Illumination-Enhanced Infrared and Low-Light Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to generate fused images with rich texture details and salient targets. However, existing methods often ignore illumination conditions, and the fusion results under low-light conditions lack texture details. To solve this problem, we propose an illumination-enhanced infrared and visible image fusion method, named IEFusion. Specifically, we first design a feature decomposition network based on retinex theory to obtain enhanced features of infrared and visible images. Then, the cross-modal feature fusion module is used to fuse important features. Finally, a gradient-enhanced image reconstructor is designed to enhance the gradient and generate a fused image. In addition, we design a contrastive learning module to guide the network to focus on deep features and maximize the mutual information of fused and enhanced images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our IEFusion over the state-of-the-art methods, in both qualitative and quantitative metrics.