make it difficult to capture the full spectrum of patterns, from subtle cellular abnormalities to complex tissue interactions, which are crucial for accurate prognosis. To address this, we propose CrossFusion, a novel multi-scale feature integration framework that extracts and fuses information from patches across different magnification levels. By effectively modeling both scale-specific patterns and their interactions, CrossFusion generates a rich feature set that enhances survival prediction accuracy. We validate our approach across six cancer types from public datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, when coupled with domain-specific feature extraction backbones, our method shows further gains in prognostic performance compared to general-purpose backbones. The source code is available at: https://github.com/RustinS/CrossFusion
Dec 3, 2024

Cascaded Multi-Scale Attention for Enhanced Multi-Scale Feature Extraction and Interaction with Low-Resolution Images

In real-world applications of image recognition tasks, such as human pose estimation, cameras often capture objects, like human bodies, at low resolutions. This scenario poses a challenge in extracting and leveraging multi-scale features, which is often essential for precise inference. To address this challenge, we propose a new attention mechanism, named cascaded multi-scale attention (CMSA), tailored for use in CNN-ViT hybrid architectures, to handle low-resolution inputs effectively. The design of CMSA enables the extraction and seamless integration of features across various scales without necessitating the downsampling of the input image or feature maps. This is achieved through a novel combination of grouped multi-head self-attention mechanisms with window-based local attention and cascaded fusion of multi-scale features over different scales. This architecture allows for the effective handling of features across different scales, enhancing the model's ability to perform tasks such as human pose estimation, head pose estimation, and more with low-resolution images. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in these areas with fewer parameters, showcasing its potential for broad application in real-world scenarios where capturing high-resolution images is not feasible. Code is available at https://github.com/xyongLu/CMSA.