DRSNFuse: Deep Residual Shrinkage Network for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared images are robust against illumination variation and disguises, containing the sharp edge contours of objects. Visible images are enriched with texture details. Infrared and visible image fusion seeks to obtain high-quality images, keeping the advantages of source images. This paper proposes an object-aware image fusion method based on a deep residual shrinkage network, termed as DRSNFuse. DRSNFuse exploits residual shrinkage blocks for image fusion and introduces a deeper network in infrared and visible image fusion tasks than existing methods based on fully convolutional networks. The deeper network can effectively extract semantic information, while the residual shrinkage blocks maintain the texture information throughout the whole network. The residual shrinkage blocks adapt a channel-wise attention mechanism to the fusion task, enabling feature map channels to focus on objects and backgrounds separately. A novel image fusion loss function is proposed to obtain better fusion performance and suppress artifacts. DRSNFuse trained with the proposed loss function can generate fused images with fewer artifacts and more original textures, which also satisfy the human visual system. Experiments show that our method has better fusion results than mainstream methods through quantitative comparison and obtains fused images with brighter targets, sharper edge contours, richer details, and fewer artifacts.