PID Controller-Driven Network for Image Fusion

With its well-designed network architecture, the deep learning-based infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) method shows its efficiency and effectiveness by realizing a fine feature extraction and fusion mechanism. However, disparities in cross-modal features often result in an imbalance between texture details and contextual information, causing detailed features to be overshadowed by prevailing contextual information. To tackle this issue, this study introduces PIDFusion, a fusion model driven by a PID controller, designed to dynamically optimize cross-modal feature fusion deviations. The core of PIDFusion is the dynamic adaptation capability of the PID controller, which facilitates real-time corrections for deviations encountered during the fusion process, thereby maintaining a harmonious balance between texture details and contextual information. Additionally, we introduced the Cyclic Self-Supervised Feature Refinement (CSSFR), which under the constraint of self-supervised loss, minimizes redundant information within the feature flow and ensures the preservation of salient feature through the cyclic input of decoupled features. Concurrently, we developed the Iterative Attention Module (IAM), utilizing the unique gating mechanism of LSTM to capture feature changes across successive iterations, thereby driving the model to cultivate more discriminative feature representations. Extensive experiments revealed that PIDFusion outperforms SOTA methods in terms of both efficiency and cost-effectiveness, through static statistics and high-level vision tasks.