SeeRF: Learning to See Beyond Fields of View via Generative Image Registration and Fusion
Authors: Xunpeng Yi, Yibing Zhang, Qinglong Yan, Yifan Lu, Han Xu, Jiayi Ma
Organizations: Electronic Information School, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China · School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · Electronic Information School and the School of Robotics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072
Due to the inherent discrepancies in imaging viewpoints and field-of-view mismatches among multi-modal sensors, existing fusion methods have long struggled to achieve complete scene-level information integration beyond the limitation in sensor fields of view. Consequently, the generated fusion results often contain modality-specific regions and fusion artifacts, limiting the comprehensive representation of scene structures and semantic information. To address this challenge, we propose a generative registration-fusion framework, termed SeeRF. Specifically, it first introduces a deformation generation strategy based on the diffeomorphic stationary velocity field, combined with visual foundation model-guided feature extraction and a coarse-to-fine progressive multi-modal image registration module, to achieve accurate cross-modal flow estimation and generate valid field-of-view masks. Subsequently, the registration module is tightly coupled with the generative diffusion module for multi-modal completion and fusion, where the cross-modal control encoding module and the control residual feature encoder-decoder mechanism provide effective guidance. By leveraging the powerful prior modeling capability of generative diffusion models, the proposed framework overcomes the limitations imposed by shared fields of view and enables effective completion and natural fusion of non-overlapping field-of-view regions. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets and real-world scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance, validating its effectiveness, superiority, and robustness. The code will be available at https://github.com/XunpengYi/SeeRF.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Analysis of image registration and fusion paradigms in terms of viewpoint and field of view.
Fig. 2: Schematic illustration of the challenges and analysis of real data in the existing image registration and fusion field. (a) Conceptual illustration and challenge of multimodal imaging. (b) Real data of imaging viewpoint and field-of-view mismatch.
Fig. 3: The framework of SeeRF. It effectively couples the multi-modal image registration module with the generative diffusion module for multi-modal completion and fusion, leveraging generative modeling to enable cross-modal information fusion beyond conventional shared field-of-view constraints.
Fig. 4: Visualization of the stationary velocity field for the diffeomorphic deformation. (a) Motion driven by the forward velocity field; (b) Motion driven by the reverse velocity field.
Fig. 5: Schematic diagram of the generative diffusion module for multi-modal completion and fusion.
Fig. 6: Qualitative comparison of SeeRF with state-of-the-art image registration methods on the MFNet (the first group), FMB (the second and third groups), and LLVIP (the fourth and fifth groups) datasets for image registration. We visualize and overlay the gradient of the visible image in purple. Better registration results exhibit higher spatial consistency between the visible image gradients and infrared structures, while maintaining closer object contours and detailed structures compared with the infrared ground-truth images.
Methods
MFNet Dataset
FMB Dataset
LLVIP Dataset
EPE
MAE
MI
CC
SSIM
EPE
MAE
MI
CC
SSIM
EPE
MAE
MI
CC
SSIM
RIFT
9.9737
0.0252
1.2731
0.8014
0.8243
7.3479
0.0246
2.1123
0.9115
0.8354
6.3640
0.0456
1.3729
0.8503
0.6646
GLUNet
15.6251
0.0282
1.2056
0.7272
0.8156
11.8658
0.0272
2.0398
0.8933
0.8297
11.4010
0.0503
1.3036
0.8292
0.6588
CrossRAFT
8.5285
0.0224
1.3560
0.7977
0.8419
10.5699
0.0319
2.0789
0.8523
0.8236
6.3431
0.0414
1.4830
0.8736
0.7037
MURF
119.0738
0.1514
0.5892
0.3273
0.5562
93.1354
0.0958
1.2406
0.5864
0.6507
197.5209
0.1419
0.5718
0.4595
0.3734
UMF-CMGR
35.5214
0.0651
0.6568
0.2784
0.6911
44.9324
0.0983
1.1564
0.4800
0.6399
36.4979
0.1283
0.4790
0.4109
0.3939
TABLE I: Quantitative comparison of our SeeRF with existing state-of-the-art methods of the image registration task on the MFNet, FMB, and LLVIP datasets. ( Bold : optimal performance)
Fig. 7: Qualitative comparison of SeeRF with state-of-the-art image registration and fusion methods on the MFNet (the first group), FMB (the second and third groups), and LLVIP (the fourth and fifth groups) datasets for image fusion. It is worth noting that the source images are also spatially misaligned.
