Multi-Source Image Fusion

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5 papers in the last four weeks, up 67% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 37

Sep 30, 2026cs.CV

When Integral Meets Decomposition: A Signal-Level Self-Supervised Feature Decompose Paradigm for Multi-Modal Image Fusion

Multimodal image fusion (MMIF) aims to integrate complementary information from different modalities into a high-quality fused image and support downstream tasks. Recently, feature decomposition has become an important paradigm by separating source images into common and modality-specific unique features. However, existing methods lack clear supervision because ground-truth (GT) decomposition feature maps are unavailable. They usually combine multiple image-level metrics as losses, which are inherently incomplete and may conflict since each pixel couples attributes such as texture, edge, and contour. To address this, we propose a 1D signal-level self-supervised feature decomposition paradigm. Our core insight is to reformulate feature decomposition from unclear 2D image-level supervision into an integral-driven 1D signal-level optimization problem. This objective-level reformulation uses the 1D signal form to compute the integral constraint. The decomposer is optimized by the integral area between common and original signals, enabling more stable optimization with a clear optimization objective. Our model follows a two-stage SSL framework. Stage I designs dual pretext tasks for integral-driven decomposition at the signal level and structure-preserving reconstruction at the image level. Stage II fuses unique features and combines them with common features to reconstruct the fused image. Experiments on representative MMIF tasks show state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Code: github.com/Wangjiayu0512/SIDFusion.

Zeyu Wang, Jiayu Wang, Haiyu Song +1

College of Computer Science and Engineering, Dalian Minzu University, Dalian, China · School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Hunan, China · Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Multi-Source Image Fusion Multimodal Disentangled Representation Learning Self-Supervised Learning Multimodal Fusion

Sep 30, 2026cs.CV

Beyond Spatial-Domain Supervision: A Relation Constrained Space for Multi-Modal Image Fusion

Multi-modal image fusion (MMIF) aims to form a single image by integrating shared information, preserving complementary cues, and coordinating cross-modal conflicts across modalities. However, due to the absence of ground-truth fused images, existing MMIF supervision commonly uses spatial-domain sources or gradient variants as surrogate ground truth, making the supervision mechanism inherently misaligned with the goal of MMIF and causing pixel-level compromise or modality bias. To address this, we propose a relation-constrained supervision paradigm that moves fusion supervision from the spatial domain to a learned relation space. Rather than relying solely on direct source approximation, we further leverage frozen pretrained representation models as information providers and design a learnable feature adapter to align heterogeneous DINO and CLIP features into a unified supervision space. The adapter infers three relation parameters, namely sharedness, dominance, and coordination radius, which define three losses corresponding to the MMIF's goal. To make this space reliable, we devise a self-supervised contrastive ranking objective tailored to the adapter and couple it with the fusion network through alternating optimization. Extensive experiments show that the proposed supervision space yields significant gains regardless of which mainstream backbone the fusion network adopts, offering a supervision paradigm better aligned with the goal of MMIF. Code: github.com/GMY628/RCS-Fusion.

Zeyu Wang, Mingyu Ge, Haiyu Song +1

College of Computer Science and Engineering Dalian Minzu University · Department of Automation Tsinghua University

Multi-Source Image Fusion Multimodal Fusion

Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

Diff-RF: Mutually Reinforced Image Registration and Fusion via Degradation-Aware Learning

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

Multi-Source Image Fusion Cross-Modal Image Registration Multimodal Fusion Multimodal Diffusion Models

Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

RoES: Rotational Equivariant Selective-frequency Fusion for Multimodal Images

Infrared-visible image fusion facilitates robust multimodal perception by integrating complementary textural nuances from visible sensors with thermal signatures from infrared systems. Due to the task's inherently ill-posed nature, existing methods heavily rely on structural priors but typically enforce rotation equivariance uniformly across all features. Such a holistic approach overlooks a critical distinction where low-frequency shared structures strictly adhere to equivariant constraints while high-frequency modality-specific details require greater flexibility to preserve unique information. To bridge this gap, we propose RoES, a Rotational Equivariant Selective-frequency fusion network. Instead of employing static decomposition, we introduce a trainable rotation-enhanced updater/predictor module to dynamically decouple low- and high-frequency components. The resulting representations are then processed through a dual-branch fusion module tailored for spectral consistency. Specifically, a rotation-equivariant Mamba is employed to capture long-range structural dependencies in the low-frequency domain, while a polar spectral attention-based Dual-Fourier block refines high-frequency details under explicit low-frequency guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoES consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in both fusion quality and downstream object detection, establishing a robust solution for multimodal fusion by reconciling frequency-selective features with equivariant constraints. The source code is available at https://github.com/BryceLosky/RoES-Fusion.

Jiabao Wang, Wenjian Liu, Yaoming Cai +5

Zhongnan University of Economics and Law Wuhan, Hubei, China · City University of Macau Macau, China · University of Illinois Chicago Chicago, Illinois, United States +3

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Equivariant Neural Networks Frequency-Domain Image Processing Multimodal Fusion

Sep 9, 2026cs.CV

When Fusion Fails: Corruption-Aware Rebalanced Fusion for Multi-Modal Medical Image Segmentation

Multi-modal medical image segmentation leverages complementary diagnostic information, yet fusion can underperform single-modality baselines when spatially aligned inputs differ in quality. Here, "corruption" primarily denotes resolution-induced degradation rather than misalignment or complete modality absence, while synthetic noise is evaluated only as an auxiliary setting. We identify a critical optimization-inference inconsistency: degraded modalities can receive weak training updates yet substantially affect predictions, indicating active interference with fusion. We attribute this failure to resampling-induced feature corruption and optimization bias, where noisy features propagate through skip connections and encourage unreliable modality selection. We therefore propose CoReFuse-Med, a Corruption-aware Rebalanced Fusion framework that suppresses corruption during feature transmission and rebalances modality contributions during high-level fusion. Experiments on EPVS, BraTS, and WMH, including multiple Z-axis slice-retention ratios and an auxiliary noise test, demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness under modality-quality discrepancies. Our code is available at https://github.com/lrever/CoReFuse.

Yuchen Pei, Xiaoyu Hu, Yixiong Zou +5

Central China Normal University Wuhan, China · Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuhan, China · Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine Guangzhou, China +2

Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation Multi-Source Image Fusion Multimodal Robustness Medical Image Segmentation Multimodal Fusion

Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

IT-TextFusion: Iterative Text-Image Interaction with Text-Guided Residual Refinement for Degradation-Aware Image Fusion

Text-guided image fusion has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for integrating multi-modal information while enabling flexible and task-oriented fusion control. However, existing text-guided fusion methods often rely on shallow semantic-visual interaction and limited attention mechanisms, which restrict their ability to robustly handle complex degradations and fully exploit textual guidance. In this paper, we propose an iterative text-guided image fusion framework that incorporates text-conditioned feature interaction across multiple fusion and refinement stages. The proposed method integrates deepest-level Cross-Attention, multi-scale Cross-Gate Fusion, and stage-specific text-conditioned modulation, allowing the global text embedding to condition hierarchical feature fusion and residual refinement. By repeatedly injecting the pooled text embedding across hierarchical decoder and refinement stages, the proposed framework provides degradation-aware global semantic conditioning while preserving complementary information from the visible and infrared modalities. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the proposed method improves several information-preservation and perceptual-quality metrics, while exhibiting metric-dependent trade-offs on some datasets.

