Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Latest papers 275

Dec 15, 2024cs.CV

Sonicmesh: Enhancing 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction in Vision-Impaired Environments With Acoustic Signals

3D human mesh reconstruction (HMR) from RGB images often degrades under poor illumination, occlusion, and non-line-of-sight conditions. Acoustic sensing provides complementary spatial cues but suffers from low spatial resolution. We propose SonicMesh, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first acoustic--visual framework for robust 3D human mesh reconstruction. SonicMesh first converts ultrasonic echoes into range--azimuth acoustic images through an Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR)-based imaging process. It then introduces a cross-dimensional anatomical registration module that maps modality-specific 2D joint features into a common canonical 3D human space. The registered anatomical representations are further integrated with acoustic and visual features through a two-stage fusion network for final mesh reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that SonicMesh achieves accurate and robust 3D human reconstruction across normal, poor-light, occluded, and non-line-of-sight environments, consistently outperforming existing RGB-, radio-frequency (RF)-, and mmWave-based approaches under challenging sensing conditions.
Oct 21, 2024cs.AI

Multi-Sensor Fusion for UAV Classification Based on Feature Maps of Image and Radar Data

The cost, flexibility, and efficiency of modern UAVs make them attractive across many applications, but their proliferation has driven a rising number of malicious or accidental incidents, making UAV detection and classification mechanisms essential. Individual sensing modalities each present complementary limitations, and existing detection systems typically rely on a single sensor or fuse modalities only at the decision level, leaving the feature-level fusion of heterogeneous image and radar detectors largely unexplored. We propose a deep neural network that fuses high-level features extracted from the individual object-detection and classification models of thermal, optronic, and radar sensors. A CNN-based architecture combines the three modalities by stacking the thermal and optronic image features along the channel axis prior to fusion with the radar features. Evaluated on a real-world multi-sensor dataset, the proposed three-modality fusion model attains an F1-score of 0.95, compared to 0.93 for the dual-modality (thermal-optronic) configuration and 0.91 for the best-performing single-sensor (thermal) baseline, confirming that fusing complementary sensor features yields measurable gains in UAV classification performance.
Jun 21, 2021cs.CV

EPMF: Efficient Perception-aware Multi-sensor Fusion for 3D Semantic Segmentation

We study multi-sensor fusion for 3D semantic segmentation that is important to scene understanding for many applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing fusion-based methods, however, may not achieve promising performance due to the vast difference between the two modalities. In this work, we investigate a collaborative fusion scheme called perception-aware multi-sensor fusion (PMF) to effectively exploit perceptual information from two modalities, namely, appearance information from RGB images and spatio-depth information from point clouds. To this end, we project point clouds to the camera coordinate using perspective projection, and process both inputs from LiDAR and cameras in 2D space while preventing the information loss of RGB images. Then, we propose a two-stream network to extract features from the two modalities, separately. The extracted features are fused by effective residual-based fusion modules. Moreover, we introduce additional perception-aware losses to measure the perceptual difference between the two modalities. Last, we propose an improved version of PMF, i.e., EPMF, which is more efficient and effective by optimizing data pre-processing and network architecture under perspective projection. Specifically, we propose cross-modal alignment and cropping to obtain tight inputs and reduce unnecessary computational costs. We then explore more efficient contextual modules under perspective projection and fuse the LiDAR features into the camera stream to boost the performance of the two-stream network. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets show the superiority of our method. For example, on nuScenes test set, our EPMF outperforms the state-of-the-art method, i.e., RangeFormer, by 0.9% in mIoU. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ICEORY/PMF.
Date pendingcs.RO

Modular Sensory Stream for Integrating Physical Feedback in Vision-Language-Action Models

Humans understand and interact with the real world by relying on diverse physical feedback beyond visual perception. Motivated by this, recent approaches attempt to incorporate physical sensory signals into Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs). However, they typically focus on a single type of physical signal, failing to capture the heterogeneous and complementary nature of real-world interactions. In this paper, we propose MoSS, a modular sensory stream framework that adapts VLAs to leverage multiple sensory signals for action prediction. Specifically, we introduce decoupled modality streams that integrate heterogeneous physical signals into the action stream via joint cross-modal self-attention. To enable stable incorporation of new modalities, we adopt a two-stage training scheme that freezes pretrained VLA parameters in the early stage. Furthermore, to better capture contact interaction dynamics, we incorporate an auxiliary task that predicts future physical signals. Through extensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate that MoSS successfully augments VLAs to leverage diverse physical signals (i.e., tactile, force, and torque), integrating multiple signals to achieve synergistic performance gains.
Date pendingcs.RO

A Multi-Modal Perception Pipeline for Object Detection and Tracking in Autonomous Racing

Object detection and tracking are fundamental components of perception systems for autonomous driving. Achieving robust performance under adverse conditions such as limited visibility, sensor noise, and failures remains an open challenge, particularly in autonomous racing, where vehicles operate at very high speeds, experience strong vibrations, and interact under small safety margins. This paper presents a multi-modal late-fusion perception pipeline for object detection and tracking in the autonomous racing domain. The proposed system extends previous work by exploiting all onboard sensors through a late-fusion approach and a dedicated multi-object tracking framework. Independent detections from cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs are combined to provide timely and robust state estimates of surrounding vehicles. The tracking method explicitly compensates for detection delays and embeds in its model prior knowledge of vehicle dynamics and track layout. Experimental evaluation on real-world data across diverse critical scenarios, representative of challenging edge cases also in urban driving, confirms the effectiveness of the proposed pipeline and its suitability to support safe and adaptive planning decisions.