Causal Mode Multiplexer: A Novel Framework for Unbiased Multispectral Pedestrian Detection

Taeheon Kim, Sebin Shin, Youngjoon Yu, Hak Gu Kim, Yong Man Ro; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 26784-26793

RGBT multispectral pedestrian detection has emerged as a promising solution for safety-critical applications that require day/night operations. However the modality bias problem remains unsolved as multispectral pedestrian detectors learn the statistical bias in datasets. Specifically datasets in multispectral pedestrian detection mainly distribute between ROTO (day) and RXTO (night) data; the majority of the pedestrian labels statistically co-occur with their thermal features. As a result multispectral pedestrian detectors show poor generalization ability on examples beyond this statistical correlation such as ROTX data. To address this problem we propose a novel Causal Mode Multiplexer (CMM) framework that effectively learns the causalities between multispectral inputs and predictions. Moreover we construct a new dataset (ROTX-MP) to evaluate modality bias in multispectral pedestrian detection. ROTX-MP mainly includes ROTX examples not presented in previous datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed CMM framework generalizes well on existing datasets (KAIST CVC-14 FLIR) and the new ROTX-MP. Our code and dataset are available open-source.