Siyang Liu, Peiyi Zhou, Tianle Jin +3

Chair of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Real-time Systems, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Cross-Modal Attention

Aug 22, 2026cs.CV

UniDiffFusion: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Multi-Task and Degradation-Robust Image Fusion

General image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from multiple source images, but existing methods often rely on task-specific models and struggle to maintain robust performance under diverse degradation conditions. In this paper, we propose UniDiffFusion, a unified diffusion framework for multi-task and degradation-robust image fusion. UniDiffFusion leverages the strong generative prior of a pretrained diffusion model to establish a shared fusion backbone across heterogeneous fusion tasks, while introducing task- and degradation-aware conditional adaptation to accommodate their distinct information-selection requirements. Specifically, we employ task prompt modulation to progressively adapt the shared diffusion representations to different fusion objectives, and develop a degradation prompt router to dynamically retrieve degradation-aware priors and restore corrupted source features before fusion. Furthermore, an application prompt bank is introduced to incorporate task-oriented semantic guidance for downstream applications, such as object detection and semantic segmentation, without altering the shared fusion and restoration pathways. The proposed framework is trained in a progressive manner to decouple fusion learning, degradation-aware restoration, and application-specific adaptation, thereby reducing interference among heterogeneous objectives. Extensive experiments on visible-infrared, multi-exposure, and multi-focus image fusion demonstrate that UniDiffFusion achieves superior fusion quality and robustness under both clean and degraded conditions. Moreover, UniDiffFusion consistently improves downstream detection and semantic segmentation performance, demonstrating its effectiveness as a unified diffusion framework for both perceptual fusion and task-oriented vision.

Xingxin Xu, Siqi Zhao, Xin Li +3

School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University · School of Artificial Intelligence, Tianjin University · School of Automation, Southeast University +1

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Multimodal Fusion

Aug 13, 2026cs.CV

P2Fusion: Prompt-based Progressive Infrared-Visible Image Fusion via Dual-Prior Distillation

Infrared-visible image fusion (IVIF) is pivotal for multimodal perception, yet reconciling the inherent information disparity between thermal and textural features remains a fundamental challenge. Existing prior-guided methods often rely on static constraints that induce optimization conflicts or utilize extrinsic semantic priors from large-scale foundation models (e.g., CLIP/DINO), which frequently fail to exploit the intrinsic modality characteristics essential for high-fidelity fusion. To address these issues, we propose P2Fusion, a prior-guided distillation-based framework that reformulates IVIF via dual intrinsic prompts. Instead of imposing hard-coded penalties, we distill image-intrinsic priors, thermal saliency and spatial quality, into learnable dynamic regulators. Specifically, a Teach-to-Fuse mechanism provides dual-granularity progressive guidance, coupled with a Gated Dynamic Expert Recalibration (GDER) module for decoupled feature refinement. This design enables the network to adaptively mediate modal competition through expert specialization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that P2Fusion achieves state-of-the-art performance across five mainstream datasets. Notably, our framework demonstrates consistent performance advantages in fusion quality, achieving state-of-the-art results in 14 out of 20 key evaluation metrics across 5 benchmarks. Furthermore, it effectively contributes to the robustness of downstream perception, such as +3.2% mAP on MSRS, +0.5% mAP on M3FD and +0.9% mAP on DroneVehicle for object detection. Our code will be available at https://github.com/YiShi99/P2Fusion

Yi Shi, Huichao Xie, Yuqing Wang +7

Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China · Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China · Rocket Force University of Engineering, Xi’an, China +1

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Multimodal Fusion

Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

RegisterBridgeMM: A Register-Centric Framework for RGB-Infrared Object Detection

RGB-infrared (RGB-IR) object detection benefits from complementary visible and thermal cues, but effective fusion remains challenging under illumination changes, weather variation, and cluttered scenes. Existing RGB-IR fusion methods often trade expressive patch-level interaction for lighter but more constrained adaptation mechanisms. We empirically observe that pretrained register tokens contain both modality-shared and modality-specific information on paired RGB-IR inputs, suggesting that they can serve as a compact substrate for cross-modal communication. Building on this observation, we propose RegisterBridgeMM, a register-mediated fusion framework organized as a three-stage register lifecycle. Aggregate preserves per-modality register summarization inherited from pretraining; Bridge performs bidirectional register-to-patch reading with consensus-residual regulation; and Project translates the resulting register summary into spatially adaptive calibration of patch features. This register pathway avoids dense patch-to-patch cross-modal interaction while preserving the pretrained patch representation. With both backbone streams frozen, RegisterBridgeMM achieves the highest mAP50-95 among the evaluated methods on all four benchmarks: LLVIP, M3FD, DroneVehicle, and FLIR-Aligned.

Zian Wang, Hangchuan Liang, Yuehua Chen +4

Jilin University, China · Taiyuan University of Technology, China · Shenzhen University, China

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared Object Detection Cross-Modal Attention Multimodal Fusion

Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

Clarity Contrast and Similarity Selection for Multi-Focus Image Fusion

Multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) aims to generate an all-in-focus image from multiple images of the same scene focused at different regions. Most existing deep learning-based methods lack explicit interaction between the source images, which limits their performance and interpretability. This paper presents a novel Clarity Contrast and Similarity Selection Network (CSNet), to bridge direct information exchange for MFIF. Specifically, by contrasting the clarity differences between source images within our proposed Clarity Contrast Attention Module (CCAM), we mutually enhance sharp features while suppressing blurry ones. This allows us to identify the exactly focused regions in each source and locate the focused-defocused boundaries. Moreover, the Defocus Spread Effect (DSE) degrades pixels in all source images around the boundaries. To further refine these ambiguous areas, we introduce a Similarity Selection Strategy, which reconstructs an initial clear image from source images and selects optimal pixels by comparing the similarity among them. Through this interactive approach, CSNet effectively preserves focused regions as well as recovering natural boundaries to fuse an all-in-focus output. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our code is available on Github: https://github.com/ZYC-HUST/CSNet.

