A Semantic-Aware and Multi-Guided Network for Infrared-Visible Image Fusion

Multi-modality image fusion aims at fusing specific-modality and shared-modality information from two source images. To tackle the problem of insufficient feature extraction and lack of semantic awareness for complex scenes, this paper focuses on how to model correlation-driven decomposing features and reason high-level graph representation by efficiently extracting complementary features and multi-guided feature aggregation. We propose a three-branch encoder-decoder architecture along with corresponding fusion layers as the fusion strategy. The transformer with Multi-Dconv Transposed Attention and Local-enhanced Feed Forward network is used to extract shallow features after the depthwise convolution. In the three parallel branches encoder, Cross Attention and Invertible Block (CAI) enables to extract local features and preserve high-frequency texture details. Base feature extraction module (BFE) with residual connections can capture long-range dependency and enhance shared-modality expression capabilities. Graph Reasoning Module (GR) is introduced to reason high-level cross-modality relations and extract low-level details features as CAI's specific-modality complementary information simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that our method has obtained competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods in visible/infrared image fusion and medical image fusion tasks. Moreover, we surpass other fusion methods in terms of subsequent tasks, averagely scoring 9.78% mAP@.5 higher in object detection and 6.46% mIoU higher in semantic segmentation.