MLFuse: Multi-Scenario Feature Joint Learning for Multi-Modality Image Fusion

Jia Lei, Jiawei Li, Jinyuan Liu, Bin Wang, Shihua Zhou, Qiang Zhang, Xiaopeng Wei, Nikola K. Kasabov

Abstract: Multi-modality image fusion (MMIF) entails synthesizing images with detailed textures and prominent objects. Existing methods tend to use general feature extraction to handle different fusion tasks. However, these methods have difficulty breaking fusion barriers across various modalities owing to the lack of targeted learning routes. In this work, we propose a multi-scenario feature joint learning architecture, MLFuse, that employs the commonalities of multi-modality images to deconstruct the fusion progress. Specifically, we construct a cross-modal knowledge reinforcing network that adopts a multipath calibration strategy to promote information communication between different images. In addition, two professional networks are developed to maintain the salient and textural information of fusion results. The spatial-spectral domain optimizing network can learn the vital relationship of the source image context with the help of spatial attention and spectral attention. The edge-guided learning network utilizes the convolution operations of various receptive fields to capture image texture information. The desired fusion results are obtained by aggregating the outputs from the three networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MLFuse for infrared-visible image fusion and medical image fusion. The excellent results of downstream tasks (i.e., object detection and semantic segmentation) further verify the high-quality fusion performance of our method.