Degradation-Robust Fusion: An Efficient Degradation-Aware Diffusion Framework for Multimodal Image Fusion in Arbitrary Degradation Scenarios

Complex degradations like noise, blur, and low resolution are typical challenges in real-world image fusion tasks, limiting the performance and practicality of existing methods. End-to-end neural network-based approaches are generally simple to design and highly efficient in inference, but their black-box nature leads to limited interpretability. Diffusion-based methods alleviate this to some extent by providing powerful generative priors and a more structured inference process. However, they are trained to learn a single-domain target distribution, whereas fusion lacks natural fused data and relies on modeling complementary information from multiple sources, making diffusion hard to apply directly in practice. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient degradation-aware diffusion framework for image fusion under arbitrary degradation scenarios. Specifically, instead of explicitly predicting noise as in conventional diffusion models, our method performs implicit denoising by directly regressing the fused image, enabling flexible adaptation to diverse fusion tasks under complex degradations with limited steps. Moreover, we design a joint observation model correction mechanism that simultaneously imposes degradation and fusion constraints during sampling to ensure high reconstruction accuracy. Experiments on diverse fusion tasks and degradation configurations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method under complex degradation scenarios. Code: https://github.com/YShi-cool/DRFusion.