mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection

arXiv 2203.16220 ↗First posted 30 Mar 2022cs.CVcited by 313

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 22 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

This study addresses the issue of fusing infrared and visible images that appear differently for object detection. Aiming at generating an image of high visual quality, previous approaches discover commons underlying the two modalities and fuse upon the common space either by iterative optimization or deep networks. These approaches neglect that modality differences implying the complementary information are extremely important for both fusion and subsequent detection task. This paper proposes a bilevel optimization formulation for the joint problem of fusion and detection, and then unrolls to a target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning (TarDAL) network for fusion and a commonly used detection network. The fusion network with one generator and dual discriminators seeks commons while learning from differences, which preserves structural information of targets from the infrared and textural details from the visible. Furthermore, we build a synchronized imaging system with calibrated infrared and optical sensors, and collect currently the most comprehensive benchmark covering a wide range of scenarios. Extensive experiments on several public datasets and our benchmark demonstrate that our method outputs not only visually appealing fusion but also higher detection mAP than the state-of-the-art approaches.

Key facts. Cited by 313 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2022.

Builds on

15 of 43 references.

References · 15

  1. 2018Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentationcited by 1,001
  2. 2018SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networkscited by 445
  3. 2020Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancementcited by 303
  4. 2019Learning a Neural Solver for Multiple Object Trackingcited by 198
  5. 2018DenseFuse: A Fusion Approach to Infrared and Visible Imagescited by 180
  6. 2021Investigating Bi-Level Optimization for Learning and Vision from a Unified Perspective: A Survey and Beyondcited by 151
  7. 2021RFN-Nest: An end-to-end residual fusion network for infrared and visible imagescited by 109
  8. 2020Convolutional Networks with Dense Connectivitycited by 98
  9. 2020DIDFuse: Deep Image Decomposition for Infrared and Visible Image Fusioncited by 72
  10. 2018Spatial Fusion GAN for Image Synthesiscited by 68
  11. 2017Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Netscited by 55
  12. 2020VIFB: A Visible and Infrared Image Fusion Benchmarkcited by 25
3 more
  1. 2021Learning Deep Context-Sensitive Decomposition for Low-Light Image Enhancementcited by 23
  2. 2020Bayesian Fusion for Infrared and Visible Imagescited by 14
  3. 2019Task-Oriented Convex Bilevel Optimization with Latent Feasibilitycited by 6

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 7; 2023: 46; 2024: 73; 2025: 95; 2026: 92.

313 papers.