Yicheng Zhang, Haoyou Deng, Zhiqiang Li +3

Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

Multi-Source Image Fusion

Aug 2, 2026cs.CV

Ranking Infrared-Visible Fusion the Way Humans Do: A Learned Pairwise Preference Measure

Human pairwise comparison provides a direct basis for perceptual infrared-visible image fusion assessment, but dense annotation becomes costly as method pools grow. We present the Learned Perceptual Image Fusion Measure (LPIFM), among the earliest learned fusion assessors trained directly on dense human A/B/Tie comparisons. LPIFM jointly examines both source images and both fused candidates, combining a shared hierarchical encoder, triadic interaction, and a tie-aware objective to predict comparative preference and perceptual indifference. We construct and publicly release all 6,300 unordered comparisons among 25 methods on 21 VIFB scenes, collected through blinded, randomized annotation and expert adjudication. Across four VIFB evaluation settings, LPIFM achieves 79.2-84.0% agreement with human pairwise judgments and Spearman correlations of 0.941-0.977 with human-derived method rankings. On full method pools, accuracy exceeds the strongest of 19 conventional metrics by 16.3-21.1 pp. Consistency diagnostics show 99.98-100% candidate-swap agreement and no observed decisive preference cycles. External experiments on EVAFusion further demonstrate rapid adaptation to a different fusion-evaluation preference protocol. After only three epochs of fine-tuning, LPIFM surpasses all 19 conventional metrics in accuracy, macro-F1, and ranking correlation. LPIFM provides a scalable instrument for human-aligned fusion assessment, with the preference corpus, model weights, and code publicly available.

Haoran Liu, Mingzhe Liu, Peng Li +1

School of Artificial Intelligence and Electronic Engineering, Sichuan Technology and Business University, Chengdu 611745, China · College of Nuclear Technology and Automation Engineering, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu 610059, China · National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230029, China

Pairwise Preference Learning Multi-Source Image Fusion Pairwise Comparison Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Image Quality Assessment

Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

Unleashing the Power of Text: Text-Guided Flow Matching for Image Fusion under Complex Degradations

Infrared-visible image fusion under realistic degradation scenarios is a challenging task, as degradations not only cause a loss of reliable modality-specific information in observed images but also hinder the fusion process. Recent studies indicate that text can provide prior information about degradation characteristics, complementing the limited evidence available from corrupted input images and facilitating fusion. However, existing methods typically inject fixed global text representations into visual features, making it difficult for textual guidance to adapt to spatially varying degradations, local structures, and thermal saliency. To this end, we propose TGFusion, a text-guided latent-space flow matching framework that unifies degradation suppression and cross-modal fusion. TGFusion encodes task, degradation, and generation cues into structured prompts. To fully exploit these priors, we design a Prompt-conditioned Multi-stream Joint Flow Transformer that represents text as an independent semantic stream alongside fusion, visible, and infrared streams. Joint attention enables token-level bidirectional interaction and layer-wise updating among semantic and visual representations, allowing degradation semantics to dynamically guide reliable information selection and fusion latent generation. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and complex degradation scenarios demonstrate that TGFusion achieves superior or competitive performance in perceptual quality, image naturalness, structural-detail preservation, and infrared-saliency retention, while remaining robust across diverse single and compound degradations.

Axi Niu, Jieheng Li, Kang Zhang +3

School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China · School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China · School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea +2

Flow Matching Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Multimodal Fusion

Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

MIND: Multimodal Intent-Driven Network via Diffusion Transformers for Medical Image Fusion

Medical image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from diverse imaging modalities to support clinical diagnosis. Existing methods typically apply uniform fusion rules globally, lacking a deep understanding of diagnostic intents and pathological structures. To address these limitations, we propose MIND, a Multimodal Intent-Driven Network via Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for medical image fusion. Specifically, we utilize BioMedGPT to generate intent-driven fusion texts from source images, guiding the fusion process with pathology-aware diagnostic intents. To combat the loss of 2D spatial continuity caused by 1D sequence flattening in DiTs, we design a Multi-scale Latent Adapter. This module explicitly extracts source image features before serialization, injecting them into the network via strict dimensional alignment to effectively supplement image features. To resolve the semantic shift caused by decoupling image outputs from diagnostic intents, we design a medical semantic consistency loss. This loss ensures deep semantic locking between fused images and fusion texts while maintaining the stability of the underlying physical manifold reconstruction. Comprehensive experiments on the Harvard, BraTS, and GFP datasets reveal that MIND delivers superior fusion quality, significantly improves downstream brain tumor segmentation accuracy, and enables flexible interactive fusion, holding significant promise for intent-driven intelligent clinical decision support systems.

Yunzhan Fu, Xiangyu Shen, Yifei Sun +3

Transvascular Implantation Devices Research Institute, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Hangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University, Hangzhou, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China +3

Multi-Source Image Fusion Diffusion Transformer Multimodal Fusion

Jul 29, 2026cs.CV

Registration-Grounded Spectral Fusion for Unregistered WLI/NBI Endoscopic Lesion Segmentation

White-light imaging (WLI) and narrow-band imaging (NBI) provide complementary views of endoscopic lesions, but their paired observations are often spatially misaligned due to viewpoint changes, tissue deformation, and sequential handheld acquisition. This makes direct WLI/NBI fusion prone to mixing non-corresponding regions and may even degrade segmentation around lesion boundaries. To address this problem, we propose a reliability-aware complex-domain fusion framework for paired-but-unregistered WLI/NBI lesion segmentation. The framework first establishes topology-regularized feature correspondence and further estimates where the cross-modal correspondence is reliable. Guided by this reliability, the model selectively fuses WLI and NBI features in a learnable complex representation. In this representation, WLI-derived cues mainly provide appearance-related magnitude responses, while NBI-derived cues provide structure-sensitive phase responses. Unlike conventional real-valued or symmetric multimodal fusion, the proposed method explicitly models the different roles of WLI and NBI and suppresses unreliable cross-modal interaction in locally mismatched regions. Experiments on paired WLI/NBI endoscopic datasets show that the proposed reliability-aware registration grounding and complex-domain fusion consistently improve lesion segmentation performance. Role-reversal and module ablation studies further validate the necessity of both the modality-role design and reliability-guided cross-modal interaction.

