Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Network Based on Self-Compensating Lightweight Convolution

Deep learning has significantly improved the quality of infrared and visible image fusion. However, existing mainstream deep fusion networks often come with complex architectures and a large number of parameters. While general lightweight techniques can effectively reduce model complexity, they often weaken feature interactions during the lightweighting process, resulting in the loss of complementary texture and thermal information in fused images and making it difficult to balance fusion performance and model efficiency. To address these issues, this paper constructs an infrared and visible image fusion network based on a self-compensating lightweight convolution mechanism, named LWC-DenseFuse. The core of the network lies in a self-compensating lightweight convolution module, which goes beyond conventional convolution replacement and explicitly addresses feature degradation introduced by lightweight design. The module decouples spatial and channel correlations of standard convolution through depthwise convolution and pointwise convolution, while incorporating a channel attention mechanism to adaptively enhance salient features. Additionally, channel shuffle technology is employed to promote information exchange between groups, thereby enhancing feature interaction and compensating for the loss of critical information caused by lightweight design. To further improve the representation capability of the lightweight network during optimization, a staged training strategy with progressive loss weighting is introduced. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed fusion network significantly reduces the number of model parameters while ensuring real-time inference performance. Meanwhile, it effectively alleviates the performance degradation typically associated with lightweight architectures, as evidenced by improvements in information entropy and visual fidelity.