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  1. 2022CDDFuse: Correlation-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition for Multi-Modality Image Fusioncited by 222
  2. 2023DDFM: Denoising Diffusion Model for Multi-Modality Image Fusioncited by 153
  3. 2023Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentationcited by 128
  4. 2023Equivariant Multi-Modality Image Fusioncited by 98
  5. 2024Text-IF: Leveraging Semantic Text Guidance for Degradation-Aware and Interactive Image Fusioncited by 83
  6. 2022Unsupervised Misaligned Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Cross-Modality Image Generation and Registrationcited by 80
  7. 2024Sigma: Siamese Mamba Network for Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentationcited by 71
  8. 2024Fusion-Mamba for Cross-modality Object Detectioncited by 67
  9. 2022CoCoNet: Coupled Contrastive Learning Network with Multi-level Feature Ensemble for Multi-modality Image Fusioncited by 63
  10. 2024Task-Customized Mixture of Adapters for General Image Fusioncited by 59
  11. 2023Dif-Fusion: Towards High Color Fidelity in Infrared and Visible Image Fusion with Diffusion Modelscited by 56
  12. 2023Strategic Preys Make Acute Predators: Enhancing Camouflaged Object Detectors by Generating Camouflaged Objectscited by 56
38 more
  1. 2023Multi-modal Gated Mixture of Local-to-Global Experts for Dynamic Image Fusioncited by 54
  2. 2023A Task-guided, Implicitly-searched and Meta-initialized Deep Model for Image Fusioncited by 47
  3. 2025Infrared and Visible Image Fusion: From Data Compatibility to Task Adaptioncited by 45
  4. 2023Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion for RGB-Thermal Perception Taskscited by 41
  5. 2023BenchLMM: Benchmarking Cross-style Visual Capability of Large Multimodal Modelscited by 41
  6. 2024Image Fusion via Vision-Language Modelcited by 40
  7. 2025MatchAnything: Universal Cross-Modality Image Matching with Large-Scale Pre-Trainingcited by 40
  8. 2024CrossFuse: A Novel Cross Attention Mechanism based Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Approachcited by 38
  9. 2023An Interactively Reinforced Paradigm for Joint Infrared-Visible Image Fusion and Saliency Object Detectioncited by 36
  10. 2023HQG-Net: Unpaired Medical Image Enhancement with High-Quality Guidancecited by 36
  11. 2024MambaDFuse: A Mamba-based Dual-phase Model for Multi-modality Image Fusioncited by 35
  12. 2025Every SAM Drop Counts: Embracing Semantic Priors for Multi-Modality Image Fusion and Beyondcited by 34
  13. 2025DCEvo: Discriminative Cross-Dimensional Evolutionary Learning for Infrared and Visible Image Fusioncited by 34
  14. 2025One Model for ALL: Low-Level Task Interaction Is a Key to Task-Agnostic Image Fusioncited by 32
  15. 2024Text-DiFuse: An Interactive Multi-Modal Image Fusion Framework based on Text-modulated Diffusion Modelcited by 31
  16. 2023Learning a Graph Neural Network with Cross Modality Interaction for Image Fusioncited by 28
  17. 2024DAMSDet: Dynamic Adaptive Multispectral Detection Transformer with Competitive Query Selection and Adaptive Feature Fusioncited by 28
  18. 2023Bi-level Dynamic Learning for Jointly Multi-modality Image Fusion and Beyondcited by 26
  19. 2023PAIF: Perception-Aware Infrared-Visible Image Fusion for Attack-Tolerant Semantic Segmentationcited by 26
  20. 2023TextFusion: Unveiling the Power of Textual Semantics for Controllable Image Fusioncited by 26
  21. 2024Task-driven Image Fusion with Learnable Fusion Losscited by 24
  22. 2024E2E-MFD: Towards End-to-End Synchronous Multimodal Fusion Detectioncited by 21
  23. 2025DifIISR: A Diffusion Model with Gradient Guidance for Infrared Image Super-Resolutioncited by 21
  24. 2023From Text to Pixels: A Context-Aware Semantic Synergy Solution for Infrared and Visible Image Fusioncited by 19
  25. 2024Caltech Aerial RGB-Thermal Dataset in the Wildcited by 19
  26. 2023TFDet: Target-Aware Fusion for RGB-T Pedestrian Detectioncited by 18
  27. 2023Improving Misaligned Multi-modality Image Fusion with One-stage Progressive Dense Registrationcited by 17
  28. 2024Removal then Selection: A Coarse-to-Fine Fusion Perspective for RGB-Infrared Object Detectioncited by 16
  29. 2025DiffV2IR: Visible-to-Infrared Diffusion Model via Vision-Language Understandingcited by 16
  30. 2023RGB-X Object Detection via Scene-Specific Fusion Modulescited by 15
  31. 2023ReFusion: Learning Image Fusion from Reconstruction with Learnable Loss via Meta-Learningcited by 15
  32. 2024MaeFuse: Transferring Omni Features with Pretrained Masked Autoencoders for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Guided Trainingcited by 15
  33. 2024AMFD: Distillation via Adaptive Multimodal Fusion for Multispectral Pedestrian Detectioncited by 15
  34. 2024All-weather Multi-Modality Image Fusion: Unified Framework and 100k Benchmarkcited by 14
  35. 2025Integrating Extra Modality Helps Segmentor Find Camouflaged Objects Wellcited by 14
  36. 2025WaveMamba: Wavelet-Driven Mamba Fusion for RGB-Infrared Object Detectioncited by 14
  37. 2025Efficient Rectified Flow for Image Fusioncited by 14
  38. 2022Unsupervised RGB-to-Thermal Domain Adaptation via Multi-Domain Attention Networkcited by 13

50 most cited of 313 All 313 (JSON)