SeACPFusion: An Adaptive Fusion Network for Infrared and Visible Images based on brightness perception

Generating a single fused image that highlights important targets and preserves textural details is the aim of fusing visible and infrared images. The majority of deep learning-based fusion algorithms now in use can produce decent fusion outcomes; however, the modeling process still lacks consideration of the different amounts of information in different scenes or regions. Thus, we propose in this research SeACPFusion, a luminance-aware adaptive fusion network for infrared and visible images, which adaptively preserves the intensity information of the noticeable targets of the source images with the texture information of the background in an optimal ratio. Specifically, we design pixel-level luminance loss (PBL) to direct the fusion model’s training in real-time, and PBL retains the optimal intensity information according to the pixel luminance ratio of different source images. In addition, we designed the Channel Transformer (CTF) to consider the relationship between different attributes from the point of view of the feature channel and to focus on the key information by using the self-focusing mechanism to achieve the goal of adaptive fusion. Our extensive tests on the MSRS, RoadScene, and TNO datasets demonstrate that SeACPFusion surpasses nine representative deep learning methods on six objective metrics and achieves the best visual results in scenes such as overexposure or underexposure. In addition, the relatively efficient operation and fewer model parameters make our algorithm promising as a preprocessing module for downstream complicated vision tasks.