  The emergence of different sensors (Near-Infrared, Depth, etc.) is a remedy
for the limited application scenarios of traditional RGB camera. The RGB-X
tasks, which rely on RGB input and another type of data input to resolve
specific problems, have become a popular research topic in multimedia. A
crucial part in two-branch RGB-X deep neural networks is how to fuse
information across modalities. Given the tremendous information inside RGB-X
networks, previous works typically apply naive fusion (e.g., average or max
fusion) or only focus on the feature fusion at the same scale(s). While in this
paper, we propose a novel method called RXFOOD for the fusion of features
across different scales within the same modality branch and from different
modality branches simultaneously in a unified attention mechanism. An Energy
Exchange Module is designed for the interaction of each feature map's energy
matrix, who reflects the inter-relationship of different positions and
different channels inside a feature map. The RXFOOD method can be easily
incorporated to any dual-branch encoder-decoder network as a plug-in module,
and help the original backbone network better focus on important positions and
channels for object of interest detection. Experimental results on RGB-NIR
salient object detection, RGB-D salient object detection, and RGBFrequency
image manipulation detection demonstrate the clear effectiveness of the
proposed RXFOOD.
