YOLOv8-RGBT-MT: A Fast Multi-Modal Fusion Network for Worker-and-Equipment Detection on Construction Sites

To address the challenges of dusty, foggy and other complex construction site environments leading to the failure of visible light imaging and difficulties in small target detection, as well as the high resource consumption hindering model deployment, an enhanced and lightweight algorithm is proposed. This algorithm employs a hybrid architecture, integrating red green blue (RGB) (visible light) and thermal infrared (RGBT) multi-modal images through a fusion framework based on you only look once (YOLO) version 8 and Mamba-Transformer (MT). We refer to this integrated model as YOLOv8-RGBT-MT. In terms of network improvements, a frequency enhancement module is first employed to enhance visible light and infrared images. And then, a module integrating Mamba and Transformer components is designed to replace base convolutional blocks in the backbone network, thereby expanding the receptive field of the model and improving feature extraction in complex backgrounds. Finally, a multi-modal feature fusion mechanism is introduced, through which complementary information from visible and infrared images is effectively integrated via an adaptive weighting strategy, so that both the detection accuracy and robustness for small targets are enhanced. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to YOLOv8-RGBT, the enhanced algorithm achieves an improvement of 18.7% in mAP50, while reducing the number of inference time by 79.7%