HaIVFusion: Haze-Free Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

The purpose of infrared and visible image fusion is to create a single image containing the texture details and significant object information of the source images, particularly in challenging environments. However, existing image fusion algorithms are generally suitable for normal scenes. In the hazy scene, a lot of texture information in the visible image is hidden, the results of existing methods are filled with infrared information, resulting in the lack of texture details and poor visual effect. To address the aforementioned difficulties, we propose a haze-free infrared and visible fusion method, termed HaIVFusion, which can eliminate the influence of haze and obtain richer texture information in the fused image. Specifically, we first design a scene information restoration network (SIRNet) to mine the masked texture Information in visible images. Then, a denoising fusion network (DFNet) is designed to integrate the features extracted from infrared and visible images and remove the influence of residual noise as much as possible. In addition, we use color consistency loss to reduce the color distortion resulting from haze. Further-more, we publish a dataset of hazy scenes for infrared and visible image fusion to promote research in extreme scenes. Extensive experiments show that HaIVFusion produces fused images with increased texture details and higher contrast in hazy scenes, and achieves better quantitative results, when compared to state-of-the-art image fusion methods, even combined with state-of-the-art dehazing methods.