FusionBooster: A Unified Image Fusion Boosting Paradigm

Abstract

In recent years, numerous ideas have emerged for designing a mutually reinforcing mechanism or extra stages for the image fusion task, ignoring the inevitable gaps between different vision tasks and the computational burden. We argue that there is a scope to improve the fusion performance with the help of the FusionBooster, a model specifically designed for fusion tasks. In particular, our booster is based on the divide-and-conquer strategy controlled by an information probe. The booster is composed of three building blocks: the probe units, the booster layer, and the assembling module. Given the result produced by a backbone method, the probe units assess the fused image and divide the results according to their information content. This is instrumental in identifying missing information, as a step to its recovery. The recovery of the degraded components along with the fusion guidance are the role of the booster layer. Lastly, the assembling module is responsible for piecing these advanced components together to deliver the output. We use concise reconstruction loss functions in conjunction with lightweight autoencoder models to formulate the learning task, with marginal computational complexity increase. The experimental results obtained in various fusion missions, as well as downstream detection tasks, consistently demonstrate that the proposed FusionBooster significantly improves the performance. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/AWCXV/FusionBooster.