Context-aware Bayesian Fusion for Multimodal Object Detection

Abstract

Reliable detection of pedestrians and road users is essential for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. However, this task becomes increasingly challenging under adverse environmental conditions, such as poor weather and low lighting, where the performance of state-of-the-art pre-trained object detectors and on-board sensors tends to degrade, which limits their effectiveness and reliability. Moreover, retraining models for each operating context imposes significant constraints due to high data requirements, computational resources, and time. Considering this, we propose a novel context-aware multimodal late fusion approach that integrates a lightweight gating network within our probabilistic calibration framework. The gating network extracts environmental context and dynamically modulates the detection outputs of pre-trained object detectors based on the inferred context, without retraining of the detectors. Our methodology is evaluated on a modified KITTI dataset, in which the camera images and lidar pointclouds are augmented for varying fog levels. Experimental results show that our approach yields an approximately 14% relative improvement over non-adaptive late fusion baselines, achieving a consistent average precision of 56% across different fog levels.