A Cross-modal Fusion Method for Multispectral Small Ship Detection

The fusion module of RGB and infrared (IR) remote sensing images is the key of multispectral ship detection. Existing works have shown that the cross-attention-based feature fusion can achieve good performance by extracting the complementary information of RGB and IR modalities. However, the existing commonly used cross-attention mechanisms introduce lots of redundancy parameters and mainly focus on global feature interaction of multispectral images, ignoring local detail information that is also important for small ship detection. In this paper, we propose a novel multispectral ship detection approach named LoGFusion. In LoGFusion, we design the cross stage partial module with partial convolution (CSPMPC) to reduce feature redundancy and utilize the local cross-modal fusion module (LoCFM) and global cross-modal fusion module (GCFM) to capture both local and global cross-modal features. Furthermore, we introduce a Multispectral Small Ship Dataset (MSSD) containing over 5k ship targets for small target detection. Experiments on MSSD validate the effectiveness of our method in terms of small ship detection in multispectral images.