An Efficient Image Fusion Network Exploiting Unifying Language and Mask Guidance

Image fusion aims to merge image pairs collected by different sensors over the same scene, preserving their distinct features. Recent works have often focused on designing various image fusion losses, developing different network architectures, and leveraging downstream tasks (e.g., object detection) for image fusion. However, a few studies have explored how language and semantic masks can serve as guidance to aid image fusion. In this paper, we investigate how the combination of language and masks can guide image fusion tasks, discarding the previously complex frameworks, which rely on downstream tasks, GAN-based cycle training, diffusion models, or deep image priors. Additionally, we exploit a recurrent neural network-like architecture to build a lightweight network that avoids the quadratic-cost of traditional attention mechanisms. To adapt the receptance weighted key value (RWKV) model to an image modality, we modify it into a bidirectional version using an efficient scanning strategy (ESS). To guide image fusion by language and mask features, we introduce a multi-modal fusion module (MFM) to facilitate information exchange. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieved state-of-the-art results in various image fusion tasks (i.e., visible-infrared image fusion, multi-focus image fusion, multi-exposure image fusion, medical image fusion, hyperspectral and multispectral image fusion, and pansharpening). Code will be available at https://github.com/294coder/RWKVFusion.