Methods
MFNet Dataset
FMB Dataset
LLVIP Dataset
SD
VIF
CC
QAB/F
SSIM
SD
VIF
CC
QAB/F
SSIM
SD
VIF
CC
QAB/F
SSIM
Reg .+U2Fusion
33.2232
0.6445
0.5233
0.5218
0.7022
33.9225
0.5727
0.5578
0.5358
0.7107
32.2680
0.4173
0.6164
0.3491
0.6420
Reg .+DDFM
31.5535
0.6845
0.5237
0.5037
0.6309
30.8141
0.4964
0.5552
0.3663
0.6299
35.3449
0.4631
0.6129
0.3391
0.6489
FusionReg.
34.6501
0.5219
0.4410
0.4728
0.5280
29.0892
0.6338
0.5404
0.5768
0.7611
44.9475
0.3849
0.4727
0.3962
0.5297
MURF
24.0411
0.2911
0.3605
0.2584
0.3905
27.7418
0.2871
0.4605
0.3143
0.5463
26.3277
0.1604
0.3801
0.1586
0.3373
UMF-CMGR
24.2902
0.4119
0.4493
0.2914
0.4271
32.0586
0.3703
0.4557
0.2410
0.4628
30.9089
0.2641
0.4449
0.2434
0.3849
TABLE II: Quantitative comparison of our SeeRF with existing state-of-the-art methods of the image fusion task on the MFNet, FMB, and LLVIP datasets. ( Bold : optimal performance)
Fig. 8: Qualitative comparison of SeeRF with state-of-the-art image registration and fusion methods on the MFNet dataset for semantic segmentation task.
Fig. 9: Qualitative comparison of SeeRF with state-of-the-art image registration and fusion methods on the FMB dataset for semantic segmentation task.
Methods
Bac.
Car
Per.
Bike
Curve
Car_stop
Guar.
Col.
Bump
mIoU
Reg.+U2Fusion
97.87
86.47
63.54
62.95
31.36
28.33
4.87
52.12
50.73
53.14
Reg.+DDFM
97.91
87.84
64.83
63.20
29.92
27.92
4.27
49.67
50.85
52.93
FusionReg
97.54
84.17
57.31
59.29
23.82
25.96
5.97
43.19
39.10
48.48
MURF
97.52
83.35
55.72
60.88
22.48
27.74
4.88
41.60
37.24
47.93
UMF-CMGR
97.67
84.86
58.59
61.09
27.17
27.31
3.15
42.46
47.67
50.00
SuperFusion
97.76
84.68
62.28
61.26
35.96
21.00
0.44
49.00
50.37
51.42
TABLE III: Quantitative results of multi-modal semantic segmentation validation for all categories in MFNet dataset. ( Bold : optimal performance)
Methods
Bac.
Road
Sid.
Buil.
Lamp
Sign
Veg.
Sky
Per.
Car
Trunk
Bus
Mot.
Bic.
