Frefusion: Frequency Domain Transformer for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Visible and infrared image fusion(VIF) provides more comprehensive understanding of a scene and can facilitate subsequent processing. Although frequency domain contains valuable global information in low frequency and rapid pixel intensity variation data in high frequency of images, existing fusion methods mainly focus on spatial domain. To close this gap, a novel VIF method in frequency domain is proposed. First, a frequency-domain feature extraction module is developed for source images. Then, a frequency-domain transformer fusion method is designed to merge the extracted features. Finally, a residual reconstruction module is introduced to obtain final fused images. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that image fusion study is conducted from frequency domain perspective. Comprehensive experiments on three datasets, i.e., MSRS, TNO, and Roadscene, demonstrate that the proposed approach obtains superior fusion performance over several state-of-the-art fusion methods, indicating its great potential as a generic backbone for VIF tasks.