Multimodal Transformer for Material Segmentation

Leveraging information across diverse modalities is known to enhance performance on multimodal segmentation tasks. However, effectively fusing information from different modalities remains challenging due to the unique characteristics of each modality. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion strategy that can effectively fuse information from different combinations of four different modalities: RGB, Angle of Linear Polarization (AoLP), Degree of Linear Polarization (DoLP) and Near-Infrared (NIR). We also propose a new model named Multi-Modal Segmentation Transformer (MMSFormer) that incorporates the proposed fusion strategy to perform multimodal material segmentation. MMSFormer achieves 52.05% mIoU outperforming the current state-of-the-art on Multimodal Material Segmentation (MCubeS) dataset. For instance, our method provides significant improvement in detecting gravel (+10.4%) and human (+9.1%) classes. Ablation studies show that different modules in the fusion block are crucial for overall model performance. Furthermore, our ablation studies also highlight the capacity of different input modalities to improve performance in the identification of different types of materials. The code and pretrained models will be made available at https://github.com/csiplab/MMSFormer.