Pole
mIoU
Reg .+U2Fusion
15.74
88.24
48.91
82.16
24.34
74.44
86.44
94.05
56.54
78.71
29.19
23.07
36.51
-
48.51
56.20
Reg .+DDFM
15.29
88.06
47.16
81.63
29.79
74.53
86.29
94.04
55.95
78.25
22.84
20.83
37.96
-
48.89
55.82
FusionReg
16.14
86.75
48.53
80.05
30.36
73.76
84.86
93.41
43.77
79.19
28.48
20.49
37.56
-
48.06
55.10
MURF
16.20
87.14
45.97
78.53
22.39
72.80
84.02
92.70
44.35
77.25
18.84
14.53
32.05
-
47.04
48.92
UMF-CMGR
15.70
87.46
46.30
78.76
26.56
72.41
84.47
93.09
43.57
78.11
21.60
16.99
37.76
-
46.61
53.53
SuperFusion
15.77
86.53
47.39
80.81
25.31
73.55
85.05
93.47
45.20
78.32
25.82
20.44
29.04
-
48.05
53.91
TABLE IV: Quantitative results of multi-modal semantic segmentation validation for all categories in FMB dataset. ( Bold : optimal performance)
Fig. 10: Qualitative comparison of SeeRF with state-of-the-art image registration and fusion methods on the LLVIP dataset for object detection task.
Methods
Precision
Recall
mAP@50
mAP@50:95
Reg .+U2Fusion
0.869
0.737
0.814
0.408
Reg .+DDFM
0.854
0.717
0.797
0.392
FusionReg.
0.576
0.445
0.493
0.179
MURF
0.688
0.532
0.596
0.246
UMF-CMGR
0.596
0.490
0.531
0.207
SuperFusion
0.652
0.565
0.571
0.242
TABLE V: Quantitative comparison of object detection on the LLVIP dataset. ( Bold : optimal performance)
Fig. 11: Visualization of qualitative comparison results in the ablation study.
DGS
FMG
CTF
EPE
MAE
MI
CC
SSIM
✓
✓
4.0561
0.0127
1.6216
0.9220
0.8944
✓
✓
3.9055
0.0132
1.6204
0.9135
0.8910
✓
✓
10.6553
0.0248
1.1675
0.7887
0.8175
✓
✓
✓
3.8548
0.0119
1.6698
0.9279
0.9010
VFM
CCE
CRFE
SD
VIF
CC
QAB/F
SSIM
✓
✓
33.4954
0.4360
0.5569
0.2890
0.4169
TABLE VI: Quantitative comparison of the ablation experiment of the general components on MFNet. ( Bold : optimal performance)
Fig. 12: Qualitative comparison of semantic segmentation results in the ablation study.
Methods
Bac.
Car
Per.
Bike
Curve
Car_stop
Guar.
Col.
Bump
mIoU
w/o_CRFE
97.81
83.91
64.41
59.86
38.87
25.73
4.00
40.16
48.90
51.52
w/o_CCE
97.89
84.91
64.61
62.20
39.40
26.91
3.42
47.75
51.65
53.19
w/o_VFM
97.92
85.73
67.97
62.62
38.68
24.05
3.96
47.27
54.71
53.66
SeeRF (ours)
98.08
87.43
68.85
64.00
43.24
25.03
3.17
46.16
52.50
54.27
TABLE VII: Quantitative results of multi-modal semantic segmentation validation in ablation study for all categories in MFNet dataset. ( Bold : optimal performance)
Methods
MAE
MI
CC
PSNR
SSIM
w/o GEN.
0.1379
0.5440
0.0535
15.8329
0.3983
SeeRF (ours)
0.1067
0.6296
0.2271
18.3355
0.5915
TABLE VIII: Quantitative results of generative credibility analysis between generated regions and the real modality in the MFNet dataset. ( Bold : optimal performance)
Fig. 13: Qualitative comparison with the state-of-the-art image registration and fusion methods in the real world.
Module
Params (M)
FLOPs (G)
Time (s)
SeeRF-Reg.
113.367
437.667
0.142
SeeRF-Fus.
