Multimodal Deep Fusion Network for Visibility Assessment With a Small Training Dataset

Visibility is a measure of the transparency of the atmosphere, which is an important factor for road, air, and water transportation safety. Recently, features extracted from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have obtained state-of-the-art results for the estimation of the visibility range for images of foggy weather. However, existing CNN-based approaches have only adopted visible images as observational data. Unlike these previous studies, in this paper, visible–infrared image pairs are used to estimate the visibility range. A novel multimodal deep fusion architecture based on a CNN is then proposed to learn the robust joint features of the two sensor modalities. Our network architecture is composed of two integrated residual network processing streams and one CNN stream, which are connected in parallel. In addition, we construct a visible–infrared multimodal dataset for various fog densities and label the visibility range. We then compare our proposed method with conventional deep-learning-based approaches and analyze the contributions of various observational and classical deep fusion models to the classification of the visibility range. The experimental results demonstrate that both accuracy and robustness can be strongly enhanced using the proposed method, especially for small training datasets.