MetaFusion: Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Meta-Feature Embedding from Object Detection

Fusing infrared and visible images can provide more texture details for subsequent object detection task. Conversely, detection task furnishes object semantic information to improve the infrared and visible image fusion. Thus, a joint fusion and detection learning to use their mutual promotion is attracting more attention. However, the feature gap between these two different-level tasks hinders the progress. Addressing this issue, this paper proposes an infrared and visible image fusion via meta-feature embedding from object detection. The core idea is that meta-feature embedding model is designed to generate object semantic features according to fusion network ability, and thus the semantic features are naturally compatible with fusion features. It is optimized by simulating a meta learning. Moreover, we further implement a mutual promotion learning between fusion and detection tasks to improve their performances. Comprehensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code and model are available at: https://github.com/wdzhao123/MetaFusion.