Pengyu Jie, Wanquan Liu, Rui He +5

School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, 518107, Guangdong, P.R. China · Department of Otolaryngology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510000, P.R. China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University, Haikou, 570228, China +2

Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation Multi-Source Image Fusion Medical Image Registration Medical Image Segmentation Multimodal Fusion

Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

BeyondFusion: Self-Aligned Latent Diffusion for Calibration-Free Infrared Super-Resolution and Infrared-Visible Fusion

Mobile infrared-visible imaging typically pairs a compact infrared sensor with a high-resolution visible camera for complementary perception. While cross-sensor misalignment caused by different optics, viewpoints, fields of view, and exposure timings hinders practical deployment. In this paper, we propose BeyondFusion, a unified latent diffusion framework for calibration-free visible-guided infrared super-resolution and infrared-visible fusion tasks. The proposed framework supports both task-specific training and joint training where two tasks are optimized and executed as two readouts of the same generative process. Instead of relying on explicit registration or geometric warping, BeyondFusion introduces a cross-modal self-aligning (CMSA) module into the denoising U-Net. CMSA reorganizes infrared and visible latent tokens into a shared attention space to learn content-adaptive cross-modal correspondence during the denoising process. Together with misalignment augmentation module, the model is facilitated to exploit visible structural and semantic cues while preserving thermal consistency, enabling high-frequency infrared reconstruction and informative fused-image generation under uncalibrated conditions. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and a mobile infrared-visible imaging system show strong performance across aligned inputs, low-resolution infrared observations, synthetic misalignments, and real mobile captures with unsynchronized sensors. Ablation studies, unified training analysis, and downstream pedestrian detection further validate the effectiveness of BeyondFusion for calibration-free multimodal imaging.

Minchong Chen, Xiaoyun Yuan, Minyu Cao +4

MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of AI, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Institute of Modern Optics, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Cross-Modal Alignment Image Super-Resolution

Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

ConFusion: Continuous Fusion Space Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Controllable infrared-visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary thermal and structural information with flexible region-aware modulation, producing fused images that adapt to diverse user requirements and downstream tasks. However, existing methods typically rely on predefined discrete control conditions, leading to a sparse space that fails to support fine-grained modulation demands. To address this, we propose ConFusion, a novel framework that learns the continuous fusion space via Gaussian-conditioned spatial-aware modulation, enabling instance-level fine-grained controllable infrared and visible image fusion. ConFusion employs a dual-branch architecture to disentangle modality-invariant and modality-specific representations under joint reconstruction and text-guided semantic alignment. Gaussian-conditioned instance modulation variables coupled with Grounded SAM-based instance masks guide instance-level fine-grained modulation through the Mask-Guided Specific Feature Modulator, while the Text-Driven Invariant Feature Enhancer improves semantic consistency and enhances fusion. During inference, the multimodal large language model parses user intents into instance-level modulation variables to guide image fusion. Extensive experiments show that ConFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics in both fusion quality and downstream tasks, while supporting fine-grained controllable image fusion. Our code is available at https://github.com/HeyufeiAnto/Confusion

Guo Yurong, He Yufei, Li Yonghao +3

North China Electric Power University Baoding, Hebei, China · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Beijing, China

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Multimodal Fusion

Jul 22, 2026cs.CV

Current Injection Spiking Neural Network for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) integrates the complementary information of two modalities into a single image with richer scene content. While existing methods are largely built on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which densely compute over all activations, spiking neural networks (SNNs) communicate through sparse binary spikes and compute only where and when a spike occurs, offering a route to more energy-efficient fusion. However, directly applying SNNs to IVIF creates a fundamental tension: cross-modal fusion relies on fine-grained responses from both modalities, whereas binary spikes can discard complementary cues that remain below the firing threshold. The membrane potential retains these subthreshold responses before firing, letting both modalities jointly shape the output when integrated at this stage. Building on this, we propose CIS-Fuse, a spiking network that performs cross-modal fusion directly at the membrane-potential level. At its core is the current injection spiking (CIS) operator, which injects one modality as a gated auxiliary current into the driving neuron of the other, so the two integrate before spike firing, with a per-channel learnable injection strength that adaptively regulates the modulation magnitude. Building on CIS, we construct a bidirectional cross-modal fusion (BCMF) module and deploy it on a dual-branch architecture with asymmetric stacking depths, where the two branches develop a clear functional specialization. Extensive experiments on four IVIF benchmarks and on downstream detection and segmentation show that CIS-Fuse achieves fusion quality on par with state-of-the-art ANN-based methods while inheriting the energy efficiency of spike-based computation, with roughly an order of magnitude lower inference energy than the similarly-sized ANN-based DCEvo. Code will be released upon publication.

Rui Zhao, Zhuoyuan Li, Wenrui Li +4

Efficient Neural Network Inference Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Spiking Neural Networks Multimodal Fusion

Jul 20, 2026cs.CV

Coarse-to-fine Framework for Generative MEF via Implicit Neural Representation

Multi-exposure fusion (MEF) expands the luminance range beyond what a single exposure can capture. Combining images taken at different exposure levels requires handling geometric differences while naturally merging their complementary brightness information. It often demands generative completion where details are missing. Diffusion-based generative methods address these challenges, however, they are computationally expensive and struggle to preserve fine structures in saturated regions. We propose LIIFusion, a coarse-to-fine framework that balances fusion quality and efficiency in generative MEF. The coarse stage performs low resolution generative fusion, enhanced by an adaptive exposure correction that recovers structure lost in saturated over-exposed areas. The fine stage adapts a local implicit image function into a multi-exposure fusion function: conditioned on the HR OE/UE sources and the coarse output, it queries arbitrary target coordinates and fuses source evidence regardless of the HR input resolution. LIIFusion achieves up to 3.5

\times

speed-up over existing generative methods while maintaining or improving structural fidelity and perceptual quality. We believe this framework provides an effective pathway toward making generative MEF more practical in real-world applications.

Sangmin Han, Jinho Kim, Jinwoo Kim +2

Yonsei University · AI Lab, CTO Division, LG Electronics

Multi-Source Image Fusion Image Enhancement HDR Imaging

Jul 15, 2026eess.IV

Video to All-in-focus Image Reconstruction Algorithm for Automated Microscopic Urinalysis

Microscopic urinalysis is a routine diagnostic test at hospitals. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of deep learning methods to automate microscopic urinalysis. These methods rely on high-quality images of the urine samples in which each cell is clearly identifiable. However, in practice, the urine sample on a glass slide has a multi-layer structure; hence, all the cells are not clearly visible within the depth of field of a lens focused at a particular focal plane. It demands acquiring multiple images at different focal planes to correctly identify each cell in a given urine sample, which is a time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose to simplify the task by recording a video, in place of acquiring multiple images, while gradually changing the focus of the lens manually by hand. A typical length of the video is from 2 to 14 seconds. We reconstruct an all-in-focus image from the recorded video frames and apply a deep learning model to detect and classify urine sediments. As a proof of concept, we conduct experiments on 14 videos acquired by a trained lab technician in a usual diagnostic lab environment and show the effectiveness of the proposed automated urinalysis pipeline with our novel reconstruction algorithm.

