Multi-Scenario Aware Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Framework Based on Visual Multi-Pathway Mechanism

Most existing infrared and visible image fusion methods neglect the disparities between daytime and nighttime scenarios and consider them similar, leading to low accuracy. However, the adaptive properties of the biological vision system allow for the capture of helpful information from source images and adaptive visual information processing. This concept provides a new direction for improving the accuracy of the deep-learning -based infrared and visible image fusion methods. Inspired by the visual multi-pathway mechanism, this study proposes a multi-scenario aware infrared and visible image fusion framework to incorporate two distinct visual pathways capable of perceiving daytime and nighttime scenarios. Specifically, daytime-and nighttime-scenario -aware fusion networks process the source images to generate two intermediate fusion results. Finally, a learnable weighting network obtains the final result. Additionally, the proposed framework utilizes a novel center-surround convolution module that simulates the widely distributed center-surround receptive field in biological vision. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework improves significantly the quality of the fused image and outperforms existing methods in objective evaluation metrics.