STF: Spatio-Temporal Fusion Module for Improving Video Object Detection

Consecutive frames in a video contain redundancy, but they may also contain relevant complementary information for the detection task. The objective of our work is to leverage this complementary information to improve detection. Therefore, we propose a spatio-temporal fusion framework (STF). We first introduce multi-frame and single-frame attention modules that allow a neural network to share feature maps between nearby frames to obtain more robust object representations. Second, we introduce a dual-frame fusion module that merges feature maps in a learnable manner to improve them. Our evaluation is conducted on three different benchmarks including video sequences of moving road users. The performed experiments demonstrate that the proposed spatio-temporal fusion module leads to improved detection performance compared to baseline object detectors. Code is available at https://github.com/noreenanwar/STF-module

VisiTherS: Visible-thermal infrared stereo disparity estimation of human silhouette

This paper presents a novel approach for visible-thermal infrared stereoscopy, focusing on the estimation of disparities of human silhouettes. Visible-thermal infrared stereo poses several challenges, including occlusions and differently textured matching regions in both spectra. Finding matches between two spectra with varying colors, textures, and shapes adds further complexity to the task. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a novel approach where a high-resolution convolutional neural network is used to better capture relationships between the two spectra. To do so, a modified HRNet backbone is used for feature extraction. This HRNet backbone is capable of capturing fine details and textures as it extracts features at multiple scales, thereby enabling the utilization of both local and global information. For matching visible and thermal infrared regions, our method extracts features on each patch using two modified HRNet streams. Features from the two streams are then combined for predicting the disparities by concatenation and correlation. Results on public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by improving the results by approximately 18 percentage points on the $\leq$ 1 pixel error, highlighting its potential for improving accuracy in this task. The code of VisiTherS is available on GitHub at the following link https://github.com/philippeDG/VisiTherS.