Chinmay Nema, Hari Om Aggrawal, Dipam Goswami +2

Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, India · independent researcher, India · Institute of Mathematics and Image Computing, University of Lübeck, Germany +1

Multi-Source Image Fusion Image Reconstruction Microscopy Image Analysis

Jul 3, 2026eess.IV

Model Confidence-Guided Multi-Image Fusion of Fundus Images for Diabetic Retinopathy Diagnosis

Purpose: Early screening for eye diseases is critical in low- and middle-income countries where access to care is limited. We investigate whether a confidence-guided, multi-image diabetic retinopathy diagnosis framework can integrate image filtering with confidence-aware predictions for reliable screening at capture. Methods: We develop a multi-image fusion method that aggregates retinal views to improve confidence and balanced accuracy. Our method uses confidence to identify unreliable predictions, prompting retakes when needed. We compare: (1) a cascaded image-quality and disease diagnosis pipeline using a single image per patient, (2) confidence-based prediction, and (3) our confidence-based multi-image fusion pipeline. All methods are evaluated using a RETFoundGreen backbone on the mBRSET (n = 1,234) and BRSET (n = 7,599) datasets. Results: At 70% coverage, our method achieves 91% balanced accuracy on mBRSET and 97% on BRSET, improvements of ~12% and ~6%, respectively, over cascade filtering. The image-quality cascade reaches sensitivities of 61% on mBRSET and 86% on BRSET, whereas our framework reaches 94% and 96%, respectively, at 50% coverage. Conclusions: Human-annotated quality labels are weakly associated with diagnostic performance, and confidence-based filtering consistently outperforms image quality-based cascaded pipelines. Translational Relevance: Using confidence-based multi-image fusion, patients receive more reliable predictions, reducing incorrect diagnoses during screening. The lightweight backbone and single inference pass per image make the framework compatible with low-latency mobile screening systems in resource-limited settings.

Ananya Raghu, Anisha Raghu, Alice S. Tang +3

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA · Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA · Wilmer Eye Institute, Department of Ophthalmology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA +3

Multi-Source Image Fusion Selective Prediction Diabetic Retinopathy Grading Fundus Imaging

Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

Additive Causal Construction for Transferable and Reconfigurable Cross-System Learning in Multi-Source Image Fusion

In multi-source image fusion scenarios, heterogeneous inputs are typically driven by distinct generative mechanisms and can be viewed as a composition of multiple causal systems. However, cross-system discrepancy (CSD) and cross-system entanglement (CSE) commonly arise during the fusion process, often leading to significant performance degradation under out-of-distribution (OOD) predictions. To address the CSD and CSE issues, we propose the additive causal construction (ACC) framework, which characterizes information fusion at two levels: firstly, it establishes causal "anchors" shared among multiple systems through intervention consistency to enable causal graph transferability (CGT); and secondly, it formalizes the fusion process as causal construction and models the reliability of constructed paths through uncertainty quantification to ensure causal graph reconfigurability (CGR). Building upon this, we revisit the traditional causal representation learning (CRL) with ACC and propose ACC-CRL as a learnable instantiation of the framework. The method explores joint causal content representations across systems via content-mechanism decoupling, and performs response alignment under shared anchors to mitigate CSD. Furthermore, it incorporates structural uncertainty to adaptively regulate the fusion process, thereby suppressing unstable CSE. We conduct systematic experiments on synthetic data (ColorMNIST) and real-world multi-center medical imaging tasks (microvascular invasion (MVI) prediction). The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves OOD generalization while maintaining in-distribution (ID) performance, validating the effectiveness and robustness of the ACC-CRL strategy based on mechanism alignment and uncertainty modeling in open environments.

Zhizhong Fu, Wei Zhou, Zhaoyang Jiang +5

School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China. · Department of Radiology, Huzhou Maternity & Child Health Care Hospital, Huzhou 313000, China. · Department of Radiology, Huzhou Maternity & Child Health Care Hospital Affiliated to Huzhou Normal University,Huzhou 313000,China. +3

Multi-Source Image Fusion Causal Representation Learning OOD Generalization Causal Structure Learning Cross-Domain Transfer Learning

Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

UHD-MFF: Shattering Barriers in Multi-Focus Ultra-High-Definition Image Fusion via Learnable Lookup Tables

With the advancement of imaging technology, ultra-high-definition images have become increasingly essential in modern visual applications. However, existing multi-focus image fusion remains largely confined to low-resolution images and faces three major barriers in UHD scenarios, namely data availability, model adaptability, and deployment feasibility, which severely hinder its practical application. To shatter these barriers, first, we propose the UHD-MFF dataset, the first large-scale ultra-high-resolution multi-focus fusion dataset. Second, we propose a scale-specialized lookup-table framework tailored for ultra-high-resolution images, termed as UMF-LUT. It consists of Coarse-Region Lookup Table (C-LUT) and Detail-Edge Lookup Table (D-LUT). Specifically, C-LUT performs joint queries of multiple gradient cues and semantic cues at low-resolution scales to enable region-level decision-making. Also, D-LUT operates at high-resolution scales, leveraging efficient Laplacian cues to provide complementary edge-level decision information. Such a design makes the model particularly well-suited for ultra-high-resolution multi-focus image fusion. Finally, it offers strong deployability with minimal computational overhead, enabling real-time 4K multi-focus fusion and showing promising potential for smartphone. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it outperforms SOTA methods in both visual fidelity and quantitative metrics. It effectively advances the development of multi-focus image fusion toward ultra-high-resolution imaging scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/zyb5/UHD-MFF.

Yibing Zhang, Xunpeng Yi, Qinglong Yan +3

Electronic Information School, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China · School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · School of Robotics, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China

Multi-Source Image Fusion

Jun 25, 2026cs.CV

Multi-modality Image Fusion under Adverse Weather: Mask-Guided Feature Restoration and Interaction

Multi-modality image fusion (MMIF) enhances scene representation by exploiting complementary cues from different modalities. Adverse weather, however, causes significant image degradation, disrupting feature representation and requiring simultaneous feature restoration and cross-modal complementarity. Existing methods often struggle with effective representation learning under such conditions, limiting their practical performance. To address these challenges, we propose a mask-guided MMIF method that integrates feature restoration and interaction. We first introduce "Pseudo Ground Truth" to simplify training, promoting faster and more effective feature learning. Then, we design a mask generation mechanism based on the mapping relationship between the fused result and the source images, quantifying the relative contribution of each modality during the fusion process. By incorporating the proposed mask-guided cross-modal cross-attention mechanism, the network is encouraged to selectively attend to informative features during modality interaction, mitigating the risk of overfitting to the static distribution of the "Pseudo Ground Truth". Additionally, we propose a mask-guided learning strategy and a task-coupled degradation-aware learning strategy to balance feature restoration and interaction. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in visual quality, quantitative metrics, and downstream tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/AMG-Fuse.

