ASIFusion: An Adaptive Saliency Injection-Based Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Network

The purpose of infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is to acquire a more informative fused image by leveraging complementary information, facilitating human perception and machine vision. Among the existing fusion methods, the saliency-based methods conform to human perception characteristics and achieve relatively advantageous fusion performance. However, such methods fail to adaptively maintain the edge and intensity of salient objects, resulting in fixed fusion performance. To address these issue, we present ASIFusion, an adaptive saliency injection-based IVIF network. First, source images are inputted to the feature extraction encoder for fully extracting features. Meanwhile, the proposed adaptive saliency injection module detects salient objects in the infrared image and then learns the fusion weights of each channel, which serve as supplementary information for further fusion. These learned weights are utilized to merge the source images’ extracted features. Finally, the feature reconstruction decoder produces a fused image with injected saliency. The fused image maintains the intensity and edge of the salient objects and fully preserves the complementary information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches with regard to fusion performance and computational efficiency.