Coupled GAN With Relativistic Discriminators for Infrared and Visible Images Fusion

Infrared and visible images are a pair of multi-source multi-sensors images. However, the infrared images lack structural details and visible images are impressionable to the imaging environment. To fully utilize the meaningful information of the infrared and visible images, a practical fusion method, termed as RCGAN, is proposed in this paper. In RCGAN, we introduce a pioneering use of the coupled generative adversarial network to the field of image fusion. Moreover, the simple yet efficient relativistic discriminator is applied to our network. By doing so, the network converges faster. More importantly, different from the previous works in which the label for generator is either infrared image or visible image, we innovatively put forward a strategy to use a pre-fused image as the label. This is a technical innovation, which makes the process of generating fused images no longer out of thin air, but from “existence” to “excellent.” The extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed RCGAN can produce a faithful fused image, which can efficiently persevere the rich texture from visible images and thermal radiation information from infrared images. Compared with traditional methods, it successfully avoids the complex manual designed fusion rules, and also shows a clear advantages over other deep learning-based fusion methods.