Xilai Li, Xiaosong Li, Haishu Tan +3

Foshan University, Foshan, China · China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing, China · Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China

Multi-Source Image Fusion Cross-Modal Attention Image Restoration Multimodal Fusion

Jun 13, 2026cs.CV

Text-Driven Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images: Achieving Image Scene Adaptation on Hyperbolic Space

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary modalities, while existing Euclidean methods impose rigid distance metrics that distort multi-modal interactions and parent-to-child semantic hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a text-driven fusion framework empowered by hyperbolic manifold learning. During training, BLIP-extracted text prompts serve as topological anchors within the hyperbolic space, guiding vision-attribute alignment through hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate varying semantic granularities. By exploiting the exponential volume growth dictated by the Poincaré ball's negative curvature, this approach seamlessly embeds hierarchical trees to encode coarse-to-fine semantics without metric saturation, while the vast peripheral space prevents texture distortion during cross-modal fusion. At inference, the fusion process autonomously adapts to input content using the learned text-attribute priors, completely eliminating the need for textual input. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets, with code available at https://github.com/Shaoyun2023/TEDFusion.

Huan Kang, Hui Li, Tianyang Xu +3

School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China · Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Cross-Modal Alignment

Jun 10, 2026cs.CV

From 2D Grids to 1D Tokens: Reforming Shared Representations for Multimodal Image Fusion

Multimodal image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from different modalities into a fused image that preserves rich local details while maintaining globally consistent appearance. Existing approaches build shared representations on 2D feature grids, which excel at modeling local structures but offer limited leverage over image-level global appearance factors. To balance these objectives, we introduce a compact 1D token interface based on a frozen pretrained image tokenizer for modeling non-local appearance/base factors. Rather than using the tokenizer as a reconstruction backbone, our design uses the 1D token space as a global carrier while retaining the 2D spatial pathway for local structure restoration. Specifically, we introduce Selective Token Editing (STE), which sparsely updates/replaces a small set of critical tokens, providing a lightweight mechanism to steer global appearance coherence while keeping the fusion backbone unchanged and avoiding extra losses. Experiments on four commonly used benchmarks show that our method achieves the best overall performance, with consistent, multi-metric improvements in both global coherence and local fidelity. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/1D-Fusion-Project-Page/

Yuchen Xian, Yunqiu Xu, Yang He +1

ReLER, The State Key Lab of Brain Machine Intelligence, Zhejiang University · College of Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang University · National University of Singapore +2

Multi-Source Image Fusion Image Tokenization Multimodal Fusion Feature Fusion

Jun 8, 2026cs.CV

Fusing Satellite Imagery and Planimetric Maps for Cross-View Localization

Current cross-view localization methods predominantly rely on satellite imagery as the aerial modality. Although recent work explores planimetric maps (e.g., OpenStreetMap tiles), these approaches often lag in performance. Yet both modalities are widely available and possess complementary properties. Satellite images are closer to ground-level camera imagery, offering finer detail, whereas planimetric maps contain annotated objects (e.g., streetlamps) and remain informative in areas where the ground is occluded, such as by foliage. Despite this, only one prior work provides an end-to-end method to fuse the two modalities, and it does not demonstrate their potential within state-of-the-art methods. To combine the strengths of both modalities, we propose a new fusion module that augments standard encoders and demonstrates that integrating satellite imagery with planimetric maps improves state-of-the-art single-modality methods. The module comprises (i) cross-modal conditioning, which processes each modality's encoding with awareness of the other, and (ii) a patch-level fusion rule that controls the granularity of information exchange. We achieve state-of-the-art results, reducing the mean localization error by 30.13%. Qualitatively, the fusion adaptively selects the more informative modality, improving overall accuracy.

Quang Long Ho Ngo, Zimin Xia, Alexandre Alahi

1 ´Ecole Polytechnique F´ed´erale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

Multi-Source Image Fusion Cross-View Geo-Localization Map-Based Localization Multimodal Fusion Feature Fusion

Jun 6, 2026cs.CV

FMRFusion: Frequency-Aware Multi-View Representation Learning for Heterogeneous Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to generate a composite image that retains significant target information and preserves detailed textures, integrating two heterogeneous modalities. Previous image fusion methods typically adopt a single-module stacking approach to extract features from the two modalities. However, these approaches may result in incomplete learning of their distinct characteristics, thereby limiting the fusion effectiveness and constrain ing robustness in real-world heterogeneous data scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose FMRFusion, a frequency-aware multi-view representation learning network for Heterogeneous Image Fusion. A Multi-Scale Struc tural Perception Module is introduced to effectively capture discriminative structures, extracting fine-grained local structures and essential contextual information. A bilinear frequency decomposition mechanism is employed to sepa rate features into high-frequency and low-frequency components, enabling joint modeling of local details and global representations across different frequency domains. Moreover, a Cross-View Complementary Interaction is incorpo rated to explicitly model and fuse the complementary characteristics between reflected light information and radiative intensity responses, facilitating effective cross-view interaction. We further improve the Performance of the fused results by flow matching, which progressively refines the fused features by learning the transformation from coarse data to high-quality representations. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that FMRFusion achieves superior and consistent performance across a range of fusion tasks, especially in nighttime scenarios

Tao Zhoua, Yunlong Liu, Qinghui Chen +6

Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, 250061, China · Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and System Control, Ministry of Education, Jinan, 250061, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, 999078, China +1

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

May 25, 2026cs.CV

Multi-Modal Building Inspection via Perceiver IO Fusion of Satellite and Street-Level Imagery

We present a multi-modal classification framework that fuses satellite and street-level imagery through a Perceiver IO architecture operating on spatial patch tokens from a shared DINOv2 backbone. The design naturally handles a variable number of street-level views per building without padding or fixed-size pooling, and jointly predicts multi-label roof element and roof material classes. We construct a large-scale dataset of 32,135 buildings (61,672 segments) spanning ten countries, pairing satellite images with up to eight street-level views per segment and evaluating four masking strategies for isolating the target building. We propose an RGB-M masking strategy that appends the building footprint mask as a fourth input channel, providing a soft spatial prior that outperforms hard cropping across both modalities. The Perceiver IO fusion model improves over all other fusion strategies and yields substantial per-class gains for attributes visible from street level (e.g., +11.3 AP for slate, +1.3 AP for dormers), though the satellite-only baseline retains a slight advantage in macro-averaged mAP for classes that are predominantly visible from above. These results establish a scalable, flexible architecture for multi-modal building inspection that can accommodate heterogeneous inputs and multiple output tasks.

