NaviFormer: Multimodal scene segmentation for assistive navigation

Safe and independent navigation is an essential part of daily life for individuals with visual impairments. Recent advances in assistive navigation have leveraged deep learning-based semantic scene segmentation with promising results by using RGB images. In comparison, RGB-D images provide richer geometric and appearance information, but their integration into deep learning frameworks for assistive navigation could be further explored to enhance segmentation accuracy. In modeling cross-modal interactions, the existing RGB-D segmentation methods tend to lose fine-grained spatial details or discard useful information, which hinders performance on dense prediction tasks. To address these gaps, we propose NaviFormer, a novel RGB-D semantic segmentation architecture tailored for assistive navigation. NaviFormer features a dual-stream transformer encoder with shared weights to efficiently extract latent features from RGB and depth modalities. It also incorporates a Local–Global Cross-Modal Fusion module, which facilitates effective information exchange between the two modalities across both local and global feature levels. In training NaviFormer, we further employ a pixel-wise contrastive loss to enhance the separability of pixel-level embeddings in the RGB-D feature space. Extensive experiments on TrueSight and Cityscapes datasets indicate that NaviFormer achieves superior performance compared to existing RGB-D segmentation methods. Our findings highlight the importance of leveraging RGB-D data for enhancing semantic understanding in assistive navigation systems, and establish NaviFormer as a solid baseline for future research in this domain.