Revisiting Network Inertia: Dynamic Inertia Inhibition Coupled Multidimensional Periodicity for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) technology has become a frontier of great interest due to the ability to integrate information from multiple sources. However, the progressive slowdown of weight updates in deep networks (i.e., "network laziness" phenomenon), makes existing methods far from realizing the full characterization potential. To this end, we propose a lightweight fusion method for IVIF, Anti-Inert Dynamic Fusion (AIDFusion), to fully utilize the potential of the network at all levels. Specifically, by progressively regulating the collaborative Learning process of multi-level prediction in the network, Dynamic Inertia Inhibition Learning Strategy (DIILS) is proposed to adaptively and efficiently inhibit inertia accumulation. Subsequently, to deeply explore the representation potential while breaking through the performance threshold, lightweight Multi-dimensional modulation fusion module (MMFM) is specifically proposed to capture comprehensive multi-view and multi-scale features efficiently. Finally, considering the semantic bias between the prediction maps of DIILS and the fusion feature of MMFM, Fourier Analysis Convolution (FAConv) is designed in feature recovery as a bridge between prediction and fusion to accomplish the implicit periodic modeling. Based on the above study, extensive experiments on three public IVIF datasets demonstrate the dual advantages of AIDFusion in terms of fusion performance and computational overhead compared to state-of-the-art baseline methods.