Niels Sombekke, Rob G. J. Wijnhoven, Martin R. Oswald

University of Amsterdam (UvA), Amsterdam, The Netherlands · Spotr, The Hague, The Netherlands

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Multi-Source Image Fusion Multimodal Classification Multimodal Fusion Image Classification

May 25, 2026cs.CV

Frequency-Guided Fusion For RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation in complex environments such as urban driving scenes remains challenging under adverse lighting conditions, where RGB images alone provide insufficient information. RGB-Thermal fusion leverages the complementary strengths of visible and infrared imagery to improve scene understanding; however, effectively integrating these heterogeneous modalities at varying levels of feature abstraction remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal fusion architecture built upon dual ConvNeXt V2 backbones that employs stage-wise, modality-adaptive fusion strategies. For early-stage features, we introduce a Frequency-Based Fusion Module that decomposes infrared features into low- and high-frequency components via Gaussian filtering, applies dual-branch spatial attention to selectively emphasize thermal patterns and fine-grained boundaries, and integrates them with RGB features through a confidence-gated residual mechanism. For late-stage features, we design a semantic fusion module with cross-modal attention and multi-scale depthwise convolutions to capture semantic correspondences across modalities. The fused features are decoded via a PANet-style bidirectional decoder with deep supervision. Experiments on MFNet and PST900 demonstrate that our lightest variant achieves 61.73% and 86.24% mIoU, respectively, with only 35.43M parameters, outperforming recent methods while using substantially fewer parameters and lower computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/ismailemrecntz/VISIBLE-INFRARED-SENSOR-FUSION

İsmail Emre Canıtez, Özgür Erkent

Hacettepe University

Multi-Source Image Fusion Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Semantic Segmentation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

May 13, 2026cs.CV

Uncertainty-aware Spatial-Frequency Registration and Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images

Infrared and Visible Image Fusion (IVIF) has shown promise in visual tasks under challenging environments, but fusion under unregistered conditions faces inherent misalignments. Current studies to solve them either predict the deformation parameters coarse-to-fine (i.e., coarse registration and fine registration) or estimate the deformation fields in multi-scales for registration. Though straightforward, they overlook the cumulative errors in registration, which contaminate the fusion stage and severely deteriorate the resulting images. We introduce the Spatial-Frequency Registration and Fusion (SFRF) framework, which incorporates uncertainty estimation and infrared thermal radiation distribution consistency into a unified pipeline to handle the error accumulation for robust registration and fusion across both spatial and frequency domains. Specifically, SFRF constructs a Multi-scale Iterative Registration (MIR) framework that iteratively refines the deformation field across scales, leveraging uncertainty estimation at each stage to mitigate error accumulation and enhance alignment accuracy dynamically. To ensure the accurate alignment of infrared thermal distributions during registration, thermal radiation distribution consistency is employed as a frequency-domain supervisory signal, promoting global consistency in the frequency domain. Based on the spatial-frequency alignment, SFRF further adopts a Dual-branch Spatial-Frequency Fusion (DSFF) module, which incorporates spatial geometric features and frequency distribution information to reconstruct visually appealing images. SFRF achieves impressive performance across diverse datasets.

Xingyuan Li, Haoyuan Xu, Xingyue Zhu +4

Dalian University of Technology · Northwestern Polytechnical University · Dalian Maritime University

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Frequency-Domain Image Processing Cross-Modal Image Registration Deformable Image Registration

May 7, 2026cs.CV

Fusion in Your Way: Aligning Image Fusion with Heterogeneous Demands via Direct Preference Optimization

As a key technique in multi-modal processing, infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) plays a crucial role in integrating complementary spectral information for visual enhancement and downstream vision tasks. Despite remarkable progress, existing methods struggle to flexibly accommodate heterogeneous demands. Achieving adaptive fusion that aligns with various preferences from both human and machine vision remains an open and challenging problem. To address this challenge, we propose DPOFusion, a direct preference optimization (DPO) framework integrating the property-aligned latent diffusion model (PALDM) and the preference-controllable latent diffusion model (PCLDM), enabling task-guided, preference-adaptive IVIF for both human and machine vision. The PALDM leverages a latent fusion prior and a joint conditional loss to generate diverse candidate fusion results with various properties. PCLDM is subsequently fine-tuned via instance direct preference optimization (IDPO), enabling direct control of the final fusion results with heterogeneous preference signals. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework not only attains precise preference alignment among humans, vision-language models, and task-driven networks, but also sets a new benchmark for adaptive fusion quality and task-oriented transferability.

Weijian Su, Songqian Zhang, Yuqi Han +3

School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology · Key Laboratory of Social Computing and Cognitive Intelligence (Dalian University of Technology), Ministry of Education · Institute of Image Processing and Understanding, North Minzu University

Diffusion Model Alignment Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Latent Diffusion Models Direct Preference Optimization Multimodal Fusion

May 7, 2026cs.CV

Adding Thermal Awareness to Visual Systems in Real-Time via Distilled Diffusion Models

Purely RGB-based vision models often fail to provide reliable cues in challenging scenarios such as nighttime and fog, leading to degraded performance and safety risks. Infrared imaging captures heat-emitting sources and provides critical complementary information, but existing high-fidelity fusion methods suffer from prohibitive latency, rendering them impractical for real-time edge deployment. To address this, we propose FusionProxy, a real-time image fusion module designed as a fully independent, plug-and-play component with diffusion level quality. FusionProxy exploits two complementary statistics of a teacher sample ensemble: per-pixel variance in raw image space, used to weight pixel-level supervision, and per-pixel variance inside frozen foundation backbones, used to route feature-level alignment spatially. Once trained, FusionProxy can be directly integrated into any visual perception system without joint optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on static recognition tasks and significantly enhances robustness in dynamic tasks, including closed-loop autonomous driving. Crucially, FusionProxy achieves real-time inference speeds on diverse platforms, from high-end GPUs to commodity hardware, providing a flexible and generalizable solution for all-day perception.

Yuchen Guo, Junli Gong, Wenjun Dong +2

Northwestern University · Northeastern University · Hong Kong Baptist University +1

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Edge Inference Autonomous Driving Perception Multimodal Sensor Fusion

May 4, 2026cs.CV

FLoRA: Fusion-Latent for Optical Reconstruction and Flood Area Segmentation via Cross-Modal Multi-Task Distillation Network

Accurate flood water mapping is critical for disaster management, yet current methods struggle to fully exploit the potential of spaceborne imagery. Optical data offers high interpretability but is limited by environmental conditions, whereas SAR provides reliable all-weather coverage with reduced visual interpretability. FLoRA (Fusion Latent for Optical Reconstruction and Area Segmentation) is a cross-modal multi-task framework that jointly reconstructs high-fidelity optical imagery and segments flood water regions from Sentinel 1 SAR by fusing the complementary strengths of optical and SAR data. During training, a lightweight optical teacher (driven by RGB and NDVI priors) provides pyramidal features that guide SAR representations into a fusion latent space via multiscale windowed cross attention and FiLM conditioning, with gated residuals preventing overcorrection. This design enables multi-task learning across two complementary objectives: (a) SAR-to-optical translation for fine-grained RGB reconstruction and (b) flood water region segmentation for hydrologic interpretation. The dual decoders are optimized using Charbonnier SSIM for structural fidelity, edge FFT magnitude losses for spectral realism, and Dice BCE hydrology-aware edge alignment for precise flood water delineation. A feature distillation constraint further aligns fused SAR features with the optical teacher's manifold. Evaluations on SEN1FLOODS11, DEEPFLOOD, and SEN12MS demonstrate that FLoRA surpasses fusion baselines in PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS, demonstrating that multi-modal fusion within a teacher-guided latent space yields semantically faithful and physically consistent flood-water intelligence from spaceborne observations.

