L2FUSION: LOW-LIGHT ORIENTED INFRARED AND VISIBLE IMAGE FUSION

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate salient targets and abundant texture information into a single fused image. Existing methods typically ignore the issue of illumination, so that there are problems of weak texture details and poor visual perception in case of low illumination. To address this issue, we propose a low-light oriented infrared and visible image fusion network, named L2Fusion. In particular, we first design a decomposition network according to Retinex theory to obtain the reflectance features of a visible image with low-light. Then, these features are integrated with the features extracted from the corresponding infrared image by a residual network. The finally fused image largely eliminates the negative impact caused by low illumination, and contains both salient targets and abundant texture information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our L2Fusion over the state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both visual effect and quantitative metrics.