MRFS: Mutually Reinforcing Image Fusion and Segmentation

This paper proposes a coupled learning framework to break the performance bottleneck of infrared-visible image fusion and segmentation, called MRFS. By leveraging the intrinsic consistency between vision and semantics, it emphasizes mutual reinforcement rather than treating these tasks as separate issues. First, we embed weakened information recovery and salient information integration into the image fusion task, employing the CNN-based interactive gated mixed attention (IGM-Att) module to extract high-quality visual features. This aims to satisfy human visual perception, producing fused images with rich textures, high contrast, and vivid colors. Second, a transformer-based progressive cycle attention (PC-Att) module is developed to enhance semantic segmentation. It establishes single-modal self-reinforcement and cross-modal mutual complementarity, enabling more accurate decisions in machine semantic perception. Then, the cascade of IGM-Att and PC-Att couples image fusion and semantic segmentation tasks, implicitly bringing vision-related and semantics-related features into closer alignment. Therefore, they mutually provide learning priors to each other, resulting in visually satisfying fused images and more accurate segmentation decisions. Extensive experiments on public datasets showcase the advantages of our method in terms of visual satisfaction and decision accuracy. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HaoZhang1018/MRFS.