Dynamic and static fusion mechanisms of infrared and visible images

This paper propose a dynamic fusion mechanism of infrared and visible images, named DIFM, capable of solving the static fusion optimization problem. The DIFM correlates the image fusion quality with the image restoration quality to construct a unified optimization loss function. According to the DIFM, a dynamic image fusion network of infrared and visible images is constructed and is therefore denoted with DF-Net. Specifically, the DF-Net comprises two modules, i.e., the dynamic fusion module (DFM) and the self-learning dynamic restoration module (SLDRM). In order to solve the static fusion problem of existing methods, the DFM is proposed to learn the fusion weight dynamically. Specifically, the DFM comprises a classification module (CM) and an image fusion module (IFM), which determine whether and how to fuse source images. In addition, a unified fusion loss function is introduced to obtain more hidden features of infrared and visible images in complex environments. Therefore, the stumbling block of deep learning in image fusion, i.e., static fusion, is significantly mitigated. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the dynamic fusion optimization method neatly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in most metrics.