A Symmetric Encoder-Decoder with Residual Block for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

In computer vision and image processing tasks, image fusion has evolved into an attractive research field. However, recent existing image fusion methods are mostly built on pixel-level operations, which may produce unacceptable artifacts and are time-consuming. In this paper, a symmetric encoder-decoder with a residual block (SEDR) for infrared and visible image fusion is proposed. For the training stage, the SEDR network is trained with a new dataset to obtain a fixed feature extractor. For the fusion stage, first, the trained model is utilized to extract the intermediate features and compensation features of two source images. Then, extracted intermediate features are used to generate two attention maps, which are multiplied to the input features for refinement. In addition, the compensation features generated by the first two convolutional layers are merged and passed to the corresponding deconvolutional layers. At last, the refined features are fused for decoding to reconstruct the final fused image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fusion method (named as SEDRFuse) outperforms the state-of-the-art fusion methods in terms of both subjective and objective evaluations

Efficient and Interpretable Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Via Algorithm Unrolling

Infrared and visible image fusion expects to obtain images that highlight thermal radiation information from infrared images and texture details from visible images. In this paper, an interpretable deep network fusion model is proposed. Initially, two optimization models are established to accomplish two-scale decomposition, separating low-frequency base information and high-frequency detail information from source images. The algorithm unrolling that each iteration process is mapped to a convolutional neural network layer to transfer the optimization steps into the trainable neural networks, is implemented to solve the optimization models. In the test phase, the two decomposition feature maps of base and detail are merged respectively by the fusion layer, and then the decoder outputs the fusion image. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate the superiority of our model, which is interpretable and can robustly generate fusion images containing highlight targets and legible details, exceeding the state-of-the-art methods