A Spatial-Spectral Decoupling Fusion Framework for Visible and Near-Infrared Images.

The visible and near-infrared image fusion aims to generate an image that integrates complementary information from images captured in different spectral bands. However, existing fusion methods either only focus on the fusion of spatial information, or fuse spatial and spectral information without decoupling, resulting in undesirable effects such as halo artifacts, information loss, and inferior visual quality. To address these issues, we propose a Spatial-Spectral Decoupling Fusion (SSDF) framework that can effectively fuse the spatial and spectral information of visible and near-infrared images. The SSDF framework decomposes the image pairs into two main branches: the Spatial Feature Enhancement (SFE) branch and the Spectral Characteristic Preservation (SCP) branch. The SFE branch enhances the salient details in the fused image by exploiting the contrast between spatial features and generating region-based fusion weights, while the SCP branch preserves the intrinsic spectral characteristics of the scene by fusing the reflectance characteristics of visible and near-infrared images. The final image is obtained by combining the spatial and spectral information. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our SSDF method can achieve superior fusion performance in subjective visual quality and objective metrics compared with state-of-the-art methods.