Spatial-Frequency Cross-Domain Mutual Guidance for Visible-Infrared Image Fusion

The primary objective of Visible-Infrared Image Fusion (VIF) is to combine the rich texture and color information from visible light images with the comprehensive thermal radiation data provided by infrared images. However, most current fusion algorithms focus solely on spatial domain feature transformations, which results in fused images lacking sufficient detail and failing to effectively preserve crucial details from the source images. In this paper, we propose Spatial-Frequency Mutual Guidance for VIF. The framework comprises two branches. Each branch reconstructs input features in the frequency and spatial domains. We introduce a novel cross-domain mutual guidance mechanism. It fully integrates information between the frequency and spatial domains to enhance the detail quality of fused images. Furthermore, a weight allocation network is utilized to adaptively assign importance to visible and infrared images based on scene characteristics. Experiments on three VIF datasets show that our method outperforms recent advanced algorithms.