# The Use of Multimodal Large Language Models to Detect Objects from Thermal Images: Transportation Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13898 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13898/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 13 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [FUTR3D: A Unified Sensor Fusion Framework for 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10642/) (2022)
- [ChatCAD: Interactive Computer-Aided Diagnosis on Medical Image using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07257/) (2023)
- [Vokenization: Improving Language Understanding with Contextualized, Visual-Grounded Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06775/) (2020)
- [Practical and Ethical Challenges of Large Language Models in Education: A Systematic Scoping Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13379/) (2023)
- [Enabling Multimodal Generation on CLIP via Vision-Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06386/) (2022)
- [X-LXMERT: Paint, Caption and Answer Questions with Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11278/) (2020)
- [GEM: A General Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09889/) (2021)
- [Overcoming Language Disparity in Online Content Classification with Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09744/) (2022)
- [Drone Object Detection Using RGB/IR Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03786/) (2022)
- [Leaner and Faster: Two-Stage Model Compression for Lightweight Text-Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13913/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Visual Reasoning and Multi-Agent Approach in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): Solving TSP and mTSP Combinatorial Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00092/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for Traffic Management at Urban Intersections: The Case of Mixed Traffic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00948/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The integration of thermal imaging data with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitutes an exciting opportunity for improving the safety and functionality of autonomous driving systems and many Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. This study investigates whether MLLMs can understand complex images from RGB and thermal cameras and detect objects directly. Our goals were to 1) assess the ability of the MLLM to learn from information from various sets, 2) detect objects and identify elements in thermal cameras, 3) determine whether two independent modality images show the same scene, and 4) learn all objects using different modalities. The findings showed that both GPT-4 and Gemini were effective in detecting and classifying objects in thermal images. Similarly, the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) for pedestrian classification was 70.39% and 81.48%, respectively. Moreover, the MAPE for bike, car, and motorcycle detection were 78.4%, 55.81%, and 96.15%, respectively. Gemini produced MAPE of 66.53%, 59.35% and 78.18% respectively. This finding further demonstrates that MLLM can identify thermal images and can be employed in advanced imaging automation technologies for ITS applications.