DDFNet-A: Attention-Based Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition Fusion Network for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

The fusion of infrared and visible images aims to leverage the strengths of both modalities, thereby generating fused images with enhanced visible perception and discrimination capabilities. However, current image fusion methods frequently treat common features between modalities (modality-commonality) and unique features from each modality (modality-distinctiveness) equally during processing, neglecting their distinct characteristics. Therefore, we propose a DDFNet-A for infrared and visible image fusion. DDFNet-A addresses this limitation by decomposing infrared and visible input images into low-frequency features depicting modality-commonality and high-frequency features representing modality-distinctiveness. The extracted low and high features were then fused using distinct methods. In particular, we propose a hybrid attention block (HAB) to improve high-frequency feature extraction ability and a base feature fusion (BFF) module to enhance low-frequency feature fusion ability. Experiments were conducted on public infrared and visible image fusion datasets MSRS, TNO, and VIFB to validate the performance of the proposed network. DDFNet-A achieved competitive results on three datasets, with EN, MI, VIFF, QAB/F, FMI, and Qs metrics reaching the best performance on the TNO dataset, achieving 7.1217, 2.1620, 0.7739, 0.5426, 0.8129, and 0.9079, respectively. These values are 2.06%, 11.95%, 21.04%, 21.52%, 1.04%, and 0.09% higher than those of the second-best methods, respectively. The experimental results confirm that our DDFNet-A achieves better fusion performance than state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.