Jagrati Talreja, Tewodros Syum Gebre, Leila Hashemi-Beni

Geomatics Program, College of Science and Technology, North Carolina A&T Technical State University, Greensboro, North Carolina 27411, USA · Institute for Water, Environment and Health, United Nations University, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada

Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation Multi-Source Image Fusion Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Image-to-Image Translation Flood Inundation Mapping Remote Sensing+1

May 3, 2026cs.CV

EAPFusion: Intrinsic Evolving Auxiliary Prior Guidance for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared-visible image fusion aims to create an information-rich fused image by integrating the complementary thermal saliency from infrared sensing and fine textures from visible imaging. Such accurate fusion is essential for real-world perception applications in complex scenes, including nighttime autonomous driving, search and rescue, and surveillance, and can further benefit downstream tasks such as semantic segmentation. However, most existing fusion methods rely upon static trained weights that cannot adapt to scene-specific content at inference time, and often suffer from a granularity mismatch when coarse auxiliary semantics are injected, which makes it difficult to simultaneously highlight targets and preserve details. In this work, we propose EAPFusion to address these issues by using self-evolving intrinsic priors instead of relying on external auxiliary models. Concretely, EAPFusion maintains a compact set of intrinsic priors and progressively updates them across scales. These evolved priors are utilized to dynamically generate convolutional kernels, shifting the paradigm from fixed, pre-trained filters to instance-adaptive parameters via prior-conditioned dynamic convolution. Furthermore, we design a channel-level fusion module that shuffles and interleaves infrared and visible channels, applying local channel mixing to boost cross-modal complementarity. Experiments on different datasets, including cross-dataset evaluation and semantic segmentation, show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative fusion results, and consistently boosts downstream performance. Code is coming soon.

Zhenyu Sun, Luobin Zhang, Axi Niu +2

Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China

Dynamic Convolution Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Convolutional Neural Networks Multimodal Fusion

May 1, 2026eess.IV

Combined Dictionary Unfolding Network with Gradient-Adaptive Fidelity for Transferable Multi-Source Fusion

Deep Unfolding Network-based methods have emerged as effective solutions for multi-source image fusion by combining model-driven iterative optimization with data-driven deep learning. However, most existing deep unfolding image fusion methods are derived from alternating minimization, which updates the features of different modalities separately. This design introduces considerable computational and memory overhead, limiting deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this issue, we propose CDNet, a lightweight Combined Dictionary Unfolding Network for multi-source image fusion. Rather than introducing a new sparse coding prior or empirically compressing an existing fusion network, CDNet translates the unique-common decomposition prior of coupled dictionary learning into a structurally constrained joint unfolding architecture. The resulting CDBlock follows a block-sparse interaction topology and performs a model-derived joint update of common and modality-specific representations, thereby streamlining feature learning and improving efficiency.In addition, we design a compact High- and Low-frequency Image Fidelity loss for unsupervised training without ground-truth images. We evaluate CDNet on four tasks, including multi-exposure image fusion, infrared and visible image fusion, medical image fusion, and infrared and visible image fusion for semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that CDNet achieves competitive or superior fusion performance with high efficiency. For infrared and visible image fusion, CDNet outperforms competing methods on four of six metrics on the TNO dataset and five of six metrics on the RoadScene dataset. In particular, it surpasses the second-best method by 1.23 dB and 1.59 dB in PSNR on TNO and RoadScene, respectively.

Ge Luo, Jun-Jie Huang, Qi Yu +6

Multi-Source Image Fusion Representation Learning Infrared-Visible Image Fusion

Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

Semi-Supervised Flow Matching for Mosaiced and Panchromatic Fusion Imaging

Fusing a low resolution (LR) mosaiced hyperspectral image (HSI) with a high resolution (HR) panchromatic (PAN) image offers a promising avenue for video-rate HR-HSI imaging via single-shot acquisition, yet its severely ill-posed nature remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a novel semi-supervised flow matching framework for mosaiced and PAN image fusion. Unlike previous diffusion-based approaches constrained by specific protocols or handcrafted assumptions, our method seamlessly integrates an unsupervised scheme with flow matching, resulting in a generalizable and efficient generative framework. Specifically, our method follows a two-stage training pipeline. First, we pretrain an unsupervised prior network to produce an initial pseudo HR-HSI. Building on this, we then train a conditional flow matching model to generate the target HR-HSI, introducing a random voting mechanism that iteratively refines the initial HR-HSI estimate, enabling robust and effective fusion. During inference, we employ a conflict-free gradient guidance strategy that ensures spectrally and spatially consistent HR-HSI reconstruction. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior quantitative and qualitative performance by a significant margin compared to representative baselines. Beyond mosaiced and PAN fusion, our approach provides a flexible generative framework that can be readily extended to other image fusion tasks and integrated with unsupervised or blind image restoration algorithms.

Peiming Luo, Nan Wang, Litong Liu +4

Southeast University · Hunan University

Flow Matching Multi-Source Image Fusion Hyperspectral Imaging Multimodal Fusion

Mar 17, 2026cs.CV

EPOFusion: Exposure aware Progressive Optimization Method for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Overexposure caused by strong daylight and oncoming headlights frequently overwhelms visible sensors, resulting in critical information loss in visual perception. Infrared and visible image fusion can compensate for such degradation via multimodal complementarity. However, most fusion methods lack region-aware optimization for overexposed areas and cannot effectively exploit infrared cues in saturated regions, resulting in insufficient infrared detail preservation or redundant information in the fused results. To address this, we propose EPOFusion, an exposure-aware fusion framework. It uses a spatial guidance module to selectively preserve informative infrared cues in overexposed regions. In addition, an iterative decoding head equipped with a multiscale context fusion module progressively refines fused representations, enabling effective infrared compensation in degraded regions while maintaining visual consistency in normal regions. The infrared and visible overexposure (IVOE) dataset is constructed with a synthetic training subset for controlled supervision and a real-world test subset for generalization assessment, supporting exposure-aware learning and evaluation. Extensive experiments on MSRS, FMB, and the proposed IVOE benchmark show that EPOFusion improves information preservation and visual fidelity, achieving an average full-image MI gain of 28.7% over the best competing methods. Qualitative results further demonstrate effective compensation in saturated regions, and downstream evaluations confirm its benefits under challenging overexposed conditions. Code, results, and the IVOE dataset will be made available at https://github.com/warren-wzw/EPOFusion.

Zhiwei Wang, Defeng He, Li Zhao +3

College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310023, China · College of Information Science and Technology, Zhejiang Shuren University, Hangzhou, 310015, China · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion