IDFusion: An Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Network for Illuminating Darkness

Guohua Lv, Xiyan Wang, Zhonghe Wei, Jinyong Cheng, Guangxiao Ma, Hanju Bao

Abstract: The purpose of infrared and visible image fusion is to combine the background information of the visible images and the thermal target information of the infrared images. Current fusion methods often neglect the challenges of low-light conditions. In the night scene, the existing methods fail to capture texture information from the visible images that is hidden in the darkness, producing suboptimal fusion results that can hinder subsequent visual applications. Therefore, we propose a method for infrared and visible image fusion under night scenes, termed as IDFusion. Specifically, our method is divided into three parts, first, a dense auto-encoder is designed to obtain more useful features from the source images. Then we design a brightness enhancement network that removes visible degraded illumination maps to obtain brightness-enhanced features. Finally, a texture fusion network is designed so that the infrared features and enhanced visible features avoid texture loss during the fusion process. Experimental results show that our network can obtain better fusion results, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in terms of subjective visual effects and quantitative metrics.