1701.765
1968.819
5.293
TABLE IX: Quantitative Computational Overhead Comparison of SeeRF. (Params.: number of parameters, FLOPs: floating-point operations, Time: inference time)
Image registration and fusion aim to establish spatial correspondences from misaligned multi-modal source images, and integrate complementary information. However, in real-world imaging scenarios, source images are often affected by complex and diverse degradations, such as low illumination, noise, etc., which severely hinder the effectiveness of registration and fusion. To address this issue, we propose a mutually reinforced image registration and fusion diffusion framework via degradation-aware learning, termed Diff-RF. It explores the intrinsic coupling between registration-fusion and information restoration in the degradation conditions, enabling high-quality fusion of unregistered images under complex degradation conditions. First, the intra-modal restoration module is designed to alleviate modality-specific degradations by leveraging information within each modality, thereby providing more reliable structural representations for registration and facilitating subsequent cross-modal fusion. Second, we develop a cross-modal diffusion registration and fusion module that establishes bidirectional interaction between registration and fusion. By integrating fusion-derived visual cues and correspondence-based geometric conditions into the diffusion process, the proposed framework progressively refines spatial alignment and exploits cross-modal complementary information to achieve collaborative enhancement. Rather than treating them as independent components, degradation-aware information restoration and the collaborative optimization of registration and fusion are tightly coupled, achieving overall performance improvements. Extensive experiments on multiple extended datasets demonstrate that Diff-RF achieves superior registration accuracy and fusion quality under various degraded scenarios, exhibiting strong robustness and generalization ability.
Xunpeng Yi, Zaixi Du, Qinglong Yan +3
Electronic Information School, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Spatial registration across different visual modalities is a critical but formidable step in multi-modality image fusion for real-world perception. Although several methods are proposed to address this issue, the existing registration-based fusion methods typically require extensive pre-registration operations, limiting their efficiency. To overcome these limitations, a general cross-modality registration method guided by visual priors is proposed for infrared and visible image fusion task, termed FusionRegister. Firstly, FusionRegister achieves robustness by learning cross-modality misregistration representations rather than forcing alignment of all differences, ensuring stable outputs even under challenging input conditions. Moreover, FusionRegister demonstrates strong generality by operating directly on fused results, where misregistration is explicitly represented and effectively handled, enabling seamless integration with diverse fusion methods while preserving their intrinsic properties. In addition, its efficiency is further enhanced by serving the backbone fusion method as a natural visual prior provider, which guides the registration process to focus only on mismatch regions, thereby avoiding redundant operations. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that FusionRegister not only inherits the fusion quality of state-of-the-art methods, but also delivers superior detail alignment and robustness, making it highly suitable for infrared and visible image fusion method. The code will be available at https://github.com/bociic/FusionRegister.
Congcong Bian, Haolong Ma, Hui Li +4
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China · School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Suzhou, China
Image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from multiple source images to produce a more informative and visually consistent representation, benefiting both human perception and downstream vision tasks. Despite recent progress, most existing fusion methods are designed for specific tasks (i.e., multi-modal, multi-exposure, or multi-focus fusion) and struggle to effectively preserve source information during the fusion process. This limitation primarily arises from task-specific architectures and the degradation of source information caused by deep-layer propagation. To overcome these issues, we propose UniFusion, a unified image fusion framework designed to achieve cross-task generalization. First, leveraging DINOv3 for modality-consistent feature extraction, UniFusion establishes a shared semantic space for diverse inputs. Second, to preserve the understanding of each source image, we introduce a reconstruction-alignment loss to maintain consistency between fused outputs and inputs. Finally, we employ a bilevel optimization strategy to decouple and jointly optimize reconstruction and fusion objectives, effectively balancing their coupling relationship and ensuring smooth convergence. Extensive experiments across multiple fusion tasks demonstrate UniFusion's superior visual quality, generalization ability, and adaptability to real-world scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/dusongcheng/UniFusion.
Xingyuan Li, Songcheng Du, Yang Zou +3
Zhejiang University · Northwest Polytechnical University · Dalian University of Technology +1