Robust Occluded Object Detection in Multimodal Autonomous Driving: A Fusion-Aware Learning Framework

Reliable occluded object detection remains a persistent core challenge for autonomous driving perception systems, particularly in complex urban scenarios where targets are predominantly partially or fully obscured by static obstacles or dynamic agents. Conventional single-modality detectors often fail to capture adequate discriminative cues for robust recognition, while existing multimodal fusion strategies typically lack explicit occlusion modeling and effective feature completion mechanisms, ultimately degrading performance in safety-critical operating conditions. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Fusion-Aware Occlusion Detection (FAOD) framework that integrates explicit visibility reasoning with implicit cross-modal feature reconstruction. Specifically, FAOD leverages synchronized red–green–blue (RGB), light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and optional radar/infrared inputs, employs a visibility-aware attention mechanism to infer target occlusion states, and embeds a cross-modality completion module to reconstruct missing object features via complementary non-occluded modal information; it further incorporates an occlusion-aware data augmentation and annotation strategy to enhance model generalization across diverse occlusion patterns. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that FAOD achieves state-of-the-art performance, including a +8.75% occlusion-level mean average precision (OL-mAP) improvement over existing methods on heavily occluded objects O=2 in the nuScenes dataset, while maintaining real-time efficiency. These findings confirm FAOD’s potential to advance reliable multimodal perception for next-generation autonomous driving systems in safety-critical environments.