# Cross-Modality Attentive Feature Fusion for Object Detection in Multispectral Remote Sensing Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02991 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02991/

## Key facts

- Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Libra R-CNN: Towards Balanced Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02701/) (2019)
- [Align Deep Features for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09397/) (2020)
- [Scale-Aware Trident Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01892/) (2019)
- [Improving Multispectral Pedestrian Detection by Addressing Modality Imbalance Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03043/) (2020)
- [Multispectral Deep Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02644/) (2016)
- [Illumination-aware Faster R-CNN for Robust Multispectral Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05347/) (2018)
- [You Only Look Twice: Rapid Multi-Scale Object Detection In Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09512/) (2018)
- [GFD-SSD: Gated Fusion Double SSD for Multispectral Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06999/) (2019)
- [SSSDET: Simple Short and Shallow Network for Resource Efficient Vehicle Detection in Aerial Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00292/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [ICAFusion: Iterative Cross-Attention Guided Feature Fusion for Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07504/) (2023)
- [C2Former: Calibrated and Complementary Transformer for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16175/) (2023)
- [SuperYOLO: Super Resolution Assisted Object Detection in Multimodal Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13351/) (2022)
- [DAMSDet: Dynamic Adaptive Multispectral Detection Transformer with Competitive Query Selection and Adaptive Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00326/) (2024)
- [DMM: Disparity-guided Multispectral Mamba for Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08132/) (2024)
- [Removal then Selection: A Coarse-to-Fine Fusion Perspective for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10731/) (2024)
- [WaveMamba: Wavelet-Driven Mamba Fusion for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18173/) (2025)
- [Guided Hybrid Quantization for Object detection in Multimodal Remote Sensing Imagery via One-to-one Self-teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00131/) (2022)
- [ASANet: Asymmetric Semantic Aligning Network for RGB and SAR image land cover classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02044/) (2024)
- [When Pedestrian Detection Meets Multi-Modal Learning: Generalist Model and Benchmark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10125/) (2024)
- [M4-SAR: A Multi-Resolution, Multi-Polarization, Multi-Scene, Multi-Source Dataset and Benchmark for optical-SAR Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10931/) (2025)
- [Multispectral State-Space Feature Fusion: Bridging Shared and Cross-Parametric Interactions for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14643/) (2025)
- [Common Practices and Taxonomy in Deep Multi-view Fusion for Remote Sensing Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01200/) (2022)
- [Bimodal SegNet: Instance Segmentation Fusing Events and RGB Frames for Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11228/) (2023)
- [DPDETR: Decoupled Position Detection Transformer for Infrared-Visible Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06123/) (2024)
- [Learning A Robust RGB-Thermal Detector for Extreme Modality Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22154/) (2025)
- [LMFNet: An Efficient Multimodal Fusion Approach for Semantic Segmentation in High-Resolution Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13659/) (2024)
- [Cross-modal Offset-guided Dynamic Alignment and Fusion for Weakly Aligned UAV Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16737/) (2025)
- [YOLOv11-RGBT: Towards a Comprehensive Single-Stage Multispectral Object Detection Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14696/) (2025)
- [SMART-Ship: A Comprehensive Synchronized Multi-modal Aligned Remote Sensing Targets Dataset and Benchmark for Berthed Ships Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02384/) (2025)
- [RGB-T Object Detection via Group Shuffled Multi-receptive Attention and Multi-modal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18955/) (2024)
- [Selective Structured State Space for Multispectral-fused Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14043/) (2025)
- [DEPFusion: Dual-Domain Enhancement and Priority-Guided Mamba Fusion for UAV Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07327/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Object Detection in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06724/) (2023)
- [On the Value of PHH3 for Mitotic Figure Detection on H&E-stained Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19899/) (2024)
- [FSMODNet: A Closer Look at Few-Shot Detection in Multispectral Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20905/) (2025)
- [Contrast-Guided Cross-Modal Distillation for Thermal Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01435/) (2025)
- [Representation Space Constrained Learning with Modality Decoupling for Multimodal Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15433/) (2025)
- [A Spatially Masked Adaptive Gated Network for multimodal post-flood water extent mapping using SAR and incomplete multispectral data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00123/) (2025)
- [DLRMamba: Distilling Low-Rank Mamba for Edge Multispectral Fusion Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06920/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-modality fusing complementary information of multispectral remote sensing image pairs can improve the perception ability of detection algorithms, making them more robust and reliable for a wider range of applications, such as nighttime detection. Compared with prior methods, we think different features should be processed specifically, the modality-specific features should be retained and enhanced, while the modality-shared features should be cherry-picked from the RGB and thermal IR modalities. Following this idea, a novel and lightweight multispectral feature fusion approach with joint common-modality and differential-modality attentions are proposed, named Cross-Modality Attentive Feature Fusion (CMAFF). Given the intermediate feature maps of RGB and IR images, our module parallel infers attention maps from two separate modalities, common- and differential-modality, then the attention maps are multiplied to the input feature map respectively for adaptive feature enhancement or selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach can achieve the state-of-the-art performance at a low computation cost.