Pedestrian Detection Enhancement via Thermal-Visual Fusion
Thermal-Visual Fusion, Multispectral Pedestrian Detection, Infrared Imaging, Feature Fusion, Low-Light Perception, Intelligent Transportation
: Pedestrian detection remains a safety-critical perception task in autonomous driving, intelligent surveillance, and smart transportation, yet conventional visible-spectrum detectors still degrade sharply under low illumination, headlight glare, rain, haze, and partial occlusion. Thermal-visible fusion addresses this limitation by combining the textural richness of RGB imagery with the illumination-invariant heat signatures captured by long-wave infrared sensors. This paper presents a structured research study on pedestrian detection enhancement via thermal-visual fusion. The study has two goals: first, to synthesize the evolution of the field across benchmark datasets, fusion strategies, and deep architectures; second, to formulate a practical reliability-aware fusion pipeline suitable for student implementation and comparative evaluation. The paper organizes prior work from early aggregated channel features to attention-based and transformer-based multimodal detectors, and it analyzes why mid-level fusion, modality alignment, and illumination-aware weighting consistently outperform naive input-level concatenation. Quantitative evidence compiled from public KAIST, LLVIP, and FLIR benchmark reports shows that multispectral fusion reduces miss rate substantially compared with single-modality baselines and produces more stable day-night behavior. Building on those observations, a proposed architecture is described that integrates modality-specific encoders, geometric alignment, channel-spatial attention, confidence-guided feature fusion, and a lightweight one-stage detection head. The paper further outlines a reproducible evaluation plan, implementation parameters, failure taxonomy, and future research opportunities including infrared-centric reasoning, transformer fusion, uncertainty estimation, and edge deployment. The presented results are benchmark-oriented comparative findings synthesized from the literature and are intended to guide future experimental work rather than claim a new private leaderboard.
Registration ID: IJVRA_702416 Published ID: IJVRA2603771
"Pedestrian Detection Enhancement via Thermal-Visual Fusion", IJVRA - International Journal of Versatile Research and Analysis (www.IJVRA.org), ISSN:2984-8903, Vol.4, Issue 3, page no.948-958, March-2026, Available :https://ijpub.org/ijvra/papers/IJVRA2603771.pdf
Paper Reg. ID: IJVRA_702416
Published Paper Id: IJVRA2603771
Research Area: Other area not in list
Country: dondaicha, Maharashtra, India
ISSN: 2984-8903 | IMPACT FACTOR: 9.12 Calculated By Google Scholar | ESTD